Soldiers;+Difficulties

A lot of people in the US didn't supporting the war, and peace movements occurred.The mayority of the soldiers were extremely young, the average age of the many soldiers was nineteen.The soldiers had little training and many of them had low intelligence or any at all.They were fighting the Viet Cong and Vietminh in an alien environment, giving the opposition an advantage.There was a high rating of deaths.They were forced to kill innocent people.They were drafted into a war that that weren't all enthusiastic about at all.There was racial discrimination in the war. For example, black people were fighting for freedom in south east asia, a freedom they had not yet got themselves in their own country.There was also the occurence of 'fragging' as disputes between officers' and soldiers becoming serious.

This picture reminds me of the interview Tim O'Brien was questioned at. He had said that his writing was a way of saving young timmy. To cope with all the things they saw. to prevent himself from being the next norman, & killing himself and keeping his life safe from all the memories and pressure. When in the picture Tim O'Brien says: through his writing, the narrator eventually accepts the realities of death and his own fallibility" he means that after being sent to war he didn't care for he has accept in his mental state to accept everything he has just gone through and to find a way to cope with all that experience.

I think that this quote might mean that, even if you do some thing right or something wrong your state of mind will always be there to torture you regardless what actually happened. That even if it was right, you going to question if it was meant to be, and that if it was wrong what would it have been if you didn't do it. For example, when Tim got his letter in the mail about being draft he went to run away but then after he got to the edge of leaving to canada he changed his mind. Now he sits and thinks about what if he would have left to canada and not went to war, what would have changed his life... what would have his family thought when he came back, or what if his family knew he never left to war.

=The vietnamese were very hard to see in the jungle due to height and forest denseness.

Vietnam was a long travel for soldiers to repeatedly send supplies

Soldiers lost hearing from excessive RPG hits.

One of the major difficulties soldiers faced were loneliness. They missed their families, wives, and girlfriends. This caused severe homesickness.



Soldiers didn't know what civilians to trust. Harmless looking children would approach them while actually strapped to bombs. Vietnamese farmers were friends by day and enemies at night. These were known as the Viet Cong. This was a huge difficulty for the soldiers because it made them very frustrated. They just wanted to kill them all even though it wasn't 'war code'. Therefore many soldiers died trying to help vietnamese. Charlie Company flipped out and just went on a rampage killing all vietnamese people in the area. The officers later went to trial because of this incident called the My Lai Massacre.

One young Marine named Jack Cunningham was assigned to a combined action program (CAP). This was extremely dangerous and known as a suicide squad. They were just a small platoon of men stationed in various towns in vietnam to prevent villages from getting out of control. They were all just wiped out though constantly so nobody wanted to do the job. He was one of the many men who had severe difficulties with these tasks. [] media type="youtube" key="ls6INXNI6V8" height="315" width="560" align="center"