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Michael Kasper

Mrs. Dougherty

AP Language & Composition

11.13.2018

The Stench of Inhumanity

The Vietnam War; while it was a conflict originally meant to encompass the freedom

of the Vietnamese from France, it became a tangible front of the ongoing Cold War

between the US and USSR. This was a controversial action, as it could’ve escalated tensions

with the USSR tenfold, and it had no benefits to offer the US. We sent troops in anyways;

regardless of the risks. And we’re lucky it didn’t escalate into a nuclear war. Many of our

young Americans, war hawks by nature, were enlisted to combat the Communist regime of

Ho Chi Minh, and none ever returned. This idea is explored in broad detail in Tim O’Brien’s

The Things They Carried; that, after the Vietnam War, many of the soldiers “died”, both

physically and emotionally; relaying this series of stories from his experiences in Vietnam

using various details, images, and diction, conveying the subjective truths behind war, and its

effects on the combatants.

As far as details go, O’Brien uses a few in particular which stand out, including the

circumstances of Norman Bowker in “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes,” both of which

describe how Bowker was attempting to assimilate back into American culture. The chapter

itself begins with “The war was over and there was no place in particular to go” (131). This
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sets the scene for the ideas governing the chapter itself; he tries to find meaning or purpose,

but the war has changed him. He sees his hometown as “still and lifeless,” and that it “did not

know shit about shit”; since “He knew shit” (137), he could never actually get these

emotional burdens off of himself, because the town didn’t know about the struggles―
the

“shit”―
Bowker went through. He moves to his thoughts, and how he might tell others about

the war; his father, and Sally Gustafson. He thinks about the way Sally would react to his

spiel about the “shit fields” and how she would say to him, “Stop it. I don’t like that word”

and how he’d retaliate with “That’s what it was” (139). This detail continues the previous

statements about the town, now in the guise of Sally Gustafson, as both “did not know shit

about shit,” and further cements the feelings experienced during Bowkers return to America:

the isolation from understanding. Nobody understands him, and he forgets how to live a life

outside of war, leading eventually to his suicide.

To further display the lack of humanity in warfare, O’Brien relates to us a story told

by Rat Kiley, known as “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” This chapter’s ending depicts the

inside of a Green Beret’s hut, which smelled “like an animal’s den, a mix of blood and

scorched hair and excrement and the sweet-sour odor of moldering flesh” (105), giving this a

very grotesque image, using the “blood” and “flesh,” most likely that of humans, as well as

the “Stacks of bones—all kinds,” but it’s also a very ritualistic atmosphere, which can be

attributed the use of “candles,” the “tribal music,” and “joss sticks and incense” (104), each of

which has the connotation of tribal rituals among the Vietnamese. Both descriptions are

enforced by the later descriptions of Mary Anne, her eyes were “utterly flat and indifferent”
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and that “At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues” (105). This use of “human

tongues” provides us insight into the possibility that she mutilated several beings, including

humans. Despite this, she is “indifferent” to the killing. This re-enforces the aforementioned

images and how they, and she, were becoming less human, the spirit of humanity dying

within them; becoming more like the uncivilised tribal peoples of Vietnam.

All of these instances are governed by diction as well, like the constant use of the

word “shit” in “Speaking of Courage,” which is indicative of the experiences that Bowker

reiterates throughout the chapter, especially when he talks about Kiowa's death and the

cowardice behind it, as he mentions the “smell,” which has both literal and figurative

connotations. The literal sense of the word is in the location; the “shit field,” also referenced

to be a “toilet.” These words can also be used to indicate a more figurative meaning; that the

war itself was repulsive, and that the cowardice was a reaction to the “smell” of war. There

was also the repulsive smell of “blood” and “flesh” in the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,”

and each attributes itself to the death of humanity; where the primal urges associated with

these items run rampant.

By compiling these stories about his experiences pertaining to the Vietnam War, Tim

O’Brien intends to inform us not only of the war, but of it’s combatants, and what would

become of them; they left as boys, never to return as men. It cannot be stressed enough that

war is an inhumane construct; capable only of destruction, be it physical or otherwise. We

can see this clearly in wars past, but this was different. This was an S&D operation: search for
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the enemy, and destroy them. There was no objective otherwise; no humanity. And thusly we

can see that it has been shed by this mentality that the enemy must be obliterated, and this

doesn’t translate well into the peacetime, evidenced by Norman Bowker and his isolation

within his hometown. No matter how one looks at this, the inability to assimilate our

soldiers back into society is a fault of war and those who demand it, for it destroys mind and

body, and scars them to the point of no return.