Ryan Gustafson
Mrs. Guerard
Per.3
3/12/11
On Patrol
I
would like to write about the short story On Patrol by Ron Kovic. On Patrol is
a short story about the atrocities of war and how much harm and destruction war
can cause on the lives of innocent civilians. Vietnam I think is kind of poster
war when it comes to this idea that war is extremely harmful to everyone, but
especially the innocent people that are living there. I say Vietnam is the
poster war because so many people were against it, and thought that we were
doing more harm than good by being there. I think for the people that were
against the war, they hear about an event like this is and think that this is
normal and happening all the time. In this short story by Ron Kovic there are a
group of soldiers that walk up on this village. They can hear things going on
inside one of the buildings, but they don't know what it is. They suspect that
it’s the North Vietnam army, so they all were getting scared and very
high-strung. Then all of a sudden one of the men fired and when that guy fired
everyone started firing without knowing what they were shooting at. After the
barrage of bullets were over the men walked up and looked at what they had been
shooting at. It was not what they were expecting at all. What they found was a
bunch of little kids and an old man, that were either dead or several wounded. It
was a horrible seen as you could image.
That
short story is similar to the chapter the man I killed in The Things They
Carried by Tim O’Brien. It is similar in the sense of its brutality. This
chapter talks about how one man killed another one, and its form his point of
view. He describes all the injuries that he had caused in that man in detail.
It is the same kind of gruesome behavior that was in On Patrol. Then the
chapter goes on and O’Brien talks about his guilt towards killing that young
man. He describes how small the man he killed was. “He was a slim, dead, almost
dainty young man of about twenty.” O’Brien starts to make up a story about the
young man to try and make himself feel better from what he has just done. He thinks
he was born into a family of farmers in 1946 and only wished for the Americans
to leave. He thinks that the man might have been a hard worker and liked
school, and had a love for math. Maybe the man went to the University of Saigon
to try and study math. Another soldier, Kiowa, tries to comfort O’Brien by
saying that the man he killed would have done the same thing to any one of
them, and then asks him if he would rather trade places with the young man.
Another
way these two stories are similar is how after a soldier or a group of solders
do something, the guilt they feel once they have realized what they have really
done. Again I think this speaks to the idea that America should not be involved
in Vietnam, and we are doing more harm than good by being there. Both of this stories
were written by soldiers, but it makes me think that even some of the soldiers
thought that America was wrong in involving themselves in Vietnam problems. These
two stories make you think that we were not only making it worse on the people
in Vietnam, but also for our own soldiers who did and witnessed horrible things
that will scare them for the rest of their lives.
