On Patrol

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.