Essentially different? (Blog Activity #1)

I've never felt like I've understood Vietnam. Since we've been exploring texts about it in AP Comp, I've found that the agenda wasn't clear enough to understand. My first true experience in learning about the Vietnam was viewing Good Morning Vietnam. But now looking back on it, what I had taken away from that film was that Robin Williams was in it...and the soldiers identified with music and it was a powerful attribute to the war. However, this is something more so reaffirmed by our class project, rather than The Things They Carried. I remember that the movie focused a lot on what was happening outside of the war itself, and the effects the war had on people.

The Things They Carried digressed from that side of the war and truly focused on how the soldiers felt, the places they traveled, and the effects the war had on them. Honestly, I felt that this was a much more entrancing way to approach the Vietnam War. The lives of the soldiers that were drafted or even that volunteered were drastically changed by this horrific war, and Tim O’Brien beautifully illustrated that—certainly more than I had ever been shown or had read before.

Apocalypse Now was my second true “learning” experience about the Vietnam War. But I’m not sure how true it really was. I watched the extended edition, which was a little too extended for my taste, so some parts might’ve been…fast forwarded…and I was very distracted. However, the overall feel of the film was very similar to the feeling I inhabited when reading The Things They Carried. In Apocalypse Now a group of men are on a journey on a boat. The dynamics of the characters are so intense and real, just like the characters in The Things They Carried.

The Things They Carried was powerful in a way that I hadn’t quite experienced before. O’Brien’s words were so stunning that I fell into a trance, and I can’t say that I was completely focused on the happenings of the war, but more so how he actually described them. However, I don’t remember understanding any happenings in the war in the films I had seen, but O’Brien portrayed events that helped create a full perspective of the Vietnam War. At this point in time, The Things They Carried, is my primary source of knowledge on the Vietnam War, and it helped me feel the war in a way that any other film or text hadn’t.