O’Brien saw a young soldier wearing an ammunition belt coming out of the fog. The only reality O’Brien could feel was the sour nervousness in his stomach, and without thinking, he pulled the key in the grenade before he realized what he was doing. When the grenade bounced, the young man dropped his weapon and began to run. He then hesitated and tried to cover his head only then did O’Brien realize that the man was about to die. The grenade went off and the man fell on his back, his sandals blown off and he was dead.
This calamitous incident occurs when he gets shot in the head and is killed while returning from using the latrine. Just moments before this tragedy occurs, Cross is daydreaming about his obsession, Martha, back in America and how he loves her and how she cannot relate with his feeling of affection. It is while his mind is wandering when Ted Lavender gets shot. Cross cannot help but feel responsible for Lavender’s death. Despite that deaths like this are commonly caused by freak incidents, he feels that if his attention had been focused on the war at the very moment Lavender died instead of the girl whose love he can never obtain, he could have prevented this loss of life.
Although O’Brien is unclear about whether or not he actually threw a grenade and killed a man outside My Khe, his memory of the man’s corpse is strong and recurring, symbolizing humanity’s guilt over war’s horrible acts. Norman was right on the side of him when he died, after about a couple of years passed by after the war he was in Kiowa home town he started crying because he didn’t do anything to try to save him. In Fallen Angels Richie see’s how almost his whole team died he and Peewee were the only ones that survived, which emphasizes the theme of youth and innocence. In calling the novel Fallen Angels, the author implies that the soldiers’ youth and innocence are more important than any of their other aspects, such as their religion, ethnicity, class, or race. They wanted them to know what war is really like and wants to help them understand what is experienced.
He decides to go to war because he is ashamed of running from it. “It had nothing to do with mortality. Embarrassment, that's all it was” (O’Brien 59). That same feeling of embarrassment is what made half of the soldiers go to Vietnam. Jimmy Cross went to war only because his friends did, and that led him to danger.
In Charles’ eyes, the real threat was that The United States was being torn apart and the noble cause of many a revolutionary soldier would be lost and their mortal lives given up in vain. Charles respected his family and it was a hard to go against their wishes but in the end it was a verse from the Bible that made the decision clear. Charles found himself mortally wounded from battle. Sheltered behind a rock formation, as his life’s blood ran out on the ground around him, he wrote these words. “I don’t know if anyone will find this journal or care to read the words I have written.
“He’d always had a joke, then, too, and now you couldn’t get him to laugh, or when he did it was more the sound of a man choking”. Lyman was trying to see how he could get his old brother back. Henry used to love that red convertible so Lyman decided to destroy it so he can give Henry the chance to be excited about re modeling it. This helped for a little while. This war had a huge impact on Henry physically.” I took myself a hammer.
When his soldier Ted Lavender died all he could do was cry and blame himself for his death, “He felt shame. He hated himself.... this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of war.” (O’Brien, The Things They Carried 42) but he didn’t let that very heart-wrenching emotion of feeling responsible for someone’s death cloud his judgment or cause him to take his job lightly. Towards the end of the story he stepped up, over-coming the guilt he felt after the death of Ted Lavender. Learning from his mistakes and changing the way he lead his platoon “He would not tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing himself.” (O’Brien, The Things They Carried 100) He showed courage while seeing the bigger picture telling himself “that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead.” (O’Brien, The Things They Carried 101) Masculinity is very apparent in this platoon.
Wade Berrigan 5-26-07 The Moral Ambiguity of War In the novel Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Meyers, shows us many examples of soldiers struggling between making morale choices or staying alive. New soldiers look at other soldiers who have been in the war for a while as if they are sick soulless creatures killing everything in their way. Later we find these same characters that are doing the questioning doing the same thing. For example Perry wonders to himself how someone can die in front of them and no one remember it the following day. This shows his morals are still intact.
130). By emphasizing the death of this man consistently throughout the chapter, it pin point the agony he felt once he killed basically a man who was not fit for war. Through the constant descriptions of the dead body, it shows the emotional truth behind the feeling of killing a human being and from that readers can understand the anguish of taking the life of another person. These soldiers also had to endure killing people “because they were embarrassed not to” and the men had to sacrifice themselves so “they died so as not to die of embarrassment” (21). In “The Things They Carried” chapter, O’Brien goes in to great detail to tell every little thing each soldier carried and a major thing they carried was the feeling of honor and to die a man.
He was a lance corporal who became a sergeant and is quite inquisitive. He starts by playing the favourite wishing game of the men, Broadbent takes the food from Brown’s haversack after he dies. He also attacks Cleary as he believes Clearly is cheating with the bread. Broadbent has the patience and self-control to shoot Renaud after he has been hit by a flamethrower. He is with the soldier in Arras and in the final battle at Amiens he and the soldier are the only two left of their company.