The Things They Carried Part 1

Questions:

Whats SOP and RTO? (23)
Whats premium dope? (23)
What is the meaning of the people carried sruff? (24)


Talking points:

During the first chapter, I was able to see that it talked a lot of different kinds of weapons like AK-47. Some of these weaposn were familiar to me because of a videogame I used to play called Call of Duty. It is aboyut the Cold War and there are a lot of mission which actually relate to some in Vietnam. These weapons are really different because of the way they are used since they have different purposes.

In Page 45 of the book, it talks about a person that carries a lot of candies during the missions they are doing. I realte to that person because I always have a type of sugar in my pockets in order to actually eat some because I am a huge fan of eating candy. I am always asked if I have any type of candy and I will respond that in fact I do have different kinds of candy.

In page 49 of the book, the author talks of imagination being a killer. I relate to this idea of imagination working as a serious badly thing because every time that it was dark, your mind starts to create different type of images from the objects in the surroundings. This will then come to frighten the person because that image that is being drawn tends to be something really bad and horrific.  

The author talks about a lucky charm in page 56 which is something that I can easily relate to because I also believe that luck can come from a special object. My lucky charm happens to be a cross that I were with my necklace. This is something that I began to wear during mid year and after that I have had a lot of luck in different aspects of my life. For example, every time that I wear that cross, my favorite soccer team hasn’t lost a game.

As I start to read the second chapter, I think that something will happen with Martha, because every time that someone is introduced to the story, then it is because of something. I think that maybe she will appear later in the story or maybe the author will talk a lot about her as I think she has something important to do in the story.
 
I’ve noticed that the character narrating the stories in the book goes to the past and retells the story but at the end it will start to be shown in the present. It is like the story is being told from the past so that the reader understands what has happened and then it will be told from the present as there are a lot of things going on during that time period that relate to the author.

In the chapter called Love, the author starts by saying that Jimmy Cross went to this apartment and they started to look at different photos of the different soldiers. I relate to this experience because every time that I go to my grandparent’s house, they show me the different photos they have from the family reunions that took place a long time ago. This also helps me in the idea of seeing how my parents looked like some time ago. It is amazing to see how much the world has changed and how the dressing style also has changed a lot.

Analyze: Page 111 to 112

He says that Mitchell Sanders was sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree which gives the idea of a relax time that he was going through. It talks about the idea that the character was at peace and that nothing seem to bother him until that point. After that he talks about the body lice that he was taking off. He says that they were a lot of time in the bushes which means that the characters were really tired and that he couldn’t go in the process of taking off his lice. After that the author describes the war as a Ping-Pong ball with the idea that you could add a fancy spin or make the ball dance. This is something really complicated because war is something really important and serious which doesn’t relate to the dance. What I think that it means is that the soldiers avoid the aggression or attacks from the adversary. The spin relates to the trickiness there are in the wars because when you play Ping-Pong, the spin is used to displace the opposite side and that relates to war when secret plans and tricky weapons are used.

Analyze: Page 130-131

The author starts with a tricky opening sentence because he talks about the war and how remembering that moment leads to a story. He refers to stories as lasting for eternity and teaching the youth about the past. He says “Stories are for joining the past to the future” and this refers to how the stories helps to explain how things were in the past and then relate that to the present and then to the future. He later says, “Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are”. This means that the people used the stories they tell to remember how they got there. This is most simply seen in the photographs because they describe in a much easier way than a lot of words. Stories are something that links human beings because they can relate to the story as there are a lot of different versions and people may know the core of the same story. This passage is for the readers to know how valuable the stories are for human kind because there is nothing better than hearing a good story.