The Things They Carried Part 5

Throughout "The Ghost Soldiers", the author talks about how he wanted to get revenged on Dr. Jorgensen because of the incident they had on the battle field. O'Brien talks about the possibility of getting his revenge with the help of other soldiers that may have something against the replacement doctor. Based on my own experience, I’ve never had any thoughts of revenge against someone; I would only get mad as it is normal for a human as well as trying to avoid the person. I think that revenge is something useless because every time you plan to actually do something wrong to that person, at the end it always turns out to be worst for that person. I think that revenge is normal on the people that have had any problems as a little kid like for example being bullied, many fights with their parents as well as not having any friends to count on in hard situations. I believe that in times of war and the soldiers fighting every day is something common because they need to let all their anger out even if that is between two of the same team.

In that same chapter, the author talks about how Dr. Jorgensen and O'Brien sort things out and they shake hands as a proof of their friendship. This action can relate to my life as well as the life of all humans because at one point they have experienced this action. It is something universal to shake the hand of a person in order to sort things out. If I were to remember my past I would find a lot of this situations because as a little boy I had a lot of fights with friends and family but then I realized that most of my problems were inside me with all the events that I had in my life. I believe that as a young person everyone encounters the same problem because they don't like what they do or what other people do. This creates problems that at the end no matter how big or how small the fight was, it all resolves with a small hand shake.

The message that I get from the last page of the book happens to be that people still think of the dead being alive. This has happened to me with my mother as I still feel her with me every time I am doing something. This feeling arises every time that I visit Bolivia or I watch videos of me as a little kid. The imagination of thinking that the dead people are still alive makes me grow up and think how my mother would react with all the things that I have achieved in my life. In the book it says that the soldiers talked about the dead in stories that at the end would make them come to live again. These stories are the ones that I hear from my aunts as well as from my grandmother because I want to learn more about her. Some people say that living in the past (thinking of the dead people) is something wrong because it can create diseases as well as it can hinder your potential in the present. I certainly do not think that is something bad because the people that actually have a dead relative that death has pushes them into doing new stuff and achieving bigger things. I believe that has happened to me because as a young boy I didn't mind about school or my grades, but after my mother's death all of that changed in a good way.

Analyze “The Ghost Soldiers” (Page 619-620)

O’Brien decides to talk about his feelings about Dr. Jorgensen by explaining, “I now felt a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason”. This sentence describes how the author was feeling when he thought about the one who hurt him. When he says that there was a deep coldness inside of him as well as darkness, then that means that he had all the intentions of doing it with all the revenge he could but he still doubted. That coldness happens to be the indecision but the darkness represents the cruelty he was planning on attempting against the doctor.  Next the author talks about his desire to do evil things and he qualifies this as one of his intentions. He says that he is capable of doing those dark and evil actions. The next sentence confirms his desires to hurt the one that didn’t helped him when he needed his help. O’Brien says “For weeks it had been a vow- I’ll get him, I’ll get him-it was down inside me like a rock”. This means that in his subconscious mind, he had the need to go and have revenge against him. The simile that we can see which explains that the vow he had felt like a rock inside of him happens to describe that it was like a necessity and that it hurt him not acting quickly. When you have rocks inside your body, they create a pain that is unstoppable. This same pain can be felt inside of the author’s body. This can be proven in the next sentence where O’Brien says “Granted, I didn’t hate him anymore, and I’d lost some of the outrage and passion, but the need for revenge kept eating at me”. This once again proofs the idea that it was nothing he could but just get revenge as a matter to level things up and get peace between the two people.