Adam's Honors Essay

War

War is not just a violent conflict between two nations; it is much more than that. In history, men have gone to war and fought for their country whether it was willingly or forced upon them. Stories are often told of the man that goes to war and survives to see their homes in post-war eras. The constant in every single situation where a man goes to war and lives to come home is change. In If I Die in a Combat Zone and In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien shows the transformations involved in a person’s life when going to war. War can change a man’s psyche as well as the way he sees the environment around him and the way the environment affects him, which O’Brien loves to express with the use of symbolism and time. Going to war can easily have a negative affect on a person’s sanity, which O’Brien expresses with the use of motifs, personification, and imagery.

     In O’Brien’s memoir of his time at war, he expresses his own identity change plenty of times throughout the book. His first example is his physical transformation that he experienced when in the army which is the butchering of his hair. Ever since O’Brien was in basic training his hair was shaven once a week. At the end of the story he refers to signing of the army as also “dodging out of your last haircut” (O’Brien 208). Shaving your head in this story is symbolic for shaving your identity. O’Brien uses this symbolism to express how your head is a representation of your identity and changing it physically can alter your identity. In this case, shaving your head causes you to not only change your identity, but to almost lose it. A person’s identity is unique and when an entire army has the same style hair, that part of you is completely vanquished. As O’Brien’s identity is taken from him with the shaving of his hair, he becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the army. They are one big array of weapons. O’Brien is able to, “acquire skills necessary to move relatively unnoticed among his own comrades” (Smith 29). He is able to do this because he learns to live like them. He “learns the language of the army” (Smith 29) and can use this blending technique to stay alive throughout battle in the war.

O’Brien also expresses the change of war in a man’s identity through a positive light. He believes that “it’s [war] horrible, but it’s a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes a man out of you” (O’Brien 23). No matter how one looks at the effects of war, it is only certain that it will make a man tough and harder on the outside. On this inside, however, a person will lose the boundary between wartime and post-wartime. This is evident when O’Brien compares, “the landscape of Vietnam and the Minnesota prairies” (Smith 38). Comparing home to the battle front is a common theme soldiers must go through for the rest of their life after returning from a war. This ends up leading to a severe mental depression, as well as long term post dramatic stress disorder. As much as war seems to weaken a person’s mental health, it will strengthen that person’s ability to create a psychological shell which makes someone appear tougher. Some would argue that this is a good quality to have because it lessens a person’s ability to get hurt emotionally due to the psychological shell posted outside him/her’s feelings.

In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses a similar transformation when creating John Wade as “the Sorcerer.” John Wade, having an interesting connection with magic that originated in his childhood with the suicide of his alcoholic father, was recalled as “the Sorcerer” by a fellow veteran. When the veteran was interviewed, he was asked, “Who’s Sorcerer?” and the veteran replied, “A guy. I can’t remember his actual name” (O’Brien 198). The thing is about this dialogue is that the person being interviewed was not just a fellow veteran who knew John Wade, but it was a “friend.” In war, your name is who you are and since John Wade was called “the Sorcerer” and not “John,” he is not remembered as his real self, only what he portrayed himself as in violent times of panic. Sometimes, when a person changes their identity in any way, it roots back to the person’s childhood. In John Wade’s case, with the “the suicide of his alcoholic father, Wade escapes into the world of magic and illusion…[and] becomes known as ‘the Sorcerer’” (Bush 1). John Wade’s identity seemed to change in wartime and then change back once he arrived home since Kathy, his girlfriend, refers to him as “John.” This is what O’Brien portrays as reality: a man can have an identity at war and a completely different identity at home. O’Brien loves to use dialogue to show these real life situations and the dialogue makes the reader seem closer to the situation.

O’Brien loves to show the change in man’s interaction with the environment when going to war. He shows in If I Die in a Combat Zone his own experiences with his changing feelings towards daytime and nighttime, light and darkness. In the beginning of his time at war, he views daytime as physical horror—when men die right in front of you—and nighttime as a mental horror when you are alone with your own thoughts. He describes one of his first nights as, “Old rituals, old fears. Spooks and goblins. Sometimes at night there was an awful certainty that men would die at their foxholes or in their sleep” (O’Brien 9). O’Brien uses imagery here to describe his frightening experiences at night, when he is alone with his thoughts. For young kids, nighttime is usually the time where death comes up the most in their thoughts. For solders, “Instead of indicating a time for rest and dreams, night becomes associated with death” (Smith 35). It is the time where the mind reminisces about the days before where men continuously die. As he gets use to the frightening time of war, O’Brien uses nighttime as a time for peace. He “watched the soldiers raise their bottles of beer to their mouths, drinking to the end of the day, another red line at the edge of the sky where the sun was disappearing” (O’Brien 133). O’Brien uses the beer as a symbol of freedom and the sunset as a symbol of peace. This symbolism that he uses creates a peaceful effect that helps the reader to experience the same peace O’Brien felt. At this time of war, O’Brien’s interaction with nighttime changes for the better.

When a person is in such difficult times, like a dangerous bloody battle, they find false hope in little things. When O’Brien’s company was on a dangerous mission, he saw a tree as “a beautiful women covered with feathers and tan skin was charming snakes. With her stick she prodded the creatures, making them dance and writhe and perform. I hollered down to her, ‘Which way to freedom? Which way home’” (O’Brien 89)? A person in their right mind would certainly not call out to a tree and ask for directions. He describes the tree as a somewhat tribal women with the use of personification to give the tree a more peaceful and graceful presence. His interaction with the environment becomes a more spiritual and connecting experience when going to war. However, O’Brien is not in his right mind here, he is at war. He is searching for any sign of freedom. This is often what happens to men at war: they search for common traits of their homeland. In the United States, freedom is obviously one of those common themes that make it so distinct from the rest of the world. When a person misses home this much, the mind will do anything to turn the environment around him/her into his/her home. This example in If I Die in a Combat Zone portrays that reaction in Tim O’Brien’s mind. Tim O’Brien is also revealing a sense of denial. At war people experience denial of what is actually happening around them or the fact that they are killers. H. Bruce Franklin states: “Another meaning of denial is believing that something is not true or does not exist despite convincing evidence” (Franklin 1). O’Brien actually believes that he is being led to America by this woman that he saw in his mind. Even though trees clearly cannot turn into women and point to freedom, O’Brien still believes that this particular tree does because he is in denial, which is a result of the war.

     People can become better people when going to war, but they can also become monsters. No matter how you think about it, going to war is becoming a killer. Mr. O’Brien portrays John Wade in In the Lake of the Woods as a frightening individual who describes to Kathy that he has “done things…ugly things” (O’Brien 74). The ominous mood that O’Brien sets here with this conversation between Kathy and John shows the insanity that goes through John Wade’s mind, especially after his time at war. John’s friend from Vietnam even describes John as thus, “First though, there was Vietnam, where John Wade killed people” (O’Brien 61). John Wade expresses his insanity towards the people around him as well as to Kathy. He either was insane already and used Vietnam as his opportunity to flaunt it, or became insane in Vietnam. We will never know, but what we do know is that John Wade’s frightening behavior got much worse in Vietnam, where it changes him for the worse. John Wade is a victim of a drunk alcoholic father who committed suicide, as well as committing terrible war crimes in My Lai in the Vietnam War. Therefore, it seems only natural that insanity might result from these two horrific events in Wade’s life. Franklin says: “John Wade had just suffered…because it was revealed that he had taken part in the 1968 My Lai Massacre” (Franklin 3). The fact of the matter is, Wade’s entire life suffered because of his war crimes and his release of built up insanity. War seems to bring out this insanity in people. Some examples are My Lai massacre, the Holocaust, and the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians. These occur during wartime because war seems to bring out evil in people since all radical emotions are being let loose. This is proven on an individual level in Wade’s life when he kills a man “by accident” and participates in My Lai.

Another mystery of John Wade presented by O’Brien is the fact that John killed an American soldier in Vietnam. O’Brien loves to pose these mysteries and let the reader decide the truth. A man being interviewed about John Wade says, “My buddy, Sorcerer, he just…/Who?/ Sorcerer. He shot this old guy by accident, that’s what he told me” (O’Brien 198). We will never know if he actually killed him on purpose, but we know he killed a man on the American side. Whether he did it on his out of impulse or his own consciousness, we know he killed a man he was not suppose to in Vietnam. If it was impulse, the war created that impulse that everyone wanted to kill him and his reflexes began to revolve around his gun.

Tim O’Brien is showing the transformations in a man through war in If I Die in a Combat Zone and In the Lake of the Woods. He uses symbolism, imagery, personification, and motifs to describe the changes a man overcomes in war whether it’s for the better or for the worse in a man’s identity, interaction with the environment, and sanity. O’Brien lets the reader decide whether these changes are for the better or for the worse and he also lets the reader solve the mysteries these changes create.