Essay 2

Stryker


Laura Darrow

Eng 201: Essay 2

2 July 2010

I want to compare CPL Waters monologue from The Sand Storm and a part of “How to Tell a True War Story” from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The situations in these two stories are surely different from almost every outside look. Thirty-plus years apart and in completely different parts of the world, yet they are the same. The similarities come from the internal pain and suffering that the soldiers go through and their inability to deal with it.

In both of these stories there are young men who have been thrust into infernos of mortar and gun fire. They had come together with their fellow soldiers only to have them killed before their eyes. Coming from a society where violence is really not extremely rampant, these men did not have a very high threshold for witnessing and committing brutal acts. Because of this inability to process seeing death, both men built up rage.

CPL Waters grew to loathe the enemy, and with that comes a sort of base racism. He began to think of everybody there as an enemy, because they don’t wear uniforms, they don’t conform to rules of war, and will use civilian areas as places to launch attacks. Waters was sitting on the truck eating his lunch when he saw, “a pile of half a dozen rags” with “one still alive and kicking. Well, maybe not kicking” (Huze 8). The man was not kicking because both of his legs were blown off. In normal places, what Waters did then is unimaginable. He laughed and hopped off the truck to walk up to the suffering “rag”. All Waters wanted at that moment was to kill this man. He was just another scumbag that had a hand in the demise of his fellow marines. This is not the roughest part of the story. When the man silently pleads for Waters to shoot him, Waters changed his mind and at the same time got a sick thrill out of it. He took on the role of a sadist, sitting there watching this man slowly bleed to death while he continued eating his lunch.

In The Things They Carried, Rat Kiley loses himself in a much more physically extreme way, but I would argue that it is more mentally extreme to eat lunch while watching somebody bleed out. In “How to Tell a True War Story” Tim O’Brien tells about Curt Lemon dying. The lining behind the story of his death is Rat Kiley’s reaction to it. They were apparently best friends, and while nobody was directly responsible for Lemon’s death (meaning he was not shot by an enemy you can see, an enemy you can shoot back), but he stepped on a I.E.D, “He was playing with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead” (O’Brien 78). A cold booby trapped explosive planted in the ground killed his friend, there was nobody to place the blame on at the time. Rat Kiley didn’t have an enemy to watch writhe and squirm in pain waiting for their death. Rat Kiley had a baby water buffalo. He took his gun out, pointed it at the baby water buffalo and started shooting. As O’Brien pointed out, “it wasn’t to kill, it was to hurt” (O’Brien 78-79). He shot it over and over, and everybody sat there staring, not saying a word. He blew off parts of the buffalo’s body, his leg, ear, mouth. By the end Kiley was crying, and to be honest, so was I. I missed Curt Lemon. I didn’t want to kill the buffalo, but I had to. Once I started I couldn’t stop and the release felt good. O’Brien does a damn good job of putting you behind the skin of his characters.

Both of these men could be said to have had serious mental breakdowns. In CPL Waters case I found it much more chilling than I found it saddening. Here was Waters, fighting a War on Terror, and yet he sits there and does the same thing back. He terrorized that dying Iraqi man by being so cold towards him, by showing no mercy but staring directly at him. I can imagine he cocked his head to the side, like a curious dog, and gave a quick smile. That is terror to me.

In Rat Kiley’s case however, it wasn’t a desire to terrorize something or somebody. It was depression and helplessness. A frustration at not being able to express his feelings to anybody else in his company. Maybe he felt like he wanted to talk to Lemon about it, but then gets even more hurt remembering that he won’t be able to again.

You can see that these two situations and two ways of coping with it are completely different, but it is the same thing they both felt. They were scared, helpless and we cannot forget, young. While they dealt with their issues in different ways, they are the same problems that countless other soldiers will end up facing, and then there will be countless stories told about how they coped with it. Both of these writers are aiming for the same goal, they want to get people informed about the war. They want people to stop saying “support our troops” and actually start doing it. They want to rid society of the stigma that faces soldiers when they openly speak out against government war policy. It seems like they aim to put people into war, without ever having them enlist in the Armed Forces. By that, I mean that they do such a good job of relating their experience, they truly make you feel what they are describing, and so in a way you get to go to war without ever having to.









Works Cited

O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They Carried. 1990. 2 July 2010. Print.


Huze, Sean. The Sand Storm. New York: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, 2004. Print.