The things they carried who is mark fossie

Some soldiers have developed mental illnesses, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression. Some veterans will always live their lives damaged and in fear. This rejection of society is fueled by the realization that the pre-enlistment society simply can not understand the reality of the Great War.

Baumer then realizes that the only ones that can understand him are his comrades in the trenches. They become his new society and war his way of life. Baumer never finds this peacefulness; rather he finds the urge to get back to the war and his comrades that were still there. All of this would change after the deployment to a land The Vietnam War changed the way Caputo viewed war.

After fighting, he saw the realities of war and became disenchanted with it. Seeing the unnecessary deaths caused, human suffering, and the longevity of the war made Caputo skeptical about the war. He felt that the United States was losing blood and treasure for a lost cause. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality.

When many think of a great, memorable story, they will probably remember an inspirational or coming of age novel, or Bildungsroman. In many ways, The Things They Carried is an exemplary Bildungsroman as it carries the reader through the lives and problems of every soldier within its pages. Each man is witnessed as he goes through his own maturation and personal times of struggle and hardships. Some are focused on more than others, but each man has a story to tell, each a moral to teach.

Brien and Mark Fossie experience a significant amount of personal maturation by gaining new knowledge about themselves, the Vietnam War , and the world around them.

There are very few times when a person goes through an experience that changes the way he or she thinks about themselves. Drastic things like war, deaths, and tragic incidents can change a person?

The Man I Killed,? Tim O? Brien describes his life changing event when he killed the Vietnamese soldier crossing his path when he was on duty. The reader learns that O? Brien is endlessly sorry for the poor soldier, whom he thoroughly describes in his mind. It is the first time he had ever killed, and it is known that O? Brien continues to remember the soldier throughout his entire life, making him change the way he thinks about himself as both a soldier and a human being.

He is a perfect example of the incongruities in Vietnam. Though levelheaded and kind, Kiley eventually succumbs to the stresses of the war and his role in it—he purposely blows off his toe so that he is forced to leave his post. A childish and careless member of the Alpha Company who is killed when he steps on a rigged mortar round.

The preventability of his death and the irrational fears of his life—as when a dentist visits the company—point to the immaturity of many young American soldiers in Vietnam. A young, scared soldier in the Alpha Company. Lavender is the first to die in the work. He makes only a brief appearance in the narrative, popping tranquilizers to calm himself while the company is outside Than Khe. Another soldier in the platoon and a minor character.

In begging Jensen to forget their pact—that if either man is gravely injured, the other will kill him swiftly—after he is injured, he illustrates how the fantasy of war differs from its reality.

A minor character whose guilt over his injury of Lee Strunk causes him to break his own nose. Instead of mourning the loss of his friend, Jensen is glad to know that the pact the two made—and that he broke—has now become obsolete.

A soldier in the Alpha Company and one of the few unsympathetic characters in the work. Every time Azar appears, he is mean-spirited and cruel, torturing Vietnamese civilians and poking fun both at the corpses of the enemy and the deaths of his own fellow soldiers.

This moment of remorse proves that a breaking point is possible even for soldiers who use cruelty as a defense mechanism. The medic who replaces Rat Kiley. Frustrated that he cannot tell her the whole truth, he is inspired by her presence since it forces him to gain new perspective on his war experience. Fossie loses his innocence in the realization that his girlfriend, Mary Anne, would rather be out on ambush with Green Berets than planning her postwar wedding to Fossie in Cleveland. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook.

It was expensive, he admitted, and the logistics were complicated, but it wasn't like going to the moon. He'd hopped a C up to Chu Lai and stayed overnight at the USO and the next morning hooked a ride west with the resupply chopper. Mary Anne Bell and Mark Fossie had been sweethearts since grammar school. From the sixth grade on they had known for a fact that someday they would be married, and live in a fine gingerbread house near Lake Erie, and have three healthy yellow-haired children, and grow old together, and no doubt dies in each other's arms and is buried in the same walnut casket.

That was the plan. They were very much in love, full of dreams, and in the ordinary flow of their lives, the whole scenario might well have come true. On the first night they set up house in one of the bunkers along the perimeter, near the Special Forces hootch, and over the next two weeks, they stuck together like a pair of high school steadies.