When America decided to engage in the Vietnam there were many reasons for going there in the first place. The American government had the idea that they had to go there because communism was taking the country. Another reason was that Ho Chi Min the leader of the Viet Kong was starting a genocide of Vietnamese people. This information being produced from the American Government created a view of the Vietnamese people that they were all American hating communist baby freedom haters. Many soldiers went over to Vietnam thinking this, but were awoken to the fact that this was not the whole truth. Tim O’Brian, author of the novel The Things They Carried, brings this truth to light. In the novel, The Things They Carried the Vietnamese people that the men come across are not what they have been told. The American government during the Vietnam war created false views of the Vietnamese people which in the novel The Things They Carried , Tim O’Brian does not see or feel.

In The Things They Carried, O’Brian describes coming across a little girl dancing among the rubble of a village blown to pieces. This was one of his first run in with the civilians. She was innocent, nothing like they had been told, he even related the little girl to his own. When he had his first encounter with a Viet Kong, it was hands on she was terrified of young men in Vietnam. Matching it to the descriptions of the worst nightmares that the American government were producing.

The Things They Carried is a novel by Tim O’Brian telling his and his companions stories as they were drafted into the Vietnam war. O’Brian states that he did not believe in the war and even contemplated going A-Wall and going to Canada, this is important because he did not believe in what the government was doing and how they were sending soldier for a cause that did not need war over. While in Vietnam O’Brian has several meetings with the natives. His first encounter was hand to hand combat on the trail where he had to kill a man and look into his eyes. His most meaningful encounter with the Vietnamese people and what goes along with this thesis is when he walked through a village. When his brigade was walking through a village the people looked at him with anger. The soldier were not being attacked, they were being looked down upon because they were the killers, the soldiers where the reason Vietnamese families were not complete anymore. After O’Brian walks though the village he can see that the war was wrong and that the American people were being fed false ideas that these were evil people and that they all wanted Americans to die.

In 1965 Operation rolling thunder commenced, this is when the first American soldiers set foot in Vietnam. This was in response to the communist party led by Ho Chi Minh taking control of south Vietnam which the Americans had been backing. This is when opinions started changing towards the war, leftist college students were protesting in the masses. The War had become a war of disagreeing politics and the Americans were tired of men getting drafted and sent to Vietnam to die. O’Brian tackles this in his novel too. There was a shy kid that was drafted and did not want to be there. He was often scared to do things and one day he ended up drowning in a sewer pit. The will of the American people to not be in the fight was seen firsthand and shown in the novel. However, there were a few men who join to just be in a war, and honestly believed that the Vietnamese people where all bad and all needed to die. When the little girl is dancing, covering her face to hide from the rubble that was her village one soldier talks about killing her. He talks about how the village was where the Viet Kong lived and they all needed to be eradicated like a pest.

 The American government had to find a reason to send troops to a country many people could not even locate on a map. Their reasoning goes back all the way to WWII, 20 years before the Vietnam war. America tends to fight anything and anyone that does not believe in what they believe in. When the end of WWII came around what America opposed what communism. When Ho Chi Minh took control of north Vietnam, America could not stand to let a country live under a political system that was not a Democracy. Operation Rolling Thunder happened when the USSR and China started helping Ho Chi Minh. When O’Brian was in Vietnam the war had been going on for several years. The soldiers there where not fight what the people years before them had. The new wave of soldiers were hunting for the Viet Kong. They no longer were carpet bombing and laying artillery fire blindly into the woods. O’Brian had to face people, he had to see the death, see the carnage. This firsthand view of the people allowed O’Brian to not see what the newspapers and the government said about the people. 

Having a view of your own is every important. O’Brian uses this in his writing, showing that what you saw in the newspapers and on video where not always true. Using his ideas in The Things They Carried you can rethink your approach voicing your opinions. This model of not trusting what you hear until you see it firsthand can be used even in today’s world. One way you can do this is in politics. Many people only have one source of news. If you were to follow Tim O’Brian’s way of storytelling, you hear from your government and then try and see from your personal experience if it is true. O’Brians The Things They Carried allows the reader to see that you cannot always believe what you are told, and that during the Vietnam war the American government did not tell the truth about the Vietnamese people to incite anger and will for Americans to go to war.
