The Vietnam war was one of the most gruesome wars in American history. This war had the most American casualties whether it was from being shot, traps, bombs, or diseases. It’s no wonder why so many Americans who returned from Vietnam had PTSD.  To better understand the Vietnam war and PTSD, two authors, Jose L. Barrera and Ted Engelmann share their accounts of the Vietnam war.  Jose L. Barrera’s essay, No Man’s Land describes dramatic events that occurred in Vietnam while Barrera was fighting there and Ted Engelmann’s bibliography, Who Are Our Fathers? describes how Ted has dealt with and lived through PTSD after the Vietnam war.  Tim O’ Brian was also a soldier during the Vietnam war and he talks about the war in a fiction sense through his book. Barrera and Engelmann provide more insight to PTSD and the Vietnam war by sharing their experiences which provides a more realistic background to Tim O’Brian’s fiction Book, “The Things They Carried.”

Barrera gives a more descriptive version of the battlefield during the Vietnam war, while O’ Brian gives more insight about the soldiers, which helps to better understand how soldiers could potentially get PTSD in O’ Brian’s book. When O’ Brian describes death he just says, “he was shot and killed …then Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden” (330). He does not go into much detail about how the soldiers died. Barrera on the other hand, the first time he saw death; he describes a man drowning in his own blood after a piece of shrapnel went through his neck. Seeing people die like that just shows some of the gruesome and horrible ways some people died during the war. After seeing a death like that, just shows why some people end up with PTSD. Seeing a person die just is not natural for most people, so that is why it can be so harmful to humans in a mental and emotional way, thus causing PTSD. Later in Barrera’s essay, he goes on to say the average weight of a backpack is seventy-five pounds but that is really all he says about what the soldiers carried. Barrera does not explain anything that the soldiers had and way they may have had that object. Whereas, O’ Brian explains in great detail some of the things the soldiers had, so the reader could better understand and relate to each character. For example, O’ Brian says, “Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations…Jenson, who practiced hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel sized bars of soap…Cross carried two photos of Martha” (328-329). By giving more insight to the characters he shows the type of people they are and how they all had different things that made them feel, in other words, like they were back at home. Also by listing out the things that the soldiers had, makes none of them seem to be killers or even want to be killers. They all seem like normal people so it makes sense how seeing death and killing people can cause people to get PTSD. Barrera also describes his first fire fight, seeing friendly fire and how he thought the VC had set that scenario up all on purpose, and he just describes lots of the horrors of battle in general. So when O’ Brian says, “Khe carried twenty pounds of ammunition, a flak jacket, and a helmet” (330) the reader can better understand why he is carrying all of those things and it is to protect himself from the enemy so hopefully he will not die. Seeing people die, not just by the enemy but by fellow soldiers, your brothers in arms, is just god awful and has to be emotionally devastating. Just being on the battlefield with bullets whizzing past you, or hearing bullets hit the ground right next to you would just be extremely terrifying. And when the fighting stops for just a moment, the soldiers are left wondering when the fighting will resume and if they might be next in line to be killed. Just walking through Vietnam, knowing that the enemy could be anywhere and strike at any minute would make anyone go nuts. Vietnam would just be such an emotional demoralizing and god awful experience that no one should ever have to through. It is hard to believe that not even more soldiers got PTSD after living through what could almost be considered hell.

Engelmann explains life with PTSD after the Vietnam war which helps explain how O’ Brian’s book relates to Vietnam war soldiers and PTSD. For example, in O’ Brian’s book the scenario comes up where lieutenant Cross has to pick out somebody to crawl into a fox hole to check it out. The person he picked ended up getting buried alive and dying. Having to carry that type of weight around can be very depressing, which may cause PTSD. As a leader and to know that you sent that person into that place and he ended up dying, that weight on your shoulders would be unbearable and that is what Cross has to carry with him now. Engelmann just like Cross had PTSD that he also had to carry around with him after the war. In Engelmann’s essay, he explains how he saw many people die throughout the war and how it caused him to get PTSD. In war soldiers have the need to feel somewhat safe and secure because they know that they could as easily end up as dead as their comrades. This is also a big deal when fighting a war because the safer and more secure the soldiers feel the more likely they will be to keep a level head and stick around to fight. As O’ Brian explains the soldiers carried photos, weed, letters, and just other personal things that made them feel better about themselves so that they would feel secure enough to fight.  O’ Brian states, “they all carried ghosts” (332) and these ghosts were thoughts of family members and loved ones which show that the soldiers also had a need to be loved as well as safe and secure. Engelmann explains how the soldiers in Vietnam had left behind kids when they were sent back the states which shows that they also had the need to be loved because love makes people feel safe, secure, and comfortable in their environment.          O’ Brian shows that the characters are starting to lose their minds a little bit when he says, “they carried all the emotional baggage of the men who might die” (338) and “when Cross says, “He would dispose of his good luck pebble” (341). This relates to Engelmann because he has felt the emotional weight he carried around for forty years after coming back to the states from the Vietnam war and he probably also deals with survivors’ guilt just like what Jimmy Cross is dealing with in the book. The soldiers are wondering after seeing so much death when they are actually going to die. They think about death and how it is almost inevitable. This would drive them absolutely crazy. How can someone live if they are always thinking that they are going to die. This is just another reason that people get PTSD from war.

Barrera and Engelmann has shown how PTSD relates to O’Brian’s novel and how the soldiers are affected throughout the book. PTSD has not just been diagnosed in Vietnam war veterans but to veterans who had fought in any war throughout history. No man or women wants to kill or be killed in war, when people, soldiers, commit and see these acts, it causes them to get PTSD. They then have to live with this for the rest of their lives and PTSD makes it very hard to come back to society and live the way that these soldiers used to live, in society before the war, because they have just experienced so many traumatic events that that is all they think about anymore. PTSD is a big deal in society today and O’Brian points out to the readers of his book what the Vietnam war is like and why so many veterans have ended up with PTSD.
