The Things They Carried Part 3

O’Brien describes in the chapter “The Dentist” that they where in the place were it felt like a two-week vacation but for their enemies it was their secret basement to place and launch their rocket attacks. This is a perfect example of how people can view the same event or place in different perceptions. I have a perfect example because every time that I have vacation most of the times I come to La Paz, Bolivia in order to be with my friends and also family. If I happen to come on the earlier months of the year or mid-year, most of time I would go to my old school because it is a way that I can learn new stuff and also have fun with my friends. They see it as a place where there are a lot of activities and things to do but I see it as something really good because I don’t have to do anything. For example they work on special subjects and I decide to help them in order to help myself learn more things.

 In this same chapter, the author talks about his experiences with dentists as well as the people with him like Lemons. If I relate this to my life, the times that I went to the dentist were some of the most painful I have had in my life. I have never had a good dental floss because I am a really lazy person so sometimes I wouldn’t brush my teeth in between meals from lunch and dinner. As the dentist tried to explain me, I didn’t hear him because I thought that I had better things to do than to do whatever they told me. At the end, when I had a lot of pain in my teeth, I understood that the dentist transmit their message as best as possible so that we can avoid these pains. The pains are really high that I think it is something really serious because you use your teeth every day. In terms of the techniques to brush my teeth happened to be described in page 277 because the author describes how the dentist showed him the proper way to actually brush teeth so that no problem could arise.

 In the chapter that is titled “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, the author describes how Rat never backed down because he claimed that in all of his stories, he had witnessed them with this own eyes. This relates to my lifetime experiences because when I was 14 years old, I was retelling an event to my sisters about how my trip to the US was but when I started talking about a show that I visited, they told me that it was too good to be true and that I don’t have that much luck to experience something that good. This was very painful because I knew that it was true as I had seen it with my own eyes and when I was retelling the story, I didn’t ignore any details because I wanted to sound as true as possible, I right now know how Rat is feeling because it is not a pleasant feeling to have when you feel something to the people that really mean something to you as they are the ones that wait for the stories anxiously.

Analyze Chapter The Man I Killed (page 389):

In the start of the chapter, the author starts to describe a man which I suppose happens to be the one that he killed as the title of this chapter states. He starts by describing the face of the person as he says that “his jaws was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, one of his eyes was shut and the other one was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose undamaged…his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull”. This gives out a creepy message about the person because as you start to put everything together and start imagining the face of the person then you could think that he was really ugly and that he was a criminal. For example the teeth gone would represent the idea that he didn’t had any floss as well as that we was really poor. Having the nose undamaged would demonstrate that he was a really good fighter and didn’t receive any hits in his face. This gives out a good message of the person because they simply picture out a scary guy as the ones that fight in the wars. If we keep on reading the description that O’Brien starts to make about the person, we realize that it had to be a great victory for the author having come out victorious about the fight. If we look at his physical appearance we can realize that he had “bony legs, a narrow waist, and long shapely fingers. His chest was sunken and poorly muscled-a scholar, maybe. His wrists were the wrists of a child. He wore a black shirt, black pajama pants, a gray ammunition belt, a gold ring on the third finger of his right hand.” This completes the picture of the creepy guy as well as it demonstrates the Vietnamese culture. With the physical description of his body, we didn’t seem that rough or strong but I am sure that it was a huge challenge because it is not easy to kill someone.