The Things They Carried and Apocalypse Now.
The Things They Carried and Apocalypse Now are both brilliant depictions of the Vietnam War. Each medium attempts to display a similar view of the war, and each succeeds exceptionally. Both stories show the horrors of war, and have anti war undertones which are easily detected. Movies and books can both bring a across a different kind of imagery, but their effectiveness depends on the individual who is being communicated with. If the person is very creative and imaginative, reading a book would create a sort of motion picture inside their heads, but for those who need some help to produce characters, and scenes, movies would be a better tool for communicating a story.
The Things They Carried is an enchanting war story that is told by Tim O"Brien, who claims that all of the tales in his book are true. After meeting Tim O"Brien at a seminar in Anaheim California in 2000, it was made clear that all of these stories are actually fictional, and Mr. O"Brien was actually a journalist during Vietnam, and saw no real action. But the visions of horror that O"Brien provides in The Things They Carried is very real. Not only did O"Brien describe the carnage of the war physically, but he also did an excellent job of displaying the mental and emotional suffering that the soldiers went through. Plenty of time is spent discussing women, and how much each man misses the companionship of a woman. The way O"Brien made the reader relate to the characters in his stories gives all of the horrible occurrences even more meaning. After reading The Things They Carried you feel as though you were part of Vietnam. You feel the loss, and the pain that Tim O"Brien feels when he returns home from the war. You feel the emptiness, and loneliness. Nobody can imagine taking another human beings life, but O"Brien does his very best to put us into his shoes, and let us feel the grief that he felt.
