Exploration 3 Cameron Mirka

My active reading skills were lacking at the beginning of the book due to a lack of practice over the summer but as time goes on I have begun to write more and more in the book. One thing that I noted in today's reading is on page 77 in The Things They Carried and the phrase is "The rockets red glare" which I thought was referencing the national anthem and showed his nationalism. In this part of the book, it was also referencing the beauty of war and its interesting how the destructive force of a rocket can be viewed as something that is beautiful in the time of uncertainty.

One story that has meant the most to me so far is the story about Curt Lemon and how people cope with the sudden trauma of one of their friends dying in a horrific way. When Curt Lemon steps on the rigged artillery shell and gets blown up into the tree in a very traumatizing way the way that Dave Jenson copes is with dark humor. In the story, it quotes "Dave Jenson and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off... Dave Jenson singing 'Lemon Tree' as we threw down parts" (O'Brien, 79). The reason this really stood out for me is that one my philosophies is that laughter is the strongest cure and this story takes that philosophy and pushes it to the extreme by trying to laugh off someone's death and the horrific way he was killed. Although I do believe in this philosophy to a certain extent, laughter of someone's death is where I believe this philosophy to fall short. Although to a civilian this technique doesn't quite seem right, a person who has gone through terrible traumatizing experiences may view this as just another day in war.

The character that really stands out to me the most is Rat Kiley because I can relate to him in the aspect of bottling things up. In the story, Rat witnessed one of his best friends and instead of talking about it with his platoon he decided to just keep it bottled up. Overtime Rat has other things happen to him but once again he doesn't tell anyone. After this build-up goes for a while he becomes a bomb where any little instance will set him off. In the story, the thing that sets him off is the baby buffalo not eating the food he tries to give it and in response Rat lets out all of his anger and maims the buffalo in a horrific way and he doesn't understand why he did it either. I feel like he is very relatable because I can see that he doesn't want to tell the platoon his feeling because he wants to look tough and resilient to the war's tragedies.