Exploration 4: Cameron Mirka

 Part One:
One common theme within the last five chapters was that people have the ability to bring people back to life through the use of stories. This theme is extremely important to the central idea of this book which is that we should never forget our past. Throughout the story, O'Brien tells us many stories about people who have been lost in the war. Although they are no longer living on earth O'Brian has the ability to have their memories live on in the minds of everyone who reads his book. One specific example that O'Brien does in his story is when he talks about his 9-year-old love for Linda. Linda may have died of a brain tumor at 9 but O'Brien has kept the memory and her alive for his entire life. O'Brien states "She was dead. I understood that ... And yet even as a 9-year old, I had begun to practice the magic of stories" (O'Brien, 231). This shows the reader that although Linda may be dead, the magic of storytelling has the ability to keep our loved ones alive for as long as we remember them.

In my own experience, I see this with my family. Whenever we get together we tell stories of our past and with this, we are able to bring family members back to life feel their presence wherever we go. An example of this is when my grandfather loves to tell stories of his loving mother and in a sense, I feel as if she has never left.

Part Two:
The question that always seemed to pop into my head while reading this book was what was the division of the American army that took on the most amount of casualties and what caused their jobs to be so deadly? The reason why this question played with my attention is that O'Brien talked of all the atrocities of the war and I wondered if there was a division that suffered far worse fates than the waste fields and the silent mountains full of sound. According to Smith Ray, the division that took the greatest number of deaths on the American side was the 1st Calvary division with 5,464 people killed in action (Smith, 5). The reason for there being so many casualties in this division was explained by the article 1st Cavalry Division and it explained that this infantry division was airlifted to new parts of Vietnam where the American forces hadn't really gotten yet and this then put them in a much more hazardous situation than the people who followed them from the more safer fronts (1st Calvary). The best information for this specific question came from Ray Smith's Casualties article because it listed all the different divisions and the number of casualties in them.

An image of member of the 1st Cavalry Division with their gear and helicopters are shown in the background.

Works Cited:
“1st Cavalry Division (United States).” Military Wiki, military.wikia.com/wiki/1st_Cav
              alry_Division_(United_States).

OBrien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Smith, Ray. “Casualties - US vs NVA/VC.” Casualties - US vs NVA/VC, 23 Jan. 2000,
             www.rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html.