Although his experience in the Vietnam War certainly changed his life and will always remain unforgettable, Tim O’Brien is right in saying that the essence of a person remains the same no matter what they go through in life. Ultimately, the only thing that changes is a person’s own perception, not the person themselves. Even if a person has an experience that truly changes nearly everything about them, such as O’Brien and his experience in Vietnam, that change only applies from that point forward. Since one cannot change his or her past, they essentially remain the same person forever, with their life events and perceptions being the things that do change.
Despite the fact that I have never gone through something nearly as extreme as O’Brien did in fighting the Vietnam War, even I can say that I have always been the same person, despite how different my perspectives have become over the past several years. Before I entered high school, my outlook on the world as well as my personality were completely different from what they are today. I believed that there was nothing I could ever do that could be considered wrong, and nothing in life was to be taken too seriously. I knew this was not just something that young teenagers feel as a result of being that age, because the people I looked up to for this reason were well into adulthood, and they too had the same attitude as I did. I believed at that point that all consequences were short-lived, and nothing would ever present me with a difficulty as far as moving on from it. However, around the time I began high school, I made some decisions that I still think about to this day, and I still question why I made them and even whether or not I regret them now. The events of the previous three years could not have been more different from what I had expected prior to that, but even today I do not feel I am any different as a person. Knowledge gained from experience does not equal permanent change from one person to another new person.
Because one will always remember how they used to be, they will, in essence, never change completely. Even though their feelings about a vital situation may have been even the opposite of how they feel about it looking back on it, this is simply a change in perspective, not a change in person. For example, before O’Brien left to go to war, he saw himself as a coward “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war” (61). But even decades later as he tells the story, he still remembers that this is exactly how he felt at that point in his life. After all that had happened between the time he left and went to war and the time he wrote The Things They Carried, he obviously does not feel the exact same way about life as he does now, but the important thing is that he does realize that these are the things that made up his life, and he still, forty-three years later, feels they are important enough to tell now. A person is not simply made up of what they are now, but rather they are made up collectively of everything they have ever been, no matter how different the past is from the present.
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About change:
My father was a captain in WWII. Not just a captain who had worked from being a private or had entered a military academy and graduated to enter the armed forces. He was a doctor who had been drafted. He was much older than most draftees. He served in a MASH unit and was forbidden to carry a weapon. His assignment: fix the wounded.
When he returned to America, he was a changed man,according to my mother. He became an alcoholic and died of coronary thrombosis at the age of 42. I was 10 years old.
Would my father have become an alcoholic if he had not served in WWII? It is quite possible that he would have. It might have been in his genes, so to speak. We really do not know.
Should he have looked for help after he returned? At that time little was known about PTSD. The Veterans Administration took care of the physically wounded.
When my father was not re-living his war experiences, he was a kind, gentle, generous, loving man. When he was overcome with alcohol, he was abusive. My mother had to seek refuge outside our home.
His death was a sad occasion, yet it was a liberating moment for him because it meant he no longer would have to contend with his demons, and those who loved him would no longer have to fear him.
No one knows his final thoughts when he died. We do not know if he suffered any remorse for his actions. None of the survivors even wondered. They saw him as a good loving man who could not endure man's inhumanity to man but did not know how to cope.
My mother loved him to the end and well beyond....She always spoke of him as he had been when she met him, fell in love with him, and chose to marry him.
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