Vietnam War (1965-1973) was the longest war that the U.S. government had entered. Its circumstances are much like Iraq current war nowadays. Both of them are wars of choice. The U.S. government has taken the Americans and the whole world to a war since 2003 on the grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction but later on no weapons have been found. Now the U.S. government is telling the whole world that they are actually in Iraq to achieve democratic self-government. This is not true since this leads to an inner civil war and the question that has no answer how long Iraq war will last. The U.S. government is repeating the old mistakes committed by them during the Vietnam era. President Lyndon Johnson entered Vietnam on the grounds that Ho Chi Minh was leading the country to chaos since there was a civil war between the South and the North of Vietnam and the U.S. government took the decision to interfere in order to achieve the democracy in the country. The war ended with the withdrawal of the U.S. leaving behind it four million Vietnamese, over 58,000 Americans and more millions were wounded by shell or shock.
Anyone seeking a meaningful understanding of the history of the Vietnam War should stand face to face at the Veterans Memorial in Washington. In order to view the Veterans Memorial means to be inside it. It is an animated grave, a collective voice speaking from the past that is far from dead, or that can only be dead if we fail to hear and acknowledge its stories. Any visitor to the wall will observe from this monument that it often contains messages from friends and families to their lost loved suggesting that the dead live on and their stories are constantly being written. The wall is a message for family and friends to be always remembered. Thus, the wall allows observers to become creative participants. The wall’s observers are symbolic readers and authors of personal and cultural history, just as the characters in contemporary novels are readers and storytellers of their own lives. The authors who really participate in the Vietnam War are able to read the text of their lives and experiences and tell stories creating by this a relationship between reading and storytelling which enriches their lives.
The Vietnam War has introduced new generation of writers who participated in the war with its horror events and are now trying to write about what they saw and felt in the war. The aim of this study is to show the impact of the war on the best author who wrote about the Vietnam Tim O'Brien (1947- ). The central character in his texts is himself a storyteller, whose stories at once connect us to the world of experience and throw us back on the problems of storytelling.
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