The film Operation Homecoming film really opens ones eyes to the reality of the emotional burdens that soldiers develop from war. This film lets soldiers from multiple different wars to tell their stories, and show the importance of writing during their time in and after war. One great quote from the very beginning of the movie is, ““I may not be a very good soldier, but I am a good witness.” Watching this film along with reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried takes the understanding of the novel to a whole new level. I made multiple connections with the novel while watching the movie. For me, it gives O’Brien’s characters faces. It makes them as real as the men telling their stories in this film. The film shows the many hardships that soldiers deal with from their experiences from war.
The men’s accounts create a new understanding of war for people like me that have no idea what it is like. One of the soldiers talks about how a lot of people have a “romantic view of the war. He tells a story following, showing no romance, just pure fear of dying. People back home want exciting stories, “blood and gore”. These soldiers have an extremely hard time relating to people back home because they don’t know how to explain what happened without telling things they themselves are trying to forget.
Another soldier’s account talks about his sergeant telling him to take all the things that bother him emotionally and “put them in a shoebox, put the lid on it and deal with it later.” These young men had to do this often. They felt guilty about things that they did to save their own lives, as well as those in their platoon. Instead of letting these things eat them up inside and drive them crazy, they try to ignore the reality going on around them.
One of the most interesting parts of the film is Tim O’Brien’s inputs. He talks about a soldier living his life fearing death. This connects to the character’s fears in the novel. It takes such a strong emotional outlook to be able to survive war. One veteran explains that, “The longer that your in combat, the more sure you are that your not going to survive.” They see people dying all around them, and the reality of what is happening can not always be ignored.
This film makes the idea of war so real to me. It makes me feel sorry for men and woman that go to war at such a young age and are expected to bear the extreme emotional pain that is thrust upon them. A point made by Sangjoon Han, an soldier in the U.S. Army is that “from the time you are born you are told it is wrong to kill people, then you are put in a situation where they are telling you to do.” He says that it is not easy to just turn that thought off in one’s head. This moral struggle must be one of the hardest things for a soldier to deal with. They are “humane” people, but the things that they are expected to carry out are not. As said in the film, “It puts you at war with yourself.”
This film makes me realize what the soldiers really went through, in the name of serving their country. One emotion that I felt after watching this film was an extreme disappointment in people that blame soldiers for the happenings of war. They are constantly trying to make the right moral decision, but obviously as Tim O’Brien says in his novel, “War is not moral.” The film quotes Anthony Swafford from Jarhead as saying, “The most complex and dangerous conflicts, the most harrowing operation, and the most deadly wars, occur in the head.” This rings very true after listening the the many soldiers accounts and reading Tim O’Brien’s short stories in The Things They Carried. These soldiers not only have physical burdens they must face everyday, but emotional scars that could last them a lifetime.
Works Cited
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried.
Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Richard E. Robbins. The Documentary Group,2007. Film.
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