#4

       Watching Apocalypse Now and reading Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong by Tim O'Brien and A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger in class made the concept of the stories easier to understand. The concept would be "War Changing the Man" or in some case, women. A Perfect Day for Bananafish  was about a man, Seymour, who was mentally scarred from war. He reaches for a gun inside his jacket when he got startled on the beach, won't show his "tattoo", he plays with a little girl like he is her age and isn't trusted driving a car. This story is more along the lines of PTSD and that is a very serious condition. Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong was about a soldier in the Vietnam war that invites his girlfriend to where he is because he misses her. She loved being in a new place, learning new things about the culture or about the war. She is very positive in the beginning but then turns dark. She learns to shoot a M-16, goes down into the village with the Green Berets and is changed. She changes, for the worse. She stopped wearing jewelry, stopped taking care of her hygiene and says, "You're in a bad place where you don't belong." She was the one that didn't belong there. She was is a dark room with decaying animal heads in the wall, skin hanging from the rafters and bones all over the floor, singing to tribal music. Her boyfriend, Fossie, saw that she was wearing a necklace with tongues hanging down! Human tongues! Apocalypse Now is kind of like Sweetheart in the Song Tra Bong. Captain Willard gets put on a mission in Cambodia during the Vietnam War to kill an American colonel. US Army believe that Colonel Kurtz has become insane and conducts his men and a local tribe on illegal guerrillas missions. Willard and his crew travel up river to try to reach Kurtz. Willard finally reaches Kurtz and unfortunately lost some of his crew, and was captured by the local tribe. Willard is held captive but later released and gained freedom of the compound, then Willard attacked Kurtz with a machete and kills him.
      Colonel Kurtz reminds me of Mary Anne from Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong because they both changed for the worse. Kurtz had corpuses and heads laying around the area and Mary Anne made a necklace of human tongues.
       War can be a scary situation to get yourself caught in. Seeing the aftermath of war, PTSD, is very scary. War ruins soldier's lives. Kurtz, Mary Anne and Seymour suffered a form of mental illness, whether PTSD or psycho-social disorder. War changed their mind, thinking that killing is fun and keeping the dead body's part is okay. For Seymour, i think its harder for him to be in society because he knows he is a grown man but is treated like a little kid.
       Visualizing the effects of war through short stories or films is a great way to understand the aftermath of what soldiers live with/through.