Courage: The ability to do something that frightens one. This is googles definition of courage and as you can tell it is a different than Tim O’ briens, the author of The things they carry.” Talking about courage O’Brien says “it comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance , and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest” (38). To him courage is not the extreme bravery it is doing good and basically being able to stay alive in the war. Obviously there are many reasons why Tim O’brien has a definition of courage and the biggest reasons is war. War was a scarring memory for people and being able to fight was the norm and it didn’t take courage.
If I had to define courage I would say that it is being able to do something that you don’t feel comfortable with and being able to get through it. Sometimes it is really hard for people to gain the courage to be able to do something and that’s how it is. I feel like now I would never have the courage to jump into a war and go kill people. Back during this time period people were being drafted and being forced into doing this. Im sure that they didn’t want to do it either but they had to man up and have the courage to jump in and fight for the country.
As talked about in the chapter PTSD was very common during this time. PTSD stands for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The reason for this being so common during this time period was because young men were being thrown into the war and they saw blood, death, and violence right at their feet, and it is hard to recover from that. In our generation we have people that we can talk to about our problems such as psychiatrists and it lets us get through our problems. At the time of the war nobody knew what it was and there was nobody to talk to, so people committed sucide. As you can see, the times have changed so much and the courage that people had back during the war was high because they knew that if they went in, they would come out a completely different person and maybe even with a mental disorder.
Overall Courage is something that everyone needs to get through problems. Everyone has a different definition of courage and since the war it has changed a lot. I never grew up with war so I could never picture myself being by that and to have the courage to fight, I couldn’t. Tim O’brien did a great job displaying courage during this chapter and it shows because he had experience.