Think about being thrown in the fight of your life. One day your a newly 18 year old adult and then next your a solider going off to fight in a war you might not even understand. Now are you surprised when I tell you that this actually happened? The Vietnam war was on of the most controversial wars most didn’t even understand why we were there fighting. The amount of courage displayed by the American solders is truly amazing. Especially in the environment they fought in with gorilla warfare many many Americans died.
And the fact is that many of these soldiers were young men that never got to experience life to it’s fullest extent. It tells us in the book that many would have doubt in their minds as they fought in Vietnam most just trying to survive to get home and start their lives as adults. Although the Young American soldiers showed a great amount of courage not all started out that way. A quote from the text shows us this. He was drafted into the war and was thinking about leaving the country so he did not have to go to war. Although he knew if he did this he could not come back to america because he would be a deserter. He was on a boat about to cross the American Canada border.
“I thought about walking away,But then I got out of the boat”47. It was scary for a lot of these young men to go off to a country they have never been to before and fight a war they did not fully understand. In this quote the man showed courage to go off to war instead of leaving the country. Courage can make ordinary people do extraordinary things like in this case. One of the stories in the book told us about how the men had to go into small tunnels that the enemies would hid in to find any Vietnamese soldiers in them. These tunnels were very small and a large sized man could not fit into them so they would send in small soldiers to do the job.
The tunnels were so small you could not stand in them and could barley move side to side. Lots of times they were also infested with rats. One thing is for sure it took a huge amount of courage to fight in Vietnam. And because of this courage many lives were saved in Vietnam as well as lost. Many people don’t realize what it really took to fight in a war like this. It was grueling hard physical fighting and if you didn’t stay on your A game at all times you could end up dead in a split second. So the next time you think about courage think about those men that fought in the war and what they sacrificed for their country. Having courage isn’t always the easiest thing but the soldiers in Vietnam managed to pull through.