Platoon Verses the Things They Carried: Exploring the Men of Vietnam.

The movie Platoon, and the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien are both very similar in many ways, for instance, they both deal with what the men who were sent off to Vietnam and had to go through, physical, mental, and emotional trials. In both the novel and the movie, the men were shipped off to a foreign land to fight a gruesome war. These men are portrayed as innocent men, who because of all of the things they had to go through, and the thing they’ve seen, and felt, have become hard, very violent men. These men, young boys in most cases, have a very hard time dealing with where they are, and the very intense things they have to deal with every day. Often times it leads the men to not only depend on each other, but become a sort of brotherhood. This strong sense of need for other people can also cause fights within the platoon of men, and this is why in the middle of Platoon Charlie Sheen’s Character says “I can’t believe we’re fighting each other, when we should be fighting them.”  
The Things They Carried, depicts what the men had to go though on a more psychological level. O’Brien often showed the men in a more philosophical light, and even though the men were not educated properly, they knew what they needed to know to stay alive. A portion of The Things They Carried was dedicated to the main characters (O’Brien) struggle with not wanting to go to Vietnam, and how close he was to running away from his problems, and the only reason he did go was because he was afraid. The fear that pushed him to go to Vietnam was the same fear that kept him moving while he was in Vietnam.
All of the men that were in O’Brien’s platoon were forced to be in Vietnam, fighting for their country, but unlike O’Brien many of the men in his platoon wanted to be there. Not in the sense that these men wanted to be in a foreign land getting shot at every day, but in the sense that these men had nothing to go back to. While some had girlfriends, and family to go home to, they...