Blog 1: Unconventional Techniques

  Tim O’Brien's unique technique use of contradiction revealed how sanity and sense of reality can be pushed and manipulated.  In his story regarding the Listening Patrol that is sent into the peaks of the mountains of Vietnam for a week to search for enemy movement, O’Brien shows the reader how during war sometimes the biggest battles are the ones going on in your head.  Over the week the Patrol starts to imagine that they are hearing the rocks and other non vibrant aspects of the forest.  This starts to push the sanity of the Patrol, they know that it is nothing but, still they call in the air strike.  Their reality had become compromised which along with losing sanity was the psychological repercussion of their war.  O’Brien uses this technique of contradiction because that's what the whole situation was, a contradiction.  O’Brien says in many cases a true war story cannot be believed, and if you do be skeptical.    

With events going on like this during a war, PTSD becomes a more and more predictable result.  There are many different psychological repercussions in war stories, each story different and resulting in different side effects.  For the Listening Patrol it was sanity and sense of reality and sanity, for Rat it was trauma, grief, and also derealization.  Not everyone veteran gets PTSD from these experiences, but the ones that do can usually link the source of the PTSD from the war stories they lived while serving.