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More love tim obrien tab8/26/2023 The company, which said 45 percent of its users in the U.S. Users can also submit “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” reactions to podcasts to further customize their recommendations.Īs of the test launch, Twitter appears to be following a Pandora-esque model for podcasts rather than trying to compete with Spotify and Apple Podcasts. To bring the podcast episodes onto the platform, a Twitter spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter that the company is pulling from existing RSS feeds and will tailor the recommendations based on the topics a user follows and the general interests tied to their accounts. The more significant battles were within themselves.Įx-soldiers turned writers can be the world’s strongest advocates for peace.Mark Zuckerberg's Sneak Attack: Twitter Rival Threads Launches Earlier Than Expected They were battling malaria, their unfamiliarity with a foreign terrain, their own feelings or ideologies, their disinterest in the outcome. They didn’t even know who they were as people, before they were flung into a conflict that they couldn’t understand. People, whose humanity is not lesser or greater than of the young American adults who were roped in to destroy them.Īnd this was O’Brien’s point too: many of those soldiers were teenagers or just a few years older. Fathers, lovers, teachers, artists or just ordinary blokes. He pointedly does not name any Vietnamese “enemies” – after all, soldiers cannot carry on with impossible obligations if they hear the stories of those that they are killing. While Tim is too deft a writer to offer up simple platitudes or morals, the takeaway for most readers is clear: war is never justified. To use them, as one might with shards of a broken object, to evoke the past or reshape the future. Who writes about his writing as a means to purge himself of memories. O’Brien himself is a character in the book. Or the burdensome guilt that one might ferry back, of lives shortened or irrevocably scarred. Except, ironically, one wonders if any soldier can honestly claim to have killed without fear. It wasn’t courage that took him there, but the opposite. He was scared of being dismissed by patriots, scared of being called a wimp. He was scared of being laughed at or ridiculed. But as a writer, who is unflinchingly honest about his emotions, he said he signed up because he was afraid. He could have escaped, he could have remained a conscientious objector. He had initially wanted to move to Canada, to avoid being drafted. O’Brien, who wrote this book twenty years after he had returned from the war, acknowledges that fear made him sign up. It’s the only way they can make it through a terrain that is already littered with defeat or pointless victories. “Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7 ounces of premium dope.” The point is to draw our attention to the sheer futility of stuff, as well as the soldier’s real or imagined dependence on “necessities or near-necessities.” All of which become weights on their backs, things like “P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellents, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets…” The mundane stuff is lugged with not-so-mundane weapons: grenade launchers, assault rifles, guns, handguns, bayonets. Tedious things, that O’Brien carefully and aggravatingly lists out, without sparing the reader. In a setting, where one might encounter death at any point, or even worse, be compelled to kill, everything is flippant. Or is merely being polite, tossing the word in, as most of us do, like a customary ciao or ta-ta. Like Jimmy Cross who wonders if someone who signs off, “Love, Martha” actually means it. Sometimes they carry abstractions, or even delusions. “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.” The memories and regrets, the hopes and whispered prayers start accumulating a tangible heft, with emotional aches seeping into physical sensations, even as they try to obliterate their entanglement from a situation that’s not of their choosing. To soldiers detonating shadowy figures, napalming living villages or darting between rocks and bushes, such burdens are magnified. Human beings carry baggage in some form or the other. Perhaps like all wars are for those in the midst of flaming shrapnel and mutilated bodies. O’Brien himself had signed up, like many others in his generation, for a war that seemed senseless. His descriptions of soldierly feelings – the fatigue, the emotional depletion, the nostalgia, the terror and stultifying numbness – seemed to carry us right into the trenches of Vietnam. When I first read Tim O’Brien’s novel-in-stories, The Things They Carried, I felt like I had been socked in the gut.
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