BLOG POST 4

I love this whole book, but if I had to choose my favorite story in the book The Things They Carried was "The Sweetheart of The Song Tra Bong". I think this story alone does a wonderful job of showing how much war can change a man, even though the story is about a woman. It shows that the things that they go through and experience and the cultures that they are around every day when they are at war becomes normal to them. And as weird as the cultural practices may look to an outsider, to someone who has been around them for a while and has nothing else to run to they tend to adapt to their surroundings.

My least favorite story would have to be "The Things They Carried" it is so much slower to read than the rest of the book, and while some of the things mentioned in this chapter you need later in the book, I think the novel as a whole is a lot deeper than the first chapter alone, though it was necessary to get to know each character.

I can sympathize with many of the men in this novel, and women. Because while each of their stories is different they all are related to the one theme of the book, and that is war. Even though maybe not every character in the book struggles with war as we define it, they all struggle with a war against something, and it is easy for me to understand each of their stories.

Azar was my least favorite character, even though his story was necessary for the novel. He shows us that war even gets to the toughest men, and that everyone has a breaking point. But I dislike him as a person(if he was real).