America hurt so many young men by sending them to Vietnam to introduce them to prostitution, gambling, drinking and drugs. Be afraid. To terror. To kill. Death is theirs. (Luther Benton quoted in Terry 78) Vietnam, the war that wasn't a war, was one of the darkest periods in American history. Men found themselves sent against their will to fight a war they did not support, only to return home as villains. Whether emotionally or physically, the men who served in Vietnam were forever scarred. These men found many ways to hide these scars; some couldn't cope and broke down, some committed suicide, others chose to try to forget and still others shared their experiences. As TinaChen of the University of Wisconsin points out, “the moral ambiguity and unresolved conflicts that characterized American involvement in Vietnam made the war an inescapable presence in the American literary and cultural imagination. » Wallace Terry and Tim O'Brien were two of the men affected by this presence. These men produced two magnificent books, Bloods and The Things They Carried respectively, about the Vietnam experience. Like all citizens of the United States at that time, these men had their own views on the war. O'Brien, who was a young intellectual, believed that those who wanted to fight this war should be those on the front lines. He felt it was unfair to send men against their will to fight a war they did not believe in. In one of the chapters of his book "On the Rainy River", O'Brien describes his difficulty in deciding what to do after being drafted. Rosalind Poppleton-Pritchard, a writer for Critical Survery magazine, says: “The scene… is a tragic illustration…… middle of paper……. » Studies in contemporary fiction. 1995, 36.4: 249-257. Article 1. Online. PerAbs. November 28, 2000. Chen, Tina. “Unraveling the deeper meaning”: Exile and the embodied poetics of displacement in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Contemporary literature. 1998, 29.1: 77-98. MLA. Online. PerAbs. November 28, 2000. O'Brien, Tim. The things they carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1990. Poppleton-Pritchard, Rosalind. “The World Beyond Measure: An Ecological Critique of the Things They Carried and Into the Lake of the Woods.” 1997, 9.2: 80-93. Article First. WilsonSelectPlus, November 28, 2000. Rosenblatt, “How We Remember,” May 29, 2000, 155.22: 26. Academic Search Elite. November 28, 2000. Terry, Wallace Bloods New York: Ballantine Books., 1984.