Both The Things They Carried and Apocalypse Now explore the trauma of the Vietnam War and its influence on soldiers' fears. Similar characters appear in both works, their identities created to represent different aspects of human nature. The protagonists, Captain Willard and Tim O'Brien, tell stories through their points of view, offering audiences windows into the guilt and emptiness, death and savagery that are rampant in war-torn Vietnam. Everyone finds themselves suffocated by guilt, suffocated by an explanation for the endless, meaningless death and violence. Likewise, Chef, the private on Willard's boat, and Curt Lemon of O'Brien's platoon mirror each other with their immaturity, their carefree, rowdy behavior, and their gruesome, avoidable deaths. With each story's protagonist as their guide, audiences examine the degree to which fear and primal instincts consume soldiers in the jungle. The fear in the hearts of men grows unimpeded in each work, as both Willard and O'Brien strive to tell their stories as much to assuage their own fear of guilt and responsibility as to comment on the fear of others. The two works tell strikingly similar stories of madness, guilt and trauma, albeit through different media. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Initially, the storytelling methods used by each protagonist appear to be completely dissimilar: Willard's moves with the action, a first-person account of events as they unfold, while O'Brien jumps from being involved in the action to reflection on it twenty years later. However, taken from a different perspective, Willard's narrative shows the same reflection on personal events and emotions as O'Brien's. Both narrators are tired of the action they have seen, shown by how each can immediately discern what kind of people are in his company. O'Brien analyzes each of his characters through the description of their possessions and habits, ultimately creating a meaningful portrait of each man. Likewise, Willard introduces his ship's crew by painting their identities with a broad brush: Lance, the young surfer, Chef, the southern sailor, etc. As they move from one soldier to another, Willard and O'Brien create indelible images in the audience's mind, colorful characters who arouse pity, sympathy and contempt. Both Willard and O'Brien have difficulty understanding the enemy. While reading the dossier on Kurtz, Willard's voiceover reveals his thoughts and emotions about Kurtz's life and sudden, erratic decisions; in "Ambush", O'Brien does the same when talking about the man he killed. O'Brien tries to imagine what the man's life would have been like if not for the grenade, and also provides an objective point of view and hypothetically tells the story to his daughter. The blend of conjecture and objectivity of O'Brien's account in "Ambush" resembles Willard's interactions with Kurtz. Like O'Brien, Willard attempts to put himself in Kurtz's shoes, wondering if a thirst for action might make him native and wild, as it did with the Colonel. However, in each case, the protagonist falters when attempting to understand his enemy, and essentially makes the title "enemy" a misnomer. Illuminating one of the problems with the concept of war, both Willard and O'Brien sympathize with the men ordered to kill and add difficulty to a simple task. The struggle to rationalize the actof the murder is more difficult for O'Brien, since the Vietnamese man was innocent compared to the monster of Colonel Kurtz. Willard, on the other hand, sympathizes with Kurtz because he has taken the same path as his enemy and feels the same potential for evil within himself. In both works, the plot structure reveals the protagonist's attempts to rationalize the horror that surrounds him. Fear, the impulse to survive, plays a pronounced role in both Apocalypse Now and The Things They Carried. Their machismo drives the soldiers to attempt to mask their fear, thus allowing it to grow within them. The attempt to deny their fear causes the soldiers to act illogically, almost making them "savage" in the end. As O'Brien describes in "The Dentist," Curt Lemon insists on having a perfectly intact tooth extracted because he so deeply fears ridicule from his colleagues and superiors. He had been ashamed of fainting during a routine military check-up and needed to vindicate his tenacity by proving that he could withstand a tooth extraction, regardless of whether or not he needed that extraction. Likewise, Lemon's final action—playing catch for a grenade—illustrates the juxtaposition between war and camaraderie, the morbid fun that soldiers engage in to maintain an illusion of safety. Just as Lemon's inherent fear leads him to behave in crazy ways, so does Chef's, the most brazen one aboard Willard's boat. Chef's death at the hands of Kurtz's savages occurs off-screen, leading to a scene depicting his mangled corpse. Like Lemon's death, Chef's is short and gruesome and overshadows the rest of his life. Before his gruesome exit, Chef loses touch with reality on the river when he decides to look for fruit in the jungle. As Chef and Willard flee into enemy territory, risking their lives just to search for mangoes, they too subject their will to the illogical judgment of fear. The fear within them, fueled by the wild passions of the jungle and the war that surrounds them, instills in Chef and Willard a desire for safety, a need to return to familiar surroundings to ease the trauma of Vietnam. The jungle wilderness consumes them in this fruitless search, and the two soldiers flee from a tiger. The tiger, like the grenade, represents a reckoning force for men. It destroys the illusion of security created by temporary peace, by the pause between fighting. The tiger brings Chef and Willard back to ugly reality and the men forget their mangoes on the Me-Kong. Their fears, and those of all the soldiers, ultimately boil down to one thing: the fear of death. As their fears deepen in the forests of Vietnam, all men become less human. In O'Brien's stories, ignorant actions reveal the savage nature that some men have developed. Kiley blows off his finger to get out of the game, for example, and Lee Strunk begs Jensen to spare his life despite their deal. Apocalypse Now delves much deeper into the evolution of fear, as Kurtz represents the embodiment of fear itself. Once an eloquent and highly respected war hero, Colonel Kurtz transforms into a mind hopelessly distorted and twisted by fear and evil. Kurtz's wickedness forces Willard to consider whether he himself has the ability to do the same. While O'Brien's stories possess nothing as coherent as the established fear in Kurtz, many of their characters embody similar traits. Azar, for example, exudes thoroughly mercenary qualities for much of his time, showing blatant contempt for the value of life before showing deference to the memory of.