The Things They Wore and Apocalypse Now explore the trauma of the Vietnam War and its influence on soldiers' fears. Similar characters appear in both works, their identities designed to represent different aspects of human nature. The protagonists, Captain Willard and Tim O'Brien, tell stories through their own perspectives, giving the audience a window into the guilt and emptiness, death and savagery that plagues war-torn Vietnam. Everyone finds themselves suffocated with guilt, choking on an explanation of endless, meaningless death and violence. Likewise, Chief, the soldier on Willard's boat, and Curt Lemon of O'Brien's platoon are mirrored by their immaturity, carefree and turbulent behavior, and horrible, avoidable deaths. With each story's protagonist as a guide, the audience examines how fear and primal instincts consume soldiers in the jungle. The fear in the hearts of men grows freely in each work, as 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. Both 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 should not be banned"? Get an original essay Initially, the storytelling methods employed by each protagonist appear to be completely different: Willard's moves with the action, a narrative to the first person view of events as they unfold, while O'Brien moves from actor to action to reflect on them twenty years later. However, taken from a different angle, Willard's narration shows as much reflection on events and personal emotions as O'Brien's. Both narrators are jaded by the action they have seen, as shown by the way each can instantly discern what types of people keep their company. O'Brien analyzes each of his characters through descriptions of their possessions and habits, ultimately painting a revealing 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 saucier, etc. As they move from soldier to soldier, Willard and O'Brien create indelible images in the audience's mind, colorful characters who inspire pity, sympathy and disgust. Both Willard and O'Brien have difficulty understanding the enemy. While reading the file on Kurtz, Willard's voiceover reveals his thoughts and emotions about Kurtz's life and his 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 without the grenade, and even gives an objective point of view and he hypothetically tells the story to his daughter. The mixture of supposition 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 the thirst for action might turn him wild and wild, as it did the Colonel. Yet in each case, the protagonist falters when trying to understand his enemy and essentially makes the title "enemy" a misnomer. Illuminating one of the problems with the concept of war, Willard and O'Brien both sympathize with the men they have been ordered to kill and add difficulty to a simple task. The fight forrationalizing the act of killing is the hardest for O'Brien, because the Vietnamese man was innocent compared to Colonel Kurtz's monster. Willard, on the other hand, sympathizes with Kurtz because he has taken the same path as his enemy and senses the same potential for evil within him. In both works, the story structure reveals the protagonist's attempts to rationalize the horror around him. Fear, the engine of survival, plays a pronounced role in Apocalypse Now and The Things They Carried. Their machismo pushes the soldiers to try to mask their fear, allowing it to grow within them. In attempting to deny their fear, the soldiers act illogically, making them almost "savage" in the end. As O'Brien describes in "The Dentist," Curt Lemon insists on having a perfectly good tooth pulled because he so deeply fears ridicule from his peers and superiors. He had shamed himself by fainting during a routine military exam and needed to regain his strength by showing he could withstand having a tooth pulled, whether or not he needed to. 'to tear out. Likewise, Lemon's final action—playing catch with a hand grenade—illustrates the juxtaposition of war and camaraderie, the morbid pleasure in which soldiers engage to maintain an illusion of security. Just as Lemon's inherent fear drives him to behave foolishly, so does that of Chef, the saucier aboard Willard's boat. The chief's death at the hands of Kurtz's savages takes place off-screen, leading to a scene depicting his mutilated corpse. Like Lemon's death, Chef's is brief and gruesome and overshadows the rest of his life. Before his gruesome outing, Chef loses touch with reality on the river when he decides to search for fruit in the jungle. As Chef and Willard flee into enemy territory, risking their lives just to search for mangoes, they too submit their will to the illogical judgment of fear. The fear that inhabits them, stoked by the wild passions of the jungle and the war that surrounds them, instills in Chef and Willard the desire for security, the need to return to familiar surroundings to soothe the trauma of Vietnam. The wilderness of the jungle consumes them in this fruitless quest, and the two soldiers flee from a tiger. The tiger, like the pomegranate, presents men with a force of judgment. This destroys the illusion of security created by a temporary peace, the lull between fighting. The tiger brings Chef and Willard back to the horrible reality, and the men forget their mangoes on the Me-Kong. Their fears, and those of all soldiers, ultimately boil down to one thing: the fear of death. As their fears deepen in the forests of Vietnam, all the men become less human. In O'Brien's stories, the ignorant actions reveal the savage nature that some men have developed. Kiley blows off her toe to put herself out of action, for example, and Lee Strunk begs Jensen to spare his life, whatever their pact may be. Apocalypse Now delves much deeper into the evolution of fear, as Kurtz represents an embodiment of fear itself. Once an eloquent and highly respected war hero, Colonel Kurtz transforms into an irreparably twisted mind contorted by fear and evil. Kurtz's illness forces Willard to question whether he himself has the ability. Although O'Brien's stories have nothing as consistent as the fear consolidated in Kurtz, many of their characters embody similar traits. Azar, for example, exudes utterly mercenary qualities for much of his time, showing blatant disregard for the value of life before showing deference to Kiowa's memory. Ultimately, mental and physical survival depends on soldiers' ability to.