The Life He Left Behind
Charcoal On Paper
In this art piece, I express what the soldiers leave behind when they go to war. The piece is drawn from what the truth of war was to me. I tried to make the soldier look saddened, to convey the emotion he could be feeling. When we studied about the Vietnam War, I discovered that there is a lot higher price that we pay than just money and peace. The soldiers pay their freedom, their life, their family. The soldiers do not come back the same, their life has changed forever. In the background of my drawing, I have a bomb going off to show what is going on around him. On the other side, there is a girl, she is waiting for husband to come back home. Her husband is the soldier that is drawn. There is a high price that is payed when we are at war. The real question is if it is worth it.
Hayley Rodriguez
January 2016
Durango, Colorado
Charcoal On Paper
In this art piece, I express what the soldiers leave behind when they go to war. The piece is drawn from what the truth of war was to me. I tried to make the soldier look saddened, to convey the emotion he could be feeling. When we studied about the Vietnam War, I discovered that there is a lot higher price that we pay than just money and peace. The soldiers pay their freedom, their life, their family. The soldiers do not come back the same, their life has changed forever. In the background of my drawing, I have a bomb going off to show what is going on around him. On the other side, there is a girl, she is waiting for husband to come back home. Her husband is the soldier that is drawn. There is a high price that is payed when we are at war. The real question is if it is worth it.
Hayley Rodriguez
January 2016
Durango, Colorado
project DESCRIPTION
For this project we studied the Vietnam war. We got introduced to the book “Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. Although we did not read the whole book we read a lot of the stories that gave us an idea what it was like for the U.S. soldiers. After that we did a lot of research of important events that lead up to the Vietnam war and events that happened during the war. We looked at primary sources of what happened in the gulf of tonkin, all of that lead up to our timed write. In the timed write we had to make up our own conclusion using the primary sources as evidence, of what really happened in the gulf of tonkin. After that we had a socratic seminar on the book, The Things They Carried, although I was not there to participate, I still prepared for it and had a lot of opinions and points about the book and about the war itself.
the Things they carried
This book was a very hard book to read. By what I mean by hard is it was very sad to hear what happened during and after the war. Though it gave me a lot of insight of what it was like in the war. The book gave me a lot of knowledge about the truth of war and the nature of it. I remember in one part it says that war can be a beautiful thing. Not all the killing and destruction of it, but the land itself, that even when you were out of a combat zone it was a beautiful thing to be alive. O’Brien gives us a lot of detail of his fellow soldiers and of himself. Sometimes we forget that the soldiers are human too, and we see them as robots, this book made me see that they are people like us in a terrible situation. War is not pleasant but this book was, it was an amazing read and insightful.
Gulf Of Tonkin "Incident" Essay
The hard work really paid off in this essay. We were given 9 primary sources so that we can make our own conclusions of what happened. We used our historical thinking skills to annotate and get out all the facts that we needed for the essay. One that helped me was sourcing. Although I had to do extra research of who the author was and when this document was created, it gave me a good idea of what was their viewpoint and helped me see the document like they did. Another skill that helped me was close reading. To detect the tone of the author was helpful. In a lot of them it seemed as if they were pressured and that they were angry. At the end it was a very good essay that I am very proud of.
take-aways
Though I am very neutral on wars I learned a lot of new skills. My biggest take-away was having to do all the research and having all the work I have. It was interesting to see what had happened in the Vietnam war. All the research and annotating took me several hours on different days, but all of that paid off, and that I think is my biggest take-away.