The Things They Carried By Leslie Marmon Silko s...

To war, or not to war, that is the question. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien faces cultural, political, and social factors that end up leading him to forgo his plan to dodge the draft, and to report as instructed, a mere yards away from his destination of Canada (57). In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Rocky and Tayo, two young Native American men, experience cultural, political, and social factors that draw them into the Army, fighting the Second World War for a country that considers them less than human. The stories of these characters are not unique, they are stories that are representative of the stories of young American men at the time, who faced cultural, political, and social factors during both conflicts. The purpose of this inquiry essay is to determine what those factors were, and why they lead these men to willingly engage in two of the deadliest conflicts in human history. In Silko’s Ceremony, Rocky and Tayo eagerly enlist in the war effort against the Axis powers (66). This experience was not an uncommon one during the Second World War. According to Thomas Morgan’s excerpt Native Americans in World War II, one-third of all able bodied Native American men served during the war, making the contributions of Native Americans during the war greater than any other racial or ethnic group per capita. The overwhelming enlistment numbers of Native Americans prompted the Saturday Evening Post to editorialize, as quoted by Alison Bernstein, in The Chiefs Go to