The Man I Killed, By Tim O’Brien

Penned during two distinctly disparate eras in American military history, both Erich Maria Remarque's bleak account of trench warfare during World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Tim O'Brien's haunting elegy for a generation lost in the jungles of Vietnam, The Man I Killed, present readers with a stark reminder that beneath the veneer of glorious battle lies only suffering and death. Both authors imbue their work with a grim severity, presenting the reality of war as it truly exists. Men inflict grievous injuries on one another, breaking bodies and shattering lives, without ever truly knowing for what or whom they are fighting for. With their contributions to the genre of war literature, both Remarque and O'Brien have sought to lift the veil of vanity which, for so many wartime writers, perverts reality with patriotic fervor. In doing so, the authors manage to convey the true sacrifice of the conscripted soldier, the broken innocence which clouds a man's first kill, and the abandonment of one's identity which becomes necessary in order to kill again.

War covets the aspect of man that is man itself, for it craves to morph them into mere objects and targets. For many soldiers, they succumb to such a fate; being depleted their ability to feel immediate emotion, they develop primitive, animalistic urges of bloodlust during a time of bloodshed. The aspects of war gravely impacts a person, and as such can be seen in O’Flaherty’s character “the sniper,” as well as seen in O’Brien’s character “Private Paul Berlin.” The sniper is a victim to the war’s cold, emotionless embrace. A Republican soldier, he is, divided from his brothers in arms on the other side, the ones called the “Free Staters.” Nonetheless, under the circumstances, they all are pawns to Dublin’s chess table of a civil war, being played at the mercy of the war’s

Writing provides authors a platform to create their own reality. Critically acclaimed author, Tim O’Brien supports this notion through his novel The Things They Carried in which he blurs the line between truth and fiction to depict its necessity when storytelling about experiences at war. O’Brien specifically includes the chapter “Ambush” with the purpose of expressing the abrupt flood of emotions soldiers experience in war through the personal story of him killing someone at war. He adopts a compelling tone throughout, through the use of rhetorical strategies juxtaposition, diction, and imagery in order to convey how a clout of one’s innocence can lead to them engaging in regrettable actions, influenced by the violence of war.

In the fictional novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien vividly explains the fear and trauma the soldiers encountered during the Vietnam War. Many of these soldiers are very young and inexperienced. They begin to witness their acquaintances’ tragic demise, and kill other innocent lives on their own. Many people have a background knowledge on the basis of what soldiers face each day, but they don’t have a clear understanding of what goes through these individual’s minds when they’re at war. O’Brien gives descriptive details on the soldiers’ true character by appealing to emotions, using antithesis and imagery.

After O’Brien subconsciously tossed a grenade at a young soldier that killed the man, he absorbed in a state of shock and guilt upon examining the body. Unlike other passages where the author left the overall picture to our imagination, he emphasized the true sight of the young man providing the reader with meticulous descriptions of the injuries in this chapter. For example, through the eyes of O’Brien, he began by noticing the most distinct feature, the jaw lodged in his throat. Then, as if he was following O’Brien’s trail of sight, he proceeded to focus upwards, describing the mouth, the eyes, and finally the hair. Thus far, even though his statements were too detailed to be “true,” O’Brien seemed calm and composed. However, as the author’s

At the same time, O’Brien struggles with destructiveness of the conflicting images of violence and peace in death through the juxtaposition of the imagery of the dead man. While “his one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole.” The dead man has one shut eye that resembles a peaceful sleep, while the other side is obliterated by the grenade into a star-shaped hole. The image of the star-shaped hole in the dead soldier’s eye represents the hopes that he once had when he was alive: “He hoped the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always” (119). Furthermore, “his right cheek was smooth and hairless,” an image of untouched innocence that contrasts with his left cheek, which was “peeled back in three ragged strips,” destroyed by the violence O’Brien inflicts upon it. The juxtaposition of the butterfly that settles on his chin and the fatal wound on his neck, “open to the spinal cord…blood…thick and shiny” illustrate the complexity and ambiguity of the unnaturalness of war, depicted by the image of the dead man’s wrung neck, contrasted with the ironic peace and naturalism of death in the image of the fragile butterfly. These select images are also those that O’Brien chooses to fixate upon and develop throughout the chapter as he struggles to comprehend the moral implications of his actions. The innocence of the “slim, dead, almost dainty young man” is further reinforced when O’Brien describes his wrists as “wrists of a

War changes the lives of each and every soldier who participates. It continues to change the way they experience events and the way their perception of the simplest things. Many veterans do not realize what truly happened until much later in life, if at all. Many live in denial of the truth, consciously or subconsciously, and many continuously remember their darkest moments. This is the case in “Salem”, written by Robert Olen Butler. The short story is about a man, late in life, recalling a past event from the Vietnam War. He remembers a man, alone in a clearing, whose life he ended. He starts to understand his actions and their true outcomes. The author uses symbolism, setting, and character to enhance the idea that one should always be aware of how his/her actions affect others.

Though the men reacted in violent ways in different situations, O’Brian’s violent act was something that stayed with him for the rest of his life and completely changed who he was as a person. “The Man I Killed” describes in detail the man and his life Tim O’Brien killed on a path in the jungle, even though he obviously did not know the man’s personal background, but mimicked it after his own. This description shows O’Brien’s life came to an end at his first act of violence, mirrored in the loss of the man’s life. After O’Brien’s incident on the pathway, he became cold and exemplified this new disposition after Jorgenson almost allowed O’Brien to die from a bullet wound, and in turn O’Brien needed pay back by scaring him in the middle of the night. The war may have physically killed many, but in this sense it damaged every soldier mentally.

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, he emphasizes a chapter on “The Man I Killed”, which describes the characteristics of a young Vietnamese man in which O’Brien may or may not have killed with a grenade. The novel is not chronologically sequenced, which leaves more room for the reader to engage in a critical thought process that fully bridges the author’s mind to their own. In O’Brien’s chapter, “The Man I Killed”, he attempts to humanize the enemy in a way that draws little separation between the enemy and himself by relating the enemy’s life prior to the war to his, and illustrates the war through the eyes of the soldiers who fought it.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses the art of fabricating stories as a coping mechanism. Trying to distinguish the difference between fictional and factual stories is a challenge in this book, but literal truth cannot capture the real violence that the soldiers dealt with in Vietnam, only “story truth” can. He explains, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie.” (O’Brien 65). The novel illustrates that storytelling is a way to keep the dead alive, even if it may not be a true story.

“If I truly believe the war is wrong, is it then also wrong to go off and kill people? If I do that, what will happen to my soul?” (pg 60). Tim O 'Brien is an American man who was drafted into the Vietnam War. O 'Brien is not a violent man and struggles because he believes that the war is wrong. He debates whether or not he should go to war or move to Canada to avoid the draft. Tim O 'Brien decides to join the army. O 'Brien uses his personal experiences as a foot soldier in the Vietnam War to convey his possible bias perspective that the Vietnam War was a waste of people 's lives and a shameful venture for the United States.

In the book, O'Brien touched on what he as a writer and participant in the Vietnam War sometimes perceived in different ways and what actually happened. Overall he was looking at the "story truth" verses the "happening truth." When something happened within a war, such as a soldier dying, the truth was at many times exaggerated. You tell the story once, and the next time you add one little detail thus exaggerating the story over time. What happens is that when you are in the moment, things happen so fast. When you sit back and think upon it though, things go slower in your mind and you start to think something more of what actually happened.

Contradiction in the mind, we struggle between decisions. Whether it is correct or not, it leaves an indelible memory. In Tim O'Brien's confessional writing, Ambush, he creates a flashback and recalls his memory in Vietnam. With detail descriptions, Tim O'Brien expresses his guilt towards killing an innocent young man. Furthermore, reinforcing his opposition against war with the writing.

“In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.” - Ernest Hemingway.