Field Trip

                           Twenty years I can't believe twenty years have gone by since it happened so long ago in Nam. The narrow mountain pass where it happened where the mortar shots took my platoon with it except for me. It happened when I was takin' a piss out in the bush a little higher up just minding my business and getting ready to join up with my platoon, that's when the mortar shots began. I took a bullet to the shoulder as I ran for cover. The rain hadn't stopped in days and the face of the mountain turned to mud. Some of the mortar shots hit a small rocky ridge causing a land slide all the mud and rock came down onto where my platoon had set up camp. The Lieutenant had said that ridge would provide shelter from enemy fire, but it fell with the rain and came oozing down over them, all my comrades who had become brothers—gone. A little earlier we had called for a dustoff chopper, one man I didn't know well had died, he always trailed behind nervous and bug eyed, poor fella' was his second day, but couldn't tell left from right up from down he was just disoriented. Wrong guy in the wrong place, he just could't take it. All the chopper ended up takin' was me, brought me back to the rear to fix me up after that bullet I took to the shoulder. They asked me what happened before the chopper took off I explained everythin' down to why I wasn't there with them all at our camping area. I forgot to mention it was nighttime and most of the men were in their foxholes when the mud slid down the mountainside, to seal them in as if they were tunnel rats, forever sealed away in enemy occupied land. I tried to think about the hospitals and the cute nurses, but I couldn't I felt as little as I could have done responsible and I wasn't even the Lieutenant who had been responsible for the lot of us, he was gone too. So now today twenty years later I stand infront of the area where the land crumbled I walk over to where I was when it all happened next to some tall trees and looked down at where there was no ridge but just a small mound formed by the fallen dirt which was overgrown with plants, weeds, and tall grasses.

The Man I Killed

                     In this Chapter it is Tim O'Brien who is telling the story of the man he killed. I think all the details that O'Brien describes about the man he has killed, besides physical details, come from inner reflection during the five minutes Kiowa has given him next to the man. O'Brien cannot stop staring and is thinking of all the things the man will miss and what led up to his death. The details are him coming to terms with the fact that this man is dead, but he was probably taken out of his misery and sadness towards honor for his family which he wanted by going to war willingly, as if it were privilege.

                     O'Brien regrets killing this man, but he threw a grenade without thinking, for he was afraid of the man. Kiowa asks him if he would rather trade places with the man, and to think about it. It was a life or death situation. Nonetheless O'Brien can't stop thinking of the state the body is now in and of all the damage he made. Also he thinks of the man's rubber sandals that blown off as he was pulled through the air and thrown to the ground before him.

Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

                           I think Mary Ann becomes in essence one with Vietnam she kills to protect it, for I think she has learned to love it.  It does not matter that she is a women, but most men are afraid of it for they do not know Vietnam, she learns to know it. They are afraid for they know of the stories from fellow soldiers. She is new to the land however, and morphs to it she wants to incorporate herself into the earth she camouflages herself into it. I think O'Brien lets Rat Kiley tell part of the story because individually the soldiers know so little of what and who they are fighting because they do not know of the land—Vietnam. I believe Rat's story fits O'Brien's criteria for how to tell a true war story, because it definitely does not suggest models of proper human behavior, and has no moral, and neither does war itself. War falls to the land it disappears and wears away it becomes the land just as Mary Ann did.

                         Most of the men went to war, not because they enlisted, but because they were drafted. Instead of running away from it all, decided that they cared more about honoring their families by going to war and not "shaming them." Mary Ann however was not afraid she did not care about the what the soldiers thought, she learned to love the land and and learned to become one with it and to protect it.