An element of War
I can’t imagine killing somebody. The blood. The smell. The guilt. What would be worse? The reality of killing someone or the guilt ridden feeling that may stay with you forever? Maybe I wouldn’t feel guilty about killing someone. Maybe I would feel guilty about something else. I might feel guilty of simply surviving enemy fire when one of my comrades didn’t. Maybe I would feel guilty for the death of comrade. Guilt would be something that would stick me forever, just like it appears to have with the soldiers in Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried.
Whether it is story truth or happening truth, Tim O’Brien in the chapter “The Man I Killed,” writes about how he killed a man. O’Brien stares at the man he killed. He describes the body to his readers and all the physical characteristics of the gun shot. O’Brien looks to his fellow comrade Kiowa for support.
“Think it over,” Kiowa said. Then later he said, “Tim, it’s a war. The guy wasn’t Heidi-he had a weapon, right? It’s a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring.” Then he said, “Maybe you better lie down a minute.” Then after a long empty time he said, “Take it slow. Just go wherever the spirit takes you.”
O’Brien feels extremely guilty for killing the man. It sticks with him for the remainder of the war and for the remainder of his life. I can’t imagine killing someone. I think that it would be so hard to do but more so, harder to cope with after the fact. It would be hard to escape guilt. Guilt reappears throughout O’Brien’s book. Kiowa later dies and soldiers like Norman Bowker feel like it was his fault. O’Brien introduces survivor’s guilt when Kiowa dies. O’Brien writes, “The truth,” Bowker would’ve sad, “is I let the guy go.” When a fellow soldier is killed in action the soldiers in the squad sometimes feel that simply being alive is enough justification for guilt. It was a challenge that many soldiers had to face in the Vietnam War where so many U.S. troops lost their lives.
Throughout his book O’Brien writes about guilt. Guilt appears again when he his separated from his comrades and when Jimmy Cross feels guilty over the death of Kiowa. Cross feels that it is his fault and writes a litter to Kiowa’s father. Cross feels responsible for Kiowa’s death and says “my own fault” as he and his squad search for Kiowa’s body. I can’t imagine dealing with the loss of a fellow comrade, especially if you speculated on how you could have prevented it.
In Born on the Fourth of July, Ron Kovich has to deal with guilt after killing innocent woman andchildren, which haunts him even after he travels back to the states. He also shot and killed a fellow soldier after a chaotic and confusing altercation with some Vietnamese soldiers. He struggles to make it back home. Struggling with guilt has appeared in several of the war stories that we have covered in class and seems to be most challenging when there is death. Guilt seems to be an inescapable element of war, which impacts so many soldiers.
The Things They Carried by Tim O’brien
Film: Born on The Fourth of July
April 16th, 2008 at 9:33 am
I really hope you understand what I am trying to say in the comment because it may sound weird. Mostly what I am thinking of is with posttraumatic stress disorder, and hopefully no one will take this the wrong way. I do not want to sound like a weirdo, but I think we can help veterans out if we knew more about the brain. I think there would be potential benefits for a veteran if we were able to find out what actually happens to a person when they have been threw something like war. (ON A TOTALY SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE) Now I know this is going to sound wayyyyy weird at first but the first impression is not what I am trying to explain by any means and what I am getting at is the psychological aspects. (I am not saying in any way I want to this to be studied!!!!) However, I do think that there would be some potential benefits if it were studied, to help those who come back from having to do something like that. I cannot comprehend the matter of shooting someone dead. It just has not been programmed into me that it would be ok. I think that a lot of those who have fought in the wars were at first like this. A back home country boy who has lived on a farm his whole life and has not even shot a bird or deer. Now he has to come in to this war and start killing other people.
I think there would be some really interesting things going on in the brain as far as neurological connections, and long term affects of exposure to the war along with the serotonins that are kept in the brain because of the stress the soldier is in. Again I do not want to see this research being done because that would qualify for having to kill people and study killing people and that is something I am not interested in doing in any way. However I think there is, a lot more that we do not know about that happens in the brain of a soldier that has been impacted by war. So please if this does sound weird I am not trying to make it weird in any way!!! Just trying to think in a chemical exposures to the brain.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:46 am
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