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Stupidly, with a kind of smug removal that I can’t begin to fathom, I assumed that the problems of killing and dying did not fall within my special province.
Before Tim O’Brien is drafted into Vietnam, he’s a studious, liberal young man who is unsupportive of the war. He has plans to attend a prestigious university for graduate school. Instead, he’s drafted into war. This reality is a difficult one for Tim to come to terms with. His life before Vietnam was an entirely nonviolent one that consisted of academics, baseball, and a quiet life in small-town Minnesota. Tim could not see himself as a soldier, but he realizes that his perspective of himself as “above” violence and death was one of privilege and naivety. Being drafted taught him that any human can find themselves in a life-or-death situation, whether they consider themselves deserving of it or not.
All I could do was gape at the fact of the young man’s body. Even now I haven’t finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t.
Tim is deeply traumatized by killing a young Vietnamese soldier via a hand grenade. He fixates on the man’s destroyed face and wonders about what his life might have been like, assuming that, like him, this man did not want to go to war either. Later, in middle age, Tim still carries the burden of having taken another human’s life. The horror and moral dilemma of the killing is something that can never truly be resolved, and he’ll endure the memory of it for the rest of his life.
Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.
Kiowa’s death is such a traumatic experience for Tim that much of the book goes by before he finally builds up the courage to tell the story. In order to distance himself emotionally from the memory, he first tells the story from the point of view of Norman Bowker, who tried but failed to save Kiowa from being sucked under the mud. He then shares that Norman committed suicide several years after returning home, which may be connected to his failure to save his friend in Vietnam. But finally, Tim exposes the difficult reality – the story he had told wasn’t quite truthful. He was the one who couldn’t save Kiowa, not Norman. Tim’s inability to speak on the events surrounding Kiowa’s death shows the burden of his perceived responsibility, and how he has needed to distance himself from the trauma to maintain mental sanity. But for the sake of his stories, and the truth, he must come to terms with his role in Kiowa’s death.
