Tim O'Brien

Tim O’Brien’s passage is a vivid look at the psychological distress a soldier went through during the war in the Vietnam. His description of the dead Viet-Cong soldier provides a terrifying example of the violence that took place. Movies rarely portray the accuracy of the violence and its effect on soldiers. His repetition of the details of the mutilated corpse only serves to burn the image into our minds. We can almost see O’Brien standing there staring at the corpse, trying to imagine who the man is and what he would have become. It shows that war isn’t killing people from far away, never seeing their bodies. The Vietnam War was fought up close, they saw the people they killed. This was something that made it even harder on the soldiers. They discovered their enemy was just like them. They were normal people caught up in a war that neither of them wanted to be in.