Field Trip

Field Trip

I was but at child at the time, I had just lost my first tooth and I was learning addition at the local primary school. I was the son of a doctor, a wise and charismatic man who always had the answer to every one's questions. Sometimes, when the moon failed to shine and the swaying branches of the bold baobab trees sent menacing shadows dancing across my room, I would curl up in the corner of my father’s study and watch him read; the way his thick eyebrows would arch ever so slightly when something surprised him amused me, and eventually the soft desk light would fade away and I would be safe in my father’s comforting arms as he carried me off to bed, singing me an old African hymn about a father lion who sees his cub for the first time. Those nights were magical.

I had just been released from school, I took a shortcut through the bush to try to beat my father home. He would always leave work at 3 o’clock sharp to greet me at the front door and exclaim, “Othenio tell me what you have learned!” and he would lift me up and sit me atop his broad shoulders and he would say, “Son someday all this will be yours.” and he would point out to the vast horizon and we would both laugh, his a deep fatherly laugh, the type that every little boy dreams of. As I emerged from the bush, only a couple of paces away from my house, I heard a blood curdling scream, the kind that instantly brings the most fearless men to a halt. I heard the sound of a truck rolling down a dirt road, American music blasting from the speakers and countless men singing along; I doubt they knew what the words meant, but they chanted along anyways. My father subsequently appeared from behind a wooden shack, first walking and then rapidly accelerating until he was in an all out sprint. A black pickup truck tailed closely behind him, its seven occupants armed with AK-47’s and belts of ammunition draped from either shoulder. My father spotted me as I began rushing towards him, and shot me a glance of desperation and horror, he waved his hands desperately, willing me back into the bush and I obeyed him. As I lay horrified across the dry soil, I peaked out between a cluster of tall grasses and watch my father as he stumbled on a thick root and collapse to the ground, tears flowing profusely out of his eyes. He begged me not to watch, not to watch as the men ran over his legs and torso, not to watch as they dragged him through the dirt and stripped him of his work clothes, mocking him all along, not to watch as they laid his naked body up against a wall and shot him three times in the arm, just to inflict pain, not to watch as a bullet pierced his skull and seized from me the only person I had ever loved in this cruel and unforgiving world. I had never hated anyone in my whole life as much as I hated these men, these cowards, these Hutu.

As I return to my village, a small coastal town on the banks of Lake Kivu, I find no trace of the day that has forever changed my life. The town was completely decimated during the war, and even though it has been less than 20 years since that day of great pain and sorrow, it seems as if it never happened. The people never talk about it, and upon further questioning the whole town denied being present the day my father died. It’s as if the most important day in my life had absolutely no importance in the lives of the rest of my village. For me it was the end of my world, but for them it was yet another day of massacre, just another day of hatred between brothers.

The Man I Killed

The Man I Killed

The Man I Killed is a depressing chapter that sets a very solemn mood for the story. This chapter tells the story of a time in which Tim O’Brien kills a young boy who he believes is being forced against his will. Tim seems to have perpetual knowledge about this boy and believes that the kid was a great student with a loving family and a bright future without any clear evidence to prove so. The Man I Killed is told by Tim O’Brien but it is a different Tim O’Brien then we have met in the previous chapters. Unlike the Tim O’Brien that we have seen in all the previous chapters who is full of thoughts and emotions and loves to dialogue with other characters, this one doesn’t ever mention a single word about his thoughts and feelings, let alone talk to another character. Kiowa attempts countless times to initiate a conversation with Tim, telling him that he did the right thing and that the kid himself was armed, but Tim just can’t get over the fact that he has killed another human being. In the next chapter, Ambush, Tim tells his account of the story and this time he shares what he was feeling at the moment and why he acted the way he did. One of the core reasons for his distress is that he truly believes that had he not just taken any action, the kid would have just gone his own way and lived a great life. In this chapter O’Brien keeps repeating his description of the boy just laying there on the trail over and over, focusing mainly on the beautiful aspects of the boy such as the star shaped hole in his eye, which was a result of the blast, and his clean black hair which implied that he was relatively new to the war.
In his description of the boy, O’Brien not only points out many of the physical aspects of the boy, but also much of the boy’s life, what he liked, what he disliked, what he dreamed of, who he loved, and so on and so on. As I read this I was baffled by how he could have known all these details about the kid’s life. Having just read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer in which he has interviewed almost every single person who participated on the expedition to the top of Everest, the native guides included, I was used to the author having almost an unlimited pool of knowledge,but the degree of knowledge which O’Brien has on this kid was just too much for it to all be true. I had speculated for a while whether the whole entire story could be fake and he just completely made up this character from the ground up, I finally got my answer in a future chapter called Good Form in which he admits that he did not actually kill the boy but he was present and that his presence alone was enough to cause guilt. This finally answered my question of how exactly did Tim O’Brien know all this about the kid with one simple answer, he didn't. Tim doesn't actually know who the kid loved, what he studied at school, or how his family felt about the war, it is all made up, and by keeping that in mind, the story made much more sense than the first time I read it. But we all know that no great author like Tim O’Brien would just make up such a character, so after a lot of hard thought I finally concluded that the boy is actually a mirror image of how Tim O’Brien pictured himself before the war. One key example is when Tim says that the boy didn't agree with the causes of the war and didn't even want to be fighting but was forced to by the pressures of society, when compared to the views of Tim O’Brien in the chapter On the Rainy River, they are nearly identical. Another example is when he talks about how the kid was very intelligent and had a bright future, which sounds a lot like when Tim talks about how he graduated top of his class in High School and went on to College. I believe he tries to create this kid as a mirror image of himself so that he can relate to the kid and because he knows that at any moment it could be him who was lying on the ground with a star shaped hole where his eye used to be. This is one of the most powerful stories in the book and by far one of my favorites.

Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

Up until the Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, we witness many powerful chapters but none to such a caliber as this one. When I began reading this chapter I was both utterly amazed that a soldier could get his girlfriend into such a dangerous and unforgiving war zone such as Vietnam, and skeptical that any of this really ever happened. Based on my knowledge of the Armed Forces of the United States I know that just recently were women allowed to enlist in the military and that to this day women cannot fight in the front lines such as the way Mary Anne did in this chapter. So based on that knowledge I would concur that this is all a fictitious story and that none of this ever happened but as we see as a recurring theme throughout this book, crazy things happen in war and I have no evidence to prove that this story is fake so I must assume that it is true.
In this chapter, a soldier named Mark Fossie is working at a secure location in Vietnam where he is seldom under attack and the environment is relatively safe,writes a letter to his girlfriend and six months later she arrives at the base in Vietnam. We go on to learn that Mary Anne is a very well rounded woman who is  smart, adventurous, pretty, and adored by everyone; but this doesn’t last. After just a few weeks of living at the base Mary Anne begins to change, the changes are subtle at first but they continue to escalate and soon she is heading off on night raids with the Special Forces team and killing people with her bare hands. Mary Anne’s transition to a killer is a baffling one and one that left me thinking for a while. What I finally realized is that Tim O’Brien tells us this story not because he was there or it was important to him, but because it symbolizes how Vietnam changes everyone. We had seen Vietnam change people in previous chapters but never before had we seen someone so innocent become so savage in such a short period of time. I think the important thing that O’Brien wants the reader to take away from this chapter is that no matter who you are, young or old, male or female, Vietnam will change you and there is nothing you can do about it.
Unlike most of the stories in this book which are narrated by Tim O’Brien (A different Tim O’Brien than the author) this one is narrated by Rat Kiley for multiple reasons. First of all, Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong is one of the only chapters in which Tim is not present for or indirectly a part of, in the whole entire book, and for that reason I believe he has Rat Kiley narrate it so that it could have a more realistic feel to the story. Another reason I believe Tim O’Brien has Rat Kiley tell the story is because unlike most of the other stories in this novel which all seem realistic and have a hint of truth to them, Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong seems far fetched and leaves even Tim O’Brien himself skeptical of whether or not this story ever happened. I feel that Rat Kiley did a great job at telling the story and that for the most part his story fits the criteria of a true war story. In the chapter How to Tell a True War Story, O’Brien lays out the basic criteria such as the story might be unbelievable, which this story definitely is, the story might be impossible to tell, which seems to be the case here, and that in a true war story nothing is absolutely true, which we can tell is true about this story. The only reason I believe that this story might not be considered a war story is because in a true war story you shouldn’t be able to separate the moral from the plot, but in this story there is the obvious moral that war changes everyone. This is probably one of the most dramatic chapters of the whole novel and I loved it.