The Things They Carried—__—page 155
This section tells of two stories. One of which is how O’Brien first killed someone in war and his feelings. The next was how he was feeling and what his life was like some time after the war when he was back in his old neighborhood.
The first part really goes into how awful O’Brien felt after killing this man. A skinny, unsoldierlike scholar came unknowingly strolling into their base area and O’Brien threw a grenade at him, killing him in the explosion. This brings up another theme of how fighting in a war and actually killing and taking someone else’s life in a war are different things. For a countless amount of time, he stays next to the body simply staring at the poor man. O’Brien imagines the life that this man leaves behind and realizes that he was the sole reason that he would never be able to return to it. Then in the second part of the reading, he still is able to realize the horrible events of war and spends a whole day reminiscing about the terrible things that he witnessed and could have prevented… but didn’t.
