The Man I Killed Summary

“The Man I Killed” O’Brien explains a Viet Cong soldier whom of which he has killed. He felt stuck in time remembering what the man he just killed may have been like before the war. O’Brien is describing the history of the dead Vietnamese man while his American troops continue to move forward. He is in shock from killing the man, meanwhile the rest of the world is moving around him, all in speech and imagination. There is no way that O’Brien knows everything about the fallen soldier playing with the notion of truth. With there being some sort of personal history makes the soldier truer to us, more of a real person. Nothing that O’Brien says is a true FACT. This story allows us to see in a soldier's mind and body during the war. We see O’Brien’s description of the man and hear his thoughts of what he was like. Not a feeling of hate, more so a feeling of regret and his moral confusion that follows afterward. The most interesting part of this story was imagining the star-shaped wound. Repeated several times in the vignette. A star in a military family symbolizes hope and I believe that the author is trying to symbolize it to the readers as well. He tied the star to death and that is eye-opening to me because the hope becomes lost. It is an …show more content…
We see in this story how Norman Bowker tries to explain to his father why the Silver Star wasn’t given to him because of his cowardice. As a result, O’Brien analyses the concept of courage very carefully and tries to make it seem more realistic than not. We see that Bowker failed to rescue Kiowa from the swamp and how the smell overwhelmed him and he let him go and sink. The harsh reality of war is that it places men and women in extraordinary situations which often require far more bravery than is humanly possible to