Oh, Stop It! I'm Bad!

"He had been born, maybe, in 1946, in the village of My Khe near the central coastline of the Quang Ngai Province, where his parents farmed, and where his family had lived for several centuries, and where, during the time of the French, his father and two uncles and many neighbors had joined in the struggle for independence. He was not a Communist.... He hoped in his heart that he would never be tested. He hoped the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always, even when he was asleep." pg. 119

What you've just experienced dear reader is a flashback! Yay! It's in the what I feel will be a controversial chapter of "The Man I Killed." More on the controversy later. For now, the flashback serves a major purpose of really humanizing the man he killed. With vivid imagery and deep emotions, the man is no longer an enemy VC, but someone in which to sympathize, even to connect. This only brings out more raw feelings about war and truth and that stuff. The controversy for me started though with the point of view of the flashback. Not that it was incorrect, because how could the dead guy make an appointment to tell O'Brien about his life before the war, but rather, what bothered me was how much authority with which it was told. How could O'Brien possibly know this about a man he just killed, brutally by the description, only to retell it in his successful book like they were the best of friends? Forgetting the "A work of fiction" on the title page, I, feeling far superior, decided everything he just told me was false and had no merit. Then, for fun, I flipped through the book a little just to apply my knew superior knowledge to further tales. The first page I found was the opening page of "Good Form." Read it and then maybe you'll know how I felt.