14. Perpetual Guilt

"In the Field" gives us yet another view of Kiowa's death. This time I noticed that there were many people that blamed themselves for his death: Norman Bowker, Jimmy Cross, and the young soldier who turned on the flashlight to show Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend. Guilt has been made a large part of the last few sections in this novel. "...but I felt sort of guilty almost, like if I'd kept my mouth shut none of it would've ever happened. Like it was my fault," (168) was said by Azar regarding the comments he made about the "irony" of Kiowa's death. Even he begins to feel responsible for his death just because of insensitive remarks he made. The soldiers all carry around a huge burden constantly. I could never do what those men did. It is especially unnerving to think that some of these men were only 18 or 19, not too much older than I, and they saw people getting blown to pieces. I would never be able to recover from something like that. O'Brien keeps writing war stories in order to try to explain to everyone what it was like. But it seems he keeps having to write because its impossible to make someone understand what it was like if they were never actually there to witness it. No matter how many stories he tells, no one will ever fully understand what he went through those years in Vietnam. I think that would be an unbelievably frustrating and lonely feeling.