19. Dealing with Death

In the final section of The Things They Carried, O'Brien recalls his first experience with death in the army and his first experience of death ever at the young age of nine. It really bothers me how the soldiers treat the dead bodies. "In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead. Shaking hands, that was one way. By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was. By out language, which was both hard and wistful, we transformed the bodies into piles of waste," (225-226). Reading the things that the soldiers said to the farmer just really got to me. That definitely is no way to treat someone who just died. I suppose they had to do that in order to deal with killing so many people, but I just have a hard time finding that okay, especially them referring to bodies as "waste." They were real people, not garbage. I definitely know I would not last a day in any war. I would never be able to handle the things I would see and hear and experience.