The things they carried who is killed

It is surely no coincidence that the star-shaped wound is on the soldier's eye, for it is with the eyes that men both gaze upon the stars and see the approaching enemy. The Vietnamese soldier obviously did not see the danger he was in; perhaps he was gazing more upon the stars, upon his future, than on his present situation.

In this case, the stars betrayed him, and he has no future. In this story, O'Brien changes the meaning of looking to the future and the hopefulness of the star through his use of this image.

The "Ambush" vignette collapses all time between the experience of "O'Brien" in Vietnam and O'Brien the author telling a story. There are three distinct points of time referred to in the vignette: the time when his daughter, as a child, asked him the question about killing a man; the time that the author is telling his story; and the time of the story itself, some twenty years earlier in Vietnam. For the author, though, any perspective that he now has is lost in the telling of the tale, and the confusion and fear that he felt as a soldier then is intimately entangled with the regret and embarrassment he now feels through reflection.

He is as unsure now as then, and even though he acted more out of instinct when he lobbed the grenade and insists that he did not ponder "morality or politics or military duty," his reevaluation now forces O'Brien to reckon his action against those gauges.

This story, perhaps more vividly than most of the novel, puts us in the mind and body of "O'Brien" the soldier. We see through his eyes and share his thoughts. Much of what O'Brien describes is formulaic, such as not feeling hate, acting on instinct, feelings of regret afterwards, and moral confusion that lingers. What is unique about O'Brien's treatment of this killing is how he introduces his daughter into the equation. Instead of a man reflecting and reconciling his actions to himself, he now has to justify them to a new audience — one who looks to him for moral guidance.

His response is to lie to her and to wait until writing this vignette to undo that lie. O'Brien gives no indication that he has ever lied to himself about what happened. Even immediately after the killing, when Kiowa tries to convince him that he did nothing wrong, "O'Brien" insists that "none of it mattered.

So, competing in this vignette are O'Brien's desires to understand his own actions and his need to relate them to his daughter, as well as move beyond what he did.

The final image of the soon-to-be dead soldier walking toward O'Brien and smiling is an act of revenge. The dead soldier not only lingers in O'Brien's thoughts, but also seems to enjoy that O'Brien cannot finish "sorting it out.

Perhaps that itself is what makes him write the story, searching for some kind of closure to either his killing or his lying. Download this LitChart!

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LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Things They Carried , which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. The story begins with a description of the dead man : jaw in his throat, one eye shot the other forming a star-shaped hole, thin womanly eyebrows, undamaged nose, neck open to see his spine--this was the wound that killed him.

He lay on his back, dead, in the middle of the trail. He was thin and bony with a sunken chest, not many muscles, "a scholar maybe. He wasn't a Communist, but a soldier and citizen. From youth, "the man I killed" would have listened to stories about heroic fighters for his country and how this was of the highest duty and privilege for a soldier.

The man accepted, but he secretly was scared because he wasn't a fighter. He enjoyed books, wanted to teach math. At night he tried to picture himself as a brave soldier, like his father and uncles had been, or the men in the stories. He kept hoping the war would end. It becomes clear that this is the description of the man that O'Brien killed—if not already evident from the title.

O'Brien, in writing out this history of the man he doesn't even know the name of, gives the man a way to live on eternally in his story. The parallels he draws to the man he killed and himself before the war show the guilt O'Brien feels for this man's death, because he sees himself in the young, dead man. The man was raised to believe he should be courageous and fight, just as O'Brien felt he was obligated to do. O'Brien mirrors himself in the man he killed, how they both felt obligated to fight.

But through story O'Brien hopes to absolve some of this guilt, to give the man some kind of life. Active Themes. Mortality and Death. Azar eggs O'Brien on, saying he "trashed that fucker. Kiowa tells O'Brien there's nothing else O'Brien could have done. Linda said nothing. He stared for a while, saying nothing, until his father, unable to address the situation, proposed a trip to the ice cream store.

In daydreams and night dreams, he could make up stories about Linda, imagine her, and bring her back to life. He says that he picked Curt Lemon out of a tree and watched Kiowa sink into the muck of the Song Tra Bong, but that he still dreamed Linda alive in stories and in dreams.

In his dreams, when he was young, Linda waited for him and stayed alive, if just sometimes obscured by other things happening. The character of Linda, for the narrator, is synonymous with his loss of innocence. With her, he experiences both love and death for the first time, at the same time.

In the story, she first represents the promise of childhood—delicate and beautiful, she agrees to go with him and his parents to the movies. Unlike the soldiers, Linda, innocent, did nothing to provoke the dangers she faced.