That Day When I Lost Everything; Samuel Lewis (Entry #7)

       

 The street of Samuel Lewis is filled with crowds, cars, and buildings; the only thing that you would say that it does not have is: quiet. Every minute of every day, someone or some family would be passing by; a night worker, a tired student, or a wild party animal. It’s hard to imagine that this is the place where I lost everything; every single thing that a teenager could possibly have—life, love, hope—was stripped away from me. I still remember bits and pieces of that fire; a house burning, screams coming from the kitchen, and agonizing cries from my family members.

         It seems like Panama is the safest spot for me; it meant home, warmth, and love. Panama meant walking under the moonlight with Mom, going to dinners with Dad, and having fights with my big brother. Yet none of that can be available for me anymore. Not ever, anymore. It’s lost forever. I can’t help but remember exactly that day, my thirteenth birthday, when everything was lost.       

         It was my birthday; there were huge presents everywhere—my friends had just gone home from the party, and my family was gathered around to make the last birthday wishes before going to sleep. Mom, putting another candle on top of a cupcake, wishes for me to make another wish in front of them. I smiled, for it was already more than ten times that that ritual has been performed. I wished for an even better birthday, and blew out the candle; then things started happening so fast. I woke up in the middle of the night to get some water, and suddenly I realized that the pathway between my room and other rooms was on fire. Why? I don’t understand and I still don’t. I remembered me screaming out my parents name and my brother’s. I didn’t get a response from their part and I was worried out of my mind, panicked. I tried to grab for the fire extinguisher, but a pathway of flames separated us.

         I remember, screaming out my dad’s name and having no place to back to but the window. I hated myself; how couldn’t I have rushed in to help? Why couldn’t I have done something different? But I did what I did. I crawled out of my window and started to run into the street. There was no sun and a high possibility of bandits out there; yet I was so scared I didn’t care. Half consciously, I remembered not helping my family in the times of need. Why was I so cowardly? I continued with that question until my vision seemed to blur and my eyelids seemed to close. When I woke up, my right arm was burned, and my heart was beating fast; the next thing I knew, I was in Hospital Paitilla, with doctors scurrying past me, and fiddling with needles injected inside my body. I could hear no one, feel nothing. I looked around, but I couldn’t see my parents’ smiling face; I could not see their worried face like the frown they would get when I fracture my leg after a basketball game. It felt like time has frozen and refused to carry on.

         I still remember the horrendous image of the lawyer, asking me if three corpses were my family. They were almost black, with no signs of life whatsoever, and barely familiar. But as I spotted my mom’s wedding ring, my dad’s favorite watch, and my sister’s preppy glasses, I nodded, feeling a lump in my throat. But the worst has yet to come; in the judicial court, my parents’ will have been disputed, and since my parents have always wanted me to earn a life on my own, they wanted to devote their money to charity. But they didn’t anticipate that they were not going to be there for my teenage years. Our distant relatives fought for the inheritance; they threw in the best lawyers just to get that money that I needed so much; yet none of them would reach in and help me.

         I ended up at an orphanage; I kind of blamed my parents for leaving me so early, but I didn’t blame them in some way. My birthday wish had backfired on itself, but I guess someone wants to send me a message, that my life couldn’t get better. I still stare at their pictures in the middle of the night, and remember that day when my last birthday wish was made; I still remember what I had. But it is now all past tense. Twenty years ago, I was that girl, that girl wandering around in Samuel Lewis with the best purses and loving parents. Now I’m a thirty-three-year-old, who’s always thinking about the past and unable to think for herself in the future. I wish that I could’ve cherished the precious things that I had. But now, my pain has not subsided, but the place seems to have forgotten about my tragedy. The streets were long before rebuilt, and the buildings shone with big letters in front and no sign of a burning building, family broken apart, and poverty. It was only when my family died, had I experienced really what losing something is; I could never forget that hopeless feeling that I got when I was sent to the orphanage, a feeling that I thought would never prevail. Yet all that grief, loss, and agony is lost in the streets of Samuel Lewis, leaving not a single trace, but only emptiness and loneliness. 

The Man I Killed; Pain and Guilt (Entry #6)

       

       The narrator, who tells the story in The Man I Killed and Ambush, is Tim O’Brien, but he doesn’t speak in first person.  Instead, he focuses on the young man that Tim killed in the midst of the war, and describes the pain, guilt, and agony accompanied with the killing. The reader could easily feel what the author was trying to project through his words; his guilt was so strong that it seemed to be the story’s cornerstone.

         O’Brien expresses his pain in an extremely interesting way; he starts imagining a life that the boy could’ve had, if not for Vietnam. The details about his life are impossible to be known by a foreign soldier. He just simply thinks about what this boy could’ve been if alive, and places blame and guilt upon himself. Knowing that although he could blame it all on Vietnam, he was the one who actually held the grenade; he was the one who killed him.

         I thought it fascinating when Tim O’Brien made up a story about the man he killed; I would never have done that, because thinking repeatedly about the what ifs of a person I stripped their life of is extremely excruciating; sometimes the burden is something that we all want to forget. Yet Tim O’Brien mentions later in the book explains that not knowing anything about the people who you have killed creates an empty feeling, with faceless responsibility, and faceless grief. 

The Killer of the Song Tra Bong (Entry #5)

         “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is an intriguing story with a lot of details that leaves the reader out of breath once finishing it. The message in this chapter is exactly what Tim O’Brien has intended to transmit throughout the whole entire story. Mark Fossie decides to bring his high school sweetheart and to-be-bride, Mary Anne, to Vietnam. She never came out of Vietnam as a whole; she turned from being a bubbly, innocent girl to a woman with no fear of anything—only desire for killing and blood.

         There are various places in the book that makes the reader think that Mary Anne is a killer; I have concluded thus, when I read about the part in which they describe her with the Greenies, with a tongue necklace. The fact that she transformed dramatically made me think that that’s what turned her into a killer; she turned into a human being that cares about nothing but battle and blood. I think that the war has illumined the darkest part of her soul, and Tim O’Brien was trying to emphasize what impact the war had on every single one of them. Everyone was slowly changing, Mary Anne being one of the most noticeable examples.

         I don’t think that it necessarily matters because she is a woman; but I do think that the fact that she’s a woman gives the story another interesting twist. Women are naturally seen as gentle and controlled creatures; unexpectedly, Mary Anne seems to be an innocent figure until war turns her around and reveals her wild inner part. She cuts her hair short, speaks in a lower tone of voice, and seems to have developed distance from her boyfriend and the rest of the team; it suddenly becomes clear to the reader that she is not going to part of them anymore.

         I think that it’s extremely interesting that Tim O’Brien chooses Rat Kiley as the narrator for “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”; his over exaggeration and overstatement could easily mislead people and it’s not entirely reliable—yet that’s most probably the reason why O’Brien chose his point of view. Rat Kiley’s facts were based on senses; his exaggeration did not mean deceit, just merely heating up the truth. He particularly felt strongly about this particular story, unlike the other guys who were mourning over the loss of Mary Anne; he based his story entirely on what he perceived what happened and all of his true senses—no one could’ve described the situation better than he did.

         Rat’s version of the story completely fits Tim O’Brien’s criteria on “How to Tell A True War Story”.  Rat Kiley, telling the story entirely based on his senses and feelings, emphasized the truth and didn’t smooth down the horrors and the dramatic changes to the story just to give the story a moral—according to Tim O’Brien, a true war story never has a moral, virtue, or a conclusion of any kind. Tim O’Brien also says that a true war story cannot be believed, because of its craziness. Insanity and truth are not antonyms in Rat’s dictionary; he would do whatever it takes to express what happened, or what he thinks happened. Rat Kiley tells the story without holding back, which leaves the reader to the choice to choose for themselves whether or not to believe it.