The Dead Young Vietnamese Soldier
O'Brien isn't sure if he killed the man outside My Khe with a grenade or not, but he has vivid, repeating memories of the man's corpse, which represents humanity's guilt for the terrible things done during war. By speaking in the third person and creating imagined images of the man before he was killed, O'Brien attempts to detach himself from the memories in "The Man I Killed." O'Brien stares in amazement at the remains of his corpse, thinking of the peeled-back cheek and the star-shaped hole where his eye should be. Because O'Brien's sentiments about the incident are never discussed in great length, the description works to disassociate O'Brien from the reality of his actions. His culpability is clear,