The Never Ending Story of War

After reading, "The Man I Killed,” by O'Brien I couldn’t help but feel touched. I liked O’Brien’s approach to his writings, it's very realistic. He pays a lot of attention to both detail, and emotions. While most war stories and movies are all about detail, but they focus in on the gore of blood and guts, O'Brien wanted you to picture what he was seeing but he did it in a sort of artistic way. I also liked how he had a whole life story to the man that he killed, not many war stories show you that, most stories just show the dead man and that’s pretty much the brunt of the whole thing. It was also very reassuring to see a solider with feelings, that's often not depicted when talking about war. It's actually usually the opposite, they don't want soldiers to show that they are human, the army seems to want them to act as machines. As a reader I really felt for O'Brien. I could feel the pain and remorse he was going through. This was the first man that he had ever killed, and he couldn't seem to let that go, despite the fact that the man would've killed him if he didn't shoot first. It shows a real side to soldiers. It might not really ever be said, but soldiers do feel remorse and guilt. And it's obvious that this was a life changing event for O'Brien because its almost twenty years later and he still can't stop thinking about it. One thing that I didn’t really like about O’Brien’s style of writing was he kept repeating certain things over and over, I thought my reading was messed up for a minute. But all and all I really did enjoy reading this and that’s a lot coming from me, because I’m not a big war story reader. The funny thing about this whole reading is his friend telling him to talk about it and he won't, yet 20 something years later he's writing about it.
Natasha Dambinskas