'"The thing is,' he wrote 'there's no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It's almost like I got killed over in Nam... Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him... Feels like I'm still in deep shit'" (page 150)
War is selfish! It takes and steals from everyone who is involved: the men and woman fighting and the countries. And what does it give back? Nothing, except maybe the assurance that your country won, but don't forget about the thousands of men who died for this victory and the thousands more who were killed.
It seems odd to me how war affects everyone differently. For O'Brien, he came back and it was almost like nothing had happened. He went on to grad school at Harvard like he had originally planned and seldom told stories about the war, except through his writing. For Norman Bowker, the war was the end of him. It took parts of him that he never got back. I think that Norman's story seems more realistic than O'Brien's because I couldn't see many people just getting over such a traumatic experience.
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