Class notes
ENG 102 Dulce Et Decorum Est." " The Man I Killed" Notes
- Course
- ENG102
- Institution
- Laguardia Community College
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READINGSFigure 1. Manuscript for Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est.” Owen wrote the poem
while fighting for the English in the trenches of World War I.
, “The Man I Killed,” Tim O’Brien (an excerpt from his memoir The Things They
Carried [1990])
His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his
other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his
nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair
was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly
freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three
ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin,
his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was
this wound that had killed him. He lay face-up in the center of the trail, a slim, dead,
almost dainty young man. He had bony legs, a narrow waist, long shapely fingers. His
chest was sunken and poorly muscled—a scholar, maybe. His wrists were the wrists of a
child. He wore a black shirt, black pajama pants, a gray ammunition belt, a gold ring on
the third finger of his right hand. His rubber sandals had been blown off. One lay beside
him, the other a few meters up the trail. He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village
of My Khe near the central coastline of Quang Ngai Province, where his parents farmed,
and where his family had lived for several centuries, and where, during the time of the
French, his father and two uncles and many neighbors had joined in the struggle for
independence. He was not a Communist. He was a citizen and a soldier. In the village of
My Khe, as in all of Quang Ngai, patriotic resistance had the force of tradition, which
was partly the force of legend, and from his earliest boyhood the man I killed would have
listened to stories about the heroic Trung sisters and Tran Hung Dao's famous rout of the
Mongols and Le Loi's final victory against the Chinese at Tot Dong. He would have been
taught that to defend the land was a man's highest duty and highest privilege. He had
accepted this. It was never open to question. Secretly, though, it also frightened him. He
was not a fighter. His health was poor, his body small and frail. He liked books. He
wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics. At night, lying on his mat, he could not
picture himself doing the brave things his father had done, or his uncles, or the heroes of
the stories. He hoped in his heart that he would never be tested. He hoped the Americans
would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always, even when he was
asleep.
"Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker," Azar said. "You scrambled his sorry self,
look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat."
"Go away," Kiowa said.
"I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal."
"Go," Kiowa said.
"Okay, then, I take it back," Azar said. He started to move away, then stopped and
said, "Rice Krispies, you know? On the dead test, this particular individual gets A-plus."
Smiling at this, he shrugged and walked up the trail toward the village behind the
trees.
Kiowa kneeled down.
"Just forget that crud," he said. He opened up his canteen and held it out for a while
and then sighed and pulled it away. "No sweat, man. What else could you do?"
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