Usually, when someone is killed, people expect the killer to feel guilty. This, however, is not the case with war. When at war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for the sole reason that he is the enemy of the nation. When Tim O'Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the muscular, evil, terrifying enemy he expected. This realization overwhelms him with guilt. O'Brien's guilt has so fixated him on his victim's life that his very presence in the story, as protagonist and narrator, fades to black. Since he does not use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy, imagining an entire life for his victim, from childhood and family to his feelings about war and Americans. . In The Man I Killed, Tim O'Brien explores the truth of the Vietnam War by vividly describing the corpse and imagined life of the man he killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to make no sense to him. Detailed descriptions of the deceased's body show the terrible physical costs of war. O'Brien's sense of guilt almost takes on a rhythm of its own in the repetition of ideas, phrases and observations about the man's body. Some of the ideas here, particularly the idea that the victim is a "thin, young, elegant man," help to emphasize O'Brien's fixation on the effects of his action: the fact that he killed someone who was innocent and not destined to fight in the war. the war. At the same time, his focus on these physical characteristics, rather than on his own feelings, betrays his attempt to maintain a certain distance to dull the pain. Long, never-ending sentences force the reader to read details…halfway down the paper…big deal rather than helping them process their emotions. Between comments from others, O'Brien sits in the inescapable silence of Vietnam, an immobility that forces one to confront the reality of war. Behind every war there should be a moral, a reason to fight. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. O'Brien conveys to readers the truth about the Vietnam War through graphic descriptions of the man he killed. After killing the man O'Brien should have felt relief, even victory, but instead he feels pain for having killed a man who was not what he expected. O'Brien is supposed to be the winner, but ends up feeling like the loser. Ironically, the moral or lesson of The Things They Carried is that there is no morality in war. War is vague and illogical because it forces humans into extreme situations that have no obvious solutions.