One moment that really struck me in Tim O'Brien’s “The Things
They Carried” was when Rat Kiley grotesquely shot the baby water buffalo. He began by petting the water buffalo
and offering it food, and then proceeded to shoot it repeatedly. “It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt
(79).” Kiley was putting all of
his anger and his burden on this poor, innocent animal. He was trying to metaphorically let go
of all the things he was carrying.
In this moment, I saw the water buffalo as a physical
representation of the men’s innocence and the constant stream of bullets as the
war. The men were essentially the
same as that water buffalo, waiting to be blown to bits. They felt wide-eyed and helpless in the
face of the war and they could only wait for their fate to reach them. Kiley repeatedly shot the water buffalo
and it went down slowly but stayed alive until the bitter end “just in the eyes
(79)”. The men lost their
innocence in a similar manner. The
devastating events of the war slowly chipped away at them, making them more
desensitized and jaded as time went by.
They gradually lost the ability to differentiate between good and evil,
right and wrong. All they had were
the objects they carried with them and the images they saw, just like the baby
water buffalo. They couldn’t go
back; the rest of their lives, if they were lucky enough to survive, would be
through their jaded eyes of war.
I really like your comparison of the men and the buffalo. I definitely agree that seeing war has numbed the soldiers to a great extent. Your title, "Jaded Eyes," made me think of the buffalo's last moments. O'Brien writes, " It was still alive, though just barely, just in the eyes" (76). I think this quote well represents how war can affect anyone who is able to survive it. Though their lives go on, I would imagine that many vets experience periods in their lives afterward where they are seeing but not actually living. They see the world differently after being physically, emotionally, and mentally hurt. Like the buffalo, they're alive, if only through their newfound perception of the world. Though, unlike the buffalo, these men have the power to continue with their lives, however damaged they may be. They don't permanently have to be "barely living."
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