No Trace

                In Albrook there was a big valley that was full of green trees and nature was abundant. It is recognizable that for that intention it was called Green Valley. This place had never been inhabited by man until progress reached it and its green forest became roads. In the forest there was a small river which inside had a cave in which water didn’t reach because of the flow it carried. This river was the home for many creatures and the water hydrated the animals.

                Before Green Valley became a complex of duplexes full of playing children, the hidden cave was the home of a family of Noriega oppositions that could never leave. This people weren’t brave enough to confront the dictatorship, but they weren’t cowardly enough to leave the place in which their family had lived for many years. The cave was a decent home which will absorb light and was big enough for a small family to live. During the morning they will come out and kill animals for food. They will get wood to make small fires which smoke will be absorbed by the humidity, but the flame wasn’t.

                The US invaded Panama and Noriega was taken out. Panama was still in shambled by this, but Noriega was gone. The family didn’t have any communication with the world so they kept living in the cave. They had become used to drinking water off the stream, using broken coconut shells as glasses; the sweet smell of blood was as good as a CH perfume. The kids had grown as tigers, carefully watching the animals get near the steam for necessity, and then stabbing them with sharp pieces of rocks. They were wild, they were untamed, they were self-sufficient, but they weren’t immortal. When construction started the rocks on top of the cave were flattened by digging equipment and other building items. The roof of the cave broke, making the cave collapse. No one knew of the family, and no one knew what happened to them. Were the old steam stood, there is mansion. Around are a set of duplexes were human families live. No one knows what happened beneath their feet.

Guilt

                In the chapter “The Man I killed/Ambush” the narrator is O’Brian. There is a small difference between the narrations of the two chapters. In “The Man I killed” O’Brian refrains from using the word “I”, as to make the entire chapter about the man he killed instead of himself. In “Ambush” things are very different because the chapter focuses in his point of view and on how he felt and also what happened that led him to kill the man.  Especially in “The Man I killed”, the man that O’Brian killed is described not only by his physic but by his life. Many intimate details as his young life, career, and love life are given my O’Brian even though there is no way for him to certainly know this information.

                O’Brian makes a judgment of the man he killed judging in his appearance and the fact that he is from Vietnam. He generalizes him with other Vietnamese that go into the war because their parents trained them to protect the land. O’Brian feels so responsible for his death that his brain plays the old trick on him in which one over analyzes something and makes it worst for you than how it already was. He is just feeling guilty for what he has done so he makes that guilt even bigger by thinking of how the life that he has ended could have gone. This makes him feel guiltier than what he already is and that is what he wanted to do, to feel guilty because that is what he feels a normal person should do. In a concise way, the details come from his guilty mind.

The Song Tra Bong

                Mary Anne comes to the war as an innocent and sweat girl that is in love with Mark Fossie, a war paramedic in a camp. While the story evolves we learn that the more time she spends in Vietnam the more she changes. She was very refined and she becomes part of Vietnam and very savage, worse than a soldier. She becomes a killer and we know this because she has a necklace which is full of human tongues and she helped in an ambush with the Special Forces. She becomes a killer because all the gore and the war lured her in because it was interesting. She wanted to know more about the war and about Vietnam until she became Vietnam, cold, killer, evil, always doing the opposite you think it is going to do, and she becomes an animal. The main reason why the character that goes through a change is a woman is because it shows how grave the situation is. Also in the time period that war took place people were very sexist and for them the idea of having women in war was considered stupid. Woman are said to be more mellow and less violent which really shows how much Vietnam may change a person—a women to a monster. Also in the past there was a belief that if a woman was a president she will be against war because it was said that women didn’t believe in killing or will never allow violence. This story goes completely against that tradition, showing the opinion of O’Brian that sexism is stupid.

                Rat Kiley is the narrator of this story because it is very likely that if the character O’Brian said the story, the reader will believe that the story is just the reflection of the author’s opinion (author also called O’Brian).  The story told by Rat fits the criteria of if it is a true war story because it is hard to separate what happened to what seemed to happen. Many things in the story can be seen in another way. An example is the disappearance of Mary Anne. All we know is that she was never seen again. What we think happened is that she became part of Vietnam and is walking around the forest, but she could have also been killed. Things like this and many other lead me to think that “Sweetheart in the Song Tra Bong” is a true war story.