Literary Analysis: Ambush, By Tim O Brien

We all make mistakes that we later regret, but that 's life. We need to focus more on just accepting to live with it.

Living with regret. "Ambush" Literary Analysis

Tim O ' Brien, a fighter affected by the Vietnam War, reveals on his participations when his daughter asks herself if he has ever taken a man’s life. At nine years old, nearly 20 years after the Vietnam War is over, Kathleen asks her father a question. Has he ever killed someone, she wants to know. O’Brien decides to tell her that he has not killed a man. It felt like the “right thing to do”; he thinks when she is a little older she will understand better. Maybe then O’Brien will tell her about the slim young man who still consumes him, whom he still thinks about when reading the newspaper.

O’Brien briefly relives the night in My Khe. He had been on watch after midnight. He saw the young man emerging from the mist, carrying a gun. He grabbed a grenade and threw it without really thinking. Right after he threw the grenade, he felt guilty. But it was too late. The grenade dealt a fatal blow. And, twenty years later, O’Brien is still living with the guilt. He doesn 't want to tell her truth just yet. After he killed the soldier Tim stated,"Even now I haven 't finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don 't"(2). Trying to understand the hardship that soldiers go through after coming home from combat, It may be a hard period of time to recover but it takes day-to-day to start a future