O Brien's Guilt Analysis
According to the interview, O'Brien's continuing guilt over his military service in a war he opposed and his anger about government deceit. He said: "I didn't go to war as an innocent. I went to war knowing, at least convinced, that the Vietnam War was ill-conceived and morally wrong. That was my conviction. I didn't go to war an innocent. I went to war a "guilt," that is to say "guilt" being a sort of weird noun. I was not an innocent, I was a "guilt." I knew that the war was wrong. I wasn't a Henry Fleming. I wasn't a Caputo or a Kovic. I wasn't a Paul Baumer. My situation was different, and it separates me from a lot of veterans to this day. It doesn't make me better or worse, but different, in the sense that I believed that the war was wrong and I went to it anyway. I didn't go to the war with a sense that I was going to prove my own courage, for reasons of glory, for reasons of adventure, for patriotic reasons--a lot of the variables that send men off to war that are so conspicuous in most literature about Vietnam and other wars. In
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He calls this feeling "a kind of schizophrenia". It is a "moral split" for him. "I feared the war, yes." "but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole history, everything that mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule and censure" . It is also one of the reasons why O'Brien quitted from his job at a meat packing plant and leave his family and hometown. He fleeing to northern Minnesota with the intention to cross into Canada. “I did not want people to think badly of me”: "My conscience told me to run," but, he also confesses, "I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing." He said, "I was a coward. I went to Vietnam" in the New York Times Magazine memoir, therefore each thing he did in Vietnam "was an act of the purest self-hatred and
He calls this feeling "a kind of schizophrenia". It is a "moral split" for him. "I feared the war, yes." "but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole history, everything that mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule and censure" . It is also one of the reasons why O'Brien quitted from his job at a meat packing plant and leave his family and hometown. He fleeing to northern Minnesota with the intention to cross into Canada. “I did not want people to think badly of me”: "My conscience told me to run," but, he also confesses, "I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing." He said, "I was a coward. I went to Vietnam" in the New York Times Magazine memoir, therefore each thing he did in Vietnam "was an act of the purest self-hatred and