Love and Honor

This story kind of shocked me at first. You never hear about American soldiers abusing their power in war and slaughtering a village of innocent people. In my eyes it just shows how awful the Vietnam War must have been. I feel like the American Soldiers slaughtered those innocent civilians out of pure frustration and anger over the atrocities of war and all the brothers in arms that they had seen die. You normally associate the slaughtering of civilians with the people the US is trying to fight whether it be the Nazi's or the terrorists in the middle east. I guess I would have to be pretty naive to believe that the US is never cruel to other innocent people in foreign nations. But I would like to think we try to do our best and be fair with others.

This story also reminded me a lot of the movie we watched. It dealt with Iowa's writing workshop and the intensity of writing stories. The first scene really cracks me up when it talked about the narrator cleaning up his apartment when his father arrived early. "As he moved into the kitchen, I grabbed the three quarters full bottle of Johnnie Walker form the second shelf of my bookcase and stashed it under the deask. I looked around. The desktop was gritty with cigarette ash. I threw some magazines over the roughest spots, then flipped one of them over because of it's cover bore a picture of Chairman Mao." This reminded me of when my parents came to visit me the other weekend. The night before they came I was trying to clean up the best I could, sweeping, doing dishes, taking out the 4 garbage cans full of trash and the empty adult beverage cans that seemed to be lying everywhere. You try to think to yourself that you are still their little boy slash girl but the truth is your not a little kid anymore, your pretty much an adult which is really sad, I miss being a kid and it will never happen again.

The relationship the narrator has with his father seems to be a very unfortunate one. They love each other yet they have a hate for each other as well. The father is the scarred army veteran who has seen atrocities while the son is a writer just living out his life in small town USA. Two very opposite lives and because of it they both misunderstand each other and never really get along. It even says that the narrator had not seen his father in 3 years, if that was me I wouldn't be able to make it. My dad would be in a worse case than me, I know he misses me a lot because I am ten hours away from him. He did not really like the idea of me going to a college this far away but he loves me so much that he supported my decision and is now a giant Clemson Tiger fan. I wouldn't know what I would do without the strong relationship I have with my dad, I respect him so much and he is a very good role model and I strive to be like him and make him proud of me everyday. I couldn't imagine having a bad relationship with him like the narrator does with his father. My father would never burn a piece of work that I had poured my heart and soul into for so long like the narrator's father did.