Civilians often assume that when someone joins the army and goes to war, he constantly fights in battles and accomplishes it in a heroic and honorable way. But what they fail to understand is the horrible killing and pointless taking of human life. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” the character Krebs in the story reveals the differences between the reality soldiers experience in war versus the illusion civilians back home assume about the soldiers ' experiences. While Tim O’Brien’s “The Man I Killed” and Kevin Tillman’s “After Pats Birthday” explain and point out the actualities and problems of war not being what it is made out to be.
A great majority of the public believe when the soldiers leave to war they expect to be treated well and come back home as a hero. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” Krebs goes to war and comes home having to lie to his family about his experiences because he “found that to be listened to at all he had to lie,” and after doing that a couple of times he had a “reaction against the war and against talking about it” (Hemingway 111). The soldiers who got home before him had already told the people about their tragic experiences leaving the public not being able to handle the reality of what happened to the soldiers. With what Krebs experienced being in the war he was taught
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In Tim O’Brien’s “The Man I Killed” Tim talks about the wounds that he caused to a guy he killed in My Khe and states: “The man’s jaw was in his throat, he says, and his upper lip and teeth were missing. One eye was shut, and the other looked like a star-shaped hole” (O’Brien 64). He imagines the guy’s life and that he was that he was “not a fighter” and hoped for “the Americans would go away” (65). Tim shows his guilt towards the guy laying on the floor and thinks the guy is like him in a way. By doing this he can feel a connection to him and identify better with the nature of