SSRJ #3: Walker

“I am the grass,” by Daly Walker, caused me to have mixed feelings as I read through the story. In the beginning I felt disturbed by the acts that the main character committed, but also felt sorry that he was harboring so much pain and shame. As the story progressed, I felt that it was nice that he was trying to do something in return for the people of Vietnam (where he had done the unspeakable things) by performing surgery on children with cleft palates. At the end, I wished the operation would have worked for Dinh. He seemed like a man that had good intentions and could have done more things if he had a usable thumb.
The element that stood out as particularly interesting to me was the main character’s ability to hide the events that had happened during the war. Although I see both sides of why he would or would not tell his family, the fact of the matter is that if those experiences affect his everyday civilian life, he needs to talk to someone. His family should be the first people that should not judge or reject him. It is interesting to read that he feels that if he tells them, they would no longer see him as a good man. “Because I love my wife and daughter, and because I want them to believe I am a good man, I have never talked to them about my year as a grunt with the 25th infantry in Vietnam.”
The situation in my life that this story made me think about is when my dad would only give me little details about his experiences in Vietnam. I know that he wasn’t on the front lines, but still to this day, I don’t know much about what he did or what he experienced. I can imagine that it would be a traumatic experience, especially because he was so young and didn’t have a good childhood to begin with. I made me wonder if a lot of veterans harbor a lot of shame or do not tell of certain events that took place on enemy soil.
The literary element that I chose and was used by the author to support and build meaning to their work is theme. I believe that the author used theme in order to convey that the meaning of the story is that life is what you make of it. If you have a positive outlook, you don’t let the bumps in the road make you stumble and if things don’t go according to plan then there will be another opportunity waiting. However, you decide to have a negative outlook, you will allow mistakes to never be forgiven (in fact, they will define who you are for the rest of your life) and there are no second chances. The narrator sums it best by saying, “Dinh believes that our lives move in circles, repeating themselves endlessly like the four seasons, like the cycle of his country’s rice crop. Planting. Weeding and waiting. Harvesting. Fallowness. Planting again. I things don’t work out, so what? Another chance will come around, the way winter always gives in to spring. But I believe that my life is somehow outside these circles, that I am on a straight march toward something final, and on that journey to the end of existence, the journey itself is all there is. When I fail along the way, when something I need eludes me because of a mistake I have made, the mistake itself becomes a defeat, and I am left with only loss, with emptiness, uncertainty, and regret.” The narrator also demonstrates how unfortunate events would define someone for the rest of their life by saying, “All these things fester in me like the tiny fragment of shrapnel embedded in my skull, haunt me like the corpse of the slim dark man I killed. I cannot talk about these things that I wish I could forget but know that I never will.”
Do you feel that the main character is doing cleft palate surgeries in Vietnam because he feels guilty? In doing the surgeries, does this make his wrongs, right? Does it make him a better man?