SSRJ # 3 D. WALKER

I Am the Grass, by, D. Walker
My emotions ran wild with this piece. After reading the first paragraph I wondered if I would loathe the narrator or revere him in the end. I connected and respected his desire to protect his family from the truth, but hated the reality of those things that were his past.
I was gripped by the antagonist element of the unyielding guilt the main character was desperately seeking atonement for. Memories of the Vietnam War “fester” in (him) “like the tiny fragment of shrapnel embedded in (his) skull, haunt (him) like the corpse of the slim dark man (he) killed”. For years after his return from the war he felt hopeless and tormented by his memories. In an effort to move on and shake these feelings from his mind he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin. At night, alone in his room, mobs of student war protestors march on the street outside of his window; another reminder that there is no escape from the war continuing on in Vietnam simultaneously with the one inside his head. The reassuring happiness he finds while caring for patients as an orderly at a Catholic hospital inspires him to enroll in medical school. He believes he has found what he was looking for. But when war protesters blow up a building near the hospital he finds himself back in Vietnam, heart pounding with fear. He realizes again that “the war (he) was trying to escape had followed (him) home.” Years later as a practicing plastic surgeon he still feels an opposing conflict going on inside his mind. On the outside he is a family man and physician but on the inside he is still the “war criminal” he feels has “an atrophied soul.” Volunteering for Operation Smile repairing the cleft palates of people in third world countries makes him feel “like something of a decent man”. Maybe this is why he decides to fly into Vietnam on his own mission, (maybe seeking reparation for himself) to repair the cleft palates of 30 children who he imagines may be the grandchildren of men he killed in the war. As he is flying into the country and during his two week stay he experiences many flashbacks helping him to appraise his feelings and memories of the war he fought in. The day after his arrival he meets Dinh, the round character in the story who he unexpectedly discovers had parallel experiences in the Vietnam War. Coming to terms with his new environment and after many successful surgeries he is feeling the guilt lesson and be “replaced by a sense of good will and atonement, as if Vietnam and (he) were two bad people who had unexpectedly done something nice for each other.” When Dinh asks him for a meeting he becomes immediately vulnerable, feeling he must have done something wrong. Instead Dinh asks him for a thumb. Both men are hopeful to receive something from the surgery, for Dinh an opposable thumb and for him resolution. The day before he leaves Vietnam is for him “the day of atonement, the time of truth, the moment to unwrap Dinh’s hand and see if his thumb is viable.’ As he unwraps the bandages and smells the faint odor of rotten flesh he knows the surgery didn’t work. He wants to run away but he stays to remove the never to be thumb permanently and thinks about the men who chopped of Dinh’s thumb in the war they both fought. The next morning he leaves Vietnam for a second time. Dihn does not come to say good bye. Has he reconciled his offense?