The audience included seventeen Towanda seniors, their teacher, Phyllis McNeal, as well as a few Towanda parents and grandparents. All were excited to meet the author of a book from their AP English course at Towanda. As fans of a book that presents the burdens of memory and guilt that soldiers sometimes carry home from war, the students were not sure what to expect from O’Brien at first.
However, O’Brien, a teacher of creative writing in Texas, quickly had them all laughing, beginning with an assortment of hilarious rewrites of overly flowery phrases. For example, when a long, involved paragraph about a woman with a graceful, swanlike neck became, “She honked,” the audience roared!
O’Brien focused on story telling throughout much of the evening. He read from his novel, nearly breaking into tears himself as he told the story of “The Man I Killed.” That chapter condensed the “many bodies” and “many battles” of his Vietnam experience into one fictional moment. Courtney Bennett, another Towanda senior, noted that she had tears in her own eyes as did a number of others.
In answer to Layne-Perkins’ question, O’Brien told the students that Azar, a sometimes cruel and impulsive character, came from his own sense of conflict between the young man he was before the war and the soldier he became. Before the war, he was a young man who saw himself as a “gentle” and “kind” Methodist who took the Ten Commandments seriously. During the war, he had to shoot or be court-martialed. Therefore, Azar was the part of himself who was cruel and violent in Vietnam. Nonetheless, O’Brien quickly explained that he was not as bad as Azar, and that he never really “strapped claymore-mines to puppies” as Azar does in the novel!