The Man I Killed, a short story about the traumatic experience of the Vietnam War was written by Tim O'Brien and published in 1990. As a Macalester Graduate Scholar College, O'Brien was drafted into the Army to fight in Vietnam, which shattered his plan to continue his education. He felt obligated to fight in a war he didn't want to participate in. After returning from Vietnam, he began writing to address his suffering. In the story, O'Brien describes how the murder he committed had a profound physical and psychological impact on his life. He highlights his torment through the use of imagery and imagination. His comrades, Azar and Kiowa, try to ease O'Brien out of misery to continue the battle. The story explores the theme. It is crucial to understand why O'Brien describes the dead soldier as "not a communist." He does this to demonstrate that the dead soldier is not his enemy. Both O'Brien and the dead soldier do not belong to the war environment, but feel compelled to fight. O'Brien is completely terrified of war and the Vietnamese soldier was destined to become a mathematician. O'Brien imagines his own death by putting himself in the Vietnamese soldier's shoes. But with the same fantasy he also tortures himself, imagining exactly why that man's death would be such a horrible tragedy. O'Brien fuels his guilt by imagining that the man he killed was in his prime. By imagining that the man he killed wrote romantic poems in his diary and had fallen in love with a classmate he married before enlisting as a common rifleman, O'Brien can more easily identify with his victim and understand the terrible nature of the crime. 'homocide. . O'Brien also details some of the soldier's aspirations. O'Brien creates this fantasy to make the dead man more realistic, causing the reader to think of him as a man, not just a body or an enemy. This is how O'Brien makes the Vietnam War seem more personal than political. O'Brien is playing with the notion of truth; the personal story makes the soldier truer to us and more real