TTTC by ali!

In my lit circles group I am reading The Things They Carried. The notion of being a coward can be debated and ultimately it comes down to how much an individual values their life versus the life of others. There are many situations in a war where the outcome is completely out of the hands of the people who inherit the situation. Such is the instance when Kiowa and Norman discover themselves under ambush, however though, while Kiowa is in, what I would consider to be the worst death, Norman wimps out. Kiowa drown in “this deep, oozy soup” (145) of human feces. He saw his life as being more important than that of his fellow comrades. Some may argue that he had no choice or that in the situation he was put in there was no way he could have saved Kiowa so the best thing to do was to preserve his own life. If he had made the choice to try harder or longer to save the life of his friend I believe that Norman would never have committed suicide. There are many other outcomes, they both could have died, Norman could have died but Kiowa could have lived, and many more outcomes but the only way they would have been possible if Norman was not a coward.