Field Trip: The Clown Doll

                Many teens in the small town of La Ceja, Colombia, babysit in their free time to have some extra money for themselves. Around a certain time, a good six years ago, babysitting became something very serious, and by serious I mean “watch my baby 24/7” serious. Kids and homes were being looked after with much care and concern, and during this time the streets were emptier at night and a few lights around the houses remained on even when its inhabitants were sleeping, that is if they managed to get calm enough to sleep. This uneasiness was caused by a fear that began to spread among the people. I will tell you what caused this fear, but I cannot assure you what you’ll get out from it, after all, it’s been some time since then.

                It happened on a Friday night during late November, the air was clod and dry, and people enjoyed a late night drink out on the streets. Natasha Gomez, a young girl, had been well acquainted with the Bermudez family and while she worked as the babysitter for their two toddlers, she was almost part of the family. This specific night, Natasha was called at a last minute arrangement to watch the kids while both parents attended a small birthday party. It all seemed well, Natasha and the kids stayed up for a while playing games and watching a movie. While both kids rested peacefully at either side of her on the couch, Natasha noticed something new about the house. She realized there was a new doll in the living room. The doll was a big—almost full-size—clown sitting on Mr. Bermudez’s rocking chair. Natasha would’ve been calm for the rest of the evening if it weren’t for the way the clown’s eyes looked, they seemed too real, the way they weren’t completely pitch dark, they had a certain gloss to them, they made the clown look almost alive. She struggled hard to concentrate on the movie after that, her eyes flickering back to the doll every once in a while, as if looking at it would stop it from doing anything unexpected.

                After a while, both kids had dozed off on her lap and she decided to carry them to their rooms. After getting them ready for bed and tucking them in she went back to the living room and continued to watch the movie and wait until the Bermudez would return. As much as she tried to ignore the doll, her thoughts would always return to it, and soon she started to imagine the doll twitch slightly. It got to the point in which Natasha couldn’t take it anymore and decided to cover the doll with a sheet. She knew it was still there, but just not having the image made it much better, it was just for the comfort. Just like when a kid covers himself up with a blanket at night, he knows the monster would not be stopped by the blanket, but it’s just the comfort of having something to isolate him what protected him. Soon Natasha was able to drift into a comfortable sleep but shortly after that, she woke to the sound of creaking wood. It was a tiny sound, barely audible, but very real. Natasha’s eyes snapped open and immediately drifted in the direction of the rocking chair. She let out a loud gasp when she noticed the sheet had been removed and the clown was staring directly at her. She made eye contact for what seemed like torturous years and then the phone rang.

“Hello?” she asked a bit afraid. She let out a sigh when she heard the voice on the other end.

“Yes, Natasha? Just calling to check in on you.” Mrs. Bermudez spoke calmly.

“Um, yeah, everything’s fine back here. I put the kids to sleep and all. Except,” Natasha hesitated, fixing her eyes on the doll again for a second.

“Except what?”

“Nothing, it’s just that the clown doll you’ve got on the living room, it’s giving me the creeps.”

“What clown doll?” Mrs. Bermudez asked in confusion.

“You know, the big, almost human-size doll sitting on the rocking chair. I’m looking at it right now.”

“We don’t have a clown doll,” There was a long silence on both sides of the phone, but Natasha’s breathing was starting to speed up. “Get out of the house. Quick!” Natasha did as she was told, running fast for the kids and taking them outside where a couple of neighbors enjoying the cold night.  A while later Mr. and Mrs. Bermudez arrived with the police and entered the house but there was no doll to be found anywhere. After much investigation Mrs. Bermudez had noticed one of her craving knives had disappeared and later that night, about five miles south into the forest the police had found the knife stuck to an officer’s throat. He had been sent along with a sniffer dog to follow the sent that was on the sheet.

                Who really was the clown? Why was he there? No one really knows, and no one really wants to. Many people say it could have been a killer, a maniac who had gotten out of hold. Others let themselves be taken by superstition and said it was the long lost spirit of one of the native legends of the land, the Whistler, who comes out of the woods to do the devil’s bidding. After that day, nothing weird or mysterious really happened, perhaps because the town was more careful and watched over the streets very often, perhaps because whoever it was got caught, or perhaps it just got what it wanted.

The Man I Killed

The narrator in “The Man I Killed” is still O’Brien, but he tells it in the perspective of the actual character, not story teller. The many details that O’Brien reveals from the man he’s killed are related to his life, just like when O’Brien said the young man must’ve probably wanted to pursue an intellectual career, so did O’Brien himself. He basically creates somewhat of a replica of his fear and his reasons for going to war, the shame he had of disappointing his loved ones, and his aspirations making them the dead man’s as well. How the dead man probably had planned a life for himself but then he was sent to war and that life disappeared. I think that O’Brien is giving all these details from the dead man’s life as a sort of self-punishment for killing him. O’Brien has ended the life of a man who could’ve had a happy one, not to mention someone who he has related to his own life. By relating the dead man’s life to his own, O’Brien is imagining his own death because he’s basically putting himself in the man’s shoes.  O’Brien comes up with the background of the man’s life, relating to some of the aspects of his own, to make his death an actual tragedy and torture himself because after all, he did take another human’s life.

              In addition, I think that by making the man’s life similar to his own, O’Brien is also comforting himself. The dead man could’ve turned out to be O’Brien instead of the Vietnamese soldier. Even though he is supplying his guilt by making up a life for the dead man, O’Brien realizes that life goes on despite the tragedy that has just occurred. By being alive and making the dead man’s life similar to his own, O’Brien is both punishing himself for killing another human being who was also scared of war and ashamed of not facing it, and celebrating life because he could’ve been in the dead man’s shoes.

Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

                What transformed Mary Anne into a killer was her curiosity. She wanted to learn more about the war and experience more about the war, and at the same time the environment she was living in also rubbed on her. Not only did she start learning from the soldiers, but she learned from Vietnam itself, and slowly started being consumed into a different life. It didn’t matter that Mary Anne was a woman because the story itself shows that the effects of war on women are the same as men. The difference was that the soldiers were forced against their will to be in such horrible place, but Mary Anne could have said no to Fossie. Because she was there for a different reason, Mary Anne was standing in a different position to that of the soldiers, but the effect of the war turned out to be the same. There can be different levels of this effect, but it’s not like it will only change men. Mary Anne arrives being the innocent American girl and gets transformed into a killer, just like when the soldiers arrive as boys and get changed into something different than their old selves. This story shows how the war can affect anyone who has been touched by it, regardless of their gender and their involvement in it.

                O’Brien lets Rat Kiley narrate the story because it doesn’t matter if the facts are what’s true, what matters is if the message and feelings the story teller is trying to communicate is true. The way Kiley tells it might not entirely fit into O’Brien’s criteria for telling a war story because Kiley does break the flow of it to insert his own interpretations of it, but in the end the message is what he was trying to get to: war is war, once you’re touched by it there’s no going back, whether you are a girl or a boy, afraid or curious.

Spin

“All that peace man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.”

                I think what this means is that while the soldier was in AWOL (Absence Without Leave) he was at peace. Hitting it on with a nurse and getting everything he wanted. He thought he knew peace, but once he came back to the war ready for combat he realized it wasn’t really peace. It wasn’t peace while his mates were out there in the war, possibly getting killed while he knew that it wasn’t fair. Peace is freedom from disturbance, and while his body was resting, his mind wasn’t. The peace he felt then wasn’t really there. Back in the battlefield wasn’t peace either because it was still war, there was still fear and pain and grief. Peace then would be defined as something that has absence of conflicts, but there can be conflicts within the mind while not physically, so then peace would practically be nonexistent. It only comes with death because both your mind and body are now free from everything; every wound, every thought, every conflict is now lost into death. I think this relates to the war in the sense that it changes the soldier’s perspective of peace, because they gain a new definition for it. They realize that peace is something harder to achieve than they thought, and that peace could also be war’s greatest lie. Because war brings death and death eventually brings peace, but post-war or out-of-war life isn’t the same as death. Post-war or out-of-war life could be the farthest thing from peace, because while your body isn’t at war, all those things you went through, all those feelings, wounds, and horrible sights will be engraved in your heart and mind. I think that what O’Brien could be saying about the war is that once you see it and you experience it, the rest of your life will never be the same and what you thought was peace before was a lie, and you’ll want to hurt that lie back.

War Letter

Dear Mother,

Things have been going rather normal since I last wrote to you, but then again, the definition of normal changes frequently around here. We’ve been marching for quite a long way and I no longer feel the pain on my feet. The sun has made my skin a darker color and a rougher texture, and I could do with a little rain. Walking through mined fields and evading getting shot has now become part of the daily life routine, and I’ve become used to the in-war environment. I have to tell you, Mother, it is a whole different world out here, not to set you off or anything but I admit my stomach has had quite a hard time growing used to the stuff you see around here. It’s mostly the shock and reality of it what’s so new, it just doesn’t feel like real life. You’d think it was a movie.

Anyway, the mates back here are all very nice and we share stories from back home, some are friendlier than others but everyone has got their own charm. You’ve got the funny one, the big strong one, the cynical one, the friendly one, the annoying one, and the surprisingly energetic one. We share the burden of carrying the heavy tech and watch out for each others’ backs. I’ve become well acquainted with Zach, a 20 year-old from Texas, and Paul, a 21 year-old from Arizona. Most of us have got a special item that we carry with us, just like I’ve got that handmade bracelet you gave to me when I was five, the chaps here have their own lucky charms. Zach, for example, has got a small yarn ball his younger sister sent to him.

I’d love to tell you that everything is going calm here, but you’d know I’d be lying. About three days ago we encountered a small group of mercenaries walking out and about the outskirts of a small town. At first we were ordered to keep a low profile and wait for the right time to attack but Zach panicked. He fired all too quickly and we had to back him up. Later on, for safety, we searched the village for any other signs of hostile activity.

But enough about war, I know it sets you off. There’s nothing much new to tell, though, and so I wait for your reply and you can tell me how everything is back home. Tell me about your latest days, what you’ve been up to and all sorts of town business. Tell Dad I love him, and to keep out of my room, when I come back I want everything how I left it. I love you and miss you terribly.

Take care,

Juli

             

  I chose to write to my mom because she is the closest member of my family, she’s always been there for me and we share a very strong bond. I always go back to her for advice and for comfort, so it would be very weird for me not to write to her if I were in such situation. I would tell her the truth about things, she knows very well when I lie, but I’d only talk about what she would ask. I wouldn’t tell her all about how I’ve been around shooting civilians and burning down towns for her sake; I know she wouldn’t take it. In a way, I also wouldn’t want her to think of me as a killer, although I’d be at war which obviously means that at some point I’d have to kill someone, it’s better to not say it. We would both know what I’d done, but not saying it directly makes it better. In this letter I have hidden the fact that the whole town was trashed and burned down. She doesn’t need to know that, and like I said before, I wouldn’t want her to think of me as a killer of innocent people. I also didn’t tell her Zach was wounded in the middle of his panic shooting and that because of this, we were ordered to fire at will. I wouldn’t tell her about how one of our soldiers got blown off by a mine, and I certainly wouldn’t tell her about the blisters and wounds that covered my body because it would hurt her more than what it would hurt me. So while I wouldn’t lie to her, I wouldn’t tell her stuff she didn’t need to know, unless she asked particularly about something.

The Things I Carry

The things I carry in my backpack are all vital for my everyday life at school: textbooks, notebooks, pencils, pens, P.E. clothes, deodorant, a calculator, my lunch, my headphones and iPod, a stormtrooper keychain, and a Yale University keychain. As eerie as it may seem the keychains, headphones, and iPod fall into the category of vitality because of what they mean to me and what I’d be without them.

The iPod and headphones go with me because music makes up a great portion of my life. Whether I’m sitting in the bus, laying in bed, or doing my homework music has the ability to open my imagination and turn whatever it is that I’m doing into something extraordinary. Snow Patrol can suddenly make my homework into a sad and melancholic situation, Pink Floyd make running a heroic and dead-or-alive act, and AC/DC even make my lunch a very rebellious one. Music is what gets me through any mood and works as a escape route to the world of my favorite bands; a world full of jazzy bass riffs, heavy drumming, hypnotizing guitar solos, and unparalleled vocal abilities. So I choose to “hump” my iPod because it’s my portal to this world, without music my world would not be the same, and surely I wouldn’t be the same. Music is like freedom to me, with it I feel unstoppable.

I carry the keychains with me because they both are a small piece of each of my brothers, Justo (Tito) and Juan Felipe (Pipe). Being the youngest in the family has its advantages, but it also means that eventually you’ll be left without the company of your brothers once they go off to college. I’ve always said that when I was born, it was as if Pipe and Tito were handed a blank block of clay and they began molding me into who I am today; a combination of them both. Because of this, I felt that when they left they took a small piece of me with them, but the keychains they each have given to somewhat replace that gap. Tito gave me a small tiger with a Yale University t-shirt on it the first Christmas we spent together after he’d left for college. He knew a keychain didn’t seem as much of a present, but he still wanted me to carry the one thing that would always remind me of him instantly. Pipe gave me a stormtrooper keychain in the summer of 2011 before he started his senior year at high school. We both knew that although there was no telling which college he was going to yet, he was still not going to stay in Panama while I did. The idea of the stormtrooper came from the days when we used to watch Star Wars together and play Star Wars Battlefront, laughing about how incompetent the enemy soldiers were compared to us. I “hump” these items as if I were “humping” part of my brothers with me, carrying the massive weight of old memories, unconditional love, and their company in the small weight of two keychains strapped to my school backpack.

The Vietnam War

Knowing almost nothing about the Vietnam War and even being unsure about my information about it made the discussions during class very enlightening for me. I only knew for a fact that the war was fought in Vietnam and that the U.S. was involved in it, but I had no idea about what went on during this period of time and its repercussions.

I learned about the division of a non-communist South Vietnam and a communist North Vietnam, and how eventually the North used the National Liberation Front (Vietcong) as a weapon to oppose the South Vietnamese government. The U.S.’s involvement began when they started sending troops to support the non-communist South and their presence escalated progressively throughout the years. What struck me the most about this war was the fact that the Vietnam War was the first televised war. This caused distress among some Americans which led to an opposition towards the war. Students also opposed the war because those who were drafted to go to war could not have the chance to go to college. It was very astonishing for me to find out that some of those who were drafted fled to Canada, and others who made the decision of fighting in the war did it out of fear of disappointing their families. I wasn’t expecting the involuntary soldiers to be so genuinely repelled by this war to even try to injure themselves in order to return home.

I was also oblivious to the fact that the U.S. didn’t actually win the war. American President Nixon announced the withdrawal of the troops and by March 29 all soldiers were expected to be out of Vietnam. Those soldiers who returned home weren’t exactly venerated as heroes, and later on, North Vietnam invaded the South and gained control over the full country. I know understand the general confusion and disagreement from some people, and why this war was so important to the U.S. and Vietnam.