Flashback

Everyone knows what a flashback is. It's a moment when a person, in the present, contemplates an even that occurred in the past. A flashback transports that person to another time and place that they have already experienced- giving them the chance to experience it again within their mind. chapter 4, to me, was a perfect example of a flashback. This chapter took the reader back to a time when Tim O'Brien was a young man. Life before the war. In this chapter O'Brien recalls what it was like to be scared and cowardly.
One of my favorite lines in this whole story lies within chapter 4. on pg 55 O'Brien writes, "I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave. That old image of myself as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream."
I love this line so much because it is so contradictory to how i feel about what was occurring at that moment. O'Brien, young and scared to enter the war was trying to muster up the courage to flee to Canada. But in the end, he says he just wasn't brave enough. But, What is Courage? To me, courage would not be runnning away from the war to live in Canada. I think real courage lies within the actions he took to accept the fact that he would face the war, and death, and life. I just found it ironic that as a young boy he saw his actions as cowardly when in fact they were honorable.