First and foremost, it is important to have an understanding of this chapter in The Things They Carried. “Field Trip” focuses on Tim O’Brien, his daughter Kathleen, and an interpreter returning to the field mainly for O’Brien’s sake of attempting to find redemption. By going to the place of Kiowa’s death almost two decades later, Kathleen is unamused by this trip. This is mainly because O’Brien had claimed this was her birthday present, seeing as how she just turned ten, but in reality this trip was for the author’s purpose. She tries to find reasoning as to why her father would ever want to be apart of the war, but O’Brien doesn’t quite have the answer for himself. Tim O’Brien spends most of this chapter reflecting on how everything has changed emphasizing the fact that it has been twenty years. He then makes his way into a very grody river that Kathleen threatens to tell her mother what he’s doing. O’Brien leaves Kiowa’s moccasins in the same spot where he thinks was Kiowa’s last spot before he died. …show more content…
While doing so, he connects this later by using natural imagery to show the mood of the environment along with keeping up with the idea of the nostalgia. He talks about the yellow butterflies, the sky being blue along with the birds soft rustlings anywhere and describing the sun being hot