The poem expressed all the things the speaker was thankful for during the war. The speaker didn’t know “what made the grass sway / seconds before the Viet Cong / raised his soundless rifle” (3-5). This imagery informs the reader that the speaker survived a bullet against the Viet Cong because the grass swayed revealing the Viet Cong. The description of the soundless rifle allows the reader to know how dangerous it is during a war because you wouldn’t even know how you died. The speaker was thankful for the fact that the hand grenade that landed next to his foot did not explode even though it was meant to be, “Again, thanks to the dud / hand grenade tossed at my feet / outside Chu Lai. I’m still / falling through its silence” (31-34). If the poet had vaguely wrote that the hand grenade didn’t explode when it was next to the speaker, then the reader wouldn’t had felt how great this event was for the speaker and how thankful he was for being alive that he still remembers it until this
The poem expressed all the things the speaker was thankful for during the war. The speaker didn’t know “what made the grass sway / seconds before the Viet Cong / raised his soundless rifle” (3-5). This imagery informs the reader that the speaker survived a bullet against the Viet Cong because the grass swayed revealing the Viet Cong. The description of the soundless rifle allows the reader to know how dangerous it is during a war because you wouldn’t even know how you died. The speaker was thankful for the fact that the hand grenade that landed next to his foot did not explode even though it was meant to be, “Again, thanks to the dud / hand grenade tossed at my feet / outside Chu Lai. I’m still / falling through its silence” (31-34). If the poet had vaguely wrote that the hand grenade didn’t explode when it was next to the speaker, then the reader wouldn’t had felt how great this event was for the speaker and how thankful he was for being alive that he still remembers it until this