Forever young.

Even though Norman made it home alive, the war killed him in the end. He joined Kiowa on the other side in 1978 when he committed suicide by hanging himself at the YMCA. This was the fate of so many veterans of the Vietnam war, other ended up homeless or succumbed to self-inflicted diseases such as alcoholism. America sent her young men off to war to be little more than child-soldiers, and they returned as men; their youth having been lost to the hell of war. In “The Man I Killed”, O’Brien shows us the tragedy of this lost youth. Even though the man that was killed in this fictionalized account was Vietnamese, he personifies the lost hopes and dreams of every young man who grew up thinking that he would be something else, be it a mill-worker or mathematician, and found himself becoming a soldier instead. Each one of these men who were plucked away from hopes and dreams, sweethearts back home, and mothers who worried sick about them was able to live forever in memory, frozen in history as a young man:

Some are like water, some are like the heat 
 Some are a melody and some are the beat 
 Sooner or later they all will be gone 
 Why don't they stay young 
 It's so hard to get old without a cause I don't want to perish like a fading horse 
Forever young, I want to be forever young 
 Do you really want to live forever, forever forever