Tayo, a half-blood Native American boy is scarred by the war in Vietnam when his role model, Rocky, gets his skull smashed by a Japanese soldier right in front of him. It seems that Tayo mourns his "brother", Rocky so much that it makes him ill. Tayo blames himself for letting Rocky die on the road when the Japanese soldiers had taken them as prisoners of war. He does this because he believes that he could've done something to prevent all of this from happening even though he truly couldn't have. In fact, the corporal said that Rocky was dead before his head was crushed. I believe what makes this the most traumatizing for Tayo is that his Auntie purposefully kept him inside the house and excluded from society because he is half-blood. This made Rocky his only friend and now he lost the only thing that really kept him motivated to live his life. It is very easy to see how Tayo could have P.T.S.(D.) after the Vietnam War.
The Native American war veterans all drink at the bar heavily together. They talk about the white women they have "done" and how America is stealing their land. They do this to wash their sorrow from the war away. They all know that the women just love the military uniform, not the man inside of it. They just chose to ignore it because they don't want to dwell over the bad times of their past. Emo, who sits with the men is diametrically opposed to Tayo in regards to moral values. He always insults Tayo for his bloodline and how he acts because of Rocky's death. Emo had no problem killing an enemy and it was almost a cake-walk to him. However, Tayo couldn't stand to kill an enemy because he would think about the enemy and how similar they are to him. Tayo begins to drink more and more in order to suppress his sorrows because he believes it is the only current way he can try to forget about what happened.
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