The point of this vignette is for O'Brien to attain some closure for the loss of Kiowa. He held an image in his mind for over 20 years of the field where Kiowa had died, but he immediately finds that the reality is nothing like the image in his mind. For example, now the land seems to be at peace, where before every hill and blade of grass made him feel fear at night — the fear of war. Neither his memory nor his field trip were truer than the other — they were simply different truths. O'Brien questions what is Vietnam: Is it a memory, is it a country, is it both, or is it neither?
Not insignificantly, O'Brien brings his daughter, Kathleen, on this trip, for he wants her to understand more about his past. Yet he finds that as attentive and interested as she is, she does not understand much, like the need to trek out into one of a thousand fields in the middle of a foreign country. When she asks about the meaning, all O'Brien can do is give an obscure answer. At first he says that there are three different perspectives, Kathleen's, his own, and those who sent him to this country. In the end, though, he simply answers, "I don't know." It is not that Vietnam has no meaning, but that he cannot understand or explain it to anyone else, even his own daughter.
Kathleen does not see the need to remember; she calls her father "weird" for his inability to forget that past. O'Brien does not see himself as weird, however, and although he never says it, he must regret his daughter's immediate desire to ignore such an important piece of his past. Perhaps this is why when they are in the field, he does not make an exhaustive effort to explain everything to her.
