Twenty - The Lives of the Dead

The first thing I noticed about this chapter was the apparent paradox that popped up in the Title, "The Lives of the Dead." Dead people are dead, not alive, so how can they have lives? O'Brien means that through dreams and stories, people who have already died can, in a way, come back to those who are still thinking of them. O'Brien demonstrates this concept several times in this chapter, first with the "funeral" for the dead man in the village, and then the conversation with Ted Lavender's corpse, and then the dreams with Linda. And that's what O'Brien is trying to do with this chapter, and perhaps with this entire book. Just like how he says "I want to save Linda's life--not her body, her life" (p. 223). That's what he's really trying to accomplish through his book. All of the people who have touched his life and have died weigh heavily upon O'Brien, from Kiowa to Linda to The Man He Killed. Their lives are the things he carries, even up to this day. But through his writing, he can make new lives for these people, and they can live again. Norman Bowker is dead, but no, really he's doing laps around a lake in his Chevy. Kiowa's dead, but really he's teaching Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen how to do a rain dance. Curt Lemon's dead, but really he's going door to door trick or treating in a Vietnamese village, stark naked. Linda's dead, but really she's just ice skating in O'Brien's dreamworld. Tim O'Brien will one day die, but he "saved his life with a story" and he'll be right there with Linda, just skating to his heart's content. That's what he means by the lives of the dead. As long as there is someone thinking about them, they can still live on.

These are ice skates. This is also the end of this segment of our blogging adventure. Good Day.

By the way, Mr. Costello, I went (roller) skating tonight and saw a fellow who looked remarkably like you. He was really good. I just thought you'd like to know you have an evil twin who uses his powers for skating as opposed to English. I mean he had the fauxhawk and everything.

Nineteen - Night Life

This lovely chapter details the mental adventure of a fellow who gradually goes insane. goody. In this situation, I don't really think the manner of his insanity matters too much. What O'Brien is trying to point out here is who finally ended up cracking. It was Rat Kiley, the medic, and the fellow who we haven't heard too much about so far. The one thing that seems to be missing from Kiley is his own personal method of coping. So far, there's been a bit of a recurring theme with several of the characters of how each one takes a different method to make the horrors of war seem more bearable. Perhaps it's a motif. I don't know, I've never understood that silly word. What the heck, let's label it anyway. There has been Azar and his tasteless jokes, Lemon and his tough-guy act, Sanders and his morals, O'Brien and his writing, Lavender and his drugs, Kiowa and his religion, et cetera. However, Kiley has no such ward to protect himself, and thus during the night, he is the only one who "couldn't make the adjustment" (p. 208). He was the only one who had absolutely nothing to hold himself up with, nothing to fall back on. And eventually, in the dark, there was nothing to keep the terrible things he had seen, especially as a field medic, from coming back and driving him insane. So I guess what O'Brien is saying is just that everybody really just needs something to help them cope with hardships in life, and if you don't...well, you can always just put a bullet in your foot.

This is a foot.

Eighteen - The Ghost Soldiers

This chapter always reminds me of the song "Soldiers of the Wasteland" by DragonForce. I do not know why. Also, I could never imagine ever being able to sleep comfortably on my back. I am a belly-sleeper for life. Enjoy your sleep apnea, Mr. O'Brien.

This chapter's only real purpose is to show a little chink in O'Brien's armor. I think it would've been all to easy to try to make it look like he made it out of Vietnam unscathed. It would've been easy to make it out with no major character flaws, and along the way he rescued a baby from a fire and cured cancer. But this chapter shows that O'Brien is human, just like all the men, he has his flaws. By exacting vengeance upon Jorgensen, he shows that he, too, has ventured far from the peace-loving article-writing fellow who once dreamed of running away to Canada oh so many chapters ago. Dare I say that this makes him a dynamic character? mmm....yes I do. The peace-loving liberal who once said "The problems of killing and dying did not fall within my special province" (p. 39) is now exacting ruthless vengeance against some poor little green medic. Granted, he didn't kill him, and it probably made him feel better, and his butt was nearly gangrene, but still, one would expect the Tim O'Brien of page 39 to forgive and forget. If this doesn't count as a great change brought on by Vietnam, then I don't know what does.

This is clearly the superior sleeping position.

Update: I hurt my arm skating tonight (July 9), and tonight it appears that in order to elevate my arm at the proper angle...I will have to sleep on my back. Ha...ha ha. So you could say that now I'm in the exact same boat as O'Brien...except upside-down...oh karma, you are a cruel mistress. At least I didn't get shot.

Seventeen - Field Trip

I felt extremely awkward while reading this chapter, both for O'Brien who went to the field expecting something magical to happen, and in the end all he had to say was "Well...there it is" (p. 178), and because I felt like I was intruding on a Moment. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between a moment and a Moment, but it has something to do with the tone of voice inflected that gives it proper-noun status. Sort of like in the novel It, when at some point you notice that you mentally pronounce "It" differently from "it". A moment is just a thing that happens, but when a Moment happens, then you should probably shuffle along and draw as little attention to yourself as possible so as not to disturb the person's Moment. And thus, I was sure to turn the pages extra carefully, out of fear that I might hear/read O'Brien shout "Hey! can you keep it down? I'm trying to have a Moment here!"

Ahem. My own awkwardness aside, there were a few nice points about this chapter that I might delve. I am not using that verb properly. Ummmm yes, it seems that O'Brien seems to be suffering from Norman Bowker Syndrome in that he really really really wants to tell people (in this scenario, his daughter) about all the things that happened, and all the things he did, and all the things he saw, but in the end, he just can't. Which makes me wonder if now I see the purpose of this whole book: he is doing what Bowker couldn't do, and is finally getting out all of those stories that he kept bottled up, and now the whole world can know. It almost seems like a catharsis, if you will. *checks list* No, that's not a literary term. I'm making it a label anyway. HA!

This is the awkward turtle. I had to fight the urge to do this throughout most of this chapter.

Sixteen - Good Form

This chapter is very nice, because it sort of explains how this book is written, and why it is written thusly, which is kind of handy for people like me who find literature tricky =D? So after reading this chapter, it seems like everything he has written up to this point is shrouded in a tricky tricky fog of ambiguous half-truth and half-fiction and it's impossible to discern what actually happened and what O'Brien just wants you to think actually happened. But that's okay. Because like O'Brien says "It's not a game" (p. 171). If there is not yet a term for this, I hereby declare it to be a Reverse Metaphor. O'Brien is not prancing about in ambiguity, sewing half truths just for the fun of it, and blending truth and fiction just to confuse us because he wants to be a tricky and evil bane of high school AP Lit students. This is not a game where he makes up stories that happened because he thinks they make him sound cooler. In reality, all of the stories, though not necessarily true, add a new level of understanding that would be impossible for somebody who wasn't actually in Vietnam to understand if he just strictly stuck to the stuff that really happened. Which better explains how O'Brien and the others felt during the war:

what probably happened, "I once saw a guy who almost died once, but then something got in my eye, and I stopped watching."

or what probably didn't happen, "his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present."

Whether it's true or not is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is making us understand what it felt like. O'Brien's goal is not to make us believe with our minds, that can only understand the truth of reality, but to make us believe with our stomachs, which can understand the truth of fiction.

It's tricky to rock a rhyme, but not to understand O'Brien's good form. Word.

Fifteen - In the Field

I've got a few observations about this chapter that don't really have anything to do with each other. First off, this is the third person from the group that has died, so far (if my count is correct). The first was Ted Lavender, who was scared and crushed his fear with drugs. The second was Curt Lemon, who was also scared, and hid his fear behind his tough guy charade. And now Kiowa, who is described as "a fine soldier, and a fine human being, a devout Baptist" (p. 156), and, like all the other fellas, he was scared, and he personally got over this fear with his faith. I think what O'Brien is saying in his selection of the dead is that the War was impartial in who it claimed. It took a drug addict, a tough guy, and a holy roller. It took good guys, as well as not-so-good guys. It took Americans and Vietnamese. It left men like Norman Bowker alive, but in the end it took them too. The whole dang war was like a big game of Russian Roulette. The people who died weren't always careless, and sometimes they were, and they didn't always deserve it, but sometimes they did, and there was no way that anybody could control who made it out alive. As I said before, the whole debacle was just madness.

The next thing I observed was the evolution of Lt. Cross's letter. At first, he composes his letter with the intention of praising Kiowa, and excluding the manner of his demise. I suppose at that point, his intention was to make his dad feel at least a tad better, maybe a bit proud of his son in order to ease the pain of his great loss. However, later I think he realizes how no matter how many nice things he says about Kiowa, his father would have been proud anyway, and so his letter changes to include every gruesome detail of why he died, and Cross accepts full responsibility for what happened. Here, I suppose that Cross is attempting to make the father's loss easier to take by giving him a name to blame. He recognizes that the least he owes Kiowa's father is the truth. Then he changes again and makes it completely impersonal. He doesn't accept blame, he doesn't praise Kiowa. All he does is just tell him he died, and that it was just a freak accident. And then finally he gives up and just decides to write it later. I think that each revision of Cross's letter shows a different side of what O'Brien is trying to say about Kiowa. The first letter shows that Kiowa was O'Brien's friend; he was a good man, and a good soldier, and what happened wasn't Kiowa's fault. The second letter shows his urge to tell the absolute unadulterated truth, and also his own feeling of guilt. Lt. Cross shares some of the blame, and O'Brien shares some of the blame, at least in his eyes. And then in the third revision, O'Brien is really just saying that in the end it was a freak accident and it was nobody's fault. and everyone's fault. Call it bad luck, call it karma, in the end, it's like everything else: just another thing that happened.

As for the golf thing that keeps popping up, I have no idea. I have not the patience for golf, and would rather watch paint dry. Also, it's 2:00 A.M. and my ability to think critically is waning fast. Any insight here would be hot.

This is golf. I don't care how long you argue, you will never convince me that it's a sport.

Fourteen - Notes

I suppose it would have been a lot easier to understand that last chapter if I had read this one too, but oh well. I greatly appreciated the M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist at the end of this chapter. It wasn't Bowker that failed to rescue Kiowa, but O'Brien?!? ZOMG! Bruce Willis was really dead all along!

Ahem...at first, I thought it was a tad underhanded to try to pin Kiowa's death on his other dead friend, but in the end O'Brien came clean with it...but still...I don't approve.

The one thing that I noticed that kept popping up throughout the course of these two chapters was their fixation on the stink and "the killing power of that shit field" (p. 153). It almost seems like the worst part of the field was just the smell of it, and not even that Kiowa died there. I don't really get it. But then again, I've never been submerged in liquid feces. I imagine it would be unpleasant.

This is the face I made at the end of the chapter "Notes" and the end of the movie Sixth Sense.

Thirteen - Speaking of Courage

I had to read through this chapter three times before I understood what was happening. At first I thought it was about an old vet doing laps in a run down camaro (because chevy is too vague, and I assigned him a model to go with his make) and reminiscing those less-than-palmy days. Song reference? anyone? anyone? buhler?

Eventually on that third read, I drew the connection between how his drive never ventures outside the circular road around the lake, and his story that he desperately wants to share never makes it outside his head. He thinks about telling it to Sally Kramer/Gustafson but doesn't in the end, and he walks himself through a mental scenario with his father, but it doesn't actually happen, and he almost blurts everything out to the intercom at an A&W, but then decides against it. He really wants to tell his story, but he just doesn't. However, it looks like he finally got his story out to the whole world through his good buddy Tim O'Brien.

This is one of the new camaros. It makes me happy to think that Bowker got to drive one of these around the lake, even though I know he didn't.

Twelve - Style

So in this chapter we see the development of this Azar fellow. I think he's pretty much the type who will crack jokes at anything in order to hide the fact that he's scared. Fairly one-dimensional I guess, although most of the characters so far have been pretty flat, from the holy-rolling Indian to the reckless tough guy. Maybe O'Brien is trying to show the many different ways that people coped with the horrors of the Vietnam War. Or maybe everyone in his squad was really just that bland. Who knows?

Anyway, I have no idea why he opens this chapter with the sentence "There was no music" (p. 129). I suppose it would effectively show that she wasn't dancing just because there was music and she was bored. *lightbulb* wait, I think I get it now. That's exactly the reason why he used that sentence. So then it sparks my intrigue, and I ask myself "well then why is she dancing, if not for the music?" And thus I make the connection that she is dancing for the same reason that Azar cracks his jokes; it is simply her own personal way of coping with the horrors that face her. Her family is dead, there are scary white people with guns in her village, she's probably going to die shortly, but hey at least she can just drown it out (by covering her ears, naturally) and dance to her heart's content. So then, I think that Dobbins is the only one that recognized this (which reinforces the inherent wisdom that he has shown already in the "Church" chapter) and thus tells Azar to stop mocking her and "dance right" (p. 130). I'm probably interpreting this badly, but I think that makes Dobbins pretty much the only character to even approach potentially "round" status. That definitely wasn't a shot at his weight, either.

This is a lightbulb. One did not actually materialize above my head. That is a figure of speech.

Eleven - Ambush

So my first question about this chapter while reading it was simply "What's the point of this chapter?" Virtually no new information was given, aside from the brief little anecdote about his daughter in the first paragraph where she asks him "You keep writing these war stories, so I guess you must have killed somebody" (p. 124). So I got to thinking that the little anecdote was probably pretty significant, as it was the only really new thing he added in this chapter. And I suppose that's when I realized that maybe I didn't really get the point of this chapter because O'Brien simply wasn't writing to me. And he wasn't writing to you either, dear reader (oh ho, look at me break that fourth wall). This chapter was written to his daughter, and nobody else. I suppose his reasoning is that he might not always be around to tell her the truth about the war, but at the time he was writing this book, she was too young to understand. So he wrote this chapter specifically for her, and put it in this book, in the hopes that she would one day read it when she has grown up. Pretty sly, O'Brien.

It's my birthday today. Happy birthday, me.

Ten - The Man I Killed

This is a pretty textbook example of stream of consciousness, which is kind of handy, as that's one of my literary terms. And I say "textbook example" only because even before I knew the word for it, I could tell exactly what O'Brien was doing, why he was writing this way, and what he was trying to accomplish. His style pretty effectively demonstrates how most people would feel, think, and act after killing somebody (I assume). O'Brien is stunned, and not quite thinking clearly. His thoughts are repetitive, rambling, chaotic, and he is grossly fixated (pun fully intended) on details, as can be seen in his description of the body on pages 118, 120, 121, and 123. Also, he seems completely unresponsive to the outside world, like Azar and Kiowa, and focuses primarily on the most-likely fictitious life he creates for the man: "Even growing up in the village of My Khe, he often worried about [performing badly in battle]" (p. 121). Even though he knows nothing about the man, he is positive he knows where he lived, how he grew up, his love for math, his aversion to war, and his fear of performing badly in battle. I think O'Brien makes up this math-loving pacifist for the sole reason of showing that perhaps the people on the other side were fighting for the exact same reason that he and the other men were fighting. They were to afraid to appear afraid. It seems that every character in this book is not fighting for honor, glory, wealth, power, personal gain, justice, love, or peace, but simply because they don't want to be embarrassed. And, to take it a step further, I think O'Brien might even be trying to say that America itself is in the war for the same reason as O'Brien and the man he killed: it doesn't want to look too afraid to go to war.

This is what I got when I googled "Stream of Consciousness." I think it fits pretty well. Especially that eye. Yick.

Nine - Stockings and Church

These two chapters both talk of the life and legend that is Henry Dobbins, and thus they merit a single blog post together. The first thing O'Brien tells us about Dobbins is that he's like America, "big and strong, full of good intentions...slow of foot, but always plodding along, always there when you needed him" (p. 111). What O'Brien is saying here is that America is not exactly the brightest country in the world, but it is at least good and decent. It might not be waging this war for the best reasons, or even the clearest reasons, but it at least is partaking in this war simply because it's what America thinks is right.

So at first, all we know about Dobbins is that he's big, strong, reliable, decent, and not all that bright. At least that's all he is at first. However, through the rest of the "Stockings" chapter, we see a few new qualities: faithful (to the power of the stockings) and a tad superstitious. Now, alone in this chapter, these qualities don't mean a whole lot, but when seen alongside the next chapter, it sets the stage rather nicely.

Dobbins faithfulness essentially sparks the conversation concerning religion, which shows us an even deeper part of Dobbins' personality: his somewhat hidden wisdom. O'Brien uses Dobbins to speak directly about religion for a moment, and I'll say that I agree with Dobbins' view. It's easy to get caught up in the ritual, or "churchiness," of religion, which is what Dobbins just doesn't like about it. It's pretty easy to lose sight of the important parts of a religion when all we focus on is how many Our Fathers you prayed, or how many times you went to penance, or limiting being a good person to one hour every Sunday. Dobbins (and really O'Brien) says that just being nice to people and treating them right is what's important. It's giving that hitchhiker a ride to the gas station, even though there's a slight chance he's just going to axe you in the skull. It's tossing a five in the hat, even though you don't know if he's just gonna buy booze with it. It's giving your hard-earned watermelon to some tired soldiers, even though they're on the other side.

This is a hitchhiker. There's a slight chance he will axe you in the skull, but you should give him a ride to the gas station anyway

Eight - Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

This little story is about the transformation of a sweet young lady named Mary Anne into a fierce Green Beret Warrior Princess, who I can only assume changed her name to Xena at some point. I was skeptical of the actual truth of this story, but, just two chapters ago, O'Brien told me that "In many cases, a true war story cannot be believed" (p. 68), so maybe there is a slight degree of truth to it. It just seems like it should be more difficult to just fly somebody into an active warzone. So rather than getting hung up on the truth, or truthiness, to use a Colbertism, of this tale, I'll just look at what it accomplishes.

O'Brien uses the metaphor "She was part of the land" (p. 110) sort of as a way to mark the end of this transformation. By calling Mary Anne the land itself, O'Brien shows that she has officially deviated as far as possible from what she once was, sweet, innocent, and adorable. So what does it mean for Mary Anne to be Vietnam itself? Well for one, she's wild now, no longer reserved, completely free, unpredictable, and unforgiving. She's lost her humanity, and it would appear some degree of her sanity. The same thing happened to so many men that came back from that war. Oftentimes, veterans of Vietnam say that they "left a part of themselves" in 'Nam. I think Mary Anne's story shows this to an extreme. Just as she left every part of her being in Vietnam, many of the men that came back, didn't quite come back all the way mentally. I guess O'Brien's just showing what war does to people, maybe to the extreme, but still...it just happens.

This is Xena. If she was real, she would be a green beret too.

Seven - The Dentist

This really tiny snippet of a story serves two purposes, as far as I can tell. The first is obviously the development of Curt Lemon. So far, we only know little morsels of information about Lemon, like the trick or treating story, and how he got blown to smithereens. This chapter shows that he is not exactly as brave as he lets on, implying that maybe all of his brave exploits that he so often does are really only masking the fact that he's terrified just like all the rest of them. This deep-seated fear seems to leak out when the dentist comes to visit, which then leads to the second purpose. O'Brien noted on page 21 that the soldiers weren't fighting because of courage or valor, they were just "too frightened to be cowards." The story about Lemon and the dentist reinforces this point by having the dentist pull a perfectly good tooth just because Lemon was afraid to appear afraid. Seems like a silly reason to pull teeth or go to war, but it makes sense I guess.

This is a dentist. Lemon is afraid of them, and can you really blame him?

Six - How to Tell a True War Story

In this chapter, O'Brien discusses how to discern the truth from a war story, and provides some truly charming examples from a squad firebombing a Vietnamese glee club to Rat Kiley gradually dismantling a buffalo with his M16. Now, I could talk about what all of these individual stories all mean ad infinitum (look at me using Latin, oh ho), so I'll just zoom in on one little thing he wrote that I found particularly intriguing: "That proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life" (p. 77). I guess the reason why this struck me as so important was because I've seen this theme of death, or near-death, bringing on a new appreciation for life in many other places. The most prominent of which I found a while ago in my recent reading of the novel Shōgun by James Clavell. Anjin-san, the protagonist, suffers a bitter insult, and thus decides to commit suicide, but is stopped by the others present. This near death experience causes Anjin-san to take on a new perspective for life, allowing him to appreciate it more fully. Another example of this concept is the song "Life is Beautiful" by Sixx:A.M. The general premise of the song is that "When you've lost it all, that's when you realize that life is beautiful." I just made a connection between Feudal Japan, Vietnam, and modern rock. There should be a literary term for that.

This is a samurai. He was in Shōgun.

Five - Enemies and Friends

As these two chapters are outrageously short and pretty closely related, I have made the official decision to simply lump the two together. The last line of the chapter "Enemies" made me laugh, actually, which I suppose sounds a little odd, as the chapter itself was pretty grotesque...I don't know, it just struck me as mildly humorous. I think what O'Brien is trying to say through these two chapters is pretty much a summary of the Truths of Friendship that can be read in about two minutes. Ninety seconds if reading excites you.

-Friends fight. Generally, it's over a stupid thing like a missing jackknife or (slightly more likely) "some girl." However, O'Brien is merely saying that disagreements will often arise between two friends (although Strunk and Jensen weren't exactly friends at the time of the argument), but usually these little disagreements lead into the second truth.

-Friends forgive. Usually, the terms of the forgiveness don't actually need to be as extreme as in this little story, in which Jensen takes a pistol and "used it like a hammer to break his own nose" (p. 60). Usually the two move on and put the past behind them.

-Friends listen. Even though Strunk and Jensen drew up a pact to kill the other in the case of a mutilating injury, Jensen listens to Strunk's pleas and doesn't kill him. Of course, one could argue that they never really meant to go through with it, but deep down I think they really meant it. So that really means a lot for Jensen to go back on his word for his friend. Granted, this example for understanding is a little extreme, but O'Brien is able to easily demonstrate the level of understanding required in friendship.

-Friends die. Strunk dies and leaves Jensen behind. This, sadly is the last truth of friendship, and is generally the hardest to cope with. O'Brien demonstrates this aspect of friendship with the death of Strunk; however, he also shows the necessary part that comes afterwards, in which Jensen moves on and is "relieved of an enormous weight" (p. 63).

These people are friends. They understand the Truths of Friendship.

Four - On the Rainy River

The fourth chapter offers one particularly handy literary device that is used pretty consistently throughout all mediums of entertainment: the flashback. I think that the reason why O'Brien elects not to start with this chapter is simply because it's far more exciting as a reader to be thrown into a story in media res than to start with backstory, develop it, and then around chapter 15 or so, start having interesting things happen. I think it's just much harder to keep a reader interested in a story if you actually do start at the beginning, as it's generally all talk and no action when one is first starting out. However, I think O'brien uses this and other flashbacks for the opposite effect as well; it helps to chop up the war scenes and hold back on the action. By throwing in a few brief stories from before and after the war, the author is able to restrain the pace of the story. I for one can only handle so many war stories about mangled children and detonated puppies before I just start to feel ill, so really it's kind of a relief to have a nice story about fishing on a river and the like every couple of chapters. Also, by chopping up the war sections into smaller chunks, he adds to the chaotic nature of his writing, which seems to emulate his feelings of the war itself: through most of it, he was pretty confused, not entirely sure what he was fighting for or what the war was even about, and this hectic style reflects the nature of war itself. We might try to disguise it with orderly marching and dry-cleaned uniforms but deep down, the true nature of war is Madness.

This is madness.
300 also includes war and flashbacks, and is therefore applicable.

Three - Spin

First off, the brief paragraph about Mitchell Sanders sending his body lice to his draft board literally made me laugh out loud. Also, I found it intriguing that he placed a mildly amusing story immediately after a mildly sad story about a one-legged child (although he at least got chocolate in the end). It looks almost like a juxtaposition of paragraphs, if that's even allowed.

Anyway, to me, the most important part of this chapter was O'Brien's simile: "On occasions, the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance" (p. 31). In several ways, this chapter seems to be set up like a ping-pong match, in which every return hit seems to put a different angle of spin on the ball. Each new spin carries with it a new emotion which is brought out in a different story. Each new story (or "spin," if you will) brings on a different angle of the war and its effect on Tim. ping A sad story about a one-legged child, pong a funny story about Sanders and his lice, ping a calming story about checkers, pong a reminiscent story about O'Brien after the war, ping a mellow story about Lavender all doped up, pong a bittersweet story about poppa-san, ping a boring story about nothing, pong a guilty story about writing, ping a peace story about a man and a nurse, pong an amusing story about a raindance and the patient buffalo, ping a sickening story about a puppy, pong a sad story about a boy playing soldier. The whole chapter is really just a series of stories that all serve to show that the war wasn't all just bloody and gory depressing war stories, nor was it fantastic stories of glorious triumph. In the end, to use one of my most favorite phrases, it was just a bunch of stuff that happened. And that's how most things are.

These are two cats playing Ping-Pong. One can only
assume that they are quite skilled in the art of spin

Two - Love

In this chapter, we see the point of view shift from an omniscient outside observer to the eyes of the author himself, Tim O'Brien. I'll be honest, this shift of perspective threw me for a second, and I couldn't quite immediately grasp exactly to whom the "I" referred. Perhaps I was simply blinded by my view of Lt. Cross as the protagonist; however, from this point on, this is clearly O'Brien's story, not Cross's. Still, I think that Cross's very presence in this chapter helps ease this shift along, and makes it fairly clear that though Cross was king of the previous chapter, the story is really all about O'Brien, his personal views of the war, and the people he knew.

Another thing worth mentioning is that Cross appears to still be humping his feelings for Martha. tsk tsk. IMHO, he should probably find himself another lady to obsess over. One thing about the little Martha-Cross anecdote that I didn't quite get though was what she meant by "the things men do" (p. 28). Theory number one is that she got raped, although that's about as bluntly as one can interpret that quote. Theory number two is that she knows lots of guys with knee fetishes, which is significantly more ridiculous, but also...feasible, I suppose.

This is Captain Falcon performing a rising knee. It also includes a bad knee-related pun.

One - The Things They Carried

I, for one, am quite the fan of puns, and while reading the first chapter of The Things They Carried, I found that I could scarcely contain my delight at O'Brien's clever wordplay with the common verb "to carry." Naturally, he uses the most common meaning of the aforementioned verb when he lists the things the troops actually physically carried, "P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy," et cetera (p. 2). However, he also lists many of the things that the men do not actually carry, but still seem to weigh down on them mentally, specifically the emotions of First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. He carries his love (or rather, love of the idea of love) for Martha. Much as a heavy object will physically restrain and weigh down upon a person, Lt. Cross's feelings hold him back, distracting him and making him sluggish and unable to lead effectively. Rather than focusing on keeping his men alive, he ponders whether dear Martha is a virgin. And so, after the death of Ted Lavender, he elects to ditch the dead weight of his unrequited love so he can carry his troops instead, which, if my count is correct, makes the third definition of "carry" used in this first chapter. Clever wordplay indeed.

This is a bad pun.

On an entirely unrelated note, I was absolutely positive that Cross would turn out to be the protagonist of this tale, but in reality that didn't quite play out, which became fairly evident in the next chapter.