Because he was a big man, Henry Dobbins was excused from tunnel duty. The others would draw numbers. The rest of them would fan out as security. They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense, compression in all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in—ass and elbows—a swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd things—will your flashlight go dead?
Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer. On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number seventeen, he laughed and muttered something and went down quickly. The morning was hot and very still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the tunnel opening, then out across a dry paddy toward the village of Than Khe.
Nothing moved. No clouds or birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked and drank Kool-Aid, not talking much, feeling sympathy for Lee Strunk but also feeling the luck of the draw.
You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell Sanders, and sometimes you settle for a rain check. It was a tired line and no one laughed. Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a tranquilizer and went off to pee. After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to the tunnel, leaned down, and examined the darkness. Trouble, he thought—a cave-in maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight.
Dense, crushing love. Kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.
He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets—why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria. Even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with love.
He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and looked away. Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security.
He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-two years old. A few moments later Lee Strunk crawled out of the tunnel. He came up grinning, filthy but alive. Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes while the others clapped Strunk on the back and made jokes about rising from the dead. Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing.
He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone. I mean really. The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his good-luck pebble. Norman Bowker, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell Sanders. The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed four ounces at most.
It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. The boy wore black shorts and sandals. At the time of his death he had been carrying a pouch of rice, a rifle, and three magazines of ammunition. Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and handed it across to Norman Bowker. There was no blood. Have gun, will travel. They carried USO stationery and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes , fingernail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more.
Twice a week, when the resupply choppers came in, they carried hot chow in green Mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a two-gallon capacity. Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecticide.
Dave Jensen carried empty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection. Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC scrambler radio, which weighed thirty pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory.
They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct.
They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.
They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost.
They marched for the sake of the march. The first is their duties and equipment for the war. The second, the emotional sorrows they were put through while at war. Their wants and needs, the constant worry of death were just a few of the emotional baggage they carried.
During the Vietnam War , like all wars, there were hard times. Soldiers always see death, whether it be another soldier or an enemy. The army believes every soldier has to earn their rank more importantly every solider is thought this since they sign up. Every soldier has a role based on rank. In the beginning of their tour in Vietnam there were 17 men. At the end there were Throughout the story you only hear about 8 of the 17 men. The short story talks about the different positions the men were in the platoon and what they had to carry with them that was standard operation procedure.
He carried a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a pistol. Mitchell Sanders was an RTO, and had to carry the radio. Rat Kiley being the medic carried a satchel with morphine and other necessities that a medic would carry for combat. Henry Dobbins was the machine gunner, he carried the M Jimmy was leader and should have been patrolling to make sure the platoon was safe.
Abbie Hoffman A countercultural icon of the s, Abbie Hoffman was successful at turning many flower children into political activists. Air Medal A U. American Legion An organization of veterans of the armed forces of the U. Bronze Star A U. C Hercules Aircraft that primarily performs the tactical portion of an airlift mission.
It can operate from rough dirt strips and is the prime transport for airdropping troops and equipment into hostile areas. Claymore antipersonnel mine An antipersonnel mine that scatters shrapnel in a particular, often fan-shaped, area when it explodes.
CO Conscientious objector. A designation for legal exemption from military combat service due to moral or personal ideological conflict. Cold War Hostility and sharp conflict as in diplomacy and economics between states, without actual warfare. Combat Infantryman's Badge An award designed for enlisted men and below who have served in active combat zones.
Darvon A white, crystalline, narcotic analgesic used for the alleviation of moderate pain. DDT A powerful insecticide effective upon contact; its use is restricted by law due to damaging environmental effects. The notion was that if one area or nation "fell" to Communist forces, that the surrounding areas would also "fall" under Communist influences, like dominoes toppling over.
The first step to being drafed into the armed forces. FREE Designation written by servicemen in the upper-right corner of an envelope in place of stamps; soldiers were allowed to mail items free of charge. Gary Cooper film actor characterized by a rugged masculine quality well known for his roles in Westerns such as High Noon Gene Autry Western movie star known as the "Singing Cowboy.
Gene McCarthy b. Cross as the carrier of these possessions as well as of his love for Martha. O'Brien moves from employing the literary technique of describing the soldiers' physical artifacts to introducing the novel's primary characters. The minute details he provides about objects that individuals carry is telling, and particular attention should be paid to these details because they foreshadow the core narratives that comprise the novel.
This technique of cataloging the things the soldiers carry also functions to create fuller composites of the characters, and by extension make the characters seem more real to readers. This aesthetic of helping readers connect with his characters is O'Brien's primary objective in the novel, to make readers feel the story he presents as much as is physically and emotionally possible, as if it were real.
Though the minutiae that O'Brien includes — for example the weight of a weapon, the weight of a radio, the weight of a grenade in ounces — seems superfluous, it is supposed to be accretive in his readers' imaginations so that they can begin to feel the physical weight of the burdens of war, as well as, eventually, the psychological and emotional burdens so much as it is possible for a non-witness to war to perceive.
O'Brien's attention to sensory detail also supports this primary objective of evoking a real response in the reader. With Lavender's death, O'Brien creates a tension between the "actuality" of Lt. Cross's participation in battle and his interior, imagined fantasies that give him refuge. In burning Martha's letters and accepting blame for Lavender's death, Cross's conflicting trains of thought signal the reader to be cautious when deciding what is truth or fantasy and when assigning meaning to these stories.
While he destroyed the physical accoutrements, the mementos of Martha, Lt. Cross continues to carry the memory of her with him. To that memory is also added the burden of grief and guilt. Despite this emotional burden, O'Brien, as he continues in the following chapter, begins to highlight the central question of the novel: Why people carry the things they do?
Than Khe also Khe Sahn A major battle in the Tet Offensive, the siege lasted well over a month in the beginning of Khe Sahn was thought of as an important strategic location for both the Americans and the North Vietnamese.
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