-
O'Briens chilhood friend Linda dies
"She died, of course. Nine years old and she died. It was a brain tumor. She lived through the summer and the first part of September of 1956, and then she was dead"(O'Brien 223-224). -
O'Brien gets drafted into Vietnam
"In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated" (O'Brien 38).
"The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968" (O'Brien 39). -
Mary Ann visits Mark Fossie in Vietnam
"six weeks later his girlfriend shows up" (O'Brien 89). -
O'Brien arrives in Vietnam and joins Alpha Company
"I was brand new to the war. it was my fourth day; i hadn't yet developed a sense of humor" (O'Brien 12) -
Azar blows up Ted Lavenders puppy
"Whats every body so upset" Azar said "i mean christ im just a BOY" (O'Brien 35). -
Ted Lavender gets "zapped while zipping"
"Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April" (O'Brien 2).
"Right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing" (O'Brien 12). -
O'Brien kills a man
"He was not a communist. He was a citizen and a soldier" (O'Brien 119).
"His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone..." (O'Brien 118). -
O'Brien gets shot for the first time
"For a long time i lay there all alone, listening to the loattle, thinking I’ve been shot, I’ve been shot” (O'Brien 180). -
Rat Kiley shoots himself in the foot
"he took off his boots and socks, laid out his medical kit droped him self up and put a round through his foot." (O'Brien 212). -
Curt Lemon has a dentist pull his tooth
"In February we were working an area of operations called the Rocket Pocket" (O'Brien 82).
" ...Lemon kept insisting, so the man finally shrugged and shot in the Novocain and yanked out the perfectly good tooth" (O'Brien 84). -
Curt Lemon gets blown into a tree
"I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must've thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round" (O'Brien 80). -
Rat Kiley kills a baby Buffalo
"Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his rifle and went off by himself. The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buggalo. For a time no one spoke. We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it" (O'Brien 76). -
Kiowa sinks in a field of waste
"When he got there Kiowa was almost completely under. There was a knee. There was an arm and a gold wristwatch and part of a boot" (O'Brien 142). -
O'Brien gets shot a second time
"When I got shot the second tme, in the butt, right along the song tra bong, it took the son of bicth almost ten minutes to work up the never to crawl over to me.By then I was gone with the pain" (O'Brien 181). -
Norman Bowker commits suicide
"He'd been playing pickup basketball at the Y; after two hours he went off to get a drink of water; he used jumprope; his friends found him hanging from a water pipe" (O'Brien 154). -
O'Brien returns to Vietnam with his daughter Kathleen
" Much smaller, i thought, and not nearly so menacing, and in the bright sunlight it was hard to picture what had happend on this ground some twenty years ago" (O'Brien 173).
