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Tim O'Brien gets draft notice
"In June of 1968,a month after form graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated" (O'Brien39). -
Curt Lemon gets blown into a tree
"In the mountians that day I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat Kiely. then he took a particular half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the booby trapted 105 round blew him into a tree" (O'Brien79). -
Kurt Lemon had the dentist pull a tooth
"The dentist couldn't find any problem, but Lemon kept insisting, so the man finally shrugged and shot the Novocain and yanked out a perfectly good tooth" (O'Brien 84). -
O'Brien arives in Vietnam
"I was brand-new to the war. It was my forth day; I hadn't yet developed a sense of humor" (O'Brien214). -
Azar blows up Ted Lanvender's puppy
"Or Ted Lavender adopting an orphan puppy-- feeding it from a plastic spooon and carrying it in his rucksack until the day Azar strapped the puppy to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device" (O'Brien35). -
O'Brien kills a man
"He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face niether expressive nor inexpressive" (O'Brien 124). -
Ted Lavender "zapped while zipping"
"Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing" (O'Brien12). -
O'Brien gets shot for the first time
"I was shot twive. The first time, out by Tri Binh, it knoched me against the pagoda wall, and I bounced and spun around and ended up on Rat Kiley's lap" (O'Brien180). -
Rat Kiley shoots himself in the foot
"The next morning he shot himself" (O'Brien 212). -
Rat Kiely kills a buffalo
"He shot ramonly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly and butt" (O'Brien75). -
O'Brien gets shot for the second time
"So when i got shot the second time, in the butt, alond the Song Tra Bong, it took the son of a bitch almost ten minutes to work up the nerve to crawl over to me" (O'Brien181). -
Kiowa sinks in a dung field
"As he came up, a pair of red flares puffed open, a soft blurry glow, and in the glow he saw Kiowa's wide-open eyes settling down into the scum" (O'Brien142). -
Norman Bowker commits suicide
" 'Speaking of Courage' was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa" (O'Brien 149). -
O'Brien ruturns to Vietnam with his daughter
"Kathleen had just turned ten, and this trip was a kind of birthday present showing her the world, offering a small piece of her father's history" (O'Brien 174).