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"In June of 1968 a month after graduating from Macalester college, I was drafted to fight in a war I hated" (38).
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"At best, Rat said, she was seventeen years old, fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High" (89).
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"I was brand new to the war. It was my fourth day; I hadn't yet devolped a sense of humor" (214).
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"Lemon looked down at his hands and said that back in high school he'd had a couple of bad experencies with dentists. Real sadism" (83).
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"His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and whilte blossoms" (67).
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"Or Ted Lavender adopting an orphan puppy, feeding it from a plastic spoon and carrying in his rucksack until the day Azar strapped the puppy to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device" (35).
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It wasn't to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood there watching feeling all kinds of things (75).
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"Before Ted Lavender died there were 17 men in the platoon, and whoever drew the number 17 would strip off his gear and crawl in head first with a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross's point 45 caliber pistol." (10)
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"He took off his boots and socks, laid out his medical kit, doped himself up, and put a round through his foot" (212).
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"The first time, out by Tri Binh, it knocked me against the Pheoda wall, I was bounced and spun around and ended up on Rat Kiley's lap" (181).
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"His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's..." (118).
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"...how in this way his son Kiowa had been combined with the waste and the war" (162).
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"Jorgenson was no Rat Kiley. He was green and incompetent and scared. So when I got shot the second time, in the butt, along the Song Tra Bong, it took the son of a bitch almost ten minutes to work up the nerve to crawl over to me" (181).
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"...after two hours he went off for a drink of water; he used a jump rope; his friends found him hanging from a water pipe. 'Norman was a quiet boys,' his mother wrote, 'and I don't suppose he wanted to bother anybnody'" (154).
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"Frowning, she squinted out at the field for a second, the nshrugged and walked back to the jeep" (174).
