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O'Brien gets Draft Notice
In June of 1968 a month after graduating from Macalester college, I was drafted to fight in a war I hated (38).
He was currently living at home and working in a slaughter house when he got the notice about leaving for war. He was debating on either running away to Canada or going to war and made his decision after spending almost a week at a lodge at the border of Canada. He decided to go because he would be embarrassed if he didnt. -
Mary Anne Bell
At best, Rat said, she was seventeen years old, fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High (89).
Mark Fossie is deeply in love with his childhood sweetheart who lives in his hometown. He decieds to fly her out to the base he was located, thinking it would be great. At first the prediction is true and then things go downhill when she joins the Green Berets. -
O'Brien Arrives in Vietnam
I was brand new to the war. It was my fourth day; I hadn't yet devolped a sense of humor (214).
After making the decision to go to war, O'Brien arrives in Vietnam and joins Alpha Company. His first experiences are not very pleasant. -
Kurt Lemon has dentist pull a tooth
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).
Kurt Lemon always comes off as a really tough soldier and when it comes time for the dentist to visit he becomes very afraid and everyone realizes he isn't as tough as people think. Then he has the dentist pull a healthy tooth to prove he is tough. -
Azar blows up Ted Lavenders puppy
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).
Little before Ted dies, he finds a puppy and takes care of it. From this we now find out that Azar was truely psychologically troubled. -
Kurt Lemon gets blown into a tree
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).
When most of these men came to war they were very young and they just didn't know. If they did, it was better to die while playing around with your best friend then bleeding to death after after a bullet hits you. -
Rat Kiley shoots a baby buffalo
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).
Rat was very upset about the death of his best friend and in his mind he had no choice but to take out his anger of the war on a baby buffalo, that he shot and killed. -
Ted Lavender gets "Zapped while Zipping"
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)
When Ted Lavender was shot, he needed to go to the bathroom so we went in to the open field. He was zipping up his zipper when all of a sudden he gets shot. The men from then on call this "zapped while zipping" -
O'Brien gets shot for the first time
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)
Tim O'Brien was pretty lucky that when he was shot he had Rat Kiley around to stich him up quickly. He only had to take about six weeks off of humping. -
Rat Kiley shots himself in the foot
He took off his boots and socks, laid out his medical kit, doped himself up, and put a round through his foot (212).
All of the deaths Rat had seen through being a medic really began to bother him and he got to the point it was all he was thinking of and not sleeping. He just couldn't take being in Vietnam anymore so he shot himself to get out of there. -
O'Brien kills a man
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).
After Tim shot the man he felt so terrible about it that he sat there and stared at him and made up a whole story to match the man he killed. -
Kiowa sinks into a pile of waste
"...how in this way his son Kiowa had been combined with the waste and the war" (162).
While humping in the night through the banks of the Song Tra Bong river inbetween two mountain ranges they were set to sleep for the night when they were attacked. The bomb hit and caused a crator that sucked Kiowa deep into the waste field. -
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 (149).
After the war he continued to believe that Kiowa's death was all his fault and the guilt ate him alive. He couldn't take it anymore so he believed he had to kill himself. -
O'Brien returns to Vietnam with his daughter
I stood with my arms folded, feeling the grip of sentiment and time. Amazing, I thought. Twenty years (173).
His daughter wants to know more about him fighting in the war so he takes her on a trip to Vietnam and they visit the place where Kiowa died. He then puts the moccasins in the river near the place of death.
