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" I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything"(39).
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"No way. Count me out. Nobody messes with these teeth"(83).
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"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 neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star shaped hole"(124).
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"It's time to be blunt. I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked throught Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier" (171).
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"...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 white blossoms"(67).
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"He opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn't intrested...He stepped back and shot it thought the right front knee...ear...hindquarters...little hump on it's back...twice in the flanks. It wasn't to kill; it was to hurt" (75).
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"What's everybody so upset about? I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy" (35).
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"He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happn, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something-just boom, then down-not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle...the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell" (6).
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"Kiowa was gone. He was under the mud and water, folded in the war, and their only thought was to find him and dig him out and then move on to some place dry and warm" (155).
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"This cute blonde-just barely out of highschool-she shows up with a suitcase and one of those plastic cosmetic bags" (86).
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"The first time, out by Tri Binh, it knocked me aginst the pagoda wall, and I bounced and spun around and ended up on Rat Kiley's lap. A lucky thing, because Rat wat the medic...just a side wound, no problem unless you're pregnant" (180).
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"This whole war, you know what it is? Just one bog banquet. Meat, man. You and me...The next morning he shot himself. He took off his boots and socks, laid out his medical kit, doped himself up, and put a round thought his foot" (212).
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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).
