Notes – “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes”:

As the author points out later in the writing, the lake Bowker circles in his Chevy is  juxtaposed with the field in Vietnam where the platoon was deeply engulfed in human waste and mortar fire. The author illustrates the displacement that may be felt by veterans after returning from war and service as compounding the displacement of being overseas and at war.

One of the greatest quotes from the entire writing comes in the form of a voice over a drive-in diner intercom: “‘Well, hey,’ the intercom said, ‘I’m sure as fuck not going anywhere. Screwed to a post, for God sake. Go ahead, try me.’” (46)

The words are meant as encouragement for Bowker to speak, to relay, to confess his mind. “Screwed to a post,” like being crucified, the occupation, the job, the detail, the post being the crucifix, the crucifixion, “for God sake,” blasphemy, yet duty performed in the name of God, for the sake of God and mankind, crucified, in the name of the father, to serve the father, and mankind, one supersized value-meal at a time. Thank you, drive thru.

Quotes – “Speaking of Courage”:

“Norman Bowker shrugged. ‘No problem,’ he murmured.

Clockwise, as if in orbit, he took the Chevy on another seven-mile turn around the lake.” (133)

“What he should do, he thought, is stop at Sally’s house and impress her with this new time-telling trick of his.” (134)

“. . . he’d almost won the Silver Star for valor.” (134)

“. . . many brave men did not win medals for their bravery, and that others won medals for doing nothing.” (135)

“. . . Norman Bowker might then have listed the seven medals he did win: the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Air Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, the Vietnam Campaign Medal, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart, though it wasn’t much of a wound and did not leave a scar and did not hurt and never had. He would’ve explained to his father that none of these decorations was for uncommon valor. They were for common valor.” . . . . “The ribbons looked good on the uniform in his closet . . .” (135)

“He looked out across the lake and imagined the feel of his tongue against the truth.” (136)

“Put on a suit and tie and stand up in front of the Kiwanis club and tell the fuckers about all the wonderful shit he knew.” (137-8)

“Number ten, they said. Evil ground. Not a good spot for good GIs.” (138)

“. . . we were camped in a goddamn shit field.” (139)

“And a pity about his father, who had his own war and who now preferred silence.” (141)

“Some of the men began shooting up flares. Red and green and silver flares, all colors, and the rain came down in Technicolor.

“The field was boiling. The shells made deep slushy craters, opening up all those years of waste, centuries worth, and the smell came bubbling out of the earth.” (142)

“Pinned to her shirt was a badge that said EAT MAMA BURGERS.” (145)

“‘Punch the button and place your order. All I do is carry the dumb trays.’” (145)

“‘Roger-dodger. Repeat: one Mama, one fries, one small beer. Fire for effect. Stand by.’” (145)

“‘Well, hey,’ the intercom said, ‘I’m sure as fuck not going anywhere. Screwed to a post, for God sake. Go ahead, try me.’” (146)

“Norman Bowker remembered how he had taken hold of Kiowa’s boot and pulled hard, but how the smell was simply too much, and how he’d backed off and in that way had lost the Silver Star.” (147)

Quotes – “Notes”:

 “In the spring of 1975, near the time of Saigon’s final collapse, I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war.” (149)

“‘The thing is,’ he wrote, ‘there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam . . .” (150)

“One thing I hate – really hate – is all those whiner-vets. Guys sniveling about how they didn’t get any parades.” (150)

“What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole.” (151)

“In this original version, which I still conceived as part of the novel, I had been forced to omit the shit field and the rain and the death of Kiowa, replacing this material with events that better fit the book’s narrative. As a consequence I’d lost the natural counterpoint between the lake and the field. A metaphoric unity was broken.” (153)

“Going After Cacciato was a war story; ‘Speaking of Courage’ was a postwar story. Two different time periods, two different sets of issues.” (153)

“In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.” (154)

– Notes and Quotes –

Alice Walker (1944-present), Everyday Use (1973)

The significance of the title reflects the pragmatism of using something because of the need or necessity for the circumstance rather than placing a value and heritage association upon the item to preserve for future generations.

Because Maggie is used to being passed over for things, Maggie accepts her Dee’s judgment, and Maggie is willing to forgo her inheritance of the quilts for some other gift that Dee may apply less value to. By settling, Maggie is perhaps better off than Dee in that she may be less interested in material possessions and more interested in family.

Dee is perhaps embarrassed by her family’s poverty. Everything about the family and the residence seem modest, humble, and impoverished, but the quality of furniture whittled by family members was built to last as can be seen in the posterior impressions in the wooden benches, and in the hand impressions in the handle of the butter churn. As well, the narrator relays Dee’s statement about always coming home to visit, but never intending to bring friends.

To escape the label of poverty, Dee changes her identity to reinvent herself as kind of cosmopolitan city girl, and strangely, the poverty of her past becomes a quaint heritage to be displayed and appreciated by other cosmopolitans. Meanwhile, the narrator and Maggie accept their poverty and history as a way of life, but perhaps the thought of “heritage” is a thought of passing association. In her efforts to stake a claim to her perception of “heritage,” Dee perhaps unknowingly embarrasses herself and insults her family by suggesting the family doesn’t understand their own heritage, and Dee suggests the family adopt her perception of “heritage.”

The narrator loves Dee as a daughter, but the narrator seems to tolerate Dee as a young adult. The narrator is perhaps pestered by Dee’s constant judgments and company. The narrator begins telling the story of her family and home, but when Dee interrupts in a bit of a surprise spectacle, the narrator almost can’t believe she and her story are being “upstaged” by Dee.

On the perception of “heritage,” the author perhaps sides with the narrator’s understanding of family history and heritage, and Dee’s perceptions are being presented as a contrast and comparison of the ways youth may view family traditions.

Notes – “The Man I Killed” and “Ambush”:

O’Brien makes his first enemy kill known, the experience is scarring, leaves him scarred, perhaps even intentionally he looks upon the corpse he’s made, and he means to burn the memory into his mind, so that he may never forget, and always carry the happening with him like finding comfort in discomfort. As the saying goes, kill or be killed, but the spirit of the dead, the killed, remain in the mind. The memory becomes the ghost, the haunting, and too much reflecting on what happened may serve as the soldier’s invitation to join those he’s helped to the other side.

Quotes – “The Man I Killed”:

Azar: “‘Rice Crispies, you know? On the dead test, this particular individual gets A-plus.’” (120)

“Later, Kiowa said, ‘I’m serious. Nothing anybody could do. Come on, Tim, stop staring.’”(120)

“‘A good kill – weapon, ammunition, everything.’” (123)

“Clean fingernails, clean hair – he had been a soldier for only a single day.” . . .

“He knew he would die quickly. He knew he would see a flash of light. He knew he would fall dead and wake up in the stories of his village and people.” (123-4)

Quote – “Ambush”:

“Later, I remember, Kiowa tried to tell me that the man would’ve died anyway. He told me that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was a war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would’ve done if things were reversed.” (127)

Notes – “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”:

The allure of identity, of self-actualization, becomes a drug like no other. Rat tells the story of Mary Anne Bell, the sweetheart and non-combatant set loose in the jungles of Vietnam. The environment changes the person, and Mary Anne is no exception. Wanting, needing, craving, Mary Anne perhaps turns more feral than wild, but, however she identified herself before the Vietnam experience, that person was just a dim shadow of what she becomes. Friendly and good-natured traits are replaced with ferocity and predatory instincts. As Rat tells the story, his audience reminds him of his responsibilities as the storyteller if anyone is to listen at all.

Quotes – “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”:

 “Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts,” . . . . “facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.” (85)

“‘A real tiger,’ said Eddie Diamond. ‘D-cup guts, trainer-bra brains.’” (92)

“There were dark smudges under his eyes, the frayed edges of somebody who hadn’t slept in a while.” (95)

“What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.” (101)

“‘All that crap about how if we had a pussy for president there wouldn’t be no more wars. Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist attitude.’” (102)

“You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story’s sound. Stick to what happened.

‘Tone?’ he’d say. ‘I didn’t know it was all that complicated. The girl joined the zoo. One more animal – end of story.’

‘Yeah, fine. But tell it right.’” (102)

“At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues.” (105)

“‘Man, you must be deaf. She’s already gone.’” (107)

“‘This elaborate story, you can’t say, Hey, by the way, I don’t know the ending. I mean, you got certain obligations.’” (107)

“‘There it is, you got to taste it, and that’s the thing with Mary Anne. She was there. She was up to her eyeballs in it. After the war, man, I promise, you won’t find nobody like her.’”  (108)

“‘What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same.” (109)

“‘She wanted more, she wanted to penetrate deeper into the mystery of herself, and after a time the wanting became needing, which turned then to craving.’” (109)

“She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill.” (110)

Notes – “How to Tell a True War Story”:

Beautifully, the writer explains his perception of the craft. How can any civilian ever begin to imagine what war is actually like, and especially what a true war story could possibly mean without ever having gone through the experience first-hand? The war story reflects the time and events . . . but a true war story reflects the ugliness of the time and events . . . The moral becomes clear. Nobody listens. Nobody listens to the environment, to each other, or to the narrator of the story, but everybody expects they “get it,” or should “get it” without any real expenditure of effort.

Quotes – How to Tell a True War Story:

“As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” (65-6)

“In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed.” (67-8)

“In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.” (68)

“You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end.” (72)

“‘Just came to me,’ he whispered. ‘The moral, I mean. Nobody listens.’” . . . . “The vapors, man. Trees and rocks – you got to listen to your enemy.’” (73)

“‘Hear that quiet, man?’ he said. ‘That quiet – just listen. There’s your moral.’” (74)

“Mitchell Sanders took out his yo-yo. ‘Well, that’s Nam,’ he said. ‘Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin’s real fresh and original.’” (76)

“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” (76)

“But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing ‘Lemon Tree’ as we threw down the parts.” (79)

“Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet / But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.”

Peter, Paul and Mary – Lemon Tree (YouTube)

“It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.” (81)

“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about . . .” (81)

Notes – “On the Rainy River”:

Decisions, decisions: To run, or to remain. On the path of no beginning and no end, O’Brien proceeds in the direction of his calling . . . whichever way it may be. With the reality of the pig slaughterhouse behind him, and the refuge of Canada just across a river, the choice to dodge the draft is no longer a choice. The slaughterhouse of Vietnam lay before him. Elroy took O’Brien to the brink of life without war, but it was exile that O’Brien feared most. Explanations become insufficient in the quest for self-sufficiency, and yet the question looms, “What would you do?”

Quotes – On the Rainy River:

“. . . you don’t make war without knowing why.” (38)

“ . . . I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything.” (39)

“There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it’s worth the price, that’s fine, but you have to put your own life on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover.” (40)

“I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile.” (42)

“. . . the man understood that words were insufficient.” (49)

“What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. I did not want people to think badly of me.” (49)

“Twenty yards. I could’ve done it. I could’ve jumped and started swimming for my life.” (54)

“You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do?” (54)

“And what was so sad, I realized, was that Canada had become a pitiful fantasy. Silly and hopeless. It was no longer a possibility. Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do.” (55)

“I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was embarrassed not to.” (57)

“‘Ain’t biting,’ he said.

Then after a time the old man pulled in his line and turned the boat back toward Minnesota.” (57)

Notes – “Love” and “Spin”:

The narrator, Tim O’Brien, chooses to include the reader in the crafting of the stories by explaining that he is also a/the writer. By writing about writing, what writing is like, how to write, the narrator/author informs the reader of aspects of his life that otherwise may not be mentioned in a work of fiction. The work, the labor of writing, takes on an autobiographical tone which invites the reader to trust the narrator/author to deliver the truth, even if there is some embellishment.

Quote – “Love”:

Lt. Cross to O’Brien: “‘You writer types,’ he said, ‘you’ve got long memories.’” (27)

 Quotes – “Spin”:

“. . . as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening.”  (31)

“That’s the real obsession. All those stories.” (33)

“That’s what stories are for.” (36)

Notes – “The Things They Carried”:

The things they carried were not merely things, but also persons, places and ideas. The missions, the memories, the superstitions, communal carrying, weight, pressure, gravity, all these things are the things people carry, and all these things are amplified by the circumstance of war.

Quotes – “The Things They Carried”:

“To carry something was to hump it . . .”  . . . . “In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.” (3)

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carry.” (7)

 “What they carried varied by mission.” (8)

“The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.” (12)

“Some things they carried in common. Taking turns . . .” (12)

“They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous.” (15)

“. . . it was the great American war chest . . .” “. . . they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders . . .” (15)

“For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity.” (18)

“They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die.” (20)

“By and large they carried these things inside, maintaining the masks of composure.”  (20)