Question 7

In my opinion, one of the best things about this book is its lack of structure. It's really difficult to judge exactly when a certain event occurred. The reader is rarely informed on the time of day, the month, the year, the location... The only consistent marker of time throughout the book is the death of Ted Lavender; it seems like everything is either before Lavender was shot, or after Lavender was shot. At first, the lack of organization sort of bugged me because I kept trying to read it like I would read any other book; I was trying to keep the events in order and remember what happened when. But as I kept reading, I realized that the scattered nature of the book makes it so much more personal. The time of day and what day it was was insignificant to the soldiers, because it was the same thing everyday. The only thing they could measure anything by was death because they were surrounded by it. Also, I'm sure they stopped caring about the minute details of the war. All the soldiers knew is that they were fighting, and they had no idea what they were fighting for; they just wanted it to be over. I can imagine how everything would start to blur together after a while. The unorganized character of the book makes it a lot more realistic, and it gives the reader a sense of how overwhelming it must have been.

Your response, Greer, really made me think. I really liked how you applied your response to real-life scenarios, and how you applied the real-life scenarios to the book. I think it's interesting how everything is, as you say, blurred, when you are in war. It's hard to imagine living life- just living life- and not really doing much else. This emphasizes the atrocities of war and how people became dehumanized in the Vietnam War. I also think that this simple "living" of life is why people were so quick to pull the trigger, or to detonate grenades to catch fish. People did not think of the consequences of their actions, only the time that they spend doing them. The count down to coming home must have been the only thing keeping them alive. Afterall, as you said, "they had no idea what they were fighting for".