Joe’s Reviews > The Things They Carried > Status Update
Joe
is on page 58 of 233
The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
— Dec 06, 2016 09:36PM
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Joe
is on page 193 of 233
The countryside itself seemed spooky--shadows and tunnels and incense burning in the dark. The land was haunted. We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science. Late at night, on guard, it seemed that all of Vietnam was alive and shimmering--odd shapes swaying in the paddies, boogiemen in sandals, and Charlie Cong was the main ghost.
— Dec 08, 2016 08:32PM
Joe
is on page 171 of 233
Henry Dobbins was a good man, and a superb soldier, but sophistication was not his strong suit. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.
— Dec 08, 2016 01:24PM
Joe
is on page 109 of 233
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. A question of degree. Some make it intact, some don't make it at all. For Mary Anne Bell, it seemed, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you're risking something.
— Dec 07, 2016 08:29PM
Joe
is on page 78 of 233
Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head.
— Dec 07, 2016 02:00PM
Joe
is on page 30 of 233
The war wasn't all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet. For instance, I remember a little boy with a plastic leg. I remember how he hopped over to Azar and asked for a chocolate bar--"GI number one," the kid said--and Azar laughed and handed over the chocolate. When the boy hopped away, Azar clucked his tongue and said, "War's a bitch."
— Dec 06, 2016 08:19PM
Joe
is on page 20 of 233
There it is, they'd say. Over and over--there it is, my friend, there it is--as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.
— Dec 06, 2016 01:20PM
Joe
is starting
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack.
— Dec 05, 2016 01:17PM
