47 pages • 1 hour read
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Summary
Story 1: “Redeployment”
Story 2: “Frago”
Story 3: “After Action Report”
Story 4: “Bodies”
Story 5: “OIF”
Story 6: “Money As a Weapons System”
Story 7: “In Vietnam They Had Whores”
Story 8: “Prayer in the Furnace”
Story 9: “Psychological Operations”
Story 10: “War Stories”
Story 11: “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound”
Story 12: “Ten Kliks South”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
A military vehicle is hit by a grenade, and the narrator—named Ozzie—climbs out of the wreckage. He sees two men from his unit, Corporal Garza and Timhead. Someone opens fire on them from a nearby building, and they shoot back. When the shooting stops, a woman is screaming from the building. When they reach the building, they see that Timhead has shot and killed a 13-year-old boy. The boy’s mother is the screaming woman.
Timhead tells Garza that it wasn’t him, so Garza assumes that Ozzie shot the boy. Timhead comes to Ozzie and says that he’s worried that everyone back at the base is going to ask him what it was like to be the first of them to kill someone. Since Garza already thinks that Ozzie shot the kid, he asks if they can stick to that story. Ozzie agrees, and when they get back, everyone in the unit shakes his hand and congratulates him on doing his job. The next day, he gets asked to tell the story many times. Each time, he adds details and realizes that his version of the story is starting to feel as if it really happened.
A week later, a man named MacClelland is killed when a convoy is attacked.