Watching from Above...

Today I watch as my fellow platoon member Tim O’Brien was shot in the butt and sent off for medical treatment because our medic Rat Kiley was injured and a newbie to the field was his replacement and almost got Tim killed when he didn’t treat him for going into shock. The Platoon later goes on a three day break at headquarters in Japan. Azar and Tim get back at Bobby Jorgenson the “newbie”. Later Tim and Bobby put their differences aside and become friends. I also see that Rat Kiley gets injured, here’s the story on that one. When the platoon is in the foothills west of Quang Ngai City they receive word that there is possible danger. Each guy acts differently and Rat Kiley keeps to himself, he then after a few days breaks down and tells Sanders that he isn’t cut out to be a medic always picking up parts and putting pieces back in place so he shoots himself bad enough to released from duty and gets sent to a nearby hospital. I also hear Tim telling a story about when he was little and fell in love with this other little girl that he knew and how she always wore a red hat on her head. It turns out that Linda had a brain tumor and was slowly dying. It was later revealed that she died and when Tim went to her funeral he thought it was weird to see her laying in a casket and I learned that Tim became withdrawn and obsessed with sleeping because he could make Linda come back to life when he was sleeping. O’Brien concludes by saying that the dead live.

The End is closer than I thought...

Tonight is the night I die a disturbing death. Let's begin by telling you how the day started off. Henry Dobbins a member of my platoon wears his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck because they are supposed to be a good luck charm. He survives a couple of incidents and then when his girlfriend dumps him, he continues to wear the pantyhose saying that the magic hasn’t been lost. We stumble upon an old church and we decide to stay a few days and to use this as our “home base”. These two monks visit us everyday and bring us fresh drinking and bathing water to use. I tell Dobbins I wouldn’t enjoy being a preacher, because even though I carry a bible everywhere with me I really don’t like interacting with people. O’Brien  lists some physical attributes and possible characteristics of the man who he killed in My Khe. I try to rationalize with him and to help him come to terms with the death of that young man. I try to explain to him that the young man was carrying a gun and that we are in the middle of a war and the point is to defend ourselves. I bend over the body and take the young man’s personal belongings including a picture of a young woman. We settled in a "shit" field so in a sewage field along a river and I settle down to go to sleep, and the next thing I know I am sinking and Bowker grabs my boot and that’s the last I see of any of my fellow platoon members.

Pass Time equals telling stories

Today, Lee Strunk and Dave Jenson got into a fight because Strunk gets accused of stealing Jenson’s pocketknife but he denies that he ever even seen it. They become almost best friends and do everything together. Later today Strunk is seriously injured when he steps on a mine and gets half of his leg blown off and must be evacuated and flown out of the battle zone and we later learn that he has died on the helicopter on the way to the hospital. We also learned that Rat Kiley once had a friend by the name of Curt Lemon and we learn of the story of how he died. It turns out that Curt Lemon stepped on a rigged mortar round and he was instantly killed. After Curt Lemon’s death Rat Kiley wrote a letter to Curt’s sister and she never wrote back, and Rat was pretty upset. Tim shares with us that mourning Curt Lemon was difficult because he didn’t know him real well. So he told us a story about Curt and “The Dentist”. A dentist had come to camp and Curt was extremely scared to death of dentists and so after he passes out when the dentist calls him in, he later goes to the dentist’s tent later that night and has the dentist pull out a perfectly good tooth. Also Kiley tells us a story about how on one of his first missions a person in his troop by the name of Mark Fossie bought his girlfriend Mary Anne to Vietnam and she adapted to Vietnam really quickly. At the end of the story we learn that Mary Anne has died and “become one with the land”

The Things They Carried

My name is Kiowa, I am a solider in the U.S. Army and a Devout Baptist and also i am a Native American. I am on my way to Vietnam to fight in the Vietnam War. I am humping my way through the jungles and different areas and i carry quite a few different things with me. Some of them are personal and some well they are standard issue.

As i hump around the jungle these are the things i carry:
Personal:

1. A illustrated New Testament
2.  My grandfather's old hunting hatchet
3. And also i carry my grandmother's distrust for the white man.

Standard Issue:

1. A steel helmet that weighed 5 pounds
2. Fatigue jackets and troucover
3. On our feet we carried/wore jungle boots which weighed 2.1 pounds
4. A steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed about 6.7 pounds
5. A large compress bandage in our helmets for easy access
6. Last but not least, a green plastic poncho to sleep on, wear and if we happened to be killed to wrap us in.

I also bring with me, a different perspective from that of my fellow soldiers to the unfortunate events that befall the Alpha Company.


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