Home Away from Home
It’s funny how a lot of the jargon used by soldiers to describe the daily activities of war seem to be attempts to make the battlefield a replica of the homefront. One of the first uses of metaphor points out this manipulation of language:
“My God, tonight’ll be lovely. I’m digging me a foxhole like a basement.”
When the Fighting Comes
A lot like a police stakeout, most of the time is spent fighting a war is spent waiting for something exciting to happen. Unlike a police stakeout, however, excitement is guaranteed to arrive and always does come because soldiers literally put their lives on the line every day they head to work. The juxtaposition is metaphorically stated:
One moment the world is serene, in another moment the war is there. It is like the cloudburst, like lightning, like the dropping of the bomb on a sleeping Hiroshima…
Last Days of a Civilian
Drafted to fight in Vietnam, the narrator spends his last day of freedom driving around his hometown. The relationship between the town—and the life he is about to leave forever—is summed up in an almost poetic paragraph of metaphor commingling wistfulness and anger:
The war and my person seemed like twins as I went around the town’s lake. Twins grafted together and forever together, as if a separation would kill them both.
The Man to the Front
The narrator describes the single most persistently terrifying thought that runs through the mind of soldiers in Vietnam. Getting lost in the thick jungles and having to wait alone either for rescue or capture or worse. That is why you always see a visual image in Vietnam War movies that you almost never see—or at least much more rarely—in movies about other wars: soldiers walking in single file:
The man to the front is civilization. He is the United States of America and every friend you have ever known.
Reveille
There is no reveille to wake up to on tour. The light arrives, breakfast rations are prepared, the flies come, and the very idea of seriously keeping watch on guard is almost a joke. It is a slow but inexorable, repetitious but inescapable:
“…like waking up in a cancer ward, no one ambitious to get on with the day, no one with obligations, no plans nothing to hope for, no dreams for the daylight.”
