Soldiers are pawns in the games of the State.

Today amid war mongering by the media following the so called ‘surgical strike’ by India on PoK/ camps on LoC; things in Syria getting much worse, amid the all round gloom, I chose to leaf through Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I re-read the passages which I’ve underlined/ marked with blue ballpoint pen and pencil. I also went through some parts that caught my attention. I should say that this activity has spurred me to re-read the work...
About the literary quality of the work maybe some other time.

Now some compelling lines/passages from the book:

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” (p-7)

“Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts.”(p-9)

“The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.” (p-12)

“They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections.”(p-14)

They carried the land itself-Vietnam, the place, the soil-a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity…They marched for the sake of the march…and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. (p-14)

It was very sad, he thought, The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. (p-24)

“The problem though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war.” (p-42)

“I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.” (p-58)

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. (p-65,66).