Top Highlights

• Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. The story travels between Cross' infatuation with a girl named Martha that he's in love with based on a single date in college, the death of the soldier Ted Lavender, and an itemized chronicle of what the men carried at war, from supplies, to tokens of luck, to emotions.
• He imagines his father consoling him with the many medals he did win. Bowker wades into the lake and watches the fireworks.
• "On the Rainy River:" Before going to Vietnam, Tim O'Brien decides to dodge the draft, and he drives north to Canada but stops near the border at The Tip Top Lodge, owned by an old man named Elroy Berdahl. O'Brien credits Berdahl with being "the hero of his life." O'Brien spends six days at the Lodge, trying to decide whether or not to flee. Berdah...
• The topic of Martha comes up, and Cross confesses that he still loves her. He tells the story of how he saw Martha at a college reunion after the war. She had never married. Cross asks O'Brien to write a story about him that makes him appear to be the best platoon leader ever, hoping Martha would read it and find him.
• O'Brien tells the story of Rat Kiley's reaction to Curt Lemon's death as an example, as well as Mitchell Sanders' story about a platoon of soldiers that started having auditory hallucinations. When O'Brien tells the story of Lemon's death, usually an older woman will say it's too sad, and O'Brien resolves he has to keep telling the stories and addi...

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