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Hawke had learned long ago that what really mattered in combat was what people were like when they were exhausted.
malingerer,”
Good word
It be about this little duck can’t grow up. Can’t grow up to be a big duck ’cause he ain’t a duck. But he don’t know what he’s ‘sposed to grow up to.” Cortell looked carefully to be sure he wasn’t losing Williams. “I mean, you don’t know what you supposed to grow up to, that make it pretty hard to grow up.”
Mellas was hit by the overwhelming, shattering knowledge that it was very likely he was going to die.
Here on this filthy piece of earth. Now. Life had barely started, and so terribly and surprisingly soon it would be over.
defilades,
Good word
He ran as he’d never run before, with neither hope nor despair. He ran because the world was divided into opposites and his side had already been chosen for him, his only choice being whether or not to play his part with heart and courage. He ran because fate had placed him in a position of responsibility and he had accepted the burden. He ran because his self-respect required it. He ran because he loved his friends and this was the only thing he could do to end the madness that was killing and maiming them. He ran directly at the bunker where the grenades from Jake’s M-79 were exploding. The
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He kept waiting for the bullet that would end the run and would let him rest. He almost wanted that bullet so he wouldn’t have to continue with the awful responsibility of living. But he ran.
His rage was gone, and in its place was an inert, sick weariness. Mellas now knew, with utter certainty, that the North Vietnamese would never quit. They would continue the war until they were annihilated, and he did not have the will to do what that would require.
He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.
Looking at Stevens with one eye made Mellas aware that he had taken seeing for granted.
“Between the emotion and the response, the desire and the spasm, falls the shadow,”
Emotion constricted Hawke’s throat. He suddenly understood why the victims of concentration camps had walked quietly to the gas chambers. In the face of horror and insanity, it was the one human thing to do. Not the noble thing, not the heroic thing—the human thing. To live, succumbing to the insanity, was the ultimate loss of pride.
China knew that if a man could kill someone, everyone knew that he could kill anyone. The only way to stand up to that kind of power was to be willing to die.
Revenge would heal nothing. Revenge had no past. It only started things. It only created more waste, more loss, and he knew that the waste and loss of this night could never be redeemed. There was no filling the holes of death. The emptiness might be filled up by other things over the years—new friends, children, new tasks—but the holes would remain.
Meaning came out of living. Meaning could come only from his choices and actions. Meaning was made, not discovered.
He knew that all of them were shadows: the chanters, the dead, the living. All shadows, moving across this landscape of mountains and valleys, changing the pattern of things as they moved but leaving nothing changed when they left. Only the shadows themselves could change.
