I predict an emotional response to the part about a long-imagined relationship and using it as both the sole reason and sole distraction, and eventually its rejection as the sole motivation.
“They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense, compression in all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in—ass and elbows—a swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.”
This was good. I could feel the walls of the tunnel closing in.
“Dense, crushing love.”
I read it again, and it’s just a back puncher. Your breath goes out, more I suppose if you’re identifying with what they’re carrying. Not being a vet I can only imagine what it is to trudge in hot, dense jungle carrying everything—and I mean everything—on top of the stuff anyone else carries around.
The whole story is weight. You get dragged further and further down by it. Deeper and dirtier, like he doesn’t want you to forget.
“… mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would.”
And of course, to someone like Martha, everything he is experiencing is unreal. We’re Martha.
“It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.”
Fight the heroic fight, be the honorable warrior. Die as a man, not live as a coward.
The switch between ethereal florid and straight lists is not exactly jarring, but necessary. All lists and they’re just what you see—all florid prose and it’s that embarassment he writes about. Need both sides.
A good-luck pebble is a good-luck marble is there’s no fuckin’ luck at all.
I hate Martha, too.
“He might just shrug and say, Carry on…”