Oh, Canada!

"I remember Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing checkers every evening before dark. It was a ritual for them. They would dig a foxhole and get the board out and play long, silent games as the sky went from pink to purple. The rest of us would sometimes stop by to watch. There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring. There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules." pg. 31

Hey, lookey here kids, it's some juxtaposition! Naturally, in the second chapter, the author would want to make some kind of comparison with which to equate war, something not widely experienced by the random person on the street. But, oh golly gee willickers, by comparing war to checkers he shows us what war is not. Checkers is first something just about everyone can relate to, so it's easy to know where O'Brien is coming from when he describes the game. Yet when implies how checkers is unlike the Vietnam war, it leaves the imagination to put the reader in his shoes rather than limiting himself to a finite analogy.

"The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen or twenty..." pg. 35

Up until this point I had assumed most of the guys were around their mid-twenties. It's only more concerning now that I'll be reading about people around my age. I don't appreciate this sentiment.   -.- <--- emoticon!