You are not permitted to touch!

This chapter ("How to Tell a True War Story") was so chocked full of dandy information, I just had to split it into two posts!

Naturally, in a revealing chapter such as this, the author, similar to Mary Poppins, tends to use some literary devices to help the "medicine go down."

"War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead." pg.76

Here is a delightful blend of anaphora and paradox.

"The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat." pg. 77

Paradox. With a shot of oxymoron (awful majesty).

"To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace." pg. 77

And a simile to round things off (however, his sentence isn't balanced). All of these devices appear in a relatively small distance from each other, practically rapid-fire. Taken individually, they are all ways to express the contradictory and inexplicableness (say that ten times fast) of war. However, taken as a whole, each enhances the ambiguity of the "truth" of war.