Chapter 20

"The Ghost Soldiers" 

Important Sections of the Chapter

1). "Diaper rash, the nurses called it. An in-joke, I suppose. But it made me hate Bobby Jorgenson the way some some guys hated the VC, gut hate, the kind of hate that stays with you even in your dreams." (pg. 191)

ANALYSIS

This quote is said from narrator O'Brien's point of view and it talks about the "fear of blushing". After Rat Kiley is taken to Japan because of a wound, a new medic replaces him, someone O'Brien calls incompetent. He claims that because of him "his ass began to rot" and hence, he had to be taken to a hospital. 

However, the point of this fragment is to make emphasis of the soldier's "fear of blushing" his hate towards ridicule and humiliation. The fact that he can't stand up, attend war, or fight and consequently needs to stay on his stomach attended continuously by the nurses, makes O'Brien feel inutile and this feeling becomes worse when the nurses make fun of him and call his butt a "diaper rush" enhancing his "fear of blushing" and triggering his hate for the man who provoked it. 

2). "We sat quietly for a time. There was no need to talk, because we were thinking the same things: about Morty Phillips and the way luck worked and didn't work and how it was impossible to calculate the odds." (pg. 196) 

ANALYSIS

This quote summarizes the Alpha Company soldier's greatest preoccupation: their mortality. In it, we readers see, how they silently accept the truth of war and the power of luck in their lives. They understand that the reason they are still alive is because of mere luck and for this reason they revere it as some powerful force that has to be taken care of and "don't messed around like that." 

They use Morty Phillips as a reinforcement to this superstition and they explain his death as a "waste of his luck" suggesting that they firmly believe in luck as a talisman as a gift that they were given to spread out in small amounts and to "fritter away". However, the essence of this quote is that the soldiers have realized that they are vulnerable and mortal, signifying that their lives are jeopardized during war and as they say, "it [is] impossible to calculate the odds." 

3). "I'd turned mean inside. Even a little cruel at times. For all my education, all my fine liberal values, I now felt deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason." (pg. 200)

ANALYSIS

This quote was one of the most interesting that I found along the chapter because it explains the effect of war from soldier O'Brien's perspective. From him we learn how the war has impacted him and thus changed him. 

He is now "mean inside" and cold, suggesting that all the tragic experiences lived, the blood scenes, the killing and the smell of death have traumatized him for life and have shaped him into another human being, one that has adopted the crudeness of war and lost the candor and innocence, or as he calls it the "quiet , thoughtful sort of person, a college grad, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude", with which he came into it.