Pages #1-25
Quote: "In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble, an ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. in the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. it was this separate-but-together quality, she wrote, that had inspired her top pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then send it through the mail, by air, as a token to her truest feelings for him." (page 7-8)
Reflection: The way Martha put so much meaning in to this pebble and how she expresses it with so much emotion really gives a better understanding of their relationship. Also the fact that shes a poet, she uses her words almost in another language (with a different meaning).

Quote: "On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs. There was a steady rain falling, which made it difficult, but he used heat tabs and Sterno to build a small fire, screening it with his body, holding the photographs over the tight blue flame with the tips of his fingers." (page 22-23)
Reflection: When Lieutenant Jimmy cross decides to burn the photographs of Martha, it reminded me of the book/movie "Dear John". In "Dear John" a similar incident occurs. The two loved ones send each other a letter every week so they have a constant in one another's lives. The boyfriend John is in the military just like Jimmy Cross; at one point in the story John decides to burn all the letters hes ever received from his girlfriend. It was emotional for him and made an impact hugely.

Pages #26-58
Quote: "Jimmy shook his head "It doesn't matter," he finally said. "I love her". (page 28)
Reflection: In this quote I noticed how even so after the war, Jimmy Cross's love for Martha hasn't gone away, and how he still dwells on the fact that she doesn't love him. In this quote I also took an understanding on how O'Brien shows through Cross's character that sometimes painful memories are essential for survival.

Quote: " And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you cant remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." (page 38)
Reflection: In this quote I noticed the use of repetition on the word "stories". (This can be seen in what the author quotes above) He emphasizes that stories are something that become part of you, and they help you cope with loneliness.

Pages #59-81
Quote: "The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but its not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war." (page 61)
Reflection: In this quote it can be seen how the author is kind of homesick about his past and looks back on what he could have done differently. When he says "I was a coward. I went to the war." he snuck away from something more cruel than going to the war back at home.

Quote: "If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty." (page 69)
Reflection: This quote here is a political statement in the book, and it is giving us a sense that it is about the truth. Normally civilians think that war is all gore, wreckage and bloodshed. But only those men who went to the war come home knowing things that citizens cant know or for the most part they don't want to hear.

Pages #82-110
Quote: "He seemed a little dazed. Now and then we could hear him cussing, bawling himself out. Anyone else would've laughed it off, but for Curt Lemon it was too much. The embarrassment must have turned a screw in his head." (page 88)
Reflection: Curt Lemon was known as the thrill-seeker of the troop, and of course he would be ashamed to let anybody know that he was afraid of the dentist. He is so mortified that he starts
cussing. In the end he proves to his troops members that he is still the daredevil of the troop by asking
the dentist to pull out a perfectly good tooth.



Pages #111-130
Quote: "The way she looked, Mary Anne made you think about those girls back at home, how clean and innocent they all are, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years." (page 113)
Reflection: Even after Mary Anne had turned into a creepy version of herself, Fossie's troop members still liked her being there because she acknowledged the part of them that reminded of them home. All the ladies back home were stuck between two worlds, Vietnam and America; but in both of those places they felt out of place.

Quote: "Dobbins shrugged his shoulders. 'What's serious? I was a kid. the thing is, I believe in God and all that, but it' wasn't the religious part that interested me. Just being nice to people, that's all. Being decent." (page 121)
Reflection: This quote explains how Dobbins was rather obliged to go to church every day, rather than going for his own sake, making us allude that he went to the war because he felt obliged to go rather than doing it by doing a heroic act.

Pages #131-154
Quote: " A while late, when we moved out of the hamlet, she was still dancing. 'Probably some weird ritual,' Azar said, but Henry Dobbins looked back and said no, the girl just liked to dance." (page 136)
Reflection: By calling the girls dancing to a 'weird ritual' Azar transmutes the girl into something surreal. Since she is Vietnamese people would normally tend to infer that she is in fact doing a 'weird ritual'. But Dobbins reminds the reader that when he looks back at the girl, all she sees is a girl who just lost his family, and likes to dance.

Quote: "And a pity about his father, who had his own war and who now preferred silence.

Still, there was so much to say." (page 147)

Reflection: It is weird how Norman's father also participated went to war (apparently he went to 

World War II) and was such a traumatizing experience for him that he couldn't talk about it, and share experiences with his son about how it felt like going to war. Even thought both father and son went 

through the same experience, Norman's father can't come to realize how in great need of talking to 

someone.

Pages #'s 155-179

Quote: "Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own." (page 161)

Reflection: In this quote we can find the use of an allusion. This can be seen when the author states that "Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up [...] That part of the story is my own." meaning that the one who lacked courage to save Kiowa and was paralyzed with horror was Tim and not Norman.

Quote: "Ten billion places we could've set up last night, and the man picks a latrine." (page 166)

Reflection: Here we can also see a hint of allusion, when O'Brien sates that "[...] the man picks a latrine.", pinpointing all the guilt on Jimmy Cross. But he doesn't just blame him for picking "the wrong place", he also holds him responsible because he has to blame somebody, for his friend's death. He can't accept that his buddies' death was meaningless.

Page #'s 180-207 

Quote: "What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. 

I look at things I never looked at." (page 180)

Reflection: One way in which Tim's stories help him, is by making them present, making all the memories he has from his past comeback to him and stick with him. Also by writing his  experiences down it helps him analyze things that he never had the guts to look over, for the fear of 'discovering' things that he overlooked before.

Quote: "He was sitting there with Dave Jensen and Mitchell Sanders and a few others, he seemed to fit in very nicely, all the smiles and group raptor.

That's probably what cinched it." (page 203)

Reflection: What this quote makes us understand is that truly, the troop-buddie bonds that you create are only temporary and last until the war is over. Jorgenson, as inept as he was, had become part of 

the troop, and O'Brien who had left the group even though he was part of the troop longer than 

Jorgenson, wasn't anymore. This inclusion and exclusion 

of people in the group had nothing to do with precedence of a group 

member but it had to do a whole lot to belonging to the fighting group.

Page #'s 208-233 

Quote: "This whole war,' he said. 'You know what it is? Just one big banquet. Meat, man. You and me. Everybody. Meat for the bugs." (page 223)

Reflection: For soldiers, imagination was another aspect of the the psychological baggage that soldiers had to carry. The fact that soldiers had the disadvantage of being in an unfamiliar place fighting against an unfamiliar enemy made them mentally unstable.

Quote: "But this is true: stories can save us...[...] in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." (page 225)
Reflection: By starting the last chapter of his book with "[...] this is true: stories save us.", we can see that the author is trying to make it explicit for us, that without his stories he wouldn't have been able to be the person he is now a days.