“I remember Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing checkers every evening before dark. There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring…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.”
-The Things They Carried, p 31
This passage struck me for its contrast with the passages around it. Before and after this anecdote, O’Brien recounts terrible instances of the war and its consequences. He writes of Mitchell Sanders mailing lice to his draft board in cold retaliation. He describes Ted Lavender’s desperate addiction to tranquilizers as a coping mechanism. He writes of witnessing the horrific deaths of his friends and comrades. Yet in the middle of this, he includes an account of two friends peacefully playing checkers each night. He juxtaposes these disparate ideas even further by pointing out the differences between a game and the war. In doing so, O’Brien emphasizes even morsel the brutality of the Vietnam War, where you didn’t know “where you stood,” there was no “winner and a loser,” and there were no “rules.”
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