Stockings - Style

I like that Henry Dobbins believes in a tangible item as his protection and comfort rather than a false god; to me that is more powerful than religion. Also, I like that he wanted to be a minister but only for the compassion towards other people and that he didn't want to get tied up with explanations and such. That's like a subconscious rejection of organised religion and a belief in human kindness, something that isn't often prevalent in wartime. He just wants to "wear a robe and be nice to people."

In "The Man I Killed," Tim O'Brien describes the extremely gruesome way that some Vietnam boy looks and finishes it with "and it was this wound that had killed him." The description makes this death seem more important than most human deaths so far in this novel with the exception of the baby buffalo. Then, he goes into an imaginary story about who this boy probably was, only going off of visual aspects of his person. This is O'Brien's first kill and I suspect that it means more to him than anything at this point, taking another' life, that he would want to speculate on what he's taken. O'Brien describes "the star-shaped hole" in the boy's eye as "red and yellow" which could be a reference to the communist flag and this is a metaphorical death of such.
He didn't kill this man out of embarrassment not to but out of nothing else to do. He explains that he was on watch at night and this man rolls out of the fog and O'Brien just throws the grenade, already prepped to be thrown so he was obviously expecting something but he didn't think this man an enemy. It seems that he killed this man because that's what the war told him to do.

The dancing girl in "Style" is strange and it's creepy that she still finds so much joy in dancing when her entire village, more specifically, her family, is burnt into a crisp.