Spin!

                O’Brien interestingly enough adjusts or structures his writing style in a way so that an ordinary civilian reader can understand certain concepts of war. His explanations seem to go from anywhere from the emotional, physical and mechanical sense of war. He uses metaphorical descriptions on page 31 when he both contrasts and compares an ordinary game of checkers to the Vietnam War. “The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. 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.” Since it is much simpler and comprehensible for ordinary civilians or his audience or readers to visualize a game of checkers, once can imagine how “mysterious” and bleak the overall playing field of the Vietnam War had been, where you could not see the enemy or any progress at all but the darkness of wartime both mentally and physically. The game of checkers is just the opposite of the war and therefore the writing style of this metaphor makes it much more practical for someone who has neither seen nor been in war to understand.

            O’Brien seems to use the same tactic or style when describing just about anything having to do with war. For example an old-poppa-san had been enlisted to guide the men through mine fields out on the Batangan Peninsula the experience is described as “For the whole day we’d troop along after him, tracing his footsteps, playing an exact and ruthless game of follow the leader” (32). Once again an act as horrifying and painfully suspenseful as walking through a mine field is put into simpler terms and described as a “ruthless game of follow the leader. Lastly and perhaps the most powerful example of this writing technique is O’Brien describing how ones memories are a collaboration of stories. For the most straight forward mind this would be a hard concept, however O’Brien represents this as intersections and roadways which are both metaphorical and symbolic of just the simplest of memories. “At the intersection of past and present, the memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets” (33).