Pills (symbol)
Pills are a symbol of escape from reality. Every time one of the Marines got a problem connected with sleep issues, anxiety and whatnot, a doctor would say, “take your pills, baby.” “Big orange ones every week,” “little white ones every day,” and “don’t miss a day.” There were so many difficulties, so many horrors that it was next to impossible to cope with them without pills, alcohol or marijuana. Not to lose your mind was the main task. As it proved to be later, it was easier said than done. That was too much even for the toughest people.
A war (allegory)
A war is allegory of uncontrollable violence, the darkness that dwells in corners of a human soul, our capability of being cruel, heartless, and bloodthirsty. When the author was just “a kid looking at war photographs in Life,” the ones that “showed dead people or a lot of dead people lying close together in a field or a street,” he felt both ashamed and entranced. He didn’t have “a language for it then,” but he could remember “the shame” he felt, “like looking at first porn, all the porn in the world.” He could have looked until his “lamps went out.” Wars manage to bring the worst in people easily.
The faces of boys (motif)
A war correspondent’s task is to depict a war, take pictures, and raise awareness. A war correspondent is also a bridge between soldiers and the world. The author wrote about “boys whose lives seemed to have backed up on them.” They needed someone to listen to them and remember their stories, for these were all they had. The soldiers and the author would “talk, sometimes fly together, guys going out on R&R, guys escorting bodies, guys who who’d flipped over into extremes of peace or violence.” They looked at him “over the distance” he knew he’d “never really crossed,” but he tried his best to hear all of them out.
