Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If I Die in a Combat Zone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Evils of the Vietnam War
Courage
Duty vs. Conscience
The Enemy
Racism at War
Summary
Analysis
At night, a lieutenant shouts “incoming” as grenades and gunfire burst along the edge of their perimeter. O’Brien and several others dive into a foxhole. When the noise settles, a soldier shows Mad Mark his bleeding hand, where a piece of grenade shrapnel hit him. Mad Mark thinks he’ll be fine. In the morning, they all discover that there was no attack: a few American soldiers were bored and decided to play a prank, faking an ambush. One of pranksters, referred to as “Turnip Head,” is the man with shrapnel in his hand. Bates thinks Turnip Head is lucky his grenade didn’t bounce back to him and kill him. Chip says the soldiers are “nutty” for taking stupid chances.
The soldiers’ decision to play a prank with real bullets and real grenades suggests that many of them possess poor judgment, inflicting unnecessary danger on their comrades in an already stressful environment. Turnip Head’s self-inflicted injury, as a result of his own prank, could have ended in someone’s death, which demonstrates how people in the Vietnam War can die in random, senseless ways. However, Bates’s and Chip’s irritation shows that some soldier possess more common sense.
Themes
The soldiers march on, each carrying a rucksack, grenades, bullets, rifle, helmet, dogtags, and their own fat, muscle, and flesh. They walk carefully, looking for mines as they step. The squad leader orders a five-minute break but advises his men to watch where they sit down. They keep marching until the end of the day, then they dig foxholes and lay out their ponchos.
O’Brien’s list of gear and weight suggests that the soldiers carry heavy burdens—both physical and emotional—as they hike through the Vietnamese jungle. This gear list forms the symbolic basis of O’Brien’s fictionalized memoir, The Things They Carried, which he writes two decades later.
Themes
O’Brien, Bates, Barney, and Chip look through a “starlight scope,” a new night-vision device developed by the government. They look into the dark jungle, listening for sounds of Viet Cong. Chip jokes that he can see a peep show amid the trees. In reality, there’s nothing out there: the night is less alive than they imagine it to be. Bates thinks that being able to see during a pitch-black night feels evil. Chip and Barney go to sleep. Bates and O’Brien wait up awhile, then pack the scope back into its case and fall asleep as well, Bates cradling his rifle.
The empty jungle contrasts with the soldiers’ fantasies of what hunts them in the darkness, suggesting that their own imaginations can be as much of an enemy as the actual Viet Cong, making the darkness more fearsome than it actually needs to be. In this way, the Viet Cong wage a kind of invisible though ever-present psychological warfare on the American soldiers. Bates falls asleep cradling his rifle, evoking the image of a child with a blanket or doll, suggesting that his weapon is his sole source of comfort at night.
Themes
