After the prank played on Jorgenson by Azar and O'Brien, I was expecting more wacky things from these guys. In "Night Life," some sarcasm is used to try to liven up such a dreary time for these men: "That was the phrase everyone used: the night life. A language trick. It made things seem tolerable. How's the Nam treating you? one guy would ask, and some other guy would say, Hey, one big party, just living the night life" (page 208). Of course, it wasn't like the nightlife some would have been used to back in the States, full of parties, booze, girls, music, and dancing. But they had to make the best out of the situation they were in. O'Brien calls it "a language trick," so some of the guys would hope that if their ears heard "night life" it would put their hearts into it a little more.
The imagery in this chapter is rich as well. Two weeks at night were described on page 209 as the "purest black you could imagine... the kind of clock-stopping black that God must've had in mind when he sat down to invent blackness." I could see the black, and I know the feeling of not knowing whether my eyes are opened or closed except for the blinking sensation because it's so dark. And we know, because of what happened to Kiowa, that they couldn't flick on their flashlights for fear of giving away the position. So it was absolute darkness; anyone could have lost their mind in a place like that, it just so happened to be Rat Kiley. I could see what he was seeing as "he'd stare at guys who were still okay, the alive guys, and he'd start to picture how they'd look dead. Without arms or legs...." The mind plays some absurd tricks on us, and unfortunitely, like Rat, some just can't recover.
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