"Some things they carried in
common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which
weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took
up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded
or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs,
Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple
Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried
diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and
leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land
itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered
their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere,
they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all
of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took
sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just
the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost."
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They
Carried, 1990
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