Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 1: “Redeployment”
Story 2: “Frago”
Story 3: “After Action Report”
Story 4: “Bodies”
Story 5: “OIF”
Story 6: “Money As a Weapons System”
Story 7: “In Vietnam They Had Whores”
Story 8: “Prayer in the Furnace”
Story 9: “Psychological Operations”
Story 10: “War Stories”
Story 11: “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound”
Story 12: “Ten Kliks South”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaStory 11: “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 11 Summary: “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound”
The narrator is woken by a phone call from Kevin Boylan, his old captain in the Marines. Boylan says he is coming to New York to “get blacked the fuck out” (237). He just got back from Afghanistan. The narrator tells Boylan that he got a job with a law firm, and Boylan is proud of him, saying that he made the right choice when he got out. The narrator thinks about how easy his experience had been: “My Iraq was a stack of papers. Excel Spreadsheets. A window full of sandbags behind a cheap desk” (238).
After they hang up, he reads a document on his computer, a citation about Sergeant Julian Deme. He wrote it and tears up a little while reading its opening description of Deme’s bravery. He says that Deme is why Boylan is calling but that someone named James Vockler is why he answered the phone when Boylan called.
The narrator is an adjutant on his second deployment. Boylan is a lieutenant who asks him for help writing a citation for Deme after he is shot and killed while trying to pull Marines out of an ambush. Boylan writes a terrible citation for him, and the narrator offers to help.
