How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
It's the randomness that makes your head this way, living the Russian-roulette lifestyle every minute of the day. Mortars falling out of the sky, random. Rockets, lob bombs, IEDs, all random. Once on OP Billy was pulling night watch and felt a sick little pop just off the bridge of his nose, which was, he realized as he tumbled backward, the snap of a bullet breaking the sound barrier as it passed. Inches. Not even that. Fractions, atoms, and it was all this random, whether you stopped at the piss tube this minute or the next, or skipped seconds at chow, or were curled to the left in your bunk instead of the right, or where you lined up in column, that was a big one. At first they were hitting the lead Humvee, then they switched to number two, then it was a toss-up between two, three, and four, then they went back to one, and don't even talk about the never-ending mindfuck debate as to your odds in any particular seat inside the vehicle, on any given day it could be anything, anywhere. "You can dodge an RPG," he said to a reporter a couple of days ago. He hadn't meant to reveal such a fraught and intimate fact, and felt cheap, as if he'd divulged a shameful family secret, but there it was, you can dodge an RPG, that damn crazy thing lamely fluttering at you, spitting and smoking like a cheap Mexican firework, tttttthhhhhhhpppppfffffftttt-FOOOM! What he'd meant to say, been trying to say, is that it's not a lie, sometimes it really happens in slow-motion time, his ultimate point being just how strange and surreal your own life can be. Lately he thinks he could have tapped it as it flew by, sent it spinning off to nowhere like thumping a balloon instead of merely dodging as it sputtered past on its way to making such a christfuck mess back there. What's happening now isn't nearly as real as that, eating this meal, holding this fork, lifting this glass, the realest things in the world these days are the things in his head. (Virtue.10)
There it is, again: the randomness of warfare. It seems like, to Billy, that's the worst part of war, hands down. Not the fighting, not the weather, not the job…but the not knowing. Everything is ultimately out of his control.
Quote #5
Everything is so clean. Iraq is trash, dust, rubble, rot and bubbling open sewers, plus these maddening microscopic grains of sand that razor their way into every orifice of the human body. Lately he's noticed the crud is even in his lungs. It whines when he takes a deep breath, a faint screeching down there like bagpipes playing deep in the valley, and he wonders if it's a permanent thing or just a temporary backup in the filtration system. (Virtue.99)
How much of this is because Iraq is at war, and how much is because it's the freakin' desert? Would Iraq be so miserable if it weren't for the war?
Quote #6
The war is out there somewhere but Billy can't feel it, like his sole experience with morphine when he could not feel pain. At one point he even tried as an experiment, stared at his cut-up arms and legs thinking hurt, but the notion simply gassed into thin air. That's how the war feels now, it is at most a presence or pressure on his mind, awareness without content, an experiential doughnut hole. (Virtue.129)
This is kind of like how you can't remember pain. You can remember that something hurt, and that you were in pain, but it's not like you can recall the pain itself. Thankfully, for Billy, the war is the same way: he can remember it, but he can't exactly feel it. His brain is apparently self-medicating.