“O’Brien” offers in his memoirs a group of related fragments of stories, or memory snapshots. He recalls Mitchell Sanders mailing his body lice to his local draft board. He remembers Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins’s nightly checkers games. “O’Brien” narrates what it is like to sit at his typewriter and remember these episodes from his experiences in Vietnam, and what it is like to read what he has written about them. He recalls the bad memories, and he recalls the good memories, such as those of the old Vietnamese man who led his unit through a dangerous minefield.
“O’Brien” continues to think about his memories from the vantage of being a writer. His daughter wonders why he writes about Vietnam, but these stories and fragments stick in his memory and bring his past into the present of his life. Finally he suggests that stories will remain, even when memory of what actually happened is erased.
