O’Brien explains that stories can bring the dead back to life through the act of remembering. He describes the first dead body he saw in Vietnam, that of an old Vietnamese man. Others in the platoon spoke to the corpse in a mildly mocking way, but O’Brien could not even go near the body. The men proposed a toast to the dead man, but O’Brien would not join in. He tells Kiowa that the dead man reminded him of a girl he used to know.
O’Brien then segues into the story of a particular girl named Linda. Though O’Brien was only nine years old at the time, he believed he was in love with Linda, also age nine. He believed that their love was a mature love, not childish love. In spring of 1956, young O’Brien escorted Linda on their first date, chaperoned by O’Brien’s parents. They went to a World War II movie whose premise was tricking the Germans by dumping the corpse of a soldier in a British officer’s uniform and planting misleading documents on him. The premise upset O’Brien but he saw Linda smiling at the screen.
Linda began wearing the red cap she wore on their date to school, and her classmates teased her about it. O’Brien wishes that he would have stood up to her main instigator, Nick Veenhof, but he didn’t. During class, Nick returned to his desk after sharpening his pencil and deliberately pulled off Linda’s cap. Most of her hair was gone, and she wore a large bandage covering stitches across the back of her head. Linda suffered from a tumor in her brain, and she lived only through that summer. Nick told O’Brien that she had died, and O’Brien left school and went home. At home, he closed his eyes and tried to make her come back to life. In his mind, he saw her and she was healthy. She asked him why he was crying, and he answered that it was because she was dead. She told him to stop crying because it did not matter.
O’Brien then recalls how in Vietnam they had also had ways to make the dead seem alive again through the way they walked and thought about the dead. They kept the dead alive with stories, like the stories of Ted Lavender’s death and those Rat Kiley told and embellished.
Returning to his memory of Linda, O’Brien describes how his father took him to the funeral home to view the body. O’Brien recalls how he made up stories so that Linda would appear in his dreams. They would talk and walk and ice skate in his dreams, and Linda would offer insights into life and death. At age 43, O’Brien still dreams Linda alive and he can see her in his dreams, as he can see Kiowa and Ted Lavender and others. Middle-aged O’Brien, a successful writer, realizes that he is trying to save his childhood self, Timmy, with a story.
