O'Brien offers his readers a series of fragmented scenes, like verbal snapshots, as a way to comment on the act of memory (in general) and on the act of remembering the Vietnam War (specifically). He presents the war as an event marked by the disorder of anti-war demonstration and military mismanagement. This mode of fragmented expression, the medium O'Brien chooses to use in this chapter and in the novel over all, is the message. That is, the nature of memory is fragmentary; people do not tend to remember an event in a narrative beginning-to-end fashion. Rather, O'Brien suggests that "what sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end."
O'Brien demonstrates this fragmentation by hopping between a wide variety of stories — the Vietnamese guide, Mitchell Sanders mailing his lice, Ted Lavender adopting a puppy — within the space of few pages. Also note this fragmenting effect on the chapter level of the novel; the novel is not marked by a continuity in which one chapter flows logically into the next, as is the form in traditional narrative novels or autobiographies. O'Brien does not set the path of memory and remembering as one that can be traversed easily (which O'Brien demonstrates through the metaphor of the minefield and his mention of the nightly checkers game). War, and by extension, memory of war and storytelling about war, is not orderly, and its meaning is not able to be captured through a pedestrian beginning-to-end narration.
