Chapter 3 Summary

Even with all the horrors of war, Tim remembers there were also some good times. During one, Azar gave a candy bar to a little boy with a plastic leg; during another, Mitchell Sanders mailed an envelope of his own body lice to the draft board in Ohio. He remembers Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing checkers, and how the checkers seemed to take on significance.

At 43, Tim says that he is a writer now, and that the war gets harder to remember with the passage of time, but the bad things that happened seem to replay over and over. But, he notes, it wasn't all that way.

For instance, he remembers how when Ted Lavendar was high on tranquilizers, he would be very happy and mellow. Or the time they got an old Vietnamese man to guide them through a mine field...