Killing Summary and Analysis

Marlantes opens Chapter 2 explaining that is often asked what it was like to kill someone. Or, alternatively, sometimes people would come to him and say that they imagine it must have felt awful to kill someone.

The answer to the question is not easy, he explains. Most of the time when he was killing in combat, he felt either nothing or a kind of exhilaration. This was not the answer most people wanted to hear, he acknowledges, and he hesitated giving it when he returned from Vietnam afraid he would appear to be indifferent or overzealous, as some protestors of the war portrayed those who fought in it.

Looking back after several years, Marlantes writes that he mostly feels sadness over the killing he has done. He relates a story where he was on a hillside in Vietnam with one other...