69 pages • 2 hours read
Tim O'BrienA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
This section presents terms and phrases that are central to understanding the text and may present a challenge to the reader. Use this list to create a vocabulary quiz or worksheet, to prepare flashcards for a standardized test, or to inspire classroom word games and other group activities.
1. rucksack (noun):
a backpack, usually made of strong, waterproof material and used for hiking
“They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack.” (“The Things They Carried,” Page 9)
2. SOP (abbreviation):
Standard Operating Procedure
“Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier.” (“The Things They Carried,” Page 10)
3. grunts (informal noun):
a low-ranking soldier
“As PFCs or Spec 4 s, most of them were common grunts and carried the standard M-16 gas-operated assault rifle.” (“The Things They Carried,” Page 12)
4. paddies (plural noun):
a field where rice is grown
“When dark came, they would move out single file across the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night waiting.” (“The Things They Carried,” Page 15)
5. VC (abbreviation):
Vietcong, a member of the communist guerilla movement in Vietnam that opposed the South Vietnamese and US forces in the Vietnam War
“It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen.” (“The Things They Carried,” Page 17)
6. monotony (noun):
lack of variety; tedious repetition
“I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies.” (“Spin,” Page 33)
7. pacifist (noun):
a person who believes that war and violence are unjustifiable
“The government had ended most graduate school deferments; the waiting lists for the National Guard and Reserves were impossibly long; my health was solid; I didn’t qualify for CO status—no religious grounds, no history as a pacifist.” (“On the Rainy River,” Page 40)
8. reticence (noun):
not revealing one’s thoughts readily; remaining silent
“To an extent, I suppose, his reticence was typical of that part of Minnesota, where privacy still held value, and even if I’d been walking around with some horrible deformity—four arms and three heads—I’m sure the old man would’ve talked about everything except those extra arms and heads.” (“On the Rainy River,” Page 45)
9. foxholes (plural noun):
holes in the ground used by troops as shelters against enemy fire or as a place to fire from
“He dug his foxholes on the far side of the perimeter; he kept his back covered; he avoided situations that might put the two of them alone together.” (“Enemies,” Page 53)
10. ambushes (plural noun):
a surprise attack by people lying in wait in a hidden position
“Over the next month they often teamed up on ambushes.” (“Friends,” Page 55)
11. villes (plural informal noun):
a vietnamese village
“He gets all teary telling about the good times they had together, how her brother made the war seem almost fun, always raising hell and lighting up villes and bringing smoke to bear every which way.” (“How to Tell a True War Story,” Page 57)
12. LP (abbreviation):
listening Post; a position set up at night outside the perimeter away from the main body of troopers, which acted as an early warning system against attack
“We’re talking regulation, by-the-book LPAGE These six guys, they don’t say boo for a solid week. They don’t got tongues. All ears.” (“How to Tell a True War Story,” Page 60)
13. LZ (abbreviation):
landing Zone
“The trees were thick; it took nearly an hour to cut an LZ for the dustoff.” (“How to Tell a True War Story,” Page 65)
14. hootches (plural informal noun):
shelters or improvised dwellings
“At one end was a small dirt helipad; at the other end, in a rough semicircle, the mess hall and medical hootches overlooked a river called the Song Tra Bong.” (“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” Page 74)
15. Greenies (plural informal noun):
short for Green Berets, members of the U.S. Army Special Forces
“Secretive and suspicious, loners by nature, the six Greenies would sometimes vanish for days at a time, or even weeks, then late in the night they would just as magically reappear, moving like shadows through the moonlight, filing in silently from the dense rain forest off to the west.” (“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” Page 75)
16. eccentricity (noun):
the quality of being unconventional and slightly strange
“It was his one eccentricity. The pantyhose, he said, had the properties of a good-luck charm.” (“Stockings,” Page 94)
17. monks (plural noun):
members of a religious community of men typically living under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience
“Or almost abandoned, because a pair of monks lived there in a tar paper shack, tending a small garden and some broken shrines.” (“Church,” Page 96)
18. cadres (plural noun):
groups of activists in a communist or other revolutionary organization
“The means for this were arranged, perhaps, through the village liberation cadres, and in 1964 the young man began attending classes at the university of Saigon, where he avoided politics and paid attention to he problems of calculus.” (“The Man I Killed,” Page 103)
19. hamlet (noun):
a small settlement, generally one smaller than a village
“Most of the hamlet had burned down, including her house, which was now smoke, and the girl danced with her eyes half closed, her feet bare.” (“Style,” Page 109)
20. humping (progressive verb):
marching or hiking while carrying a rucksack
“The routine, daily stuff—just humping, just enduring—but that was worth something, wasn’t it? (“Speaking of Courage,” Page 114)
21. bivouacked (past tense verb):
to stay in a temporary camp without cover
“Then he would have told about the night they bivouacked in a field along the Song Tra Bong.” (“Speaking of Courage,” Page 116)
22. quaint (adjective):
attractively unusual or old-fashioned
“The pair of mud hens floated like wooden decoys, and the water-skiers looked tanned and athletic, and the high school band was packing up its instruments, and the woman in pedal pushers patiently rebaited her hook for another try. Quaint, he thought.” (“Speaking of Courage,” Page 118)
23. monsoons (plural noun):
a seasonal prevailing wind in the region of South and Southeast Asia, blowing from the southwest between May and September and bringing rain (the wet monsoon), or from the northeast between October and April (the dry monsoon)
“Off to the west there was thunder, soft little moaning sounds, and the monsoons seemed to be a lasting element of the war.” (“In the Field,” Page 130)
24. shrapnel (noun):
fragments of a bomb, shell, or other object thrown out by an explosion
“Kiowa came sliding to the surface. A piece of his shoulder was missing; the arms and chest and face were cut up with shrapnel.” (“In the Field,” Page 139)
25. condolences (plural noun):
an expression of sympathy, especially on the occasion of a death
“In his head he was revising the letter to Kiowa’s father. Impersonal this time. An officer expressing an officer’s condolences.” (“In the Field,” Page 140)
26. dustoff (noun):
a military term for the emergency patient evacuation of casualties or the wounded from a combat zone
“Rat Kiley went through the kid’s pockets, placed his personal effects in a plastic bag, taped the bag to Kiowa’s wrist, then used the radio to call in a dustoff.” (“In the Field,” Page 139)
27. bungled (past tense verb):
to carry out a task clumsily or incompetently, leading to failure or an unsatisfactory outcome
“To make it worse, he bungled the patch job, and a couple of weeks later my ass started to rot away.” (“The Ghost Soldiers,” Page 152)
28. superstitious (adjective):
having an unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event
“On the other hand, I’d already been hit with two bullets; I was superstitious; I believed in the odds with the same passion that my friend Kiowa had once belied in Jesus Christ, or the way Mitchell Sanders believed in the power of morals.” (“The Ghost Soldiers,” Page 153)
29. klicks (informal noun):
kilometers
“All alone, he just takes off, hikes a couple of klicks, finds himself a river and strips down and hops in and starts doing the goddamn breast stroke or some such fine shit.” (“The Ghost Soldiers,” Page 155)
30. NVA (abbreviation):
North Vietnamese Army
“The platoon had been working an AO out in the foothills west of Quang Ngai City, and for some time they’d been receiving intelligence about an NVA buildup in the area.” (“Night Life,” Page 173)
31. vouch (verb):
confirm that something is true as a result of one’s own experience
“Lieutenant Cross went over and said he’d vouch that it was an accident.” (“Night Life,” Page 176)
By Tim O'Brien
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