Thesis for a trivial essay

How did Love affect the soldiers during the Vietnam War?

One of the major themes of this novel is, love. All of the soldiers mentioned in the book experience some aspect of love or lack there of. The soldiers yearn for love, affection and female company, someone to be there for them and give them a sense of normality, an anchor in the chaos of war. We will further examine the effects of "love" on the soldiers attitudes and actions in the War.

Passage re-write page 210

And now, finally, the bear was out. We slipped back to our stations and went to work again on the nets. Louder now, more persistent. Moonlight sparkled in the barbed wire, and there were eerie reflections and layerings of shadow, and the big white stars added some resonance. There was no breeze. The night was absolute. Slowly we carried the ammo cans closer to the bear’s cave, and this, in addition to the moon, gave a sense of impending threat, the slow belly-down crawl of evil. At three in the morning Azar set off the first trip flare. There was a light popping noise, then a fizzle out in front of the cave. The night seemed to cut itself in half. The white flare burned ten paces from the bear’s lair. I fired off three more flares and it was instant daylight. Then the bear moved. He made a short, low snarl- not even a snarl, really just a short sniffled whimper- and there was a distorted sequence as he sprung sideways and tumbled toward a heap of leaves and cowered there and hugged himself and waited. “There,” I whispered “Now you know.”