Borges

Borges is a soldier in the narrator’s infantry company, portrayed through brief but vivid episodes rather than a sustained personal history. He is both an example the narrator follows and a figure whose conduct exposes the disorder surrounding military life: battlefield bravado, violence toward an animal, drug use among soldiers, and a barracks confrontation that dissolves into a night out. The memoir gives no fuller account of his background, but the incidents make him a recurring presence in the narrator’s experiences of risk and camaraderie.

Combat and the Example He Sets

During a patrol along a river, a light infantry brigade hears gunfire and explosions coming from a hamlet across the water. While the brigade takes cover, Borges and the narrator move toward the side from which the shots are coming and watch the opposite bank. It is the narrator’s first day carrying a rifle; he has exchanged his pistol with Yuri for Borges’s rifle, and is looking for someone he might shoot. The shooting soon stops, and the narrator learns that it has not involved his unit.

The narrator has followed Borges’s example, but the two are not treated alike afterward. Borges nearly loses his balance as he slips into a ditch, yet no one reprimands him. The narrator is told to take cover when gunfire starts and, next time, to move in the opposite direction. The account explains the difference by noting that Borges is reenlisting: if he chooses to take risks, that is his business. The moment makes Borges a practical model for the narrator’s impulsive response, while also showing how the same behavior can be judged differently within the unit.

The patrol returns by the same route and stops at an empty house facing the river. A date-palm-covered island lies in the water. North fires an explosive grenade toward it, performing a display whose futility is apparent: the soldiers are on the wrong bank, and North knows he will hit no one. Borges is present in this wider scene of soldiers handling weapons and making spectacle, although the firing is North’s action, not his. The distinction matters in a memoir where proximity to violence does not always mean direct participation.

Violence and the Routine of the Unit

On another day, after the soldiers have inspected houses, Borges shoots a dog directly in the face. The account offers the act without explanation or aftermath, placing it among the day’s otherwise abbreviated events. Its bluntness gives the incident particular force: Borges’s violence is not described as a response to a firefight or as part of an identified tactical action. The text does not supply a motive, and the act remains an abrupt detail in the patrol routine.

That detail sits uneasily beside the earlier episode in which Borges and the narrator move toward apparent gunfire. In the first scene, their exposure is framed as misplaced eagerness and inexperience; in the later one, Borges’s violence is directed at a dog. The memoir does not turn these moments into a formal judgment of his character, but their juxtaposition leaves his conduct inseparable from the everyday proximity of weapons and harm.

Drugs and Comradeship

Borges also enters the narrator’s account of drug use at the base. After a package from Roy has supplied brownies made with marijuana, the narrator and Lessing become heavily intoxicated. Burnes and Borges come in as the narrator is taking Percocet. The narrator urges Lessing to try a pill, then Burnes and Borges say they will take Percocet because the narrator is offering. He redirects them toward the brownies instead. The passage establishes that Borges is present and willing to participate in the exchange, but it does not confirm what he ultimately consumes.

The scene sets informal camaraderie against the seriousness of military discipline. The soldiers’ drug use takes place within the base, and the narrator imagines severe punishment as a possibility, yet the encounter itself unfolds through casual offers and refusals among fellow soldiers. Borges appears not as an isolated outsider but as part of a group whose shared routines include both service and intoxication.

The Haussmann Dispute and Its Aftermath

On a Wednesday evening at the Echo Company barracks, Borges begins arguing with Haussmann; the narrator does not know what the dispute is about. Borges tries to stab Haussmann, who gets away and calls for police assistance. North, the officer responsible that night, arrives with police from Killeen rather than military police. The narrator has already urged Haussmann to repair the situation, while Lessing has spoken with Borges. When the officers separate the men for questioning, the narrator supports Haussmann’s account that the incident was a misunderstanding and that nobody had truly tried to stab anyone.

Borges openly rejects that version. From farther down the corridor, where he is with Lessing and another officer, he turns toward the others and shouts that they are lying. The dispute therefore leaves the group with incompatible accounts: the narrator and Haussmann minimize what happened to the police, while Borges publicly says their account is false. The text does not report an arrest or imprisonment. Instead, no one goes to jail, and the group later goes together to Bennigan’s: Borges, Haussmann, Lessing, and the narrator.

Even there, the episode ends on an ordinary, awkward note rather than on a clear reconciliation. Borges tries to flirt with the pregnant waitress and fails; she says she will stop serving him Long Island iced teas. The sequence—from an attempted stabbing, through a contested account to the police, to a restaurant outing—captures the unstable boundary between conflict and companionship in the soldiers’ lives. Borges’s appearances do not resolve into a single explanation of him; they preserve that instability as part of the memoir’s portrait of the unit.