Burnes

Burnes is a private and Army medic whose studious habits and wary intelligence distinguish him from the military culture around him. His service brings him into moments of urgent care and moments of intoxication, making him a figure through whom the memoir shows how practical competence and disorder coexist in the same soldier.

Identity and Background

Burnes serves as one of two enlisted medics associated with Bravo, under Sergeant Shoo. The narrator considers him a good man, but also judges him perhaps too clever for the Army: its stupidity seems to wear on him. In contrast to the exuberant, heavy-metal-loving Yuri, Burnes tends to keep to himself. His free time goes to differential calculus and Icehouse beer, an unlikely pairing that captures both his intellectual ambition and his ordinary barracks routine.

Burnes is in his early thirties, an age that makes him seem distinctly old to the younger soldiers around him. He is contemplating a career in politics, a plan that sits at an angle to the institution he currently serves. The memoir gives no account of whether he pursues that ambition; instead, it introduces him through the gap between his evident intelligence and the military environment he finds wearing.

Care During the Humvee Rescue

A few days after Christmas, an improvised bomb tore apart a second-platoon Military Humvee and set it on fire. The soldiers escaped, but a journalist remained unconscious on the back seat, badly injured and trapped beside the ammunition box. Sergeant Thorpe went back into the burning vehicle to pull him out, believing that he was under fire; the sounds were actually ammunition exploding. Thorpe got the journalist out and was struck in the inner thigh by a stray round, a superficial wound.

Burnes, the second platoon’s medic, treated the journalist’s severe facial and upper-body burns and kept him alive until he could be evacuated by helicopter. The journalist survived, though he was later found to have brain injuries. The narrator credits Burnes with doing good work, distinguishing the medic’s effective care from the rescue itself: Thorpe’s courage saved the journalist from the burning vehicle, and Burnes’s treatment carried that rescue through to evacuation.

Intoxication, Tolerance, and Barracks Conflict

Burnes also appears within the unit’s drug culture, where his reserve does not mean abstention. When the narrator and Lessing returned to base furious after a difficult day, they ate potent marijuana brownies sent by Roy and became so impaired that the narrator imagined almost anyone who encountered them might send them to prison or have them summarily executed. He makes an exception for Borges and Burnes: their presence, in his view, would not have brought that kind of punishment. Burnes and Borges came in as the narrator was taking Percs; after he first encouraged Lessing to try one, the narrator offered the newcomers the brownies instead. The scene presents Burnes as part of a small circle in which drug use could be visible without automatically becoming a report to command.

During a recovery day, Burnes told the narrator about an earlier episode from his civilian working life: while smoking marijuana at a job at Boston airport, he had driven a tanker truck into an airplane. The account arrives as he and the narrator are both high. Burnes takes a puff from a Miami cigarette and drinks coffee, a matter-of-fact gesture that places his stories of past recklessness alongside the routine of their present barracks life. His intellectual habits do not make him an observer standing outside the disorder; he participates in it, and can describe his own past carelessness without turning it into a cautionary tale.

That routine is abruptly threatened when Shoo tells the men they must stop smoking in their room. The narrator calls this the worst news and explains that he and Burnes smoke about four packs of Miami cigarettes a day. Burnes initially treats the announcement as a joke and protests that it is unreasonable. Shoo explains that a new private, Branson, is moving in; the order is therefore tied to the arrival of a newcomer, not to any change in Burnes’s habits or a newly described enforcement campaign. The narrator’s emphasis on the daily quantity makes the rule feel less like an abstract regulation than an interruption to an entrenched shared practice.

Burnes’s reaction to Branson turns that irritation into open confrontation. When Branson looks around the room without appearing concerned by the tension, Burnes challenges him angrily and presses Shoo not to impose the arrangement. The episode gives Burnes a sharper public presence than the solitary student introduced earlier: he can keep to himself, yet he is also willing to speak forcefully when the established barracks routine is disrupted. Across these scenes, his competence as a medic and his participation in intoxication remain side by side, without the memoir resolving them into a simple contrast between responsible caregiver and reckless soldier.

The Standard of Care

Burnes’s successful treatment of the journalist gains added weight beside the narrator’s later account of treating a wounded man in the field. The two episodes do not involve Burnes in the same scene; together, however, they show how differently medical work could unfold under pressure. The narrator packs gauze into the wound, covers it with a plastic bag and tape, and asks Sullivan to hold the dressing while he searches for an exit wound. He cannot find one, cannot establish an intravenous line because the man’s veins are flat, and admits afterward that he should have used more gauze and positioned the patient differently. Where Burnes is credited with keeping a badly burned journalist alive until a helicopter evacuation, the narrator’s account is shaped by uncertainty and by a precise inventory of what he failed to do.

That inventory does not end with the wound. The narrator describes the wounded man’s eyes rolling upward as he tries to decide what care to provide, then recalls the man’s family gathered around the body after he dies. An older woman repeatedly throws earth over her head and strikes her face against the ground; a pregnant young woman joins her, while two boys cry. When Sullivan later tells the narrator that the older woman was killed by friendly fire that morning, the news confirms that the scene of care and grief has also become a scene of further loss. Burnes is not present in this sequence, but its stark difference from the journalist’s survival clarifies the significance of the narrator’s praise: competent care matters in circumstances where neither effort nor responsibility can guarantee a good outcome.

Burnes’s portrait therefore resists a simple opposition between the reliable medic and the disorderly soldier. His work for the journalist is presented as effective and consequential, while his barracks life includes heavy smoking, marijuana, and the angry challenge to Branson. The memoir does not treat one side as canceling the other. Instead, Burnes remains a capable caregiver and a participant in the same precarious, compromised military life that surrounds him.