Lockhart

Lockhart is a corporal living on an Iraqi base, where the narrator presents him through two closely connected aspects of barracks life: his place among a small, overlooked group of soldiers and his participation with Jeffries in making recordings of mice being killed. Away from the base, his marriage is deteriorating. His wife becomes emotionally distant, parties and works as a dancer in Killeen, spends his money, and tells him about an affair. Together, these details make Lockhart a portrait of disconnection: his home life is increasingly remote, while the conduct he shares with Jeffries brings deliberate cruelty into the confined world of the barracks.

Identity and Life on the Base

Lockhart is a corporal who lives in a small room with the private first class Jeffries and the private first class Haussmann. Their quarters are across from the narrator’s, inconspicuous enough to escape notice unless someone knows to look for them. The three men have lived there throughout the year, and none has spent much time away from the base. The room’s obscurity and the residents’ limited movement give Lockhart a place at the edge of the soldiers’ shared life rather than at its center.

Lockhart and Jeffries are described as particularly slight, and both have been assigned menial duties in the company arms room. Haussmann is also part of the room’s social arrangement, though the narrator distinguishes him from the two corporals’ companions: he complains constantly, is left alone by others, and repeatedly asks to move to another room without success. The account does not describe Lockhart as similarly isolated through complaint. Instead, it locates him alongside Jeffries through their shared work, music, and treatment of animals.

Conduct with Jeffries

Lockhart and Jeffries listen frequently to My Chemical Romance and repeatedly complain about Lockhart’s wife. Their talk about the marriage sits beside a more disturbing shared pastime: they catch the mice that are common in the building and make staged recordings of killing them. The narrator has seen one of the videos, made in an empty ammunition box, and reports that the two men produced numerous recordings. The account avoids presenting this as an isolated incident; the ready supply of mice and the men’s descriptions of other videos suggest a repeated practice.

Their repertoire, as they describe it, includes several different ways of killing mice, and they treat the recordings as something to recount and compare. The narrator’s description establishes the basic circumstances without making the animals’ suffering the subject of spectacle: the important fact is that Lockhart and Jeffries repeatedly turn the killing into entertainment. Their position as soldiers assigned to the arms room gives the setting a pointed military backdrop, but the account does not claim that the army ordered or sanctioned their behavior.

Marriage and Distance

In Killeen, Texas, Lockhart’s wife has become more emotionally distant since he left for Iraq. She parties frequently, works as a dancer, spends his money, and has an affair with a man named Dale. She tells Lockhart about the affair in considerable detail. The narration emphasizes both the distance between them and the unusual directness with which she communicates what is happening, without explaining her motives beyond noting that her conduct has a vindictive quality.

The narrator also places this marital account beside Lockhart’s treatment of mice. That juxtaposition complicates any simple division between an injured husband and a cruel soldier: the wife’s behavior is described as hurtful, but Lockhart’s own participation in the recordings remains part of the same portrait. The narrator adds that his wife is attractive and that Lockhart spends his time killing mice, a comparison that draws attention to the marriage’s antagonism without turning either person into a complete explanation for the other.

Narrative Role

Lockhart appears in a brief, sharply observed portrait rather than in a sustained account of his personal history. The narrator can describe his room, routines, and videos, and can report what is happening in Killeen, but the evidence does not provide Lockhart’s own account of the marriage or of the recordings. His characterization is therefore assembled from visible habits and reported circumstances, not from an extended explanation of his inner life.

The portrait’s force comes from its arrangement of ordinary details against acts of cruelty: music, company duties, complaints about a spouse, and a small room sit alongside repeated staged killings. The marriage extends that sense of disconnection beyond the base, but does not resolve it. Lockhart’s wife is distant, the room’s residents are largely confined to the installation, and the narrator offers no later outcome for either the relationship or Lockhart’s conduct. The character remains defined by this uneasy conjunction of domestic estrangement and barracks violence.