United States Army

The US Army is a recurring institution in the novel’s biographies, but the service attached to its name is not uniform: it encompasses the narrator’s account of communications work in Germany, a job applicant’s résumé claim of Vietnam infantry service, and the narrator’s memories of his father as a Second World War soldier. Set beside one another, these records show how military experience can function as personal history, professional qualification, and a source of resentment over who is thought to deserve a job or a living.

Service and Biographical Records

One employment-history entry identifies service as an information specialist in the US Army and says the work taught typing and radio skills. The record places those practical abilities alongside civilian employment and education, presenting military service as training that could be carried into a subsequent working life. The details are specific, but the entry does not explain the duties beyond the occupational label and the skills acquired.

Another résumé makes a substantially different claim: its applicant describes himself as an infantryman in the US Army, serving in Vietnam from 1968 to 1971. The adjoining personal history presents him as married with three nearly grown children, active in church and community life, and formerly a Boy Scout scoutmaster. In this résumé, military service sits within a broader portrait of settled responsibility. The account is important not as evidence that every military record in the novel is reliable, but as a claim that the narrator later disputes when he encounters Vietnam service in a competitor’s résumé.

A further career profile says its applicant earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from West Texas University Extension while serving as an enlisted man in the US Army, with two tours between 1963 and 1971. That profile also records a high-school diploma, a later master’s degree earned through night school, and an ongoing part-time doctorate. The combination of enlistment, continuing education, and successive qualifications constructs a long record of self-improvement. The profile belongs to the résumé material the narrator scrutinizes; it should not be conflated with his own account of serving in Germany.

The Narrator’s Account of Germany

The narrator explicitly says that he was never in Vietnam. His own account places his Army service in Germany after boot camp, in a communications platoon at a small base east of Munich, on a tall, pine-covered hill that he supposes was a foothill of the Alps. The platoon’s stated practical responsibility was to keep its radio equipment in working order in case the Russians attacked, although the narrator says most of the men did not believe an attack would happen.

He recalls the eighteen months there as largely spent drinking beer in Munich, which some of the men called Mootown. His account includes a small distinction in military slang: in Vietnam, soldiers called a kilometer a click, while the men in Germany continued to call it a K, though the Vietnam usage was spreading into Europe too. The episode grounds his service in a particular place, communications work, and a joking barracks vocabulary rather than combat. It also establishes the contrast on which his later reaction depends: he has Army experience, but not the Vietnam experience claimed by the résumé he resents.

Military Service as a Contested Credential

When the narrator reads that another candidate served in Vietnam, he reacts with irritation. He links that claim to a question of entitlement, wondering whether a veteran’s service is being offered as special pleading for employment decades later. His response is not detached assessment: the applicant’s record becomes personal competition, and the narrator’s own noncombat service sharpens his hostility toward the implied advantage of combat experience.

The novel also places this resentment beside the narrator’s assertion that, before shooting Herbert Everly, he had never seen a person dead through violence. His Germany service had not prepared him for that experience. The contrast matters because a résumé can make military categories appear decisive—infantryman, information specialist, Vietnam veteran—while the narrator’s account emphasizes the gap between those labels and what a person has actually seen or done. His anger at the other applicant’s claim does not erase the difference between their records; it makes that difference part of his judgment of the man.

Family Memory and Narrative Significance

The narrator’s thoughts about the possibility of killing bring another Army history into view. He imagines wanting to ask his father how a person knows beforehand whether he can kill, because his father had been an infantryman in the Second World War. In the narrator’s recollection, his father saw action during the final advance across France into Germany in 1944–45 and had shot at, wounded, and probably killed men wearing dark gray wool. The narrator describes his father as calm about that experience in retrospect, but says he cannot ask him: his father died at sixty-three after cigarettes and lung cancer caught up with him.

The three service histories therefore carry different narrative weight. The father’s wartime past offers the narrator a possible point of comparison for killing, but death makes the desired conversation impossible. The narrator’s own Army service supplies a concrete counter-record to a competitor’s claim of Vietnam combat. The résumé profiles, meanwhile, show military service being recorded among qualifications that may influence an employer’s view of a candidate. The US Army is not presented through an institutional overview; it enters through these personal accounts, whose discrepancies and uses reveal how military history can be remembered, advertised, and turned into a measure of standing.