The_Soldier_And_The_Stone

The Soldier And The Stone The Soldier and the Stone” War. When a commoner thinks of this word, little is brought to mind. We get an image of a soldier; usually male, dressed in a camouflage uniform, helmet, and creeping through a field undetected by the enemy while carrying their gun. This naivety has kept us in the dark, giving us an altered definition of the word, perhaps to conceal its true form. Only experience can bring someone to complete comprehension of anything. This is O’Brien’s story. Jimmy Cross is the central character in this third-person narrative recollection of the Vietnam War. He is a young Lieutenant who is madly in love with a woman back in the States named Martha. Although she writes to him every week, the passionate love is not returned. In one letter, Martha includes a “simple pebble...smooth...milky-white with flecks of orange and violet” (O’Brien 1106). She found it on the New Jersey shore- “where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated” (1106). Despite the pebbles’ small stature, I believe it to be the central idea of this story. The majority of the story centers soldier, stone, jimmy, martha, story, war, together, things, separated, high, about, yet, tide, think, something, soldiers, shore, read, pebble, much, love, land, image, home, found, felt, death, believe, word, woman, while, through, ted, sea, rest