Spare Parts

In Chapter 5, Williams is still worried about training. During his eight weeks of LAV school, he only spends two days on the firing range. He says the curriculum is faulty because there simply wasn’t enough time to train Marines fully. He is told he will get the training he needs back at his unit, but Williams wonders why they don’t get the training at the school, where they are supposed to receive it. This is one of many times he wonders how Marine Corps training could be better. Seeing combat-trained Marines fire the LAV guns makes Williams realize just how inadequate his training is, a theme that will become even more clear when they are sent to war.

Williams also begins to see shades of racism at LAV school. All Marines are considered “green” as their color, so African-Americans are “dark green” and Caucasians are “light-green.” But with Poole, Williams realizes the truth: they aren’t all the same color. Poole prefers partnering with black Marines, often ignoring Williams and the others from his home unit. He disrespects Moss and treats the other white soldiers with contempt.

Williams also see Edsar and Frye making fun of Asian-Americans with their kung-fu theater. Williams is competing with Corporal Chin for graduate honors. He describes Chin as a loner who isolates himself, and though Williams does admit that maybe Chin doesn’t appreciate the other’s cultural satire, he does not acknowledge the shades of racism he shows toward Chin and Poole, only that he wants to outperform Chin to take graduate honors and that Poole never gave Williams a chance to like him, showing that even the author of the book might have blind spots when it comes to racism. 

In the final part of the chapter, Iraq invades Kuwait, and the first part of the war begins. Williams is telling the reader here what he should have realized all along: that Marines are trained to kill, so when the war begins, they will be going, and killing.

In Chapter 6, Williams is finally faced with going to war, and what might happen there. Signing his last will and testament forces Williams to face what being a Marine really means. After visiting his father and brother’s graves, Williams decides he cannot dishonor his brother—he is still following in his footsteps.

At the formation in which friends and family see their loved ones off, Williams believes he is going to make the world a safer place. He sees the little brothers standing in the crowd—a reference to his love for Lenny—and thinks he is keeping them from having to fight when they are older. Only later, Williams hints here, does he realize that every generation before him had thought the same thing, and all of them were wrong. He will learn through combat that the world will always be at war, men will always fight, and someone will always have to die because of it. He is telling the reader he wishes he would have known that before he went to combat, and that he wishes he could change it now.

Some of the men in his unit do not show up, claiming dying relatives or uncooperative employers. Williams however, has a clear conscience, but he includes this section to show how great the fear of war is. Even Marines get scared, Williams is saying, and war is the scariest thing of all.

Once again, gear and training become an important element of the chapter. The LAVs are sent ahead to Saudi Arabia, so Williams and the other members of the unit cannot train realistically. Williams lists their gear and pre-maintenance checks to show how important the LAVs are, but without them, their training is inadequate. They are also not issued all the gear they need, so Williams buys his own, demonstrating that the Marine Corps is not taking care of them in the way it is supposed to, which lowers morale and makes Williams wonder what other ways the Marine Corps is being negligent.

The most important aspect of their training, however, is the Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical training they undergo. The commanders know that Saddam Hussein has chemical agents he has used in the past, and they want to make sure Williams and his unit are prepared. During a brief demonstration in which they are gassed, Williams and the others get the message of how important their NBC gear is to them, but Williams thinks of the contradiction here: their gear is all-important, but they don’t have all of it. Training is all-important, but they don’t get the right kind of training, or enough of it.  

Conflict between Marines appears again when Williams’s unit gets in a fight with active-duty Marines, who call them “spare parts.” That same night, a corpsman slits his own wrist in an attempt to get out of the war, showing the inner conflict they are all going through, and how that inner conflict can translate to conflict with others, as well as a desire to escape so great that fear takes over.

The theme of toughness and mental attitude appear one more time as well, when the Marines are given a four-day pass to be with their families. For Williams, the time passes far too quickly, and takes him out of the mental state he needs to be in for combat. His family, he says, makes him weak, when he needs to be strong: “it softened me, just when I needed to be at my hardest” (163).