Tim O’Brien talks about death in different ways. In the second vignette he makes a statement about the death of a soldier’s puppy. He says, “Ted Lavender adopting an orphan puppy- feeding it from a plastic spoon and carrying it in his rucksack until the day Azar strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device.” He said that this was once of those “odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.” (36).  In the third vignette he talks about death in the slaughterhouse and he makes the comment, “my life seemed to be collapsing toward slaughter.” By associating the guesome imagery of a slaughterhouse with what his life was heading towards (war) he reveals some of his thoughts about death. He thinks this war is just a mistake because “Once people are dean, you can’t make them undead.” (41) He doesn’t think it is necessary for all these people to be “slaughtered” for this war that people were not really sure why they were fighting in the first place. In the very first vignette O’Brien tells how the soldiers tried to take the seriousness away from death. “They used hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness… and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and deystroy the reality of death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs…” (20) The lack of emotion in the diction used describing the killing of the puppy supports the idea that these soldiers tried to deystroy the reality of death. O’Brien describes his view of death before he entered the war very gruesomely and with lots of emotion. From the difference between the way he described death during the war, and before the war you can conclude that this war made the men cold, and emotionless, or nearly so.