The Things They Carried: Night Life Summary & Analysis

O'Brien notes that he wasn't there when Rat Kiley was wounded, but he got the story later from Mitchell Sanders. The platoon had been west of Quang Ngai City and had received intelligence about a likely enemy attack, which fueled a number of more outrageous rumors involving the Russians. The soldiers didn't take the rumors seriously, but they still only walked at night and stayed off of the main trails for two weeks. The troops began to call it "the night life." It made the task seem more bearable to them to play this linguistic trick when they would ask the other how the night life was going.

Sanders told O'Brien everyone was tense, but Rat Kiley took it the worst and it ended up with him in Japan. During the two weeks the routine was the same: sleep during the day (or try to) and then start marching single file at night. Sanders claimed it was the darkest dark he'd ever experienced. It was so dark it made you jittery and nervous, and you'd worry about being separated from the group. Different soldiers coped in different ways: Dave Jensen took vitamins high in carotene, Lt. Jimmy Cross took NoDoz, Henry Dobbins and Norman Bowker attached a safety wire between their two belts.

Rat Kiley, though, was different than all the rest. Perhaps it had been that he had seen too many dead bodies put into bags, and too much gore. Initially, Kiley was completely quiet and didn't talk for five or six days. Then he was incapable of not talking, but on odd subjects like how the worst thing in the war were the bugs—that they were mutant bugs who were out to get him. He believed they were whispering his name. Kiley started to scratch himself constantly on his bug bites, and he developed giant scabs, which he ripped off where he'd then scratch the open wounds. "It was a sad thing to watch," because it wasn't the old Rat Kiley.

To a degree, everyone was feeling off, though. Moving only at night was disorienting and often felt like they were chasing ghosts. Around midnight things always seemed to become "wild," and you could hear "a strange hum in your ears" that you couldn't identify. It was like you were walking through Vietnam's body, "some kind of protoplasm…the blood and the flesh."

Rat Kiley finally lost it. He no longer slept, and the nights were too much for him. One afternoon, before the platoon started to march again, he cracked in front of Mitchell Sanders. He wasn't crying, but he was close. Maybe he'd been in Vietnam too long, or maybe he wasn't fit to be a medic. He stared at the ones who would survive and picture them dead or without limbs. He couldn't make the images stop. Kiley said the days weren't terrible but the nights were, because that's when he started to see images of himself: "chunks," his own organs. The darkness was a kind of crystal ball. He couldn't take it anymore.

Sanders didn't know how to react and they sat for a while in silence. Rat Kiley shook Sanders' hand and said he'd done the best he could. He rambled for a while about some of the guys they'd lost: Curt Lemon, Kiowa, and Ted Lavender. Kiley said he couldn't wrap his head around how people who "were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead." Kiley nearly laughed, and then said the war was a giant banquet for the bugs.

The next morning Rat Kiley shot himself through the foot. He'd doped himself up with items from his medical kit first. Sanders said that no one blamed him for what he did. When the chopper came to take Kiley away, there was some time to say goodbye. Lt. Jimmy Cross vouched that the shooting had been an accident. Henry Dobbins and Azar gave Kiley comic books to read in the hospital. Everyone stood in a circle around him, and tried to cheer him up "with bullshit about the great night life in Japan."