Spin

In “Spin,” O'Brien recalls several memories from his experiences in the war. His memories seem scattered and unchronological. He jumps from one story to another, without fully disclosing the purpose of the first story, which suggests the way his war experiences are fragmented in his memory. O'Brien also jumps from the past to the present when speaking with his daughter Kathleen. Kathleen wants her father to write other stories rather than his usual Vietnam stories. O'Brien responds to his daughter, “But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present” (33).  O'Brien scattered memories and his commentary of the present, provide readers with a first-hand interpretation of the war. In “Spin,” we are introduced to O’Brien’s actual war experiences with other soldiers. We see the way the soldiers pass time and the ways they act around each other. Since the area in which the soldiers had to walk around often had mines, a man nicknamed old poppa-san, would lead the soldiers through the Batangan Peninsula mine fields. The soldiers created a rhyme, “Step out of line, hit a mine; follow the dink, you’re in the pink,” to chant while crossing the mine fields. The soldiers found ways to keep themselves entertained while in war. In this chapter, we also see a negative experience of soldier interaction. Ted Lavender, one of the soldiers, had adopted a puppy and carried him around his rucksack until one of the other soldiers, Azar, had a slight meltdown. Azar strapped the puppy onto a mine and ultimately killed the puppy. Azar blamed his outburst on him just being a kid/prankster, but we can see that this outburst was from the stress of the war. The war memories O’Brien described in “Spin” depict the soldier interaction and the stresses of war experienced.