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The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Navy SEAL by Eric Greitens
1. Greitens opens his memoir dramatically with a suicide attack on his barracks in Fallujah. Why does he open the memoir with this incident? In what way is this incident a pivotal moment in his life?
2. What effect does the death of Lieutenant Travis Manion have on Greitens?
3. Greitens writes: “On the frontlines—in humanitarian crises, in wars overseas, and around some kitchen tables here at home—I’d seen that peace is more than the absence of war, and that a good life entails more than the absence of suffering” (p.11). What is needed to create and maintain the “good peace, a solid peace” of which Greitens speaks?
4. How do the heroes of history and legend that Greitens reads about in his youth shape his later interests?
5. What does Greitens mean when he says that after a few weeks of attending college, he felt as if he’d been lied to (p.15)? Why is he disappointed in public policy studies?
6. When Greitens returns from China, why does he decide to take up boxing? In addition to boxing, what are some other things Greitens learns from his trainer, Earl Blair?
7. When he sees his grandfather for the last time, what does Greitens not do that leaves him disappointed in himself?
8. While volunteering in the war-torn former Yugoslavia, why does Greitens refuse to take pictures of a donor who has come to hand out gum to refugee children? What did he dislike about the aid organization advertisements for refugee children?
9. Greitens says, “It was in Gasinci that I got my first lesson in international diplomacy” (p. 60). What does he learn?
10. When Greitens visits a local church congregation to show slides of photographs he took in Bosnia and Croatia, the questions
the audience asks leads him to a sort of epiphany. What does he realize?
11. In Gaza, what does Greitens learn about poverty and the root causes of insurgency and terrorism?
12. After traveling to Rwanda, Colombia, India, and other places around the world, Greitens concludes that aid is not enough. He writes, “It took people with courage to protect those people in need of protection … I could keep talking or I could live my beliefs” (p. 125). How does this realization lead him to enlisting in Navy SEAL training?
13. What are the various reasons the men in Greitens’s group want to be SEALs? Is Greitens’s motive unique?
14. Greitens says, “It’s true that SEALs are capable of great violence, but that’s not what makes SEALs truly special” (p.189). What is it that makes the SEALs special?
15. Writing about Afghanistan, what does Greitens mean when he says, “You can’t buy peace but you can sometimes make a down payment on it” (p. 223).
16. In what ways does Greitens embody the characteristics of the classic citizen-warrior?
17. In the opening chapter, Greitens says Travis Manion reminded him of a line from a speech Pericles made to the families of the Athenian war dead: “What you have left behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others” (p. 30). How is the quote reflective of what Greitens has done and continues to do with his life?
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One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Nathaniel Fick
1. How does Sergeant Olds compare to drill instructors you have seen portrayed in films and television? What impression does Sergeant Olds make on Fick?
2. What are some examples of how Fick and his fellow candidates are acclimated to violence at Quantico?
3. What five rules of Marine Corps leadership does Captain Fanning share with the candidates?
Which of the rules does the book’s title reference? What does “one bullet away” refer to in the leadership rule?
4. What does the Infantry Officer Course (IOC) represent in the Marine Corps? What is taught in IOC? How does that training compare to the rest Fick receives?
5. What is Fick’s reaction to being placed in command of Bravo Company’s weapons platoon?
6. What are Fick’s first impressions of Jacobabad? Why does his unit’s mission there quickly become a frustration?
7. Before leaving for Kandahar, Fick listens to a CD of a 9/11 benefit concert and says, “A feeling of profound gratitude that I was in a position to get revenge for 9/11 surged through me” (p.106). He says the intensity of the feeling surprised him. Do you think this was a common sentiment among the military sent to Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks? Ten years later, how do you think this sentiment has changed for soldiers serving in Afghanistan?
8. What does Fick mean when he says, “We never returned to the country we’d left? (p.142)? What changes does Fick observe?
9. What disturbs Fick about the “bluster” he observes when he returns to the United States (p.143)?
10. In what ways do the Marine Corps’s reconnaissance units differ from special operations units like the Navy SEAL and Army Special Forces?
11. What motivates Fick to apply for Recon training? How would you characterize the training he receives? What is the worst part of the training for Fick?
12. Before the invasion of Iraq, Fick and other officers listen to a lecture on “rules of engagement.” The lecture reminds Fick of St. Augustine’s “just war” theory he learned in college (p.182). What do you think of the concept of “rules of engagement”?
How is it possible to fight a war according to rules? Is it reasonable to expect that soldiers will follow rules in combat? Is it possible for war to be just? Under what circumstances can war be considered justified?
13. What is the “hyperclarity” that Fick places so much importance on in combat?
14. What is Fick’s reaction to the officers photographing and laughing at the insurgents his unit killed? What are his feelings about the men they’d killed?
15. When Fick’s unit comes across the wounded girl, what does he realize about the difference between training scenarios and reality?
16. Why does the captain want to relieve Gunny Wynn for insubordination? What is Fick’s initial reaction to the captain’s decision? How does Fick convince the captain to reconsider his decision?
17. What insights does Fick offer into the differences between military ideals and military practice?
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The Things They Carried
by Tim O’Brien
1. What are some of the intangible things the soldiers carry in the title story? Which do you think is the greater burden, the tangible or intangible? Who in the unit do you think carries the greatest emotional burden?
2. Of the good-luck charms the soldiers carry, the most macabre is the thumb from a dead VC that Norman Bowker carries. When Mitchell Sanders cuts it from the corpse of the teenage boy, he says “there’s a definite moral here” (p.13). What do you think the moral is that Sanders refers to?
3. How does the death of Ted Lavender affect the men?
4. “They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it” (p. 20). Why do you think the men are more afraid of showing their fear of dying than death itself? In what ways do they cope with their fears?
5. On the morning after Ted Lavender is killed, why does Lieutenant Cross burn Martha’s letters and photographs?
6. In the story “Love,” the narrator meets Jimmy Cross many years after the war and says “he’d never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death” (p. 27). Why does Cross feel guilty for Lavender’s death? How was he responsible? Should Cross blame himself?
7. In the story “On the Rainy River,” the narrator begins: “This is one story I’ve never told before. Not brother or sister, not even to my wife. . . . Even now I’ll admit the story makes me squirm” (p. 39). What has made him want to tell the story now?
8. The narrator has to choose between accepting the draft or dodging it by going to Canada. He asks, “What would you do?” (p. 56) How would you answer?
9. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien writes: “A true war story is never moral” (p. 68). What does this mean? Is it possible to tell a true war story? O’Brien’s stories are autobiographical but works of fiction. To what extent can fiction be true?
10. O’Brien writes: “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (p.71). How is it possible to tell a “true” story when what happened cannot be separated from what seemed to happen?
11. The stories “Speaking of Courage,” “Notes,” and “In the Field” all deal with Kiowa’s death told from different perspectives.
How do these different perspectives shape your understanding of Kiowa’s death and the incident’s effect on the platoon?
12. What are some literary devices O’Brien uses to make the reader feel the immediacy and reality of the war?
13. In “How to Tell a War Story,” O’Brien writes: “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty” (p. 80). What are some examples of the paradoxes of war that O’ Brien reveals through his stories?
14. “A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (p.78). Which of the stories made your stomach believe? What is it about them that felt “true”?
15. In “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien writes: “Stories can save us” (p. 225). How do stories save the narrator?
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Introduction
In a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, there’s a ghost who won’t keep quiet.
Mircha fell from the roof and was never properly buried, so he sticks around to heckle the living: his wife, Azade; Olga, a disillusioned translator/censor for a military newspaper; Yuri, an army veteran who always wears an aviator’s helmet; and Tanya, a student of hope, words, and color.
Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, a place that holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knockoffs created with the materials at hand, from foam to chewing gum, Popsicle sticks to tomato juice. When the museum’s director hears of an American group seeking to fund art in Russia, it looks as if Tanya might get her chance at a better life, if she can only convince them of the collection’s worth. Enlisting the help of her neighbors, Tanya scrambles to save her dreams, and along the way discovers that love may have been waiting in her own courtyard all along.
Discussion Questions
1. References to the title abound in the story. “Without a dream we are dead” (p. 29) Olga says. Why are dreams so important to these characters? “At the end of her human self and wishing nothing more than for a few moments of flight, misery turned her leaden bones to hollow ones. And then her mother wasn’t a woman anymore but a bird . . . ‘This is how she flies away’” (p. 70). Where else do you see flights in the novel?
2. “Tanya rolled her eyes heavenward. She took another swallow of air, of cloud” (p. 137). How does Tanya’s notebook sustain her? What is her relationship to clouds and to color?
3. Discuss the role tradition plays in the lives of so many of these characters. Where does each of the families in the building come from and how do their heritages either free or hamper them from pursuing their dreams? Gina Ochsner has said, “What draws me to Eastern Europe is the knotted nature of the past with the present. I used to think that history was a mere plot line of events that happened in the past. I’m beginning to think that history is a state of being, a collectively constructed, shared, and carried creature that is not only constantly being rewritten and revised, but is at all times rewriting us.” How do you see this expressed in the book?
4. Ochsner has also said, “Dreambook is also a story about stories: our need to keep certain fictions alive; our need to have certain stories told in particular ways; our insistence on and faith in these stories, which are more than superstitions wearing words, more than lucky talismans—they are the substance of hope and life itself.” How do stories sustain these characters? How are stories important to you? What are the stories that sustain you individually and culturally?
5. “I’ll tell you what’s down there. It’s an old story” (p. 333) Olga says about the gaping hole in the courtyard of the apartment building. What do you think the hole is?
6. Why does Yuri hear a ticking in his head? Why does he love fishing so much?
7. Why do the application questions from the Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification so confound Tanya and the others? How do they show the differences between American and Russian cultures? When the Americans arrive, how do their reactions to the museum, the city, and the apartment building’s environs further demonstrate these differences?
8. Why does Mircha haunt the living after he’s died? What other fantastical elements did you find in the novel? Why do you think the author used magical realism in her story? How do these elements enhance our understanding of these characters and their lives?
9. “And where do people go to get rid of what they don’t need? The toilet, of course” (p. 193). Where do you see the struggle to dispose of things in this novel, both physical and emotional?
10. How does Olga reconcile herself to telling or not telling the truth? Do you think there are varying degrees of truth? When do you think it might be okay to not tell the truth?
11. Why do so many of the characters in the novel avoid love?
Copyright © 2011 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Discussion questions written by Hannah Harlow
