AP English Language and Composition
The Things They Carried Unit Test
Lawrynovicz
Spring 2016
Form: Lemon
KEY
Character Quote Identification: Match the quotation with the person who said it. Yes, technically O’Brien wrote the whole book, and there are places where others are relating a story, or even where the character is imagined as speaking, but please identify the most immediate speaker, the person to whom the quotation is actually attributed in the book. Answer options may be used once, more than once, or not at all.
1. “You want my opinion, there’s a definite moral here.” Mitchell Sanders
2. “I’ll tell you the straight truth. The guy was dead the second he stepped on the trail. Understand me? We all had him zeroed. A good kill—weapon, ammunition, everything.” Kiowa
3. “Some dumb thing happens a long time ago and you can’t ever forget it.” Kathleen
4. “Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country—the dirt, the death—I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me. That’s how I feel. It’s like this appetite. I get scared sometimes—lots of times—but it’s not bad. You know?” Mary Anne
5. “All that had to be there for a reason. That’s how stories work, man.”
Mitchell Sanders
6. “If you want, you can use the stuff in this letter. (But not my real name, okay?) I’d write it myself except I can’t ever find any words, if you know what I mean, and I can’t figure out what exactly to say.” Norman Bowker
7. “All right, but dance right.” Henry Dobbins
8. “Brings back memories, I bet—those happy soldiering days. Except now you’re a has-been. One of those American Legion types, guys who like to dress up in a nifty uniform and go out and play at it. Pitiful.” Azar
Multiple Choice: Carefully read the questions and all answer options before making a choice. All questions have only one answer unless otherwise indicated.
9. All of the following are included in O’Brien’s rules for how to tell a true war story EXCEPT
a. it cannot have a moral / d. it embarrasses youb. it is never about war
c. it never seems to end / e. it has to have some kernel of happening-truth in it
10. In some ways, both ____ act as stand-ins for the audience, voicing opinions about storytelling that O’Brien disagrees with (and ultimately wants the reader to disagree with).
a. Rat Kiley and Norman Bowker / d. Mitchell Sanders and Kathleenb. Martha and Mary Anne
c. Azar and Kiowa / e. Linda and Henry Dobbins
11. Of the different soldiers, whose coping mechanism never really fails him or ends up twisting him?
a. O’Brien’s / d. Norman Bowker’sb. Azar’s
c. Jimmy Cross’s / e. Henry Dobbins’
12. In the opening chapter, O’Brien writes, “At various times in various situations, they carried M-14s and CAR-15s and Swedish Ks and grease guns and captured AK-47s and Chi-Coms and RPGs and Simonov carbines and black market Uzis and .38 caliber Smith and Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAWs and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives.” Which of the following is NOT true of this sentence?
a. it contains polysyndeton, which makes the list seem even more lengthy / d. it emphasizes the haphazard, disorganized nature of the infantryman’s war experienceb. it contains jargon that makes O’Brien seem more credible
c. it contains epistrophe, which gives the sentence a frantic, breathless quality / e. it hints at an almost illegal quality of the war
13. Which of the following are NOT parallels in The Things They Carried?
a. The relationship between Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen, and the one between O’Brien and Bobby Jorgensonb. The empty eyes of Martha and Mary Jane / d. Kiowa’s death and the “burying” of his moccasins
e. the deaths of Ted Lavender and the baby buffalo
c. Cross and O’Brien focusing obsessively on pictures of women who are not their girlfriends
14. O’Brien’s structure helps him accomplish which of his purposes?
a. making it seem as if the dead are still alive / d. all of the aboveb. getting the “real truth” of being a soldier in Vietnam across to the reader
c. confusing the readers about the facts so that they will seek out more information about Vietnam and educate themselves / e. only A and B
ac. only A and C
bc. only B and C
15. O’Brien argues that language is a powerful tool, and that it was used by [Mark ALL that apply]
a. soldiers to distance themselves from the reality of death by dehumanizing the dead / d. the soldiers to hide fear by making them sound toughb. Jimmy Cross to convince his men that he knew what he was doing when he actually had no idea what the proper procedures were / e. O’Brien and the soldiers to bring the dead back to life
c. politicians to manipulate O’Brien into believing that the war was morally right
16. In “Love,” O’Brien writes, “At one point, I remember, we paused over a snapshot of Ted Lavender, and after a while Jimmy rubbed his eyes and said he’d never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death. It was something that would never go away, he said quietly, and I nodded and told him I felt the same about certain things.” Given the rest of the book, what does O’Brien likely have in mind when he says “certain things”?
a. the death of Kiowa / d. what he said to Elroy before he leftb. not ever telling Linda how he felt about her c. shaking the dead man’s hand / e. how he failed to write Henry Dobbins’ story correctly the first time
17. How is Henry Dobbins making the washing motion with his hands in “Church” different from Azar’s dancing in “Style”?
a. Dobbins is trying to make Kiowa laugh while Azar is trying to humiliate Dobbins / d. Dobbins does it out of respect for the monks while Azar is mocking the girlb. Azar doesn’t understand why the girl was dancing while Dobbins knows what the washing motion means / e. Dobbins is imitating something without understanding it completely while Azar knows what the dancing means
c. Dobbins is mocking the monks while Azar is trying to cheer up Rat Kiley
18. In “Spin,” O’Brien relays Mitchell Sanders’ story about a soldier who went AWOL and “shacks up in Danang with a Red Cross nurse.” But then later the soldier “rejoins his unit in the bush. Can’t wait to get back into action. Finally one of his buddies asks what happened with the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the guy says, ‘All that peace, man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.’” This story most closely parallels
a. Azar blowing up the puppy / d. Rat Kiley going to Japanb. Mary Anne’s transformation / e. O’Brien’s experience in “Ghost Soldiers”
c. What happens to Dave Jensen when he returns to the U.S.
19. O’Brien spends a great deal of time trying to redefine courage and cowardice. Towards which part of his audience is this argument about courage and cowardice mostly directed? Why?
a. those who fought in Vietnam; because they could not have understood what real cowardice was at the time / d. those who opposed the war by protesting; because he wants to point out that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the warb. those who didn’t fight in Vietnam; because they would likely have misconceptions about cowardice in war, and O’Brien wants to correct those / e. those who dodged the draft during the war; because he wants to point out that they, too, were wrong about what bravery really was
c. those who supported the Vietnam war; because he wants them to realize the terrible consequences of their actions
20. The Charlotte Observer published a review of The Things They Carried that included the lines “It will be nominated for prizes, but I wonder if any prize will do it justice. Maybe a silver star for telling the truth that never happened.” The idea that the book deserves one of the military’s most prestigious combat medals suggests that the reviewer agrees with O’Brien’s argument
a. that happening-truth is more important than absolute occurrence / d. that truth is a fluid thing, and what really matters is if you felt like you were a herob. that telling the story-truth may be an act of bravery that saves lives
c. that letting go of Kiowa was not an act of / e. that life itself is just as much a war as the Vietnam war, and sometimes just surviving is an act of courage
cowardice, nor something of which he should be ashamed
21. O’Brien mentions several instances in which he rewrites stories/the past, and in each instance he explains the purpose(s) for the revisions. Which of the following is NOT a reason he ever gives?
a. to atone for failures he made in earlier versions / d. to make himself the hero of the story, when at heart he is a cowardb. to help him forgive himself / e. to get the real truth across to others
c. so that he can be brave and face what he couldn’t when he was in Vietnam
22. For what purposes does O’Brien write the chapter “On the Rainy River”? [Mark ALL that apply]
a. to explain why he went to war / d. to confess something of which he is ashamedb. to criticize Jimmy Cross’s choices in comparison to his own / e. to confront his now dead father who was so disappointed in him
c. as a gesture of gratitude towards Elroy
23. What would O’Brien most likely say to readers who want to know which of the events or people in the book are actually real?
a. That he, Kiowa, and Norman Bowker were real, although some of the events and other people were changedb. The book is a work of fiction; none of it is true
c. There is no such thing as objective truth; we all experience our own version of truth, none being more real than others / d. You have missed the point of the book. The point is not to learn about the absolute occurrences, but to understand the way the soldiers felt
e. The people are all real, but their names and some of the events have been altered to protect them
Matching: Match the objects below with the person who carried them.
24. His girlfriend’s pantyhose Henry Dobbins
25. Tranquilizers Ted Lavender
26. Letters, two pictures, and a pebble Jimmy Cross
27. An illustrated New Testament Kiowa
Use the excerpt below from Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War to answer the question that follows.
The hallucination I had had that day in the mess, of seeing Mora and Harrison prefigured in death, had become a constant, waking nightmare. I had begun to see almost everyone as they would look in death, including myself. Shaving in the mirror in the morning, I could see myself dead, and there were moments when I not only saw my own corpse, but other people looking at it. I saw life going on without me. The sensation of not being anymore came over me at night, just before falling asleep…I was sure that another few months of identifying bodies would land me in the psychiatric ward.
28. The paragraph above most closely resembles O’Brien’s description of what happens to
a. Curt Lemon / d. Norman Bowkerb. Rat Kiley / e. Kiowa
c. O’Brien himself
Use the passage below from Michael Herr’s nonfiction book Dispatches (1977) to answer the questions that follow.
[When discussing the reasons that reporters and soldiers were in Vietnam, Herr writes that people gave reasons such as…]
Hearts and Minds, Peoples of the Republic, tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah; you could also hear the other, some young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence, saying “All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period.” Which wasn’t at all true of me. I was there to watch.
5 Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing
10 until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn’t frozen, you are.
Sometimes I didn’t know if an action took a second or an hour or if I dreamed it or what. In war more than in other life you don’t really know what you are doing most of the time, you’re just behaving, and afterward you can make up any kind of bullshit you want to about it, say you felt good or bad, loved it or
15 hated it, did this or that, the right thing or the wrong thing; still, what happened happened.
Coming back, telling stories, I’d say, “Oh man I was scared,” and “Oh God I thought it was all over,” a long time before I knew how scared I was really supposed to be, or how clear and closed and beyond my control “all over” could become. I wasn’t dumb but I sure was raw, certain connections are hard to make when you come from a place where they go around with war in their heads all the time.
29. The diction in lines 1-2 indicates that Herr views these reasons as
a. inspiring / d. insidious and dangerousb. heartfelt and patriotic / e. uninteresting
c. generic and somewhat ridiculous
30. Lines 6-7, where Herr writes, “I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything.” O’Brien went through his tour in Vietnam
a. with the same convictionb. at first with the same idea, but found that he was not brave enough to continue looking
c. with the same sort of writer’s interest in details so that he could faithfully relate them later in his books / d. using the exact opposite approach, which was largely to avoid looking at things
e. mostly with the opposite idea, but later, after the incident with the buffalo, decided he needed to start looking at things more closely
31. Herr writes that it took the war to teach him “that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did” (lines 7-8). O’Brien would