Reading the Chunksters discussion

His name is Andrew (Andy) Loeb. :)

I'm still midway through the Ram chapter.

I make notes anyway because I can't remember what was in which week's section without notes :)
so I'm happy to paste them in, or not, if you want to do it Lorna, I don't mind at all either way.

Did they mention before if Monkberg was given those orders?

No, I don't think we know if Monkberg had those orders or not.

My quote of the week is from Ram:

“Sergeant Shaftoe? Do you have an opinion?” Root asks, fixing Shaftoe with a sober and serious gaze.
Shaftoe says, “This code business is some tricky shit.”

Great summary of the whole book there from Shaftoe :)

That's a great quote, Rosemary! :D

I'm still not done with this section, it's been a busy week. But I just finished the exciting U-boat mission and Shaftoe's split-section decision to blow up the safe, which would also allow him to retrieve the morphine. What a great rush of action.

Lol, I totally laughed at that quote too, Lorna!

I think this is my favorite section so far. I had two shaftoe moments that stood out to me.

“He opens his eyes to see Sergeant Shaftoe lifting it to his mouth as if it were a microphone. Shaftoe stares at him coolly and speaks into the stethoscope: “Sir, torpedoes in the water, sir.” Then Shaftoe turns and leaves Waterhouse alone in the cabin.”

Good ole Shaftoe thinking on his toes and getting the attention of Waterhouse by speaking into the stethoscope, which becomes a humorous moment within a tragic one. I love it.

I also liked,

“Shaftoe begins to think that making it out to Sweden might be one of Detachment 2702’ s easier missions. The only hard part, as usual, is understanding what the fuck is going on.”

It is just funny to me how casual he is about this, and I like how he seems to communicate what I am feeling as well. That’s about how I feel at the moment.

The other thing I noticed about this section was the detail of the experience with the u boat. I was actually in a car accident Tuesday of this week with my son. We are both fine, but it was strange the way my sensory experience changed throughout the experience. I was fine and normal, then memory becomes vivid and episodic and I can clearly hear my son’s voice and see him, but it is like my own voice seems to be coming from a different direction.

Anyways, the point is that reading some of these chapters is like reading about people experiencing a really long car accident where the sensory experience has changed.

I think it has been around a hundred years since the term shell shocked was created during world war 1, and there has been a lot of mystery surrounding what actually happened in the war. Most of the people I remember when I was younger who had been in world war 2 never talked about it a whole lot and I don’t feel like a movie gives the same experience as a narrated version is able to do.

World war 2 was something you learned about in history books, which is missing a whole lot. It has really helped to give me a greater appreciation of what war veterans experienced.

Thank you Lorna. I also don’t like war movies or books too much because they are...maybe too passive. I don’t know if passive if the right word, but maybe it is like they are somewhat afraid of the same experience they are fascinated by, and it translates into a more superficial experience.

Stephenson has a certain fearlessness in translating these experiences into a story that creates a different experience. MASH is a good comparison.

The pentagon is actually involved in the production of some military movies, so that might affect the viewer experience sometimes because they are not writers, and they have some control over the script in exchange for the use of the equipment.

“Robert Anderson, the Navy’s Hollywood point person, put it even more clearly to PBS in 2006: “If you want full cooperation from the Navy, we have a considerable amount of power, because it’s our ships, it’s our cooperation, and until the script is in a form that we can approve, then the production doesn’t go forward.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...

You also mentioned something about shaftoes addiction that I noticed as well. They wouldn’t have had as many resources for addiction and I like the way this is shown from a creative writing perspective. It is very clear that he is addicted without being overt and breaking character by stating something explicitly about being addicted.

Oh, Marie, I am glad you and your son are okay!
It's so true that perceptions change at moments like that.
Also, there can be delayed shock ... I hope you're taking things easy.

Thank you rosemary. Yeah, I have been resting and catching up on some reading the last couple days. I am feeling a lot better today, and it didn’t seem like it slowed my son down at all. Thank goodness.

Sorry for being absent this week. I finished this section last weekend and kept meaning to post, but this week has been hectic. I've been falling behind in all my print books this week.

Marie, I'm so glad you and your son are OK. Coincidentally, I was also in a car accident with both of my kids in the car a month ago. I don't think our accident was nearly as bad as yours, but it was my first accident while driving in all my years on the road and it certainly has left me hyper sensitive to driving and finding myself jumpy at the same thing happening again.

My grandfather was in WWII and like you said, Marie, he did not talk about it much at all. I was much older when I learned that his entire (now I don't remember the exact terminology here) squad?, platoon?, perished, except for my grandfather, when they landed on the shores of Anzio, Italy.

I used to watch war movies years ago with my husband, but those pretty much went to the wayside when we had kids, along with dramatic tear jerkers. I'm just way too sensitive now and would rather watch uplifting movies or scifi, mysteries, etc.

My favorite paragraph this week was in the last chapter - Sultan. It was near the end when everyone was seated around the table and Randy is looking around as the Sultan is speaking. The paragraph is long, but in part it is...

The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints...[ ]...In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan's speech.

Thank you Linda. I'm glad to hear you all are okay too. That would be scary.

Your grandfather's story is amazing. What an intense experience. It is no wonder that it would be difficult to talk about afterward. It just makes me feel kind of speechless trying to put myself in his shoes.

I loved that quote in Sultan too. What an interesting way to describe silence.