Cracker

Rick Hanski is confronted with a pile of coffins draped in American flags when he and his fellow dog handlers land at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon. This connects to the recurring theme of War and Conflict. Rick naively assumes that the pile of caskets is a “red, white, and blue platform of some kind,” perhaps for a “welcome ceremony” (107). Rick and his fellow dog handlers are ordered to clear the plane “double-time” to make room for the caskets. Rick’s experience with the devastation of the war begins at this moment: He experiences a loss of innocence and becomes increasingly inured to violence and death. The number of caskets demonstrates the chaos and violence of the war; what Rick assumed would be a “welcome ceremony” instead entails him loading the bodies of deceased American soldiers onto the plane.

This sinister symbolism, of dead bodies replacing the live bodies in the plane bound back for America, illustrates the immense casualties during the Vietnam War—not only by Americans but by their Australian, New Zealander, South Korean, Filipino, and Thai allies, as well as Vietcong and South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. Rick’s shock at the caskets also alludes to the fact that those veterans who survived the war did not survive unscathed but were instead haunted and traumatized by what they experienced of injury, death, and destruction. While Rick enlists to make something of himself, the pile of coffins symbolizes that his self-actualization will come at a cost.