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While Forrest recovers in a hospital, he meets a tank commander named Dan. Dan was badly wounded and is one of the only officers Forrest has met who he considers smart. Dan says that everything happens for a reason, which confuses Forrest as he thinks about Bubba’s death. An officer arrives and tells Forrest that he has won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He will be flying home the next day to meet the President.
Forrest begins playing ping pong in the hospital, and it’s immediately obvious that he’s a prodigy. Not even the best players can challenge him. One day, Forrest realizes that he doesn’t know what he’s going to do after the war. He decides to start a shrimp pond and then grow and sell shrimp, just as he sees a local Vietnamese man doing.
At the end of the chapter, he receives three letters. The first says his mother’s house burned down after a malfunction with a hairdryer, but she is unharmed. The next is from Dan, who says that Forrest has a good heart and is on the cusp of greatness. The third is from Jenny. She’s playing in another band and is highly active in anti-war demonstrations.
When Forrest and Colonel Gooch land, a huge group of Vietnam protestors are waiting. They throw tomatoes at Colonel Gooch and Forrest runs away. Eventually they find each other, get back on the plane, and fly to Washington, DC so that Forrest can receive the Medal of Honor. Forrest receives the medal from President Johnson, who asks to see where Forrest was wounded. Forrest pulls down his pants and shows the President the bullet scar on his buttocks. Photographers capture the moment, which is on the front page of the newspapers the next day.
Colonel Gooch tries to get Forrest to speak to college students as a recruiter for the Army. But when asked what he thinks of the war, Forrest answers honestly, saying, “I think it’s a bunch of shit” (75). The Army cancels the rest of the tour. He impulsively enters a ping pong tournament when visiting Walter Reed Hospital and wins, thus qualifying for a national tournament. He is informed that he will be going to China to represent the United States as a member of the national ping pong team.
In China, the other players on the team are kind to Forrest, but he manages to get into trouble quickly. While trying to find a restaurant where he is supposed to meet the team for dinner, he is suddenly taken to jail. When his coach bails him out, he says that they suspect him of being a spy and asks what Forrest has done. Forrest has no clue why they would think that, and the matter is quickly resolved.
One day the team goes to a river where the eighty-year-old Chairman Mao is swimming across the river for publicity. He stalls halfway across and Forrest realizes that he’s drowning. He dives in and saves him, which the Chinese citizens applaud. But his superiors tell him that the best thing that could have happened for the United States would have been for Mao to drown. Within days Forrest is a Chinese national hero, who throw a parade for him. During a private audience with Mao, he repeats what he said earlier about the war being a bunch of shit. Mao laughs and they shake hands. Soon he receives word that, largely based on him saving Mao’s life, China has agreed to reopen various negotiations with America.
When he returns to his base, Forrest is told he is going home for good. The Army is letting him out early. He is anxious to see him mother, but decides to go to Boston first, to try and find Jenny.
Forrest goes to the club where Jenny, in her letters, said her band played regularly. She is the lead singer and the crowd seems to love her. He meets her behind the stage after her first set and she is happy to see him. She tells him about a series of men she has been with, relationships that have all ended badly. She is currently with a philosophy student named Rudolph. Forrest begins staying with them at night.
Soon Rudolph leaves Jenny, and she vents to Forrest over dinner about how unreliable men are. When they go home, she tells Forrest that she wants to have sex with him. For hours she initiates him in every sexual act he has ever heard of. When they finish, she asks him “Where have you been all my life?” (94). After that, Forrest begins playing with their band and seeing Jenny constantly. He’s never been happier.
A literature professor named Quackenbush invites Forrest to play the part of the fool (or, idiot) in a production on King Lear. But during the performance, when Forrest enters the stage with a torch, he accidentally lights a makeshift hut on fire, and then his own cape. After that, he receives no more invites to be an actor. But he doesn’t care. He and Jenny are together all the time and he’s getting better at playing the harmonica with their band.
One night, one of his bandmates offers him a marijuana cigarette. Soon, Forrest is smoking all day, every day. It is one of the only things that always makes him feel better. Jenny says he’s smoking too much and they take a weekend trip to the mountains. While in a small mountain town, they go to a bar where two women recognize Forrest as the harmonica player. One of them takes her shirt off while the other straddles him, before he can even realize what is happening. Jenny walks in and sees him with the women, then leaves. When they talk, she says he has to get his own place. She then leaves town. He doesn’t hear a word from her for a while, but one night a friend of his sees Jennyon the news. She’sat a protest in Washington DC. Forrest packs his bags and goes to find her.
When he finds her, she has just been released from jail for her involvement in the protest. She takes him home and says she wants him to come to an anti-Vietnam War demonstration. The following day they are at the front of a crowd when she tells Forrest to tell everyone that he is against the war, and to throw his Medal of Honor away. He does, and it hits the clerk of the U.S. Senate in the head. He is quickly arrested and taken to jail. The judge orders that Forrest be given a psychiatric evaluation. The report mandates that Forrest be “put away,” (105) just like his mother always worried about.
Forrest is locked in a sanitarium with people who have committed terrible crimes and who suffer from the worst mental illnesses. He is examined by a group of doctors who give him Rorschach tests, and then a battery of mathematical exams. He does so well on the math that they tell him that NASA wants to speak with him. NASA wants to send him into space to help with a mission. If he helps, he will be cleared of all charges for hitting the clerk with his medal.
After extensive training, Forrest is shot into space with another astronaut (a woman who goes by Major Fritch) and an ape. The ape is supposed to be a female, but at the last moment, they accidentally put a male in with the crew at takeoff. Forrest calls the ape Sue.
After meeting Dan, Forrest is suddenly confronted with bigger existential questions that he has previously faced. Before Dan, Forrest was mainly concerned with learning football plays, avoiding bullies, following orders, and mooning over Jenny. Not even the lethal conflicts he participates in during the war make him introspect on the same level as Dan’s questions about the laws of nature and the supposed justification for a God who can allow evil and suffering to exist.
However, once the chapters leave the war behind, the novel ventures into something more like slapstick comedy. When Forrest is suddenly being recruited by NASA and launched into space with an ape, all within the span of a few pages, it is unclear how the author intends for this to be taken. From this point on, the reader is required to exercise a heightened suspension of disbelief that was previously necessary.