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Gunnery Sergeant
A commissioned officer. In the U.S. Marine Corps, the rank is divided between Second Lieutenant, who is lower-ranking, and First Lieutenant. A first lieutenant ranks below a captain, or skipper.
Lieutenant Quotes in A Rumor of War
The A Rumor of War quotes below are all either spoken by Lieutenant or refer to Lieutenant. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter Five
Quotes
On the way back, I saw an example of the paradoxical kindness-and-cruelty that made Vietnam such a peculiar war. One of our corpsman was treating the infant with skin ulcers […] At the same time, and only a few yards away, our interpreter, a Vietnamese marine lieutenant, roughly interrogated the woman who had been tending the fire. The lieutenant was yelling at her and waving a pistol in front of her ravaged face […] This went on for several minutes. Then his voice rose to a hysterical pitch, and holding the forty-five by the barrel, he raised his arms as if to pistol-whip her. I think he would have, but Peterson stepped in and stopped him.
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Lieutenant Term Timeline in A Rumor of War
The timeline below shows where the term Lieutenant appears in A Rumor of War. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter One
...in the student union at Loyola University. They have displayed a poster of “a trim lieutenant” with an “athletic, slightly cruel-looking” face.” He looks “like a cross between an All-American halfback...
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...of 1961, Caputo attends Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. He and the other aspiring lieutenants range in age from nineteen to twenty-one. Those who survive the course will be sent...
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...School. There is no more harassment from drill sergeants who now have to call the lieutenants “sir.” Living conditions are also “regal.” The purpose of the school is to turn the...
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The senior first lieutenant lectures Caputo and the other junior officers on counterguerrilla operations. The instructor disabuses his students...
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Chapter Two
...the ranks being filled with enlisted men who went to boot camp together and other lieutenants who graduated from Quantico in the same year. Having done everything together and gone everywhere...
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...a result, he is nicknamed “boot brown-bar,” which is slang for a very fresh second lieutenant.
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Chapter Five
...emerges from the trench and Campbell says, perhaps reproachfully, that he did not know the lieutenant was in there. Peterson then comes over the radio and warns Caputo against using up...
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Chapter Six
...a grenade instead. Buchanan stands “in a tense crouch” and refuses to look at the lieutenant or take his finger off of the trigger of his rifle. Then, something does indeed...
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Chapter Seven
...to acknowledge. PFC Lockhart says what many of them are thinking: “They’re just like us, lieutenant. It’s always the young men who die.”
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Chapter Thirteen
...time, “thinking about those kids.” It is not a confession that colonels usually make to lieutenants, so Caputo does not know what to tell him. Two days later, the colonel is...
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