They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.
Tim OBrien,
The Things They Carried
John Sheehans job was to find trouble.
And he was good at it.
Sheehan was a LURP, a special forces scout tasked with scouring the South Vietnamese jungle, usually with a group of four or five of his fellow Green Berets, to look for the enemy.
I figure 95 percent of the time, Id get up, have some breakfast, tear down a bunker, put on my rough sack and start walking, Sheehan said.