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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What do PFC Thinbill and John agree to do the night after the massacre?

2. What does Calley say about the massacre?

3. What food does Kathy have, in the scenario the narrator describes in Chapter 18, "Hypothesis"?

4. What did Colonel William V. Wilson say about the massacre at Thuan Yen?

5. In the hypothesis in Chapter 27, what does John do?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Patricia say to John when she arrives?

2. What was Kathy thinking about, in the narrator's hypothesis in Chapter 24?

3. Describe Kathy's feelings for Harmon, according to the narrator's hypothesis in Chapter 18.

4. What does Arthur Lux tell John when John goes into town to meet Patricia?

5. What does the narrator speculate in the hypothesis in Chapter 24?

6. What was John like in the eighth grade?

7. Describe the conversation Kathy and Tony Carbo have after John finds them gambling together.

8. Describe the scene the soldiers encountered when they were ordered back to Thuan Yen.

9. What does the narrator speculate happened, in the hypothesis in Chapter 27?

10. What is the narrator's last hypothesis?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How does this book create its effect on the reader? Describe in detail how Tim O'Brien uses a combination of suspense and details to draw the reader in.

Essay Topic 2

What questions are we really asking when we ask what happened to Kathy? What is this book really about, at bottom?

Essay Topic 3

In what way is the John still always trying to erase himself from the records after Vietnam? Where does he succeed? Where does he fail? Is complete erasure possible? Is it desirable?

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