Guns
Oates elucidates, “It wasn’t 100 percent true, he didn’t feel young. A gun in his hand, he felt pretty good. Cleaning a gun. Loading a gun, aiming a gun. Firing a gun (at the firing range) and never flinching at the noise or the recoil. Noting calmly if you’d struck your target (heart, head) and it not, how far off you were. And try again.” The Rookie Cop is unconditionally spellbound with guns. Perhaps, the guns endow him with a greater sense of power than any other object can. Evidently, his survival incorporates the gun.
‘Death’s Smell’
Oates elucidates, “In the Iraqi desert he had participated in killing an indeterminate number of human beings designated as enemies, targets…He had not seen individual enemies die but he’d smelled their deaths by frying, explosion. Inhaled the unmistakable burned-meat odor, for he’d been downwind from the action, either that or not breathe.” The odor of death gives the imagery of annihilated bodies whose odur spreads all over the battle scene. Explosions utilized by the Rookie cop and his companions are very powerful, so much so that they demolish enemies into pieces which discharge the stench of death.
