Simile: Canina
There are very few moments of peace or contentment while fighting the war, but getting high is one of them: "After just a few puffs they found themselves lifted, quietly floating like a wisp of smoke itself floating on the wind" (12). This simile, comparing smoking to being a thin aft of smoke on the wind, reveals how welcome such a feeling would be—how much of a respite to feel oneself incorporeal, borne about in the air, loose and free. Alas, this only a respite from the fighting, not a permanent state.
Metaphor: Men
Kien is promoted and the personnel officer tells him, "We must keep our best seeds, otherwise all will be destroyed. After a lost harvest, even when starving, the best seeds should be kept for the next crop" (18). The metaphor likens men to seed, the best of which need to be saved and not planted because they will have to form the basis of a new crop when the rest of it is wiped out. This metaphor is instructive, but it also reinforces how the men of the NVA are valued solely for their ability to fight; their humanity is overlooked for their utility.
Metaphor: War
Kien thinks of the war, "But war was a world with no home, no roof, no comforts. A miserable journey, of endless drifting" (31). The metaphor suggests that war is the opposite of that symbol of safety—home—in that it is itinerancy, only a journey and never a homecoming, a situation shorn of security, peace, comfort, and permanence.
Metaphor and Similes: The Apartment Building
Kien looks around him when he is home from war and writing his novel, sometimes wishing he could write about the people he saw rather than about the war. Here, he uses both metaphor and simile to express the abundance of life before him, the simple, cyclical beauty of the world: "Even such a tiny stream of life, running through the apartment building, contained so many waterfalls, so many cliffs, so many eddies and whirlpools. Children were born to life, sprouted like mushrooms after a shower of rain, grew up, became adults. The adults grew old, some of them falling away every year. Generation after generation, likes the waves of the sea" (62).
Metaphor: Love
Kien hopes that he and Phuong will be reunited and live happily together when he returns from war, but this is not the case: "His life, after ten destructive years of war, had then been punctured by the sharp thorns of love" (84). In this metaphor, we imagine sharp, brutal thorns puncturing something—a balloon, skin, a bubble—that represents love. It's a striking, blunt image, which aptly conveys what war did to the young lovers.
