"They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage,the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility" page 259 from "The Things They Carried" "The Things They Carried" was an absolutely devastating story to me. The way that it portrayed the life of a soldier and the struggle to keep one's humanity for such a long time was really poignant. The sentence above that I chose from the story really encapsulates this feeling of the fading humanity of the soldiers in my opinion. It shows the slow, meth