“ . . . and I didn’t meet any communists out there preaching Marxism, and Engels — you met poor people who were trying to stay alive and feed their families and themselves, and where they may have been indifferent 10 years before, they weren’t indifferent anymore, nor would anyone else be. It was the way to lose a war. Because you take people out of their houses and you move them. And big aggregates of people, and you boss them around, and you call all the shots, and you beat up on people, and you trash everything that could be trashed — all in the name of searching for the enemy. The consequences are you make enemies. You may kill a few Vietcong along the way, but you are making enemies — just imagine one baby being shot by accident — it’s got a mother and a father and an uncle and aunt and friends and brothers and sisters — and they may have been indifferent before that baby died, but they’re not indifferent anymore and nor would you or anyone else.”
Read the quote above by O’Brien. How do details ring true in his stories?