The Dallas Cowboy Football Soldier

As Dr. Hughes has explained, my task is to explain the tensions within one of your passages and to speculate about what you were trying to accomplish in it. I am curious about the passage on pages 175-178 in which Billy is speaking with the Dallas Cowboy football players about his service in Iraq. In a sentence, I think your goal in the passage was to show that civilian that do not serve in the war do not understand the emotional strain that soldiers go through. In the passage on pages 175-178, both Billy and the football players are trying to get something out of their conversation. Octavian Spurgeon wants to know what the war in Iraq is like. They ask extensive questions about the weapons that Billy and his fellow soldiers use while on duty. They ask Billy about what weapons they use specifically and the firepower behind these firearms. The football players are also very interested in the feeling of killing someone. Octavian said to Billy, “But like you ever cap somebody you know of? Like, fire

The Cowboys’ relentless questioning of Billy causes him to have to think back on past experiences and situation. One of experiences that Billy had to go back to was to himself killing another person. After Octavian asks Billy about the feeling of killing someone, “Billy swallows. The hard question. That’s where he bleeds, exactly.”(176). The type of question that Octavian asks is the type of question that bothers Billy greatly. He does not like to think about the people that he had to kill in combat. Killing is not a thought that he likes to have resurface. While Billy is uncomfortable with this topic, the players are intrigued and interested on what Billy has to say about it. It is also said that, “Someday he’ll have to build a church there, if he survives the war.”(176). Billy wants to build a church if he survives the war as a way to atone for all the killing that he has had to do for his