Prime Directive

The story I read is a very interesting story. When I first read it, I had no idea what to think. There was so much going on that I did not know what the point was, or where the author was going with the story. It seemed to be jumping from subject to subject with no point, but after I sat and compared and contrasted pieces of the story, it all started to come together like a puzzle.
Throughout the story, there was a constant battle of how things should be compared to how they truly are, and this story describes many of them. Each character has a role in this story promoting a section of information that makes the story whole.
During the story, the author sees many things you too would see on a normal Halloween night or weekend. When I think of Halloween, many different thoughts come to mind, but the more I observed these thoughts, the more things in the story began to make sense. When I think of Halloween, I think of dark scary nights, with cute kids in costumes. I think of going to parties where everyone is dressed up having a good time, with decorations surrounding us trying to scare us, tombstones of R.I.P., and people talking of stories of the dead and the devil. And then there are the pranks. Are they scary or fun? Depends on what end of them you are on. Am I the one playing a prank on someone, or is someone setting me up to get scared and run away. After analyzing all the different aspects of Halloween, I was able to understand how things seem and how they are. Things may seem scary, when they are really fun, or vise versa, they may seem fun, when indeed they are truly scary. The ideas of how Halloween is tied the rest of the story together.
The story opens up with the author dressing up as Captain James T. Kirk for Halloween. In the beginning of the story, this seems to be extra detail, but in all reality, it sets the stage for the story. The simple Captain costume begins to carry a much deeper meaning throughout the story as I learned how much he despised a Captain, Captain Graner. Later in the story, an important quote comes up showing that how things are is not always how things should be. “I think of my enlisted cousin who, at my grandmother’s funeral, dressed in his Marine uniform, said that he couldn’t wait to bomb Iraq into the fucking Stone Age.” Usually, at a funeral, people do not talk about bombing a country and killing more people. It’s usually a time of sorrow, not a time to talk about killing more people.
Throughout the story many examples of this are used to tie things that happened that night, to things that have happened in the war. First, the author is continuously going from party to party, constantly traveling and moving. It did not seem that things changed from party to party, he was still unhappy, and bored. This is related to the war because during the war, the army is constantly moving from one location to another. Usually things don’t change a whole lot from one location to the next. There is not much different, they are still in the same war, trying to accomplish the same thing.
The moving part also coincides with his wife moving to Indiana. Many pieces in this story seem to flow together. When his wife moves away, he is left quite lonely, with pretty much nothing. His house has nothing left in it except a computer, six books, and a lamp. Because he is lonely he goes to his neighbor across the street, Mel, to pass out Halloween candy. Mel is described as a person who wakes up every morning asking “How can I help others today?” From a guy who wakes up every morning thinking this, you would not expect him to purposely scare little children on Halloween.
There are many examples in this story that prove that things aren’t always what they are made out to be. In this story, a lot of the things are actually the exact opposite of what you would think. Sometimes how I think should be are really not at all what they really are.