Name ________________________
War & Humanity: Things They Carried
AP Lang: Hour ____________________
Ch 1-4 Vocabulary
Noun:
Adjective: Elusive
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
difficult to detect or grasp by the
mind or analyze
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
More than anything, he wanted Martha to love
him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly
chatty, elusive on the matter of love.
Noun:
Adjective: Devout
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
deeply religious
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated
New Testament that had been presented to him
by his father, who taught Sunday school in
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Noun: Malaria
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
an infective disease caused by
sporozoan parasites that are
transmitted through the bite of an
infected Anopheles mosquito; marked
by paroxysms of chills and fever
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel
filled with morphine and plasma and malaria
tablets and surgical tape and comic books and
all the things a medic must carry, including
M&M’s for especially bad wounds, for a total
weight of nearly 18 pounds.
Page 1
Name ________________________
War & Humanity: Things They Carried
AP Lang: Hour ____________________
Ch 1-4 Vocabulary
Noun: awe
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
an overwhelming feeling of wonder
or admiration
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
They carried all they could bear, and then
some, including a silent awe for the terrible
power of the things they carried.
Noun: ambush
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
the act of concealing yourself and
lying in wait to attack by surprise
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
On ambush, or other night missions, they
carried peculiar little odds and ends.
Noun: insignia
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
a badge worn to show official
position
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
They carried chess sets, basketballs,
Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of
rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic
cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct.
Noun: artillery
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
an army unit that uses big guns
Page 2
Name ________________________
War & Humanity: Things They Carried
AP Lang: Hour ____________________
Ch 1-4 Vocabulary
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the
village well, they called in artillery and
watched the wreckage, then they marched for
several hours through the hot afternoon, and
then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how
Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found himself
trembling.
Noun:
Adjective: casualty
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
someone injured or killed or
captured or missing in a military
engagement
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
They would check for casualties, call in
dustoffs, light cigarettes, try to smile, clear
their throats and spit and begin cleaning their
weapons.
Noun: zeal
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
a feeling of strong eagerness (usually
in favor of a person or cause)
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
Some carried themselves with a sort of wistful
resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly
discipline or good humor or macho zeal.
Verb: comport
Adverb:
Picture:
Noun:
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
behave in a certain manne
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
It wouldn’t help Lavender, he knew that, but
from this point on he would comport himself as
Page 3
Name ________________________
War & Humanity: Things They Carried
AP Lang: Hour ____________________
Ch 1-4 Vocabulary
an officer.
Noun:
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb: forthrightly
Picture:
directly and without evasion; not
roundabout
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a
moral emergency we will behave like the
heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly,
without thought of personal loss or discredit.
Noun:
Adjective: frugal
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
avoiding waste
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in
finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by
being frugal and stashing it away and letting it
earn interest, we steadily increase our moral
capital in preparation for that day when the
account must be drawn down.
Noun:
Adjective: naive
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
lacking information or instruction
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so
the American war in Vietnam seemed to me
wrong.
Noun: deferment
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
Page 4
Name ________________________
War & Humanity: Things They Carried
AP Lang: Hour ____________________
Ch 1-4 Vocabulary
act of putting off to a future time
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
The government had ended most graduate
school deferments; the waiting lists for the
National Guard and Reserves were impossibly
long; my health was solid; I didn’t qualify for
CO status—no religious grounds, no history as
a pacifist.
Verb: exile
Adverb:
Picture:
Noun:
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
the act of expelling a person from
their native land
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile.
Noun: acquiescence
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
acceptance without protest
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
I’d be screaming at them, telling them how
much I detested their blind, thoughtless,
automatic acquiescence to it all, their
simpleminded patriotism, their prideful
ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes,
how they were sending me off to fight a war
they didn’t understand and didn’t want to
understand.
Noun:
Adjective: pious
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
having or showing or expressing
reverence for a deity
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
Page 5
Name ________________________
War & Humanity: Things They Carried
AP Lang: Hour ____________________
Ch 1-4 Vocabulary
All of them—I held them personally and
individually responsible—the polyestered
Kiwanis boys, the merchants and farmers, the
pious churchgoers, the chatty housewives, the
PTA and the Lions club and the Veterans of
Foreign Wars and the fine upstanding gentry
out at the country club.
Noun:
Adjective: cryptic
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
having a puzzling terseness
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely
concentrating, and on those occasions when
speech was necessary he had a way of
compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic
packets of language.
Noun:
Adjective: grotesque
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
ludicrously odd
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
Twenty-one years old, an ordinary kid with all
the ordinary dreams and ambitions, and all I
wanted was to live the life I was born to—a
mainstream life—I loved baseball and
hamburgers and cherry Cokes—and now I was
off on the margins of exile, leaving my country
forever, and it seemed so grotesque and
terrible and sad.
Noun: reticence
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
the trait of being uncommunicative;
not volunteering anything more than
necessary
Page 6
Name ________________________
War & Humanity: Things They Carried
AP Lang: Hour ____________________
Ch 1-4 Vocabulary
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
To an extent, I suppose, his reticence was
typical of that part of Minnesota, where
privacy still held value, and even if I’d been
walking around with some horrible
deformity—four arms and three heads—I’m
sure the old man would’ve talked about
everything except those extra arms and heads.
Noun: vigil
Adjective:
Dictionary Definition:
Verb:
Adverb:
Picture:
a purposeful surveillance to guard or
observe
Story Sentence:
Original Sentence:
I’ll never be certain, of course, but I think he
meant to bring me up against the realities, to
guide me across the river and to take me to the
edge and to stand a kind of vigil as I chose a
life for myself.
Page 7