Foil Characters

"I was shot twice. The first time, out by Tri Binh, it knocked me against the pagoda wall, and I bounced and spun around and ended up on Rat Kiley's lap. A lucky think, because Rat was the medic. He tied on a compress and told me to ease back, then he ran off toward the fighting... I kept waiting for the pain to hit, but in fact I didn't feel much. A throb, that's all. Even in the hospital it wasn't bad... Jorgenson was no Rat Kiley. He was green and incompetent and scared. So when I got shot the second time, in the butt, along the Song Tra Bong, it took the son of a bitch almost ten minutes to work up the nerve to crawl over to me. By then I was gone with the pain. Later I found out I'd almost died of shock. Bobby Jorgenson didn't know about shock, or if he did, the fear made him forget. To make it worse, he bungled the patch job, and a couple of weeks later my ass started to rot away. You could actually peel off fillets of meat with your fingernail." Page 180 and 181

Rat and Bobby are definitely foil characters. Rat is prompt, efficient, confident, and a great medic. On the other hand, Bobby is scared, unsure, and still unused to the environment of war. I have no doubt that he grew to become a great medic. He simply did not have the same experience as Rat. This passage again shows how the war changed people. The soldiers began as boys who were naive and scared like Bobby. They eventually grew to be confident and skilled soldiers as Rat did. They simply had to settle in and the rest would follow.