62 pages • 2 hours read
Buzz WilliamsSpare Parts
Buzz WilliamsNonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
In Kuwait City, hungry children swarm Williams’s LAV, looking for food and water. While they are eating and drinking, a car comes out of the city and tries to run them over. Captain Cruz explains the children were Palestinian, second-rate citizens in Kuwait, and the men were Kuwaiti. He says there’s nothing they can do.
That night, the LAV begins to take fire. Williams want to return fire, but Moss can’t find the muzzle flashes, nor can he get Sgt. Krause on the radio. When he makes the decision to drive to Krause’s position, fearing they need help, he finds Krause and his crew asleep. Moss doesn’t report the incident, but he gains honor in the eyes of his fellow Marines.
On guard in Kuwait City, near a water plant, a Kuwaiti named Jabul tells them of the atrocities the Iraqis committed when they captured the city. Williams doesn’t really understand, the same way he didn’t understand what the war would mean when he was in LAV school. After going through houses where women were raped, a room where men were tortured, and a room where executions took place, Williams thinks about the atrocities of war, and how no one in the United States can understand them.
In the following weeks, on patrol outside the city, Williams and the others begin collecting trophies: AK-47s and Iraqi helmets. While Edsar, Williams’s friend from LAV school, is trophy collecting, he accidentally trips a grenade and is killed. At Edsar’s funeral, Williams hears “Taps” again and remembers his brothers: his real brother Lenny, and his Marine brother.
Chapter 10 Summary
Once back home from the war, everything changes. Many men in his unit—Moss, Dougherty, Poole, Nagel, Cruz, Shane, McCole—have transferred, or left. Williams has nightmares in which enemy soldiers are advancing, and he keeps fumbling with his gear and can’t shoot. At college, the concerns of his fellow students and professors seem unimportant, and he can barely remember the work he did before the war began.
Despite the changes at weekend drills, Williams begins to take charge by working with active-duty Marines. At the firing range, however, his nightmare returns, and he fails to qualify with his M-16. During a night drive, he panics, thinking the LAV is going to overturn.
His student teaching helps him cope. He prepares a lecture on the Middle East and presents it to elementary schools in the area. He begins working with special-needs students, and, while trying to reach them, institutes a “boot camp” at school, which becomes a great success.
The next weekend drill is a failure. At the range to fire the guns on the LAVs, Williams realizes the holes in training, the poor way training is conducted, and how much they need to learn. He meets with the new commanding officer, relating his concerns and, after speaking with the active-duty Marines who run Camp Upshur, becomes the company’s master gunner, after a two-week training course at Twenty-Nine Palms base, under the direction of Staff Sgt. Nicholson. When he gets back, he is promoted, and takes a position on the training and planning staff.
Despite all his success, Williams decides to leave the Corps. He tells Major Celeste he wants to start a family and to go to graduate school, but doesn’t talk about the anxiety, the nightmares, and the feeling that he is back in the war.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
After all the mistakes the Marines have made in previous maneuvers, Chapter 9 introduces the theme of redemption. After gunfire erupts all around them, Moss is redeemed when he follows proper procedure. He doesn’t order his men to fire blindly, as happened before, with the mail truck. He also sees a combat veteran fall asleep on duty, and, when he decides not to report the incident, he gains respect and redemption in the eyes of his fellow Marines.
Williams, too, is redeemed, in several ways. The reports of LAVs flipping all over the desert help him get over his guilt. Moss following proper procedure, when Williams is calling for his fellow Marines to fire back, helps him to understand how easy it is in a combat situation to forget training, and helping the small Palestinian children who are second-rate citizens in the eyes of the Kuwaitis helps him understand the prejudices people are raised with.
Williams also feels justified in his prejudice against the Iraqi soldiers when he and Corporal Shane find the torture rooms. He realizes their mission in Kuwait helped save lives and kept atrocities from recurring. When he also realizes that people in the States don’t understand what happened here, it’s a two-fold realization: one is that Williams is glad they will never know, and two is that he is protecting them as much as he is protecting the Kuwaitis.
The last part of the chapter, though, partially contradicts the lesson Williams just learned. After combat has essentially ended, Williams and the other Marines go hunting for souvenirs like children. They seem to have forgotten the deaths and torture and bombings they have seen only days before. When Edsar is killed by a grenade and they are forced to turn in their souvenirs, Williams realizes that Edsar was his brother, too.
Chapter 10 describes Williams in the aftermath of war. He does not realize at first that he is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He is reliving combat, and many of his earlier fears come back to haunt him: his fear of not having the right training, of his gear failing, and of failing his fellow Marines.
It’s through teaching that Williams is able to overcome his anxieties. By learning more about himself, he is able to help others. This applies to both his civilian job as a teacher and his post-war role in the Marine Corps. By instituting a “boot camp” for special-needs students, he is able to integrate the Marines into his civilian world. By teaching other Marines at his weekend drills, he is able to bring his civilian job into the Corps.
Ultimately, however, Williams must leave the Corps, or continue to be haunted by his nightmares: “I had counted on my promotions in rank and responsibility to distance me from the war and ease my anxiety problems. It had never dawned on me that drilling each month was my problem” (288). Williams is telling the reader that he can never leave combat behind, and since being a Marine is always focusing on combat, his weekend drills continue to remind him of those fears and anxieties. Much like when he first joined, and had trouble going from civilian to Marine and back to civilian again, Williams realizes he can’t continue bouncing back and forth.
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