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‘machine’ of the story’s title includes the factory processing of living flesh and the wider social and structural violence within which the murder occurs. Jesse justifies his actions with reference to the Vietnam War, describing how in this fictional world front-line troops were maintained with the bodies of the dead through organ transplants: ‘“Got to keep the war machine running!” they told us. Then there wasn’t enough. We finally had to get our own casualties. The NCOs told us to get what we needed off our own. They wouldn’t let us take nothing off the whites
helpless pose, passive, almost in prayer, places him as a quiet victim – a sacrifice to the war machine. His vulnerability makes him sympathetic, but it also renders him childlike, if not effeminate. 3 Pity was an emasculating emotion, and injured and disabled men were well aware of that. 4 The doctor leads Anderson through the train looking at his patients, telling stories of heroic surgeries and narrow escapes from Zeppelin attacks. She wonders at how the patients were ‘so pitiful
war machines and torture instruments, p. 109. 45 Ibid . p. 98. 46 This exorcism is also metaphorical and related to guilt: Mister B. sees writing things, ‘setting [them] down in pages’, as a way of ‘purging all