That's messed up.

Okay so one part of the novel way delightfully disturbing. On page 215, the platoon talks to a dead guy and do some pretty odd stuff to him. After handing him some orange slices, Mitchell Sanders says "a guy's health, that's the most important thing." I'm not sure how most people felt about that, but it gave me a feeling somewhere between nausea and surprise birthday party.
I suppose their actions are understandable. They were getting killing people while getting shot at themselves. They needed some sort of entertainment as well as a way to make light of the situation they were in. By making a joke out of a guy they had killed, they wouldn't be weighed down by guilt and sorrow later in life while thinking about all of the people they killed. O'Brien is hitting on a topic that I'm sure most people can understand. Everyone has laughed when they wanted to cry or made light of some terrible situation. The author is showing the reader that the soldiers still had these human needs. They could not deal with the horror they saw, so they did what all of us would have done. This adds a sense of timelessness to the novel, because everyone can relate to what they did. Even though it might not have been something that odd, everyone has done something like that.