"'I just want to go home ad start all over again.' Then, so quietly he almost didn't hear her, 'Alone,'" Helena says (Fallon 145). By emphasizing how quietly Helena said alone, it shows she was unable to outwardly admit to Kit that she wanted to start over again, with her own fresh start. It makes the reader feel sympathy for both Kit and Helena, because it's apparent that Helena knows she's crushing Kit's world by wanting to leave him. Adams has a different approach to making the reader feel sympathy, by bringing in examples that tug at the reader's heartstrings. "Soldiers may go overseas and come back to the same base, repeatedly," he writes. "They may have met their spouses in the area, bought houses, sent their kids to school" (Adams). He brings up an example almost anyone can relate to, talking about how the base is a place where they've spent so much of their life, and where they established their families. Everyone knows what it's like to go back to a place where you've spent a big part of your life, which makes it easy to imagine what it feels like and makes it feel so real.
Another emotion the authors tap into is fear. Through their writing, readers can see how terrifying the jobs these soldiers have are, and can make them scared to ever go into the military themselves. Fallon specifically uses imagery to capture these emotions. "His body threw Kit against the side of the Humvee and somehow, miraculously, shielded him from the flame until Dupont, from the truck behind, grabbed Kit by the right arm and pulled him out," she writes. "Kit had escaped with almost every single bone in his foot pulverized and burns on his face and hands" (Fallon 148). The imagery she uses really gives the reader an idea of what it was like to be in that situation, and it makes the reader feel scared for Kit in that situation. More generally, it makes the reader feel scared for anyone in the military, because one can see how dangerous their job is.