Why was Garraty in the Long Walk?

[Pucker]

I think that suconsciously all fifteen years olds think they are invinsible.

This is a very good point right here, and I think it goes directly to the heart of the mattter. It's important to note that we don't really know what "getting a ticket" is until someone actually gets one, and there's very clear imagery when Curly (If I remember correctly) gets the first one of it hitting home with the boys . . . well . . . just like a bullet . . . something about how it wasn't little red flags that say "Bang!" It was real. That, and Garraty himself thinks about the impossibility of the demise of "The Ray Garraty Story."

I think we're all like that. When we're young we understand death as an abstract. Yes, it's inevitable, but it's for someone else. Only when someone close to us goes "before their time" do we actually face the starkness of the reality, and even then the lesson has a tendency to wear off. I would say that, beyond the obvious parallel to sending randomly chosen boys off to die in the jungle, this story is about battling impending, inevitable doom with friendship.

But getting back to the question of "Why?" It seems to me that The Walk represents a badge of honor (and there's that war imagery again); a nice bullet-point on your resume in a life that offers little but drudgery, fatigue and slow death.

Either that, or I am entirely wrong.

[fushingfeef]

At the time SK wrote this one, he was seeing many of his friends and contemporaries joining the armed forces knowing they were going to face action in Vietnam. While many of them were drafted, many joined voluntarily. I'm guessing if you asked any of the volunteers what they thought their odds of death were, not one would say they were going to die. That's something that happens to someone else, right? So I don't think at the time SK felt the need to put in a whole lot of reasons why someone would do this, it was happening around him all the time in real life.