The colonel is the most obviously heroic character in the book, or he would be if the author cleared space for him.
The relevance to Iran and WMD is clear enough, though this is not a novel that uses Vietnam for anything so trivial as allegorical purposes. The colonel is also a thinker about the relationship between government and the armed forces and prepares an academic paper on the cross-contamination of data waves, in other words, the way in which the military massages the facts to give the information that government wants or expects.
I believe we'll wander in the darkness for a good long time and some of what we do here will never be made right, but we will be forgiven.' Perhaps this is a little implausibly long-range for a prediction made in 1969. The colonel is sceptical about the future of the war, though not, in the end, despairing. With no official status, the colonel creates a little enclave of esprit de corps and goes native, but in a good way. Sands, a veteran of the Second World War (he was one of the Flying Tigers, joining the fray before Pearl Harbor), becomes in Vietnam a sort of mirror image of Colonel Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. I'm fighting for the freedom of real individuals here on this ground in Vietnam and I hate to lose.' I'm fighting for Lucky and Hao and folks like your cook and your housekeeper. But I'm not fighting for the United States. It seems some sort of survival from an early draft when the larger-than-life maverick Colonel Sands, universally known as 'the colonel', says to his nephew: 'For the United States, it'll all be fine in the end. He can do direct confrontation between characters who spell out their philosophies to each other - and perhaps it's a good thing that this should be such a rare event (likewise tucked away near the end).
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