How we cite our quotes: (Section.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I was so mad at my mother, Zelda that I didn't write or call for almost two months. She should have gone up the nun's hill to the convent, like she wanted, instead of having me. But she had married Swede Johnson from off-reservation, and I'd arrived premature. He'd had the grace, at least, to go AWOL from army boot camp and never let his face be seen again. (1.2.15)
Soldiers are actually all over this novel, now that we think about it. In this early reference, Albertine casually drops that her father was a soldier in an unnamed conflict (and a deserter, apparently).
Quote #2
She started after him. Party because she didn't know what she was looking for, partly because he was a soldier like her father, and partly because he could have been an Indian, she followed. (9.1.12)
When Albertine runs away to Fargo, she ends up at the bus station with no money and no idea where to go. For a lifeline, she latches on to a dude she sees walking by who looks like a soldier. Although Albertine didn't really have a relationship with her dad, she decides that the fact that he and her pops shared a profession is reason enough to trust him.
Quote #3
She was tall, strong, twice the size of most Vietnamese. It had been a long time since he'd seen any Indian women, even a breed. He had been a soldier, was now a veteran, had seen nine months of combat in the Annamese Cordillera before the NVA captured him somewhere near Pleiku. They kept him half a year. He was released after an honorable peace was not achieved, after the evacuation. (9.1.18)
Now the third-person narrator slips over to the soldier's perspective, and we learn that he was in Vietnam and had been captured. Also, we get a wry comment about the Vietnam conflict overall, in which "an honorable peace was not achieved."