"He remembered how his mother always used the old Hoover on Saturdays. The smell of carpets, a fine powdery dust rising in the yellow window light. An uncluttered house. Things neatly in place (157)."" His remembrance of the clean, ordered house is a sign that he was happy before he came to Vietnam and wants to again be displaced back home away from the harsh reality he currently is in. The structure and order that he imagines allows him to keep fighting and going after Cacciato because it pushes him to a purpose, to once again be happy with his family in the United States, whereas war has no purpose or reason. .
In addition to Paul Berlin using his imagination to escape the hardships of war, Mine Okubo does to. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, people with Japanese ancestry who were American citizens who had committed no crime, were placed in internment camps. Okubo and her brother were among the Japanese Americans whose freedom was taken from them and sent to the camps. They lived in awful conditions where food was limited, their names were reduced to a number, and privacy was non-existent. Okubo wishes to forget what it was like, but remembers:.
We were close to freedom and yet far form it. The San Bruno streetcar line bordered the camp on the east and the main state highway on the south. Streams of cars passed by all day. Guard towers and barbed wire surrounded the entire center. A huge sign, "Enjoy Acme Beer,"" stood out like a beacon on a near-by hill (81-2).
The sight of freedom in the outside world, a world she once was apart of, forces her to use her imagination to displace herself from the harsh reality she currently was in, bringing remembrance of once what it was like to be free, having no restrictions. The remembrance of the past allows her to keep on going each day in the camp; one day soon she hopes to be free again similar to Paul Berlin who often remembered of his life prior to the war allowing him to forget about the tough reality.
