Staff Sergeant Sam Croft, Woodrow Wilson, and Roy Gallagher are playing cards the night before a scheduled attack.

They are members of a recon platoon fighting in the Asian theater of World War II on a fictional island named Anopopei.

General Cummings makes the rounds to evaluate the storm damage and good-naturedly tells the men to expect a Japanese attack.

Stanley tells a story about a time he stole and then repaid money from a store he worked at to buy cheap furniture.

Cummings instructs him to go pick up supplies for the officers' mess hall, but secretly pays off the seller to keep the goods from Hearn.

Hearns cuts Cummings back by asking, "Short of bringing in every man in the outfit, all six thousand of them, and letting them pick up your cigarettes, how are you going to impress them?"

Minetta spends a couple days in the mental ward and realizes he can't take it anymore, so he claims to have woken up with no memory of the past week.

They share laughter for a while, which is slowly replaced by a silent sadness, mixed with uncertainty and frustration that the entire patrol was for naught.

"[7] The narrator illustrates the exhaustion and humiliation of the soldiers' life: “When a man was harnessed into a pack and web belt and carried a rifle and two bandoliers and several grenades, a bayonet and a helmet, he felt as if he had a tourniquet over both shoulders and across his chest.

It was hard to breathe and his limbs kept falling asleep.”[8] Dehumanization of the soldier is also seen in Chapter 5 when the platoon had to carry antitank guns between 1st Battalion and A Company, which was about a mile of muddy trail.

[9][10] Mailer described The Naked and the Dead as "'an odyssey of fear, exhaustion, and death,'" and presents the natural world as "uncaring, unyielding, implacable, and occasionally, beautiful.

Despite divisions of rank, economic, political, sexuality, or class, loneliness was a universal phenomenon among soldiers and officers during the Second World War.

Roth, for example, wishes to have someone whom he “could talk to seriously.”[15] He realizes that he doesn’t know his own comrades very well, since everyone he met when he initially entered the Army was either killed or reassigned.

The narrator reveals "[u]ntil Hennessy had been killed, Red had accepted all the deaths of the men he knew as something large and devastating and meaningless .

[23] The contrast between Hearn and Roth's deaths reflects both the bonds of brotherhood made among soldiers during war and the division between rank.

Not only is the platoon shattered, Mailer underlines the division between the empowered and powerless, the narrator declares, "It was Croft's fault that Roth had been killed.

Chickenshit, as termed by Paul Fussell in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, was a major aspect of the theme of power in the novel.

"[28] Mailer told his sister that he wrote to his wife, Bea, about his plans for a novella with "'a ridge or a peak as a symbol' of 'the higher aspirations of man, the craving for the secret, the core of life,'" and the Faustian need for power.

[29] In another letter to his wife, Mailer recounted an encounter with the top mess sergeant, who called him "'a chickenshit son of a bitch.

[35] During World War II, General Patton was considered one of the most fastidious perpetuators of chickenshit, constantly enforcing the Army's dress code on his soldiers.

'"[38] While writing his combat novel, Mailer stated that "[t]here are going to be troubling terrifying glimpses of order in disorder, of a horror which may or may not lurk beneath the surface of things.

'"[39] Hennessey's death as well as Croft, Reed, and Martinez's "primitive glimpses of a structure behind things" is Mailer's depiction of '"the old business of man constructing little tag-ends of a Gd for himself in his moral wilderness.'"

They ain’t a goddam thing wrong with you.” Mailer's use of Croft in this scene emphasizes the unilateral sentiment and necessity of brotherhood during wartime.

[45] The theme recurs in Part III when Brown, Goldstein, Ridges, and Stanley attempt to carry the wounded Wilson back to camp.

[46] The gravity of Roth's death demonstrates the deep bond of brotherhood, pervasive not only during World War II but more specifically among the platoon.

[48] The construction of American masculinity predicated off of violence and adventure narratives is particularly distilled in Croft as the typified combat soldier.

Mailer insisted "it was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective.

It was written with vigor and contained acute descriptiveness which enabled readers to imagine what World War II was really like.

[62] In its initial review the Times Literary Supplement complained that the novel "grows increasingly unreadable" due to Mailer's tendency to "leave nothing out".

I have not changed my opinion of the book since… I do recall a fine description of men carrying a dying man down a mountain… Yet every time I got going in the narrative I would find myself stopped cold by a set of made-up, predictable characters taken not from life, but from the same novels all of us had read, and informed by a naïveté which was at its worst when Mailer went into his Time-Machine and wrote those passages which resemble nothing so much as smudged carbons of a Dos Passos work.