In The Things They Carried, the men disguise their fear of death by using slang to refer to it, saying that a fellow soldier has been offed, lit up, or zapped while zipping. O'Brien also recalls that when his childhood friend Linda died, another boy told him that she had kicked the bucket. He continues:

I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead. And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut.

The same phenomenon is exhibited in physical form when the men shake hands with the dead body of a Vietnamese man, and include him in their conversation. O'Brien at first feels that they are being disrespectful to the dead, but he later realizes they are attempting to show contempt and indifference towards death itself.

Euphemisms for death in contemporary American culture are much more polite and decorous than the terms used in The Things They Carried. People tend to say that the dead have gone to a better place, passed away, or simply passed. Such respectful language appears to be the polar opposite of the vulgar terms used by the soldiers, but actually fulfils the same function: to obscure the seriousness and finality of death. Someone who has passed seems still to exist, like someone who has graduated from high school and gone on to college. Death, therefore, seems to be a stage of life, rather than its conclusion.