Playing with Parallelism

On page 73, O'Brien includes some parallelism into his text. The second paragraph on the page Mitchell Sanders tells his fellow comrade, Tim that he think he knows the moral of the whole situation of the men thinking they were hearing voices and sounds in nature while at a lookout point. He believes that in the case of these men they actually listened to their enemies. Now, whether or not the sounds they heard were real or a figure of their imagination, they believed they heard them and that's all that mattered. Now, as for the parallelism. O'Brien compares these men to politicians, all civilian types, your girlfriend, everybody's sweet little virgin girlfriend. By doing this the reader is shown that they need to listen to their enemy, contrary to what the soldiers in Vietnam did.