One feels that these guys can take care of themselves. It seems fair to say that Hemingway never really understood himself. He laid bare his confusion, his resentment, his doubt, in everything he wrote, but never seemed to know it. Hemingway's literary versions of himself reflect this self-deception. He can ride, shoot, wire a bridge with explosives, even face his own death with equanimity.
Fear is just another obstacle to be mastered.
They can't seem to reminisce without becoming sentimental. This is the closest Hemingway ever gets to writing about what must have been one of the most traumatic episodes of his life. A bitter loneliness afflicts these characters. Women seem to exist wholly for the pleasure of his protagonists, like the good whiskey they're always extolling. Because there's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them.