Horror of War

¶ … Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien and the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen are two wonderful pieces of literature that depict the horrors of war in a way that is both visceral and astute. The images, the relationships, the deaths, the birth of the unknown void, and the perils of being in a life or death situation are brilliantly told within the context of a battlefield.

But what are the true horrors of war? Are they simply the awful experiences and the loss of life? Is the horror of it all the act of tolerating it and then becoming another person after? Regardless of what people experience during a war, it changes everyone involved. The loss of innocence, the loss of hope, the loss of sanity, the loss of the known, of stability, those are the true horrors of war.

Although both works deal with the effects of war on soldiers, the poem does it in a way that shows a scene, a page of war. The short story reveals what happens after, what happens before and what happens in the middle, the little things. "Dulce et Decorum Est" has several scenes in the poem that show death and blood and gore.

In the middle of the poem the line: "GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;" (Owen 1) prepares the reader for the catastrophic events that will unfold as the soldiers experience the attack. Much like in other war related stories or poems, the fear, the anticipation often comes back with the soldiers who experiences war. The constant fear of being attacked or remembering what happened there, that is what is true fear and horror for them.

They say it is always calmest before the storm, but it also the tensest, especially if one knows a storm is coming. This line is very similar to the anticipation felt in O'Brien's story. His depiction of waiting and preparing for battle, is similar in feeling to Owen's.

The poem continues with: "In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, and drowning." (Owen 1) Here is where Owen decides to show how death affects the soldiers, by seeing their friends, their colleagues die in front of them. Death is chaotic and in battle no one knows is going to die at what time. To demonstrate the true madness and intensity of death on the battlefield is to show a horror that people rarely see.

People always think of death in a battlefield as being quick. In reality it is slow and unyielding with madness everywhere as the bodies lay in heaps or slowly dying on the ground. Unlike O'Brien, who shows the everyday things, Owen reveals the catastrophe, the vulgarity of the war. Additionally, he does a great job of showing what the soldiers go through just traveling and getting to places. People fail to realize that soldiers even after an attack, have to continue marching to their destination. "Men marched asleep.

Many had lost their boots-But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots." (Owen 1) It is these scenes that show the true horror of war because people suffer the most when they have to endure. O'Brien also reveals endurance as a horror of war through his depiction of the marching.

One of the last lines of the poem: "To children ardent for some desperate glory, the old Lie: Dulce ET decorum est Pro patria mori." (Owen 1) show what a lot of soldiers feel after the war is done. They feel cheated. They come in thinking they just have to win a war, shoot, hopefully not die, but in reality, even if they win and make it back alive, they have to deal with everything that happened there.

Furthermore, they also have to deal with the realization of the true purpose of war and their roles in it. Soldiers are pawns for the king to use. When soldiers look back on what they went through, all for the sake of some land, or power play, they feel as though it were all for nothing. That bitterness experienced in the poem is also shown in "The Things They Carried." In "The Things They Carried" O'Brien does a great job of showing the reader, soldiers are people.

They have feelings, personalities, and fears. "Some carried themselves with a sort of wistful resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it." (O'Brien 22) Readers at times picture soldiers as these dolls that are just numbers and platoons, marines. In reality they are like everyone else, with the difference being, that they chose to fight in a war.

Revealing these personal details definitely differ from the writing style of Owen who makes the soldiers faceless and merely fodder for the scene. Fodder is a huge symbol for a lot of these war stories. War invites a person to be hard, void of emotion. Most of the horror in war is often masked, hid from view, especially when they leave for home. In the story O'Brien recounts the "things" inside of the soldiers and their desire to keep it all within.

"By and large they carried these things inside, maintaining the masks of composure." (O'Brien 24) To keep these dormant, intense feelings within the mind often leads to post traumatic stress disorder because they did not want to accept or express the pain they felt in the battlefield. Owen does not connect with the reader through personal pain but rather, a universal depiction. Pain is universal.

It is at times the only thing left after everything has happened and it is the endurance of pain, even in the smallest forms, that people suffer. O'Brien mentions how soldiers endured the cold rain and how brave it was to sit there and take the cold. "How the rain never stopped. How the cold worked into your bones. Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in.