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Works on War
Boys, I've been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It's entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here. Suppress it! You don't know the horrible aspects of war. I've been through two wars and I know. I've seen cities and homes in ashes. I've seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is hell! -- General William Tecumseh Sherman, 1880, to the cadets.
General Sherman truly says it all with his statement, "War is hell." Even if it is to protect one's country and its people, such as World War I or II, war still is the worst thing possible. The British poet Wilfred Owen strongly communicates this same message throughout his work about World War I in 1917. He relates the horrors he experiences on the battlefield and the terrible impact it is has on fighting men.
In the poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, for example, Owen completely contradicts Horace's saying, "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country." Through his very detailed and moving words, for example, he depicts the affect of gas warfare on one of the soldiers who is "guttering, choking, drowning." He watches in dread as the man dies before him:
... white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter...
It was also not about deeds, or lands, "nor anything about glory, honor, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except war ... " He concluded, "the subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity."
The impact of war is not any better for those on the other side of the war. These men and women may be considered "the enemy," but they still are human beings. The Civil War is the worst example of this situation: friends fought against friends, family fought against family.
In the book A Novel Without a Name, Duong Thu Huong depicts the hell that the North Vietnamese went through during the many years of the Vietnam War. Duong relates the…
The novel also portrays how war impacts the basic needs of all humanity, such as food to eat. Starvation was not atypical of the Vietcong and the villagers, because many of the rice fields were lost through the bombing. The smallest amounts of horrendous tasting food, which do not even offer any nutrition, are worth gold. Early in the novel, Quan declines orangutan soup, where even the animal's hands are cooked. People steal and fight over food and use it as a means of barter.
Such stories are distasteful to everyone. The Vietnamese government even banned A Novel with No Name because of the "scathing dissection of the day-to-day realities of life for the Vietnamese during the final years of the Vietnam War." Apparently so much of the detailed material was brought to everyone's attention in this book, that Duong was arrested and jailed for seven months in 1991. Naturally, books such as this are just as difficult for Americans to read especially since the Vietnam War was very controversial and needlessly took so many lives on both sides.
How can one say which of these writers' works is more personally disturbing? Each war was so atrocious in its own way. Given the futility of the Vietnam War (which was not even a declared war) as well as the immense disrespect for the Geneva Convention and the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians, perhaps this was a greater hell. However, can there be one hell greater than another?
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was first recorded in soldiers after the Civil War, but was not recognized as a common occurrence until after the Vietnam War, when symptoms developed in over 30% of combat veterans (Harvard Men's Health Watch). After they are removed from combat, former soldiers often experience nightmares, flashbacks, outbursts of anger, and the inability to sleep (Cohen 1). Beah experienced all of these symptoms when he and some
boys who exercise the dominant leadership roles in William Golding's The Lord of the Flies are the characters named Jack and Ralph. Ralph is a practical, solid individual with little charisma but with very sensible ideas about how the stranded boys can best survive on the abandoned island their plane has crashed into. Jack is the more attractive and 'sexy' leader of the two individuals. He leads by organizing
" There is a more calm feeling to his description. This is not to say that the author was portraying war as being a patriotic act, but the author was not as graphical in his describing what the soldiers were seeing and going through. The reader is more connected to the actions of the poem and not the fact that someone is dying. He ends his poem by referencing "hell"
Winning the Civil War The American Civil War is considered the most costly of all the wars fought by this nation in terms of the human lives that were lost and the casualties which left young men mutilated, amputated, and barely able to carry on. Approximately 750,000 young men died by the war's end either from wounds inflicted in battle or from infection and lack of sanitation in hospitals.[footnoteRef:1] At the
Thinking of his father, he defies even the coach's remark that he is too puny to play. Jerry must overcome his own sense of powerlessness, and the sickness that overtakes his body after being buffeted from all sides. Emotionally and physically, although he may appear weak, Jerry has inner resources of steel that he discovers when he is, literally and figuratively, down for the count and up against the
Lesson 6 Journal Entry # 9 of 13 Journal Exercise 6.4B: Responding to Literature Modern British Poetry Lesson 6 Journal Entry # 10 of 13 Journal Exercise 6.5A: Responding to Literature The poem was written in 1919, which is immediately after the First World War. I think that Yeats is, on one hand, enthusiastic about the end of the world and the coming of a new era. On the other hand, I think he is