Cruel and Sorrowful War
War is cruel and sorrowful, no matter in which country and at what time. The Vietnam War began in 1955 and did not end until 1975. In the Vietnam War, it exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from less than one million to more than three million (Vietnam War casualties). World War I was a major war centered on Europe that began in the summer of 1914 and ended in November 1918. In World War I more than 70million military personnel, were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9million combatants were killed. It was the second deadliest conflict in Western history (World War I). I can feel the cruelty and sorrow from the huge amount of death in those wars. The novels I read let me feel deeper about the despair of the people who involved in the war.
War is hell, but thats not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead (How to Tell a True War Story para.91). This is how OBrien generalized the war in the work of How to Tell a True War Story. From his work I find out why he said so.
War is mystery, just like the sound which the soldiers caught. War is terror and despair. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead in the war. Those deaths make peoples soul sick. The major reason why Rat slaughtered the baby buffalo is because he cannot face his friends death. War is pity which we can feel through the death of Rats friend Curt Lemon. War is love. The worse the situation is, the more precious the love will be. Love can always save people from the despair of the war.
As I have understood more deeply about what the wars look like, I also find that war will influence people who were involved forever. I find it in both of the works, Soldiers Home and I Am the Grass.
In the Soldiers Home, Krebs returned back to his hometown from the war, but he felt he could not reintegrate into the society any more. The war brought a great shock to the soldiers mind. He did not believe the happiness of the life, he did not believe anyone. His mind is full of pain and frustration. The buildings once were destroyed could be rebuilt in one day, but the humans mind could not be. The people who were killed in war no longer had lives, and the spirits which were destroyed in war are no longer repaired. Krebs even did not know how to live a normal life.
The other reason why Krebs could not live a normal life, I think is because of other peoples attitude. When Krebs returned to his hometown, the greeting of heroes was over, and the reaction had set in. People seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late. I think it reflected that people in the town did not like the war and they did not like the people from the war either, although they welcomed the soldiers at first.
The change of Krebs and his family is huge. Before the war Krebs is a student of Methodist College in Kansas. It seemed that he is a promising young man. But when he came back, he became a man who lied to attract people. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it (Soldiers Home para.4). Before Krebs went to the war, he had never allowed driving his fathers car. After he came back, his father allowed him to drive the car out in the evening whenever he wished. But Krebs seemed not interested in it. He did not have goals any more. He lost himself in the war, and he did not understand the significance and meaning of life.
Krebs lost his pursuit to the love and the career in the war. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics with girls in love. He did not want them themselves really. They were too complicated. There was something else. Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to work to get her. He would have like to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics. He did not want to have to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasnt worth it (Soldiers Home para.11). He did not want to work until his mother pushed him. His spirit was crushed by war. He lost his pursuit and felt no interest in life. It was war caused his situation. It was war destroyed his ideals. He was alive but lived like a corpse.
Fortunately, the narrator of I Am the Grass was also suffered in the war, but he still had love. However, his love made him could not tell the truth. He did a lot of cruel things during the war, and he could not forget it although the war was ended.
The first paragraph tells me a bunch of horrific things the narrator did in the war. It helps me understand that how cruel the war is, and I know that the narrator feels shame about what he did. The narrator uses a metaphor to say that all these things fester in him like the tiny fragment of shrapnel embedded in his skull. It tells me the narrators conflict that he really wants to forget it but he cant, and he loves his family but he cannot tell the truth to them either.
During the story I find the narrators attitudes changed. At the beginning, he still holds in contempt to the people he hurt. At the end, he feels guilt and a sense of good will and atonement. He cannot face the dirty things he did in Vietnam at the beginning, but now he is capable of facing the land and the people in Vietnam as he makes peace with the country and himself.
I Am the Grass displays different types of festering wounds which is in need of healing. Time alone is incapable of healing all emotional and physical wounds. The plastic surgeon-narrator and Dr. Dinh both served in the army during the Vietnam War and are surgeons. Each man was hurt by the war. Dinh lost his thumbs and the narrator lost peace of mind and a part of his soul. Dinh asked the plastic surgeon to perform a toe transplant to replace one of his missing thumbs. Despite the initial optimism of both men, the operation ultimately failed as the digit became gangrenous and then dead. I Am the Grass makes a powerful statement about the destructive force of war and how the damage reverberates long after the last shot is fired and the final bomb dropped.
The title, I Am the Grass, derives from an eleven-line poem by Carl Sandburg titled Grass (1918) that the narrator quotes in the context of revisiting Long Binh. The poem Grass talks that people are killed everywhere in war and the nature cover them all. In Walkers story, the narrator did lots of dirty things and he covers them all like the grass. The poem also talks about the property of the nature that it works on its own business dispassionately and ineluctably even in wartime, just like the grass describe in the 19th paragraph which covers everything.
To most people, War is defined as a behavior pattern of organized violent conflict, typified by extreme aggression, societal disruption, and high mortality (War). From all the war stories I have read, I found that war is grotesque. War is hell, but thats not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead (How to Tell a True War Story para.91). The war changed soldiers lives and emotions. The influence of war will be last forever.
(1451 words)
Work Cited
Vietnam War casualties. Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, 28 Feb. 2011. Web. 28 Feb. 2011.
World War I. Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, 28 Feb. 2011. Web. 28 Feb. 2011.
OBrien, Tim. "How to Tell a True War Story." The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. 346-355. Print.
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