Blog One “It’s Just Nightmares Talking. It Ain’t Real.”

Prompt 1:

The image of American assembly lines creating Sherman after Sherman, facilitated by standardized parts and heavy demand, is rather similar to the waves of trained crews in line to operate the next tank. For me, this article highlighted a subsumption of sorts in which the soldiers at war (subjects) became interchangeable parts themselves (objects). When a tank falls another crew is there to replace it, as the people who initially volunteered their service become trapped in a machine of war. 

Prompt 2:

I was struck by Jane Blair’s excerpt of Hesitation Kills in which she recounted the difficulty of sleeping alone after returning to America. It particularly stood out to me because of the connection I noticed between her own experience and later definition of PTSD. As she wrote, “Post-traumatic stress disorder isn't just flipping out and killing someone; It is a failure to adjust the normal society,” so when I read the line about the gun she kept under her pillow, I had to read it again because I found such acclimation tragic. In adjusting to civilian society, the closest comfort was that from which she came. She had returned to America, but it was a place she no longer knew.

Prompt 3: 

Hundreds of thousands of war-related deaths in just the brief sixteen years of my life. The killing of foreign civilians, oppositional forces, and American soldiers continues daily, yet I remain largely unaffected. The war doesn’t reach my front door—probably never will—and some days it’s hard to conceive of the fighting my country does across the world from me. Yes, America is at war, but I am not involved. Largely isolated from this forgotten conflict, if I smell smoke or see fire, it’s because I’ve gone camping with my friends, not because my house has been bombarded. The perpetual war in which I have grown up has banalized that which I should find shocking, death tolls reported as large numbers are digested alongside tomorrow’s daily news. Oddly enough, I think less and less about war as the countless fatalities become a backdrop to my adversely peaceful life.