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

An aspect about war that this scene shows is the humanity of the soldiers. Often times, I consider soldiers to have a heroic invincibility in their personas, but this scene looks far beyond that. Don seems to portray what I envision of an unbreakable soldier, but Grady illustrates the personal toll of the war. Previously, I had envisioned soldiers as fearless, but I had not really considered that the soldiers could be just as scared of the war as the Americans sitting at home.

The poem “Dress Blues,” by Jason Isbell stuck out to me because of the perspective that it was written. The lines, “The high school gymnasium’s ready/Full of flowers and old Legionaires,” showcase aspects of life that are unsettlingly familiar to my life. This setting in a school, that I easily relate to, made this poem about a death in war seem close to my life.

As a younger child, I was always under the impression that war was inevitable, so I did not question the idea that America was at war. This notion never personally affected me more than a few moments of critical thought, but overall it has numbed my perspective on war. I now think of war as a necessary evil that America engages in to correct injustices in the world, but statistics like the ones in this question test this belief.