- In past studies involving war and its effect on soldiers, I became familiar with the concept of was driving people past their mental capacity to extreme paranoia and panic. While such side effects are extremely justified and not at all surprising, the aura of crippling helplessness in this scene still caught me off guard. I don’t think I have ever seen the horrifying mental effects of war on soldiers in such a blatant and vulnerable context. Having experienced moments of panic and anxiety in my own life, I found myself appreciating this scene even more. It humanized the soldiers I had learned about in past courses, and made me see their pain in a light I could relate to — even if on a much smaller scale.
- I saw many comparisons to war and drugs or addiction in the excerpts on the teacher page, the most direct connection found in the quote for Chris Hedge’s War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which describes battle as a “rush” much like the high of a drug. Having never personally considered war and violence to be desirable experiences, it was fascinating to hear that often, war can be an addiction worth suffering for when one is so immensely attracted to power.
- Those numbers remind me of the discussion of fairness in war that we also had today. While many American lives have been lost in this conflict, those numbers are but a fraction of the Afghan losses in the same amount of time. While America’s presence in Afghanistan is not something I fully understand, these numbers make me wonder why, if the war is so poorly balanced in terms of casualties, the conflict has persisted for as long as I have been alive.
Thursday, August 15, 2019
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1. This scene struck me because of the contrast of how soldiers are normally portrayed. Soldiers are almost always seen as heroes, so the fact that Grady was opening up to Don humanized him. Because soldiers are often only portrayed as invincible and strong, it is easy to not acknowledge the toll that war takes on their mental health. This scene represents a holistic view of a soldier's life, which is different to how I normally see soldiers represented.
ReplyDelete2. One quote in particular that jumped out at me was, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” The author shows how war pushes soldiers so much that their reality becomes warped. This quote also relates to mental health and the toll that war take on that. The author describes how a group of soldiers really believed that a jungle was singing, proving that war forces one to endure so much that you become delusional. It is interesting to see how people react to such harsh conditions and how that makes their realities shift.
3. Although we have been at war, war has not affected my life directly. War is never in my face, unlike WW1 and ll. If I want to learn more about war, I have to go out and find information online or by listening to the news. Because I only hear about war through short summaries, I do not have a full perspective of the conflict, and war becomes very distant. It is hard for me to imagine and believe the tragic stories I hear because they are so different from my daily life and I am not consciously involved in the war effort. I am excited to take this class to understand a theme that has been prevalent in every period in history and still drives our world today. It is fascinating how the government spends so much time and resources into the military, yet its citizens are mostly in the dark about what is happening.