(I've got to warn you of two things. One, I read ahead, so read at risk of spoilers. Two, I'm basically rambling, but it is rambling concerning AP Comp, so here we go. Enjoy if you can, haha.)
I'm really not sure on my thoughts, so let's make one thing clear, shall we? I hate war stories. I hate blood and bone breaking through skin; I hate bombs going off forty years after the battle; I hate seeing broken families pray for dead brothers; I hate boy soldiers shooting other boys soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam, the snows of Stalingrad, the hills of a divided America. Watching old men cry over bullet holes and Dear John letters breaks my heart. Rage and terror and pure, unbridled sadness rap at my ribcage just acknowledging what war is.
But what and why and how are war and the stories it leaves behind? It was chapter seven of The Things They Carried that took my string of reasons and pulled it apart. Wars stories are so many things, hate included, and O'Brien's prose pulled me along, breathing the words in and out and breaking down and building up what war stories are. Throughout the reading I realized, in the words of Rat Kiley, that I was a dumb cooze. I abhorred war from the get go, sometimes ignoring the very human, very real side of it, thinking it nearly pretty when printed on paper. I may not appreciate people killing each other for reasons they don't understand in a war that's so tangled up in hidden agendas that it's nearly a blessing that the media is doling out news and not the truth, but I can't just turn my nose up at it either.
"A true war story is never about war." I'm figuring that out as I devour O'Brien's words. I've never watched my best friend die or had a leech latch onto my tongue, I've never been drafted, ordered to fire, charge, bomb, kill, rinse and repeat. I hope I never do. I hate the pain that war presents us, but, for the first time, I'm starting to see that there's more there than negativity. I haven't figured it out yet, and I doubt I ever will, but maybe The Things They Carried will leave me less of a cooze than I was during chapter one.
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"...there's more there than negativity."
ReplyDeleteThis book, at the very least, leaves us no room to think of war in the simplistic and one-sided terms in which it is often presented. Too often, it seems we hear about war from people who do not know what it is or don't want people to know what it is. War is always immediately patriotic, noble, and glorious, about bravery, or war is the truism, "war is hell." Every book I've read that contains "true" war stories is not romantic or idealistic; they have all been surreal, blunt, tender, harsh, and painful combination of the simple and complex.
I really enjoy how the book presents multiple sides and feelings toward the war. Most of the time we don't get something so colorful.
ReplyDeleteGood Post