Becca's Story

Jim Murphy wrote a book called the Long Road To Gettysburg. It is a nonfiction book. It has 109 pages. The two main characters are General Robert E. Lee for the South and General Meade for the North. Other minor characters include General Joseph Hooker of the North and General John Dooley of the South. This book teaches you the Horrors of Gettysburg. The theme is violence is never the answer.

I read this book in high school, and I really enjoyed it. After we were finishing reading the book we had a guest speaker who was a Vietnam war vet come into our class and speak on different parts of the book. I picked this short story to do my paper on because I felt like I had the most connection to this story because of my prior knowledge from reading the book. I do think I am getting some parts confused with the short story and the book. I know when I read the book in high school some chapters were very dull and boring but others were exciting and interesting. After reading the short story it was just a refreshment of the interesting things that happened in the book.

In “Company Aytch,” Sam R. Watkins first wrote this book to describe his experience at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864. As a soldier in Company H of the First Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, CSA, Watkins witnessed the panorama of war in grand scale as he marched and fought with the hard luck Confederate Army of Tennessee across the Western Theater. His honest, vivid, and dramatic memoir, published in the 1880s, is a classic that conveys the horrors, humor, and realism of the Civil War, and the firsthand experience of being in this war

The comparisons in the plot service in molding the books and helping the reader to have a better understanding of a soldier’s thoughts, and their mental state of mind. Close friendships form between the boys and other soldiers in their lines, in both cases the friend dies, forcing reality to set in and the boys are stricken with fear, and an urge for blood. At the beginning of the book, like Charley in “Soldier’s Heart,” Henry has certain morals he wants to keep, but loose in the heat of battle, becoming a savage in order to protect himself and his country. Surviving to see the end of the war, both boys have a wound left over from the war, whether it be a mental or physical scar, it is still present. These stories are alike in a numerous amount of ways that gives the reader a better sense of knowledge of what the soldiers go through during battle.

The book begins by showing Lincoln in the final days of the Civil war waiting anxiously to hear results of the battles that took

20) O’Brien tells how these young men were drafted which were constantly in fear, they wished to be there obliviously but war takes up all of one’s attention; it played a big role in their life, changing their tactics, personality and becoming a new person. O’Brien uses this to show the stressful moments in war where one has pressure to be alive and in this case to fit in with everyone else and feel part of something, in a lonely place such as the war.

The novel The Killer Angles, by Michael Shaara, gives a story like depiction of the American Civil War at the Battle of Gettysburg. In this novel we see the views of both Confederate and Union armies. The officers for both sides in this novel used to go to war with each other but are now on different sides according to their political views. In the end both armies realized the war had accomplished nothing but all the deaths of soldiers.

Some important highlights from the book were the motivated volunteer soldiers who risked there lives in the Civil War both Confederate and Union. Eighty to ninety percent of the fighting soldiers were volunteers. Most of them volunteered in the first year of the war. During this

The Battle of Gettysburg brought the dueling North and South together to the small town of Gettysburg and on the threshold of splitting the Union. Gettysburg was as close as the United States got to Armageddon and The Killer Angels gives the full day-to-day account of the battle that shaped America’s future. Michael Shaara tells the story of the Battle of Gettysburg through the eyes of the generals and men involved in the action of the battle. The historical account of the Battle of Gettysburg gives the reader a chance to experience the battle personally and not the history book manner taught in schools. A historical novel gives the facts straightforward and provides no commentary by the people involved in history. The

War forces young soldiers to grow up quickly. In Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming is no exception. He is faced with the hard reality of war and this forces him to readjust his romantic beliefs about war. Through the novel, the reader can trace the growth and development of Henry through these four stages: (1) romanticizing war and the heroic role each soldier plays, (2) facing the realities of war, (3) lying to himself to maintain his self-importance, and (4) realistic awareness of his abilities and place in life. Through Henry’s experiences in his path to self-discovery, he is strongly affected by events that help shape his ideology of war, death,

To begin, the story starts out with a huge debate between the soldiers. One boy had heard a rumor that the regiment would be moving on to fight a battle the next day.

How maybe he was a scholar and maybe his parents were farmers.  Then O'Brien goes on to talk of maybe why this young man was in the army, and maybe why he was fighting;  these are something’s that are taught in the schools.  O'Brien states that the man may have joined because he was struggling for independence, juts like all the people that were fighting with him.  Maybe this man had been taught from the beginning that to defend the land was a mans highest duty and privilege.  Then on the other hand maybe he was not a good fighter, and maybe in poor health but had been told to fight and could not ask any questions.  These reasons are all reasons that are taught in textbooks; they go along with the idea of the draft.  Some people go fight because they want to and others go because they are told they have to. How do you tell these people apart in the heat of battle or when they are dead?  The way that O'Brien starts to describe the young man as someone who was small and frail, and maybe had plans for a bright future puts sorrow in the readers heart, in that all his plans can not happen for him or maybe the family that is longing for his return.  It also shows the regret that maybe going on in the killers’ mind.  For O'Brien to be writing on how this young mans life has come to a sudden end and his plans for the future is over is intriguing.  Then to add to that he had the story written through the eyes of the soldier that ended this young mans life.  The

The second theme is the unromantic reality of war. Richie and most other soldiers enter the war with illusions about what the war will be like. Like most other civilians, he learned what war is from movies he watched and stories that he heard and they portray battles as heroic and glorious, the army being organized and efficient, and the warfare depending on skills and

With this part of the story, O’Brien is able to inject the theme of shame motivating the characters in the book. This chapter is about how the author, who is also the narrator, is drafted for the war. He runs away to the border between Canada and the United States, he stays in a motel with an old man for about a week and finds that he should go to war for his country. In the beginning it was about shame, he didn’t want to look like a coward because in truth he was scared. He was afraid to face the pressures of war, the humiliation and the fact of losing “everything”. This man was an average person who lived an average life with no problems, until he got the notice about the war, which caused the shame and fear of being seen as a bad person to come out.

The author writes of many different human beings, showing that each one thinks war is ultimately, the worst thing. While in the war, Billy is in the hospital during his imprisonment by the Germans. There is an old general there who was a teacher before joining in the war efforts. One day, in a conversation with Billy and another older man in the hospital, the general starts to talk about what he thinks of the war. He says, "You know-- we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "‘My God, my God----’ I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade’" (p. 106). This general feels that war is nothing but babies being murdered by one another. He is disturbed by the thought of war and the fact that so many young people are dying for its cause.