Lord Shigeru Otori Personal Narrative

To be engaged in war is to be engaged in an armed conflict. Death is an all too ordinary product of war. It is an unsolicited reward for many soldiers that are fighting for their country’s own fictitious freedom. For some of these men, the battlefield is a glimpse into hell, and for others, it is a means to heaven. Many people worry about what happens during war and what will become of their loved ones while they’re fighting, but few realize what happens to those soldiers once they come home. The short stories "Soldier's Home” by Ernest Hemingway and "Speaking of Courage” by Tim O'Brien explore the thematic after effects of war and how it impacts a young person's life. Young people who

William Manchester, author of “The Bloodiest Battle”, utilizes personal war-stories throughout the essay to portray not only the challenging hardships of war but the vivid descriptions of human-to-human annihilation, and how that affected him emotionally. Manchester’s purpose was to show the audience that two countries (America and Japan) could make peace, but the individuals who fought it still struggle, including himself. He portrays the idea that there is more behind the victory of the war.

Almost every person knows someone who has served in a war, whether it may be a sibling, a parent, or a friend. After an individual comes back from their service in a war, he or she usually has changed as a person, either positively, or most of the time negatively. In All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr shows through characters seeing death, characters that are not in combat, and characters that are soldiers in war, that war impacts individuals negatively, despite their backgrounds and differences.

War is a horrible and devastating event that hurts many people in many ways. This something many people have to cope with. Authors are among those who have to cope with war as well. Many people cope different ways but authors cope by protesting war. To do this authors use imagery, irony, and structure.

Even though the soldiers join the war as naive youths, the war rapidly changes them and they develop into young men. Surrounded by death, the boys are bound to foresee the fragility of their own lives and are stripped of the carelessness and brazenness of youth. The dreadful horrors around the boys bound them to consider a world that does not accommodate to their childish and simplistic view. They want to only see a separation between what is right and what is wrong, they instead find moral doubt. Where they had wanted to see order and meaning, they only found senselessness and disorder. Where they wanted to find heroism, they only found the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These realizations destroyed the innocence of the boys, maturing and thrusting them into their manhood.

From two different perspectives of the war, the author of this book showed that, depending on location and timing, everyone can be affected differently by warfare. It followed the story of two children who grew up on opposite sides of World War II. When their paths crossed, they developed feelings for one another, disregarding the fact that their historical circumstances placed them on opposing sides of the war. In the book All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr depicted how internal principles were able to overpower external pressures.

The psychologist Sigmund Freud once said, “Because every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will.” He initially stated this when he was corresponding with Albert Einstein via letter. This quote is also a great explanation of the events that take place during war that people chose to not recognise. War is terrible, and no matter how hard we try, nothing will change that. Erich Maria Remarque shows us that soldiers have endured dreadfully throughout World War I in his book “All Quiet on the Western Front”. The character in the book, Paul Baumer, endures through the tragedies of war with some of his old schoolmates as well as new comrades that he meets along the way. They survive through all of the tragedies together, but in the end, the war made them lose their friendships as well as their lives. The reality is that war comes with consequences while it destroys people, and there is nothing that will ever be able to change that. The book “All Quiet on the Western Front” shows how war comes destroys people's lives with its consequences through three of its themes: the importance of comradery, the loss of innocence, and the horrors and brutality of war.

Over the past few decades, the war changed everyone’s perspective. According to NCBI, 61% civilians suffer from psychological disorders caused by wars. Specifically, two books, Night and Persepolis, talks about the author experiences during the war and their struggles. Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, documents his childhood when he was maltreated by the Nazis, and Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, share her experiences during the Iraq-Iran war of how it change her. War changes childhood because of near-death experiences, family departure, and witness horrific acts of violence.

“Sometimes we have to stop being scared and just go for it. Either it will work or it won’t. That’s life.” Most people experience hard situations in their lives and have to deal with difficulties, but their reactions to the hardships are different. Some can manage their problems while others give up. When we face hard conditions and everything seems unmanageable, we should keep cool and have many positive feelings to continue in the best way. We should try to learn how to control our behavior in tough situations. If we can deal with our situations, we can overcome difficulties easily with confidence. In the story of Farewell to Manzanar written by Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Houston, the story shows how war

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change” (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein). War can be a drastic change for the life of a person as war can ultimately morph them into a slave of the battlefield. In the book The Things They Carried, Tim O’ Brien describes the experiences of people in the Vietnam War and how they have become changed individuals from their past lives before combat. War pummels you with things that transcend your typical escapades and the more you try to understand them, the more you get sucked into the void of combat. The increased time the characters are in the battlefield, the more they have to think about it, thus shaping who they are. Only time can determine how much war can affect you.

Commonalities can be pulled from the use of propaganda and revenge to indoctrination and even inspiration. These children did not require eloquence. Their refuge was found often after months of running, witnessing countless atrocities and feeling the helpless vulnerability of having no security in their lives. If the war did not kill these children out rightly, starvation would. As we read in these sobering memoirs even those who, like Ismael Beah, survived the lack of food, protection and stability still fell victim to the death of their childhood, their families and all the things that should have formed their identities as adults. Lost in revenge that hardened their souls, drugs that dulled their emotions and alter egos who encouraged their violent acts these child soldiers were truly lost to the war that took all they held dear. Though Ishmael Beah could be considered one of the lucky ones, his personal losses were no less severe than a sort of death “All the way up to the neck there are bullet holes. . . I lift the cloth from the body’s face. I am looking at my own” (Beah 19). This book gives insight into a culture, time, and events that would be impossible to adequately capture in a history book. Too often we read such stories as fiction. Perhaps it is a defense mechanism of the mind that ensures protection over the reader that one can read of a horrific event and later run errands and make dinners. Upon reading Beah’s book, it seems impossible to remain distant from Ishmael’s plight. He is not an ambiguous character in history; he suddenly becomes a son, a brother or a friend. This is a valuable perspective, especially for those who enjoy security and plentiful resources as most Americans do. In spite of the unsettling nature of this book, perhaps even because of it, there is importance in reading and understanding it not only in the context of these events of war in Sierra Leone but also in a grander context of a

Many people don’t comprehend how traumatic the life of a young fighter in World War I was. In my opinion, this book will especially help you understand this. The descriptive language describing the wounds and unpleasant content made me feel queasy at times, but also forced me to feel compassionate for the military troops. In this book, limbs are lost, animals such as horses are killed, starving soldiers dig through garbage for food, the troops are destroyed by poison gas, munitions, and bombs. The conditions the fighters went through in the war was dangerous and disturbing which makes me realize how fortunate my life is and causes me to feel compassion for the fighters because of what they had to struggle with.

In this essay, I will discuss how Tim O’Brien’s works “The Things They Carried” and “If I Die in a Combat Zone” reveal the individual human stories that are lost in war. In “The Things They Carried” O’Brien reveals the war stories of Alpha Company and shows how human each soldier is. In “If I Die in a Combat Zone” O’Brien tells his story with clarity, little of the dreamlike quality of “Things They Carried” is in this earlier work, which uses more blunt language that doesn’t hold back. In “If I Die” O’Brien reveals his own personal journey through war and what he experienced. O’Brien’s works prove a point that men, humans fight wars, not ideas. Phil Klay’s novel “Redeployment” is another novel that attempts to humanize soldiers in war. “Redeployment” is an anthology series, each chapter attempts to let us in the head of a new character – set in Afghanistan or in the United States – that is struggling with the current troubles of war. With the help of Phil Klay’s novel I will show how O’Brien’s works illustrate and highlight each story that make a war.

In the novel Tu, the author visits the horrors and terrifying aspects of World War II for the men of the Maori Battalion. Among these men is the main character, Tu. Tu is proud of his name, the Maori God of war, and felt destined to be a part of the action. Tu is young and went straight from school into the war, he wrote, “Off I ran, out of the iron gates and away to war.” (Grace 17). He is pleased with the decision he made, and is excited to have the ship pull away from his waving family below him. There was no where he rather be than off at war. Tu was not the only child that left for war, he was one of the three. Tu would watch many others fall before him, dropping like flies, and among these were his good friends, cousins and his two brothers.

Death is inevitable in every person’s life, but death in these character’s lives is easily predicted to be early, and this represents the sadness and sorrows in the innocence of war. There are many ways to die, and war is the saddest way for that to occur, but at the same time,