Poteciano By Kayla Ravanko Essay

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

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca is best known as the first Spaniard to explore what we now consider to be southwestern United States. His nine-year odyssey is chronicled within the book The Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition. His account is considered especially interesting because it is one of the very first documents that illustrates interactions between American natives and explorers. However, when examining the exploration of the modern United States, there are many arguments that have to do with the entitlement to the land and the motivations behind settling in the first place. Most explorers were obviously in favor of their own conquests and Cabeza de Vaca is of course no exception. In Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition, Cabeza de

Some of the soldiers were such cowards that they injured themselves just to be taken away in a helicopter and extracted from the war scene. The soldiers “spoke bitterly about guys who had found release by shooting off their own toes or fingers. Pussies, they’d say. Candy-asses” (22). However, deep down inside, the soldiers who did all the mocking “imagined the quick, sweet pain, then the evacuation to Japan, then a hospital with warm beds and cute geisha nurses” (22). The soldiers even dreamt at night about freedom birds. The men were flying on a “real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching… The weights fell off; there was nothing to bear” (22). The soldiers did not want to be at war, they imagined to themselves “It’s (the war) over, I’m gone!—they were naked, they were light and free” (22).

Beginning my love of reading an early age, I was never the type of child who was drawn to fictional stories. As an 8 year-old child in West Virginia, I was recognized by the local library for my love of biographies, autobiographies and recollections of world events. This love has continued throughout my adult life, desiring to read novels such as “We Were Soldiers Once…and Young” by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore rather than watch the major motion picture “We Were Soldiers” starring Mel Gibson. Even though the motion picture received multiple awards, when reading the recollection of Mr. Moore’s accounts, the feeling of loss, distress, anxiety and fear can be felt in each word that he has written while reliving this horrendous war.

During the secret war, many families had to leave some of their love ones behind in Laos because there was not enough space, money, and time to come to America. A memoir that Kao Kalia wrote reflects on her memories of childhood, the Hmong family cultures and traditions. Some parts in the book includes how they treated their grandmother when she was ill, her funeral, and things they would do to survive in America as immigrants. This sources is important because it describes how Kao Kalia Yang wrote a memoir to reflect her early journey of as a Hmong

Once the family has been evacuated and are on a train to an internment camp, the daughter takes over as narrator and represents a different impression of the Japanese Americans. The

When authors write about World War II, most set their stories in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, but few would give a moment of thought to the atrocities perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army in East Asia and the Pacific region. However, Laura Hillenbrand has brought us this heavily neglected side of the tragedy. By following the vicissitudes of a USAAF lieutenant named Louis Zamperini in her bestseller “Unbroken”, she pays tribute to all ex-POWs and soldiers that lost their lives on the Asian battlefield.

Comparably, Ooka Shohei also utilizes theatrical effects in his story as a tool to convey unconventional themes such as cannibalism that happened among Japanese troops oversea. Ooka is a survivor-author with personal experience of war’s dehumanizing nature when he was drafted abroad to the Philippines during the Pacific War. Thus, his work, “Fire on the Plain,” which serves the therapeutic purpose as Ooka recovered from wartime trauma, is somewhat based on his direct experiences. However, the book reads more like a fictional account of the war by focusing on the psychological turmoil. When working on provoking readers’ sympathy with the agony suffered by Japanese soldiers stranded in an unfamiliar land, Ooka has to overcome the problem of possibly

Valerie Matsumoto talks about the time in history during the second world war when America removed over 100,000 American Japanese citizens from the comfort of their homes.The bombing of Pearl Harbor planted fear in America arousing suspicion of Japanese spies and traitors. This led to concentration camps of Japanese American citizens. Matsumoto also discusses the camp living situations, families surviving, the work that had to be done, food and sanitary conditions, and most importantly, how women survived in these difficult times. She also focuses on the Issei and the

Purpose of Laurel writing this book is to share the diaries of many children in the holocaust and world war II. Many of these children from all over the world were very young, between the ages of 8 and 18, that had experienced trauma, maybe even PTSD. The trauma that they have experienced shapes their lives and were their testimonies to share so that many people would know the real and cruel world that they were living in. She wrote this to show that there was no way out for these children and that they were going to live with and through this for the rest of their lives by themselves,

Some people may ask me why I am writing this now. Why I didn't tell everyone before. Well, I finally have an answer. I used to tell myself that nobody would believe me if I told my story, but the truth is... I wasn't ready to tell it. It's been 68 years and I'm still not ready. I can never forget what happened during the summer of 1943, and although I might try, a part of me doesn't want to let go... Not yet. I don't think I'll ever be ready to tell my tale, but this is a tale that needs to be told. My time is slowly coming to an end and I don't have much longer...so... here

The story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is an enormously detailed fictional account of a wartime scenario in which jimmy Cross (the story’s main character) grows as a person, and the emotional and physical baggage of wartime are brought to light. The most obvious and prominent feature of O’Brien’s writing is a repetition of detail. O’brien also passively analyzes the effects of wartime on the underdeveloped psyche by giving the reader close up insight into common tribulations of war, but not in a necessarily expositorial sense.. He takes us into the minds of mere kids as they cope with the unbelievable and under-talked-about effects or rationalizing

Sandro Botticelli painted La Primavera between 1477 and 1482 for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, a member of the powerful Florentine family. While many Renaissance works depicted scenes of Christianity, this work as well as the others in its group – The Birth of Venus, for example - are focused around tales from classical mythology. Designed to hang in a private room, the painting did not need to be made accessible to large audiences like other works of the time, such as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. An educated family with strong Humanistic ties, the Medici would have had the necessary knowledge to interpret the painting’s subject, while the common people would not have. Now located in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence,

Located in District of Boalemo, Pulo Cinta is a mainstay of Indonesia International tourism in Gorontalo Province. This island is in the middle of the sea and shapes like a heart lobe. The island is accommodated with several floating resorts that are very exclusive, and certainly, show the exoticism of the charming sea. Pulo Cinta Gorontalo has been already familiar in the ears of the foreign traveler as "Maldives van Gorontalo".

Knowing that he grew up during a war, I ask him about his experiences from that time. My grandfather recounts what it was like as a young boy back then, saying that during the Japanese occupation of Malaya, “it was difficult times during that period. And you live through fear…not knowing what tomorrow is like. It was sort of depressing and very sad to hear stories of atrocities done by the Japanese to the people of Malaya.”