The Experience Of War Essay

No one knows war as well as someone who served in it. No one can explain their experiences like a writer. Clearly the best person to write about their times in war would be a soldier and an author, like Michael Herr. Herr wrote Illumination Rounds which is made up of many personal stories of his service in Vietnam. The stories range from his helicopter being shot as he watched his fellow soldier die, to getting high with his friends. The contrast between these two types of events really show how crazy war was for him. He had an interesting experience no one else had. This was written to inform people who were never in a war, what it is really like. Not only is it terrifying, like when he saw a little girl’s leg detached next to her, but it

War is a terrible event. When it ignites, it is like an unquenchable fire consuming the countries involved and the people who fight for them. Everyone is affected in some way. The men will go off to fight for their country. The women are constantly worried about their loved one’s whereabouts and the children constantly miss their fathers. The elderly are also affected they see their sons coming home in body bags, in some instances for a fight that is not their own. And then there are the soldiers and how they have been negatively affected by living through it. Respectively, the two literary works that were written by former soldiers of World War 1 and the Vietnam War include the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen and the short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien came as a result of the authors’ personal backgrounds relating to war, the effect of the technology of that time period, and their mentality of perceiving war.

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world” (Remarque 132). These are just a few things that soldiers see every single day. Just imagine being drafted in World War I and experiencing these horrors that war makes soldiers go through. In the beginning, soldiers start off as a joyous, typical men and at the end they become damaged and traumatized. War morphs people’s point of view and persona when they come out of war. This is what Paul Baumer had to encounter in All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. In the novel, the story is told by Paul Baumer’s point of view in World War I. As the reader, you get to see the different parts of war

Life in the trenches during WWI was miserable. There seem to be no words that could truly match the horrific experience, but soldiers tried to conjure images using literature to come close to their experience. As stated in The World’s History, Europe had not warfare on such a scale since the Napoleonic wars (Spodek 664). Even watching the American Civil War from afar could not have prepared Europe and the young men that served for the devastation WWI brought. The poems described the war as a collection of numbed men, simply waiting to die, “lines of grey, muttering faces.” Men who had joined to serve their country had now become disillusioned with the nobility of dying for their country, wondering if the suffering both in and out of the trenches

The point of view a person has is often shaped by their life experiences. The reader can see how war can change a soldier’s ideals as they experience it. In the poem Exposure, Wilfred Owen writes about the mental toll war takes on the human mind. He writes about how the soldier is “worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous but nothing happens”. This shows the soldier’s paranoia during the night. The soldier’s cannot rest even though it is quiet, because they are afraid of what they cannot hear. Their paranoia is taking over their minds and making them nervous about what is to come. Owen tells us how the cold and slightly changing conditions wear and

This instantaneous use of alliteration and onomatopoeia allows the poet to evoke sympathy in the reader for the soldiers, as the reader can clearly visualise and empathise towards what the soldiers ventured through. By doing this, the readers are furthered against the idea of war. Owen is successful in using imagery to engage with the reader and persuade them to view the gruesomeness of war as he does.

The British poet Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” which portrays a part of the reality of war. He describes what it is like to see death and how inescapable it is, writing about how he still sees a dying fellow soldier in his dreams. Owen and a German soldier’s recount of the Great War are quite similar. The unnamed German soldier writes from the trenches

Literature, most especially poems, were able to show the true horrors and destructions war caused, be it mentally or physically. Through poems, those who didn’t go to war understood what the men went through, holding a deep pity for them. Sir Herbert Read – writer of ‘The Happy Warrior’ – was a surviving soldier of WWI, he went and fought the war at the age of eighteen/nineteen as an infantry soldier, and his poems often speak of his lost childhood. Wilfred Owen – the poet of ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and ‘Disabled’ – fought the war until he was twenty-one when he died, he is well-known as one of the greatest voiced for WWI, he spoke for the soldiers to show the pity of war. Richard Aldington – author of ‘Bombardment’ – wrote of WWI through many of his works after going there himself when he was around twenty-four years old, wounded on the western front only a year later.

Wilfred Owen knew more about modern warfare than most of his readers. Being a soldier himself, Owen saw the full brutality of World War I firsthand. He experienced the terror of battle and helplessly watched countless comrades die from both mechanical and chemical combat. Owen knew that it was difficult for non-soldiers to understand what life on the front lines was really like, so he used his talent for writing to relate the realities of modern warfare to his readers. One of the main points that he tried to make in his poems was that the experience of soldiers in World War I was completely different from the romanticized war stories that many people knew and

There is plenty of literature portraying what war is like. The genre ranges from personal memoirs and novels to poetries and journals. As far as I concerned, from the several works we have studied, Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est best illustrates what war is like because Owen’s poem is not just a recreation of the reality of war, it is a connection between the audience and the war. The poem uses sensory and detailed languages to stimulate the audience imagination and to create a greater emotional effect, and thus it builds a link between the readers and wars. On the other hand, the poem by directly communicating with the audience also creates a straightforward bond between the audiences and the subject of the poem, which is war itself.

Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Soldier’ was written at the outset of WW1, his representation of war is more propaganda like as it romanticises war, death and patriotism. Brooke never actually made it to the frontlines, so therefore he had no experience whatsoever. Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ was written from a firsthand perspective. He had experience from within the trenches and his representation focus’ on the sheer brutality and reality of war. Owen also challenges the perception of war within society. Eva Dobell’s poem ‘Pluck’ was written from a firsthand, female perspective. She had experience from working as a nurse and her representation is the aftermath of war and the brutal, life altering physical and mental injuries that

In the early twentieth century, people who were in the war would describe their experiences during the war through poems and literature. Through the different styles of literature, veterans of war would communicate their thoughts and ideas to the world. Wilfred Owen, a famous World War One poet, wrote poems about people who would send young men to war. His “Anthem for Doomed Youth” has an incredible way of describing the sound. He describes objects in such a realistic way that the reader feels transported into the battlefield in the midst of war. With the use of illustrative words, the reader gets connected to the poem. The repetition in “Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” (1-2) describes the horrifying way in which the soldiers were cremated in the great war. In addition to this, the alliteration in

Often, poetry is used to portray the highlights of this life or maybe even some of the small bumps we encounter along the way, yet, none really compares to that of war poetry. World War I, much like any other war, was nothing shy of a horror story. Innumerable deaths, traumatizing situations, and the lives of returning soldiers changed forever were, and still are, products of war. From our side, we have our own idea of what war might be like, but Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenburg choose to give us a small glimpse of what “serving our country” is about. Both men chose to write about the harsh realities of war and while these poets have several differences, they share very common ground: educating many about reality of war. Having both been affected

War poetry emerged as a genre during the World War I, when many young men joined the army inspired by the glorified propaganda of the war by the government, only to realise the futility of war when faced with the enemy on the battlefield. Many soldiers began writing poetry to release their emotions, giving rise to a whole generation of war poets. War poetry was being written before the World War but was not acknowledged much. The World War poets like, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon emphasised on the massive destruction and the futility of the great war.

New and innovative ideas have proven to be instrumental in lifelong learning but there is a great deal to be learned from the study of military history. Today’s military encourages and requires a new way of doing business. Commanders at all levels offer civilian employees incentives for creative ideas to solving problems and encourage service members to “think outside of the box”; business as usual is not the ‘group think’ anymore. But as spoken in the words of General Douglas MacArthur, “…But research does bring to light those fundamental principles and their combinations and applications, which in the past, have been productive of success. These principles have not limitation of time. Consequently the army extends its analytical