The Modern Age Presents Multiple Channels For Action, Dialogue And Discussion

War changes the lives of each and every soldier who participates. It continues to change the way they experience events and the way their perception of the simplest things. Many veterans do not realize what truly happened until much later in life, if at all. Many live in denial of the truth, consciously or subconsciously, and many continuously remember their darkest moments. This is the case in “Salem”, written by Robert Olen Butler. The short story is about a man, late in life, recalling a past event from the Vietnam War. He remembers a man, alone in a clearing, whose life he ended. He starts to understand his actions and their true outcomes. The author uses symbolism, setting, and character to enhance the idea that one should always be aware of how his/her actions affect others.

People both today and back then have been traumatized by war’s brutal combat, fallen victim to cruel soldiers, and had war cause sorrow and grief to them. Through characters seeing death, characters that are soldiers, and characters that are not in combat, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See demonstrates that war affects individuals negatively, even if they are extremely

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

In If I die In a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien, the author shows how the hatred of war can cause remorse and sadness through memories. He uses his experiences as a radio operator in Vietnam war to showcase the range of emotions he was feeling at the time. O’Brien shows this by using memories and his comrades to paint a picture on how the war in Vietnam affected him for the rest of his life. O’Brien shows how he felt about the war through memories. Even though he opposes the war he still finds himself unable to disconnect from it.

Preserving Memories Through Storytelling – “We kept the dead alive with stories. When Ted Lavender was shot in the head, the men talked about how they’d never seen him so mellow, how tranquil he was, how it wasn’t the bullet but the tranquilizers that blew his mind.”(226). The men in O’Brien’s platoon were young, innocent people. They had never dealt with such tragedy before, so when one of the members died

In 1975 the Oxford University Press published the first edition of The Great War and Modern Memory written by Paul Fussell. As Fussell states in the opening line, “this book is about the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918.” In this paper I will argue, that despite the numerous literary awards this book has won, it contains historical inaccuracies and shortcomings in relation to the accurate information provided that takes away from the prestige of the book. Despite the numerous negative aspects of the book, this paper will also briefly highlight the few positive areas of the book, therefore providing an in-depth analysis of the book.

Memories are what make us who we are and storytelling is how we seek to share who we are with others. This has long been the tradition of mankind, passing on our experiences and lessons to others as a means to not only enlighten and endow our listeners with what we have learned about life, but also how those lessons have served to shaped who we are. When sharing our stories and memories, we are able to better resonate with our audience by connecting with them on an emotional level. Such is the manner in which the personal experiences of war are shared in the pieces The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara and The Things They Carried. Although McNamara and O’Brien’s experiences of war were vastly different, their personal recollections and the separate examinations of the manner in which they each experienced the war can serve to provide insight into the true nature of warfare. Both accounts prove that human memories are important in helping us to understand our own histories and that personal experiences often color the manner and method in which that history is told, whether our role is as a decision maker or the one being affected by the decisions of others. The depiction of the memory process for each piece will be examined in order to better understand each figure’s recollection of historical events in regards to their role, where McNamara served as one of the “planners” and O’Brien’s characters as the “participants.”

Death defines life; it has the ability to reinvent the living for better or worse. “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, provides a non-linear, semi-fictitious account of the Vietnam War that poignantly depicts the complicated relationship between life and death. His account breathes subtle vitality and realism into the lingering presence of the dead, intimating that the memories they impart have as profound an impact as the living.

As Tim O’Brien states in his short story book, The Things They Carried, the only true thing about war is its allegiance to evil and obscenity. One example of this faithfulness war has to stick to its truth is the inevitable death of many soldiers. War consumes. It consumes a large amount of resources, money, energy, time, but most of all it consumes human lives. The ones who don’t pass must bear the witness of the death of the others. “In the Field”, one of the short stories in O’Brien’s book, explores the way death is handled by soldiers and the process by which absorb the emotions that come along with it.

I revere Memorial Day, but it isn’t the only day that I remember our war-dead. Not a day of my life has passed since then that I don’t recall the horrors of decades ago. And, while it doesn’t happen with persistency any longer, I still bolt upright in bed in a heart-pounding cold sweat. Only I’m clutching my pillow and, mercifully, I realize that the blood-soaked lifeless soldier’s body and the horrible stench of thick, sticky, bloody goo are, once again, only a nightmare. And, somehow, I’m able to fall back to sleep.

From afar a sea of white crosses stood before me, and it took my breath away how many there were. As I walked past each grave no longer was it a an objective experience but personal. I watched people find their great grandfathers and fall to their knees and place red poppies before the crosses. It was in doing so, I found the grave of Private Robert ‘Bobby’ Johns, the youngest soldier to parachute into Normandy on D-Day, who was just 14 when he ran away from home to join the army, two years

Different experiences affect people in different ways. They can make great memories that put a smile on your face or, sometimes, they can lead you down the wrong road of despair, loneliness, and heartbreak. But it all depends on a person’s way of handling the situation given to them, and those who don’t fare so well sometimes need a boost in the right direction. A war veteran, Tayo, is one example of a man stuck living in the past, unable to find peace to move on. In ceremony, Silko uses the rhetorical devices of flashbacks, symbolism, and story telling to reveal the healing process occurring within the characters throughout their journey of finding balance between his past and present.

An anti-war poem inspired by the events of the Vietnam War, Homecoming inspires us to think about the victims of the war: not only the soldiers who suffered but also the mortuary workers tagging the bodies and the families of those who died in the fighting. The author, Australian poet Bruce Dawe, wrote the poem in response to a news article describing how, at Californian Oaklands Air /Base, at one end of the airport families were farewelling their sons as they left for Vietnam and at the other end the bodies of dead soldiers were being brought home. Additionally, he wrote in response to a photograph, publishes in Newsweek, of American tanks (termed ‘Grants’ in the poem) piled with the bodies of the dead soldiers as they returned to the

In everyone’s life there is a moment that is so dreadful and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized by death for example it is very natural to shut off the memory in order to self-defense suppresses the awful emotional experience. Very often it is thoughtful that this neglecting and abandoning is the best way to forget. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, memory is depicted as a dangerous and deliberating faculty of human consciousness. In this novel Sethe endures the oppression of self imposed prison of memory by revising the past and death of her daughter Beloved, her mother and Baby Suggs. In Louise Erdrich’s

Our human condition is defined by mortality, contingency, and discontentment. This reality combined with the new outlooks of relationships between our lives and the objects that surround us in our world, have caused authors in the twentieth century to question traditional Western thought. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust extends these comparisons to include one's use of memory and