Works on War Boys, I\'ve Been Where

Works on War

Boys, I've been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It's entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here. Suppress it! You don't know the horrible aspects of war. I've been through two wars and I know. I've seen cities and homes in ashes. I've seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is hell! -- General William Tecumseh Sherman, 1880, to the cadets.

General Sherman truly says it all with his statement, "War is hell." Even if it is to protect one's country and its people, such as World War I or II, war still is the worst thing possible. The British poet Wilfred Owen strongly communicates this same message throughout his work about World War I in 1917. He relates the horrors he experiences on the battlefield and the terrible impact it is has on fighting men.

In the poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, for example, Owen completely contradicts Horace's saying, "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country." Through his very detailed and moving words, for example, he depicts the affect of gas warfare on one of the soldiers who is "guttering, choking, drowning." He watches in dread as the man dies before him:

... white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues

Owen, who died in 1918 during one of WWI's major battles, said that his poetry was not about heroes. It was also not about deeds, or lands, "nor anything about glory, honor, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except war ... " He concluded, "the subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity."

The impact of war is not any better for those on the other side of the war. These men and women may be considered "the enemy," but they still are human beings. The Civil War is the worst example of this situation: friends fought against friends, family fought against family.

In the book A Novel Without a Name, Duong Thu Huong depicts the hell that the North Vietnamese went through during the many years of the Vietnam War. Duong relates the truth of jungle warfare and how badly the soldiers were fed, clothed and treated by their officers. Such descriptions as the building of thousands upon thousands of caskets and the brutal treatment by their enemy -- the Americans -- are painful for anyone to read.

Duong spares no detail of the horror that the main character Quan sees: " ... naked corpses. Women....The soldiers had raped them before killing them....So this was how graceful, girlish bodies rotted...." The women had "a few pieces of red and blue yarn, a few betel nuts. The yarn to tie their hair, the betel nuts to clean their teeth. They must have believed that they would see their men again...." Quan is revolted by the sight of his friend Bien "rotting in a compound for the insane." Sitting in his own excrement, Bien bangs his head against a wall, and the compound supervisor notes, "The nails. He always aims for the nails."

The novel also portrays how war impacts the basic needs of all humanity, such as food to eat. Starvation was not atypical of the Vietcong and the villagers, because many of the rice fields were lost through the bombing. The smallest amounts of horrendous tasting food, which do not even offer any nutrition, are worth gold. Early in the novel, Quan declines orangutan soup, where even the animal's hands are cooked. People steal and fight over food and use it as a means of barter.