War, as is its nature, takes much from those who partake in it, whether willingly or no matters not. It steals them from their lives and returns them stricken, not the same person as the one who left. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder often follows them like a wraith cloaked in black. The fulcrum of their lives has been shifted, their eyes opened to the cruel and brutal monstrosity that is the human race. When one has seen what they have seen, returning home to live out a normal life like nothing happened is near impossible. And when one is still in their youth, with little to return to, the impossibility is compounded. Many books have been written, and many movies made, that glorify war. That make veterans out to be the Hercules and Perseus
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It’s the ultimate real world battle between the ever present forces of good and evil. The naïve young spitfires who dream of ‘fighting the good fight,’ could never see the people their killing as other human beings. People who haven’t gone to war rarely think about this side of it. Vonnegut, in his novel Slaughterhouse Five, captures this fault in humans reasoning about war in a single sentence. When questioned by his wife, Valencia, about his time in the war, Billy Pilgrim didn’t feel antagonized by what she said, he realized “it was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamor with war.”(SH5, pg. 121) In a sense, Vonnegut uses this interaction between Pilgrim and Valencia as a personification of the interactions common to many veterans who have returned home. Those who haven’t experienced the horrors and tragedies of war see soldiers and veterans, as they rightly should, as heroes. As some pinnacle of the human spirit, a statue on a pedestal for everyone strive to be. They compare the service of these brave men and women as the deeds of a fantastic Greek hero, who stares down the throat of death and doesn’t waver. But, in reality, these people we idolize are simply that, people. Your average people who feel it is their duty to serve. But, many times, as outlined by Slaughterhouse Five and All Quiet on the Western Front, those who go off to war, are just as frightened of death as those who stayed
It’s the ultimate real world battle between the ever present forces of good and evil. The naïve young spitfires who dream of ‘fighting the good fight,’ could never see the people their killing as other human beings. People who haven’t gone to war rarely think about this side of it. Vonnegut, in his novel Slaughterhouse Five, captures this fault in humans reasoning about war in a single sentence. When questioned by his wife, Valencia, about his time in the war, Billy Pilgrim didn’t feel antagonized by what she said, he realized “it was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamor with war.”(SH5, pg. 121) In a sense, Vonnegut uses this interaction between Pilgrim and Valencia as a personification of the interactions common to many veterans who have returned home. Those who haven’t experienced the horrors and tragedies of war see soldiers and veterans, as they rightly should, as heroes. As some pinnacle of the human spirit, a statue on a pedestal for everyone strive to be. They compare the service of these brave men and women as the deeds of a fantastic Greek hero, who stares down the throat of death and doesn’t waver. But, in reality, these people we idolize are simply that, people. Your average people who feel it is their duty to serve. But, many times, as outlined by Slaughterhouse Five and All Quiet on the Western Front, those who go off to war, are just as frightened of death as those who stayed