Margaret Atwood's It Is Dangerous To Read Newspapers

Soldiers and war veterans recognize when they return home that they must protect the idea of war in the civilian’s mind; therefore, they can never be honest and expose the truth of their experiences. The truths of war, then remain decorated causing difficulty for civilians to perceive the war in the same context as soldiers. This idea also inhibits civilians from learning the lessons war offers, permitting civilians the opportunity to revert back to children because they are naïve and ill-equipped to grasp war. War offers many lessons such as truth, horror, fear, and reality, but the twenty-first century can change the notion of war in civilian minds. Margaret Atwood vividly expresses the truths of war in “It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers.” Atwood explains how war is all around us when she writes “as I walked to …show more content…
Anderson justifies reality when he illustrates the differences in the decisions a soldier has to make when deciding to kill; in a situation with one Iraqi soldier surrounded by twenty-five civilians, a solider decides to not take a shot, but in a similar situation with only one or two civilians and an Iraq soldier a soldier is likely to risk the shot (5). At other times being able to make a decision because protecting one’s self and battle buddies is perhaps more imperative. In Parker Gyokeres “Hardest Letter to Write,” he mentions many realities that he endured while in war, that he knew no one else, not even his wife, would understand (Busch 472). The reality of the bond with his battle buddies is because of the traumatic experiences they share, but he struggles in everyday life without them (Busch 468). On another occasion Gyokeres remembers when an Iraqi soldier arrives almost dead and no one has any remorse for him because they accepted that they could not help him and they moved on without any regret. The overall reality of war is the daily risk of a person’s