The identification of civilians’ bodies after genocides or political atrocities has received considerable attention in academia due to its social, judicial, and humanitarian implications. By contrast, the remains of soldiers have not been given enough attention. For one thing, soldiers are not always regarded as victims---they are trained to kill people and their deaths are deemed as battle casualties with less moral or legal consequence than civilians. For another, due to the destruction of bodies during battles, the necessity of quick troop maneuver, the loss of territory to enemies, or merely sanitary concerns that demand immediate disposal of bodies, abandoning soldiers’ remains in remote, unmarked graves is not beyond the imagination of …show more content…
The first war of this type is perhaps the American Civil War. Thousands of men died hundreds of miles away from home without being taken care of at their last moment, which contradicted the contemporary Victorian values. The mass casualties, combined with primitive communication methods, left many families uncertain about the fate of their loved ones. Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, argues that these situations made the Union government realize that as the volunteer citizen soldiers had paid their ultimate price to save the country, the country was reciprocally responsible for accounting them and taking care of their remains. If the state left the duty to individual families to recover their loved ones, only the wealthy families could afford such practice, which was against the basic principles of democracy and equality that the Union fought for. She also argued that an accurate counting of casualties and the construction of national cemeteries demonstrated the recognition of their sacrifice by the country, thus to justify the tremendous price for defending the nation unity. The identification of the dead and their honorable burial or repatriation not only brought closure to their families, but also facilitated the distribution of pensions and back payment, which were also duties of a modern state with expanding …show more content…
Michael Allen’s book argues that the Vietnam War POW/MIA campaigns aimed at demonstrating the futile loss of human lives in an ill-planned war and assigning responsibility to the authorities. The leaders of such campaigns attempted to highlight their victimization and the memory of defeat in Vietnam in the context of post-Cold War triumphalism. The identification of soldiers’ remains, especially that of the Vietnam War Unknown in response to development in DNA technology and irresistible pressure from POW/MIA activists, symbolizes the country’s shift from the traditional mode of collective war commemoration to the individualization of the memory for war loss. According to Sarah Wagner, the public effort to associate the Vietnam War Unknown with Michael Blassie built a new connection between the justification of war and death with a nation distinguishes itself through its care for the war dead. The country’s response to the demand of the POW/MIA families to search and identify the Vietnam War missing is perceived by Thomas Hawley as a desperate but limitedly effective attempt of the authorities to revive a body politics irreparably weakened by the Vietnam War. He also argued that as the government recovers the remains from Vietnam and assumes the duty of their identification, it endeavors to assert its sovereignty over both
The Vietnam War that commenced on November 1, 1955, and ended on April 30, 1975, took the soldiers through a devastating experience. Many lost their lives while others maimed as the war unfolded into its full magnitude. The book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman presents a series of letters written by the soldiers to their loved ones and families narrating the ordeals and experiences in the Warfield. In the book, Edelman presents the narrations of over 200 letters reflecting the soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield. While the letters were written many decades ago, they hold great significance as they can mirror the periods and the contexts within which they were sent. This paper takes into account five letters from different timelines and analyzes them against the events that occurred in those periods vis a vis their significance. The conclusion will also have a personal opinion and observation regarding the book and its impacts.
In her article “The Weight of What If,” Anna Quindlen writes about the tragedy of fallen soldiers. She says that we often forget how each soldier is a life unlived, and we often forget “what if” they had lived. Speaking in a balanced tone, she deals with the Iraq conflict, as well as World War II and Vietnam. She forces us to ask questions about war and the effect it can have on us.
In her book The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, author Marilyn Young examines the series of political and military struggles between the United States and Vietnam, a nation that has been distinctively separated as the South and the North. Young chooses to express the daily, weekly, monthly progresses of the affairs collectively called the Vietnam Wars, focusing on the American interventions in the foreign soil. She seeks to provide an answer to a question that has haunted the world for years: What was the reason behind the United States interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country in which it had no claims at all? Young discloses the overt as well as covert actions undertaken by the U.S. government officials regarding the foreign affairs with Vietnam and the true nature of the multifaceted objectives of each and every person that’s involved had.
Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried” epitomizes the degradation of morals that war produces. This interpretation is personified in the characters who gradually blur the line dividing right and wrong as the motives for war itself become unclear. The morality of soldiers and the purpose of war are tied also to the truth the soldiers must tell themselves in order to participate in the gruesome and random killing which is falsely justified by the U.S government. The lack of purpose in the Vietnam War permanently altered the soldier’s perspective of how to react to situations and in most cases they turned to violence to express their frustration.
On March 16, 1968, over 300 unarmed civilians were killed in South Vietnam during an indiscriminate, mass murder event known as the My Lai Massacre. Conducted by a unit of the United States Army, the My Lai Massacre ranked one of most appalling atrocities carried out by US forces in an already savage and violent war. All victims involved were unarmed civilians, many of which were women, children, and the elderly. Victims were raped, tortured and beaten, even mutilated before being killed. The massacre was forever seared into the hearts and minds of the American people as the day “the American spirit died.”
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses the art of fabricating stories as a coping mechanism. Trying to distinguish the difference between fictional and factual stories is a challenge in this book, but literal truth cannot capture the real violence that the soldiers dealt with in Vietnam, only “story truth” can. He explains, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie.” (O’Brien 65). The novel illustrates that storytelling is a way to keep the dead alive, even if it may not be a true story.
The Vietnam war was an absolutely brutal time in American history. The war lasted for the majority of the 1960s and left many young men dead. The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam give us just a glance into the war by giving using the three themes of fear, pressures, and blame/guilt to embody the concept of war and how it absolutely changes a person. War not only destroys countries, but it destroys people.
This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War exposes a different perspective of the Civil War that is sparsely discussed and challenges the reader to broaden their views and beliefs of the war. Author, Drew Gilpin Faust, conducted nine chapters, or the new and transformed ars moriendi, primarily focusing on the past and present of the Civil War and its soldiers.
While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the
Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War tackles a subject that is not widely written about: the ways of death of the American Civil War generation. She demonstrates how the unprecedented carnage, both military and civilian, caused by the Civil War forever changed American assumptions of death and dying, and how the nation and its people struggled to come to terms with death on an unimaginable scale. The war created a veritable “republic of suffering” and Faust vividly portrays the United States’ ordeal, transformation, and
The growing perceived ineffectiveness and illegitimacy of America’s role in Vietnam was the product of what was viewed as little more than an anti-communist crusade in which neither logistical concerns nor the nationalist motivations of a people who had yearned for sovereignty over centuries carried significant weight. Less and less Americans were willing to bankroll, much less have their sons paying “any price” or bearing “any burden” for what was becoming a quagmire. Bodybag after bodybag was being filled with American boys on a daily basis, not to mention that every dollar of damage incurred by the Communist enemy in Hanoi cost the United States ten dollars , helping to quickly bring an end to an era of unprecedented American prosperity.
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.
In the novel The Things They Carried and the documentary Regret to Inform, people that were involved share their recollection of events that occurred during the Vietnam War. Consequently, both works also share the underlying idea that people are affected by the war even after it is done. They convey this meaning through the stories of mental and physical harm each witness deals and dealt with because of the war.
One would think that there were lessons learned as the result of the Patton case and many similar situations after the end of World War II. On the contrary, some 78,000 American World War II MIA’s still remain unaccounted for (of which 38,000 are considered recoverable) yet a minimum effort is being applied by the US Government to discover, recover and identify these fallen warriors. Most of the resources of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), the responsible agency, are directed toward the 1800 MIA’s of the Southeast Asia conflict. This is somewhat understandable as next to nothing was being done about MIA’s of any era until years of lobbying by families of the Southeast Asia war MIA’s brought The Department of Defense to it’s senses.
If Philip Caputo’s memoir is meant to be the story of an American soldier, Trâm’s diary becomes the story of the Vietnamese people and their struggle. On May 7th 1970 Trâm recounts her feelings on the history of war in Vietnam, and how the people still remain undeterred. “Twenty-five years immersed in fire and bullets, we are still strong.” Not only after all this fighting and after all that Trâm herself has witnessed and endured she is still confident in her country. “We will persevere and be courageous and hold our heads high and take the offensive.” Trâm’s diary makes it clear that there was never any doubt in