Make it real again…make it face to face

Whatever happened to the honor of fighting in close range battles, with guns that couldn’t shoot 100 with accuracy, and attaching bayonets to finish people off? I think it that sort of brutality and personal feel to it, war would be less likely to happen on a grander scale. War has become much more impersonal now days to where we can fly an unmanned aircraft and drop a bomb someplace and no one is ever in harms way. It just makes it too easy, like a video game or something. What the suicide bombers are doing is bringing back that personal touch to war, and that makes most civilians see how inhumane it is out there, and want to end this war because we see what is going on and the grotesqueness of this war.  Like here

“Four American soldiers were killed at a checkpoint in northern Iraq yesterday when a suicide car bomber attacked their vehicle, authorities said. Three soldiers died in the attack in Mosul and a fourth died later of wounds. An interpreter also was killed, and two Iraqi police officers were wounded at the checkpoint.”

Just imagine if any one of those people killed were your brother, or lover, or friend, or acquaintance, how bad you would feel and how you would mourn their loss. Now just imagine that on a larger scale with millions dying and how that would almost entirely affect everyone in America. If only we made millions of people die for every time we wanted to start a war, then they would be far and few in-between.

Vera’s book gets back to that intolerable side of war; it tells of things no one wants to hear about, she gets to pick Roland’s brain, based on his letters and her own experience of being a nurse. So many people are affected by what happens and she is right in the middle of it all. I believe that there is honor in dying for your country even though this was said,

“Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing,who loves to roll fort stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country…let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been his ribs…who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?” (pg. 198 )

When most people read and see this, they get the visual of what Roland is seeing; having been in a similar circumstance I have to believe that they would have preferred this to getting hit by a bus. At least they knew what they were getting into and made their choices. There were many words spoken about being ready to die, not many are ready, but some do and at least gave the impression that they were at peace with that.