This misconception was due to the failure of communication and the failure to understand the thoughts and feelings of our opponents. On the issue of the War on Iraq, the government is once again failing to empathize with our enemy. We have angered the people of Iraq so much that they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their families just so they can destroy us, the Americans. We are not making an effort to understand or communicate with them and instead are retaliating in the same way. We are actually killing our enemies even if it means harming innocent people and destroying their homes.
They were placed into a war that from the start was impossible to win due to many circumstances and situations starting with the rules of war. The rules of war had a major negative affect on our troops in Vietnam, which created more struggle and confusion then there already was. The frustration level was at an all time high with American troops and they started to get very irritable. A lot of soldiers lost their minds because the war took its toll mentally. Someone was bound to snap and that was exactly what happened at My Lai.
The other party is called Absolutist; they are the ones who refuse to do anything that assists of the war. Conscientious Objectors are considered as cowards and selfish in the early 1900’s, all from various and valid reasons. They were willing to let other people die for them while they just stayed at home. They were not willing to faces reality and join the army in order to protect one’s country. They resisted to the system, knowing that the demand for troops and solders are increasing massively and that death and wounds needed replacing.
The consequences and the lives lost in the Vietnam War classify as bad judgment by the masterminds of it. McNamara and all the others involved were clueless about Vietnam; all they thought they had to do was use their military superiority in the correct way to keep communism from spreading. The most crucial mistake McNamara made was when he had doubts about the United State’s possibilities of actually winning the war and did nothing about it. He did not want to argue to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson that we should have withdrew from Vietnam. By doing this, more cities were destroyed, approximately 58,000 dead American causalities, and countless more Vietnamese.
When Haig discovered that the tactics he had prepared were ineffective and that there were numerous casualties, he chose not to change tactics, and instead kept using the faulty ones. According to the textbook, Haig “knew about the German dug-outs and the masses of barbed wire in front of them” but decided on using tactics that, he was aware of, may not work. This just proves that Haig was an incredibly atrocious leader as, since he was the highest rank of officer in the British army – field marshal, he was the only person who had the authority to change the tactics but resisted to and instead led his troops into their doom by knowing his tactics would not function properly but chose not to change them. As a result of this, thousands of men lost
The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a lower-party member who has grown to resent the society he is living in and starts to lose his rationality and sanity due to the restrictions of society. "And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive. "(p.130) Winston clearly hated the Party and all he wants is liberty of his actions and ideas. He will fight his hardest to revolt and stop the Inner Party’s “dictatorship.” To keep all of this in order, and to avoid revolts, the Inner Party has to think of creative and smart ways to control the public. This is done by introducing orthodox methods in the minds of the Party members such as with childhood.
On top of their horrible conditions, there was food, clothing, supplies, and weapon shortage. This novel truly describes how soldiers die and in what true conditions they are when in war. This book made you want to hate Germany because these young boys were in a hell hole and all authority ignored them. Even though this book was published before all Nazi violence broke out against Jews, it still seemed like a threat. The world looked at Germany as a very powerful country especially when it came to war, and this book screamed the opposite.
The Volunteer Army For One The military draft has always been and forever will be a hard sell to the American people. Namely because they wouldn’t want to fight in a war they could careless about. This attitude shows in our rapidly declining military reserves, when our nation is involved in two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The voices of the numerous protestors cry out the same three arguments into the media; It’s unfair! It’s against our rights!
However, very little literature addresses the predicament of solders who had to endure the dangers of the battle field with most of them scantily understanding the reason for the bloodshed. The war was particularly fuelled by a battle of supremacy in ideologies and the ambition of certain political leaders to impose their ideologies on certain nations. The situation that had emanated to a full blown world war had begun much earlier characterized by mutual suspicion, regional alliances, conspiracy and espionage. Heller attempts to bring out the sufferings that the soldiers who were forced to shoot each other just because politicians had passed legislations requiring them to do so. In Chapter One of the novel Yossarian outlines how he was forced to love the hospital because it gave him momentary peace away from the harsh conditions of the battle field.
The physical and emotional toll of war, of blood, of killing, of fallen soldiers, are too difficult to put into words. Tim O’Brien’s, The Thing They Carried, effectively exemplifies these tolls and the devastating consequences of them. The collection of short stories show that we must appear composed in war, in times of emotional distress, and through these unexpressed emotions, a story emerges. The lines between “happening-truth” and “story-truth” become blurred as the soldier incorporates both the seen and the unseen parts of experience. The emotion a soldier experiences cannot be understood by anyone except those in war.