The Good Soldiers By David Finkel Essay

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Creating Killers In the book, “The Good Soldiers” ,David Finkel demonstrates how the war creates killing machines out of otherwise normal human beings. The soldiers abhorrence for their conditions and the violence of war evolves into a hatred for the Iraqis. It is a sequence of revulsion and violence that leads to an unstable army ready and overjoyed to kill. These conditions create the ailing men and women that they become, a killing force with serious mental instability. The soldiers live and fight in terrible conditions. This environment begins a cycle that causes the soldiers to despise the Iraqis. They are under constant fear of being attacked or blown up. They are living in a location, the desert, which they are not use to. “The dust, the fear, the high threat level, the isolation-all of that was the surge the soldiers knew . . . Here, Cummings had another thought: ‘This place is a complete shithole’“ (Finkel 148-149). The frustration of the soldiers develops further as the conditions continue to be unbearable and now deadly. They begin to think about the rationale for this war. Many feel the war serves no purpose and that they are not getting anything out of being in Iraq,…show more content…
Their stress under the unbearable conditions in Iraq damages the mental health of the American troops. In an article on war trauma Greg Mitchell says, “Nearly one in five soldiers deployed in Iraq, now more than 300,000, suffer post traumatic stress disorder, according to the of-cited RAND Corp. study.” Troops that are mentally unstable or mentally ill from the conditions of war should not be forced to continue to fight in an environment that will only make them sicker. Unfortunately, they continue to experience the same situation that made them unstable. They become an unhinged fighting force happy to kill. This cycle creates more killers and more
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