Monday, February 16, 2009

One Leg

There's a part really early in the book on page 31 of my copy..It's titled spin. He talks about war not being all terror and violence and about the boy with the plastic leg. He asks for a piece of chocolate and Azar laughs and hands it over..he then procedes to make the comment amount someone not having enough ammo to finish the boy off. Wow I just keep on thinking about that part. He acts so humane and caring and then makes a remark that is so cold. It's just a little section so the story itself was trying to show something significant I think.. maybe that war is viscious even in what seems to be an act of kindness? Or maybe that the enemy is always the enemy in a foreign land and no matter what it's impossible for Azar to feel compassion? What do you guys think? Like I said while I read I just keep on thinking about that part.

2 comments:

  1. I think there's a lot of parts like this in the book. Like, "How can you think that? or say that?" They mock the dead, make fun of how people die (zapped while zipping), and at times seem quite all right with what they're doing. But then at other times, they do get mad and hurt. One part that kind of made me tear up was when Rat Kiley wrote Henry Dobbins' sister a note saying how he was a great guy and then she never wrote back and he calls her a dumb cooz. He's vulgar, but he's so hurt. Then i another section, I don't remember exactly where, someone does something stupid and he's like "what do you expect? I'm just a kid!"

    I think that's something that I forget when I'm reading, that they're really just kids. The average age in Vietnam was 19 I think. When I found that out I feel like some of the stories made more sense. These guys are dealing with some crazy shit and most of them are fresh out of high school. So when they say things that seem insensitive or do things that seem so gross or weird, I just think, how the heck would I deal with this stuff? Would I cray all time? Would I crack jokes to make it better? Would I pretend to be unaffected so it didn't hurt? To bring up some gender issues: I think these soldiers feel like they have to be "tough men in the face of danger" even though most of them are just still, in a way, little boys who are seeing things that no person should ever have to see.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I went on the goarmy website, because I wanted to see the qualifications to enlist in the army, and I was shocked (and yet, somehow, not really surprised, if I can make that distinction), that the entire website is constructed to appeal to young, teenage boys. There is this character named Sargent Star, who looks like a manly GI Joe, who guides you through the website. There are chat boxes to ask Sargent Star questions about enlisting... and then there are the age requirements, which you could say the army puts up so that its soldiers are in peek physical condition, but I think the age requirements are there for a second reason: younger guys might not question things as much. Younger guys may be more easily influenced by authority and easily caught up in the brotherhood and patriotism. Younger guys might be easier to convince.
    The army website has a separate section "For Parents," and even in comparing that section to the rest of the website, you can tell that each part is tailor-made to appeal to a specific audience. The For Parents page uses a more "formal, old fashioned font" such as Georgia or Times New Roman, where the rest of the site, aimed, I'm arguing, at younger males, uses more modern, "masculine" fonts like Arial, or Helvetica. http://www.goarmy.com/about/index.jsp

    ReplyDelete

No need to raise your hand...