Charley was climbing over dead bodies to get to the rebels. Charley was hiding behind his friends; unfortunately both of his friends get shot. Charley was standing in the middle of the hill jabbing people and screaming until he gets shot. Charley does survive from his wounds but dies later on during the book Narrative Structure: A major theme in Soldier's Heart is the horror of war, and how war changes a person. The author uses events that really happened in the Civil War to bring home the brutality of war--the building of a wall with dead bodies, young men shot in the stomach being left to die, horses being killed to feed starving men.
130). By emphasizing the death of this man consistently throughout the chapter, it pin point the agony he felt once he killed basically a man who was not fit for war. Through the constant descriptions of the dead body, it shows the emotional truth behind the feeling of killing a human being and from that readers can understand the anguish of taking the life of another person. These soldiers also had to endure killing people “because they were embarrassed not to” and the men had to sacrifice themselves so “they died so as not to die of embarrassment” (21). In “The Things They Carried” chapter, O’Brien goes in to great detail to tell every little thing each soldier carried and a major thing they carried was the feeling of honor and to die a man.
The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide trembled like a philosopher, and concealed himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery. At length, while the two kings were causing Te Deums to be sung in their camps, Candide took a resolution to go and reason somewhere else upon causes and effects. After passing over heaps of dead or dying men, the first place he came to was a neighboring village, in the Abarian territories, which had been burned to the ground by the Bulgarians, agreeably to the laws of war. Here lay a number of old men covered with wounds, who beheld their wives dying with their throats cut, and hugging their children to their breasts, all stained with blood.
It tells of the horrors that the innocent men, women and children went through at the expense of Americans soldiers. Another poem, “Truth Blazes Even in Little Children’s Hearts” by Huy Can, a Vietnamese native, reflected on Beideler’s poem. Can wrote, “America, America! Don’t you hear the screams Of those thousands of children Consumed by the golden fire? Golden fire of napalm Golden fire of dollars Which eats the flesh Like a cancer.” Can was getting his point across by using guilt.
Its not like being shot its way worse. ➢ Robert Ross was on the lines of the battle when the Germans used the flamethrower. ➢ Using the flamethrower also has an affect of the other soldiers who see there partners or team being burned. Just like Robert witnessed it. ➢ It causes them horror as they are seeing someone being burned to death in agony yelling about the pain they are in.
In the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul experiences many atrocious war events which leave him scarred and damaged emotionally, but in the same way other characters carry physical burdens and other such objects. While stranded in a ditch, Paul stabs a French soldier who unsuspectingly falls into the same ditch. Yet as the man slowly dies, Paul regrets this action, wishing “If only he had run two yards farther to the left, he might now be sitting in the trench over there and writing a fresh letter to his wife” and promising “I will help [your wife] and your parents too, and your child…” (Remarque 118). Paul then begins to doubt his action of survival and he allows his mind to become dominated with repentance. This experience leaves him emotionally wounded by the way that the French solider dies and Paul feels responsible for it.
Paul and his friends experienced death scenes from the ones that stood by them since they stepped foot on the battle field to the ones on the other side. They thought war was glorious and honorable. They then realized war was just a brutal thing. What they repeatedly asked themselves was: “Then what exactly is the war for?” (205).
These feeling are expressed in the story about Rat Kiley's letter, with which the chapter is started - with his feelings of grief about loss and final «cooze», because he was not written back and he could not cope with his loss. His pain is shown in the shoking story of shooting baby buffalo. However, all these stories might have never happened, the soldiers were fighting the war and facing blood, troops and losses, struggling because of their youth and immaturity, fear that cannot be ignored about war. This terrible experience of war is the only truth that author wants to make the readers understand in his
O’Brien writes “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but intangibles has their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (108) Death changes a solder. Cross’s solders all told jokes after the death of Ted Lavender. This was their way of making themselves deal with the loss of a close friend and soldier. “Zapped while zipping” (107) is what they all said because Lavender died while returning from going to the bathroom.
This calamitous incident occurs when he gets shot in the head and is killed while returning from using the latrine. Just moments before this tragedy occurs, Cross is daydreaming about his obsession, Martha, back in America and how he loves her and how she cannot relate with his feeling of affection. It is while his mind is wandering when Ted Lavender gets shot. Cross cannot help but feel responsible for Lavender’s death. Despite that deaths like this are commonly caused by freak incidents, he feels that if his attention had been focused on the war at the very moment Lavender died instead of the girl whose love he can never obtain, he could have prevented this loss of life.