Guns don’t kill people, people do, but the gun helps

Comments:

http://wancourp.uniblogs.org/2008/04/14/when-the-music-plays/#comment-10

http://roodme.edublogs.org/2008/03/26/wives-on-the-homefront/#comment-6

http://zod1703.edublogs.org/2008/04/12/war-bonds/#comment-9

http://kerijaynes.uniblogs.org/2008/03/26/describing-realities-through-literature/#comment-9

http://collijes.learnerblogs.org/2008/04/14/correspondence/#comment-8

http://tubbsd.edublogs.org/2008/04/14/a-nation-that-goes-to-war/#comment-17

http://thirdsquad.uniblogs.org/2008/03/26/promises-promises/#comment-15

http://derekvp.uniblogs.org/2008/03/20/religion-as-a-reason-for-war/#comment-9

http://bliepe.uniblogs.org/2008/04/15/forced-patriotism/#comment-15

http://siladked.uniblogs.org/2008/03/24/christmas-christmas-christmas/#comment-9

This class was unlike any other class I’ve had so far. I really enjoyed it and the reading was great. The only thing that sucked is I figured out the whole, writing blogs in Microsoft Word and then post them at the every end. I lost a blog from the internet being dumb so I just left it, until now.

I wish the best for everyone and later in life, if we cross paths, I hope you’ll remember me enough to smile.

I know you’re not suppose to “judge a book by its cover” but when I first read the title of The Things They Carried I thought it was either going to talk about the awesome machinery or the guilt and emotions each soldier has to deal with. When first reading about the weight each soldier had to carry it reminded me of my cousin complaining about how his daughter is taller than him. He claimed that his pack and helmet and all of his gear weighed him down. I’m not sure what his missions were and I don’t know much about his stay in S. Korea. I just know he met his wife there so, even though I was adopted, I have cousins that look like me.

There are so many burdens a soldier has to carry. That’s why it shocks me to hear about all of the stories of betrayal from loved ones. “How Easily Life Changes,” is a blog I read about a soldier observing what his fellow soldiers have to deal with. It must make your boots heavier knowing that when you get back home, everything is different. I’m not sure if it would make me angry at the person so I would fight harder or if I would blame the military for my situation and want to get out as quick as possible.

You’d think these military wives would know what they’re getting into. It’s sad and I agree with the writer when he says,

“These women really have no excuse for doing what they did to these soldiers. Maybe it was selfishness, the inability to adapt (in the Army you can get chaptered out early for that), who knows.”

Sure, it may be lonely without their husband there, but think about how lonely he feels.

In The Things They Carried Tim thought about running. But he didn’t.

“I was a coward. I went to the war.”

He decided to go to Vietnam because he would be embarrassed if he ran. He didn’t want people to think less of him. Guilt is what made him go.
My uncle was almost drafted. I’m not sure of the specifics but there was something about his number that he knew for sure that he was going to be sent over so he joined an ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) program at Western Michigan Univ. He figured, if he has to go, then he’ll start on top! (or at least a little closer to the top than the guy next to him.) He didn’t run. He embraced it. It could partly be since his older brother was in the Air Force, it couldn’t be too bad and he didn’t want to seem weak.
I never really realized how someone’s perception affects us. We all strive to make our parents proud or to impress someone. I honestly can say that maybe about half of my satisfaction from doing something is solely for me. The rest of it is divided up between parents, friends and coworkers. It may seem sad but it’s true.
Something else that seems to drive people is religion. The Catholics believe that doing works will get them to heaven. All views of Christianity “thank” God by using the gift that He gave them. People feel that they should honor the situation that they’re in by making the most of it.
There are a lot of people that are less fortunate that we are, maybe we should honor them by working really hard on our take home finals. The inopportune can be your motivation : )

In the military, there seems to be a sense of camaraderie with the people you’re stationed with. I don’t know the difference between a battalion and a platoon but I know that they’re groups of people that have to look out for each other. It’s amazing how people change when they’re put into an uncomfortable situation. There are always going to be the few that get scared but it seems like it balances out with those who step forward and take the lead.

I like how the trio in Fallen Angels is shaped in the beginning. Some of them are scared but they come together and do their job when the time comes. From the beginning you can tell that the main character and Pewee have a tight bond. It takes Perry a bit to figure him out but they’re in the thick of it together either way.

In “When a Team Unites,” a blog found in the Sandbox, he talks about how his team is being broken up. And poor leadership is in command, forging the way.

It reminds me of a few things from class. The first day, learning about the ball turret, the guy gets shoved in there without any real training. There are some situations where the wrong people seem to have the authority. Sergeants that don’t know how to take control of situations or even on the minor scale, here at GVSU I’ve had some poor professors that I feel shouldn’t have the privilege to impact on students’ education. It just doesn’t seem right that leaders today don’t do their job well, at least in the eyes of their subordinates.

This post also reminds me of Fallen Angels when he talks about Hollywood making a movie about his team. He was lucky and probably picked first since he has Jude Law to portray him in “The Last Stand.” It’s a very strong title; I think it would do well in the box office.
One of the characters in Fallen Angels, Lobel, views his life and the war like a movie. He’s not sure which character he’s playing quite yet but he knows which ones to look out for like, “The role of the good black guy who everybody thinks is a coward and then gets killed saving everybody else.”

Everyone has their own process to block out reality.

Everything happens for a reason and once again, I feel like you never have a strong opinion about something until you have an experience. Ron Kovic is an antiwar but he didn’t start that way.  He enlisted in the marines out of his own free will. Captivated by Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

I was curious of how our friend The Usual Suspect got his start. After blog-stalking, I found his old blog, went back to the beginning of it and finally found the post where he answers the million dollar question, “Why Am I Doing It?” It answer is a little half-hearted but maybe it’s because he’s not entirely sure or just doesn’t know how to say it. The answer he comes up with is that it feels right and it’s his “calling.” Reading further it seems like his family is also involved in the armed services. His uncle served in Desert Storm.  But reading is current blog, “Combat Blue Balls,” it seems like his view have changed. He’s bored and angry and it seems like he wants to do more than what he is doing.

“Instead, you’re standing there with sweat running down your face, thumb still on the safety, ready to feel like you’re in Iraq for a reason, to fulfill your own individual purpose, and nothing. Sorry bud.”

It makes sense because it doesn’t seem like he is doing much. In this blog he tells a tale of how his instinct took over and he was told to go by the slow protocol instead of getting approval to give a “justified a warning shot” to an Iraqi ambulance driving down the military lane.

People may start for all sorts of reasons but it seems like a lot of them aren’t satisfied once their time is done.

Some changes are only minute and some are drastic. I found a writing piece by Ron Kovic  about Born on the Fourth of July.

To kill another human being, to take another life out of this world with one pull of a trigger, is something that never leaves you. It is as if a part of you dies with them. If you choose to keep on living, there may be a healing, and even hope and happiness again–but that scar and memory and sorrow will be with you forever.

Some changes are permanent. Hopefully our friend will find the excitement he was looking for.

Although they call the War in Iraq the “Internet War,” communication between the soldiers and family remains the same. Lindsey talks about how she rarely talks to her husband. She, like the wives and girlfriends in Since You Went Away, she has a support group of other military wives.  A difference nowadays is that she’ll wait up for his phone call. Military families back during WWII didn’t have that option. I don’t know if that makes it easier on the family or harder. During WWII you could watch for the mailman and go to the movie theaters for news updates but it wasn’t as much of a waiting game. Always being ready and able to talk on the phone or do a video chat online. In theory you’d get more instant updates in present time but it seems like you’re life would have to be scheduled around it.

After the discussion in class about handwriting letters, I decided that I was going to write a letter to my oldest brother, Aaron, who lives in Santa Barbara, California. I got about a page done and then my roommate interrupted me and I haven’t found a moment to pick it up and again and continue. It shows that it does take a lot more effort and time to sit down and hanwrite a letter but I don’t think that’s everything.

I guess I tend to have opposing views to the class but personally, I would enjoy a video or a recording of someone saying, “I love you,” instead of trying to make those words out of their chicken scratch handwriting. I think everyone can agree that hearing someone’s laugh instead of reading “haha” or “LOL” would be more satisfying.

The Holocaust is one of those things I don’t remember learning about, but I’ve always known about. I read the Diary of Anne Frank in elementary school and in middle school the movie came out. It wasn’t until high school that I got all of the gruesome details. Sophomore year is when my stereotypical history teacher taught us from a tattered American history book. That’s when I learned the traumatic numbers came out. It may seem a little late but I actually understood what they meant. How can you fathom a death toll six million people when the population of Grand Rapids seems like the world?

The template used to teach others usually consists of WWII details, Night, Schindler’s List and if you’re lucky, a talk from a Holocaust survivor. But teaching nowadays has changed. Is that a good thing? Maus stirred up some conversation about if it should be used to teach. I think it could, maybe not in a history class as the first time discussing the topic, but in an English class, a lot like this one, where you are taught to read past the words on the page. Forget the fact that they’re mice and go more into relationships and symbolis. The meaning is still there.
A real controversy for teaching would be Nintendo’s new game. Nintendo has a Holocaust game in the works, Imagination is No Escape. There are a few news articles all saying the same thing: Nintendo of America doesn’t plan to distribute the game in North America, there is no on-screen violence and the game is causing a lot of controversy. Nintendo Passes on Holocaust Game. The game follows a Jewish boy through the Holocaust and from what I understand from these articles, he has to pretend he’s somewhere else in order to escape the cruelty of what’s going on. *DemoNews, a website that I had to have translated from German, said it was a mix of Schindler’s List and Alice in Wonderland.

It’s weird how technology changes and how we find ways to use it.
The effectiveness of this game will be interesting to find out about.

*if you use this translator, it will translate the whole page

On the first day of class we discussed the British poet Rupert Brooke. He wrote amazing patriotic poems about the honor and privilege of being a soldier and was the best “recruiter” of his time. His poem, “The Soldier” is what we went in depth in.

“If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust conceal’d;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air.

Wash’d by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”

We also watched army and marine recruiting commercials. They are very proud pieces of media and gave me chills. Although embellished and very biased to only the “fun” exciting parts of being in the armed forces, they are positive messages. But there is other media that is contradicting that warm, fuzzy and proud image.

In 1998 “Saving Private Ryan” hit the screens and it was the first big war time production. There were many stories of veterans having to leave the theater because of it’s astonishing likeness. The movie was reported as very authentic and was inspired by the true story of the Niland brothers. After this movie, other war time movies were captured on film. “Pearl Harbor” was released in 2001. These movies were cool because it put a twist on history and helped ignorant teenagers learn about all of the big points they sleep through during class. Two years after 9/11, there were at least four movies (United 93, Fahrenheit 9/11, 9/11: The Twin Towers, Sorry, Haters), there were also countless military movies, like Jarhead and others that seem to escape me. These movies weren’t so cool, at least not to me.
There are so many differences between these two groups of movies. I liked the older stories because they had follow up information after the movie but before the credits but also, they were all resolved. The 9/11 movies were too new to have that kind of big information, except for casualties. The tragic event was just barely history.

I don’t think Rupert Brooke would appreciate these movies undoing everything is poetry achieved. There is one movie imparticular that i am referencing to, “Stop Lost.” This movie is about soldiers going home and thinking that they were done serving but now the government is instructing them to do another tour of Iraq. It shows the turmoil of the soldiers and families. In Testament of Youth, you read how much Vera missed Roland’s physical presence. There’s a line in the trailer, the army wife to the main character says, “I can’t go another year without him touching my face.”
For those of you who don’t know a lot about the military, this does really happen. (i know, weird right? that MIGHT be why they’re doing a movie about it!) But to me, this seems like one of the things the army doesn’t want everyone to know about, just like how every day of being in the army isn’t EXACTLY like the commercial.

It, in a way, angers me that they advertise this kind of thing. Yeah, it’s negative and it sucks but I think now, more than ever, we shouldn’t be discouraging youth from going into the armed forces. Our numbers are down, which is one of the reasons the military is pressured to pull crap like this, and I don’t think we need any more reasons for people not to go.

It sucks more than I can image to have a loved one overseas and then once you think you have them back, they’re ordered to ship off again but what else are we going to do?

Last weeks assignment got that snowed out was to read, “When the vision dies…” out of Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. For those of you who haven’t had the chance to flip through those pages, Roland dies. Vera is consoled through letters and everyone talking to her and trying to comfort her, but nothing really helps. She tries to move on but it’s so hard for her, like it is for anyone who has had someone close pass away.

“‘Everything is so exactly the same as it was before, which brings sit all back so vividly,’ I wrote to Edward. ‘It seems unendurable that everything should be the same.’”

That line really spoke to me. It seems like she’s asking, “how could people go on with their life normally when Roland just died? How could people laugh and smile when I am in so much pain?”

Death seems to happen more often nowadays and people are so unaffected by it. In movies people get shot up and since it’s a “bad guy” no one really cares. I may be looking a little too deep into it but “bad guys” have families too! There might be some high speed chase and police cars are crashing into each other and then BOOM! one explodes and the flames rise 10 feet high! But what about the drive of that car? Policemen always seem not to make it very long in an action flick and that bothers me a little. They’re suppose to be well trained and highly respected. Their job is to protect us but they are portrayed as lousy shooters and bad drivers. Respectable people don’t get enough respect, at least that is how I feel.

In the book it reveals the events that happened when Ronald was killed. He took a bullet to the stomach while about to repair the wire in the front of the trench he was in. Coincidentally, The Usual Suspect, who everyone is probably subscribed to by now, spoke about someone on the other side of the spectrum.

“There’s gunfire out of nowhere, and soon it’s a squad on one rooftop against the enemy on another rooftop. “Chaz” returns fire with his SAW and watches as his rounds smack into some guy’s ribs. He shakes for the rest of the day.”
The Downward Spiral

For the few of us that death still affects, when we hear of someone being shot we only seem to think of the victim, after reading that paragraph, it made me think of others too. Taking someone’s life would be a feeling I don’t think I could ever come to terms with. Inflicting pain on those close to that person would fill me so full of guilt I wouldn’t be able to bear it. No justification would be able to satisfy that guilt either. But that is what the military does. Our soldiers shoot other soldiers for our government. They do it to prove that our country is better than theirs and we should have control over the situation. But really it is, our country has better training facilities, or our country has more resources to send to beat up another country. And the reports that come in are just numbers.

In Period 6 of the Iraq Coalition Casualties Count, the United States had 858 deaths in the last 367 days. That is 858 families effected by this war more than just a raise in gas prices. That’s 858 people that can’t be hugged or laughed with or slept next to at night. These broken families have sacrificed so much happiness for something that isn’t really thought about, past looking at the number.

No one in my family has ever, “died for a cause” but I can image that it really sucks
….especially when you don’t whole heartedly agree with the cause in the first place…

I have 5 reader categories – Big News Sites, European Countries, Milblogs, Military Podcasts and Google News

Big News Sites: BBC New front page b/c British people have great humor and interesting news
NYT National b/c my oldest brother has a crush on the New York Times

Milblogs: There’s a link that i’m not sure about, a link from a surgeon (i think he’s a marine and marines are usually hot but very irogant) and a WWI English soldier

Military Podcasts: Air Force and Navy. The Navy b/c my friend is in the Navy and stationed in Hawaii.

Google News: I searched for Foreign Policy and Iraq War

i also google news-ed writer’s strike cause that is stupid and i hope it doesn’t interfere with my House M.D