Humanities

Humanities Poetry Project - Curious Words and Coffee Stains - -

Final Draft Poem - -

Where We Are Now
 by Elizabeth Duncan

Glory.
Soldier.
Battlefield.
Guns ready,
Fire!
What does this say?
Truth is, there’s no glory.
Soldier, the innocent man with no clue what he’s gotten himself into,
Battlefield, word for final resting place for men who had no clue,
Guns ready, who’s ready?
Fire! Dreamlike visions before my eyes, all a blur,
No senses, all courage..
What was that?
All went black….
“What just happened?”
A bomb was what happened,
So quick and so clean
I didn’t know what it was like outside a movie screen
I didn’t realize that I was believing in an illusion
There’s been some evolution
No more trenches
Barbed wire fences or
Untouched land
Now
Nuclear
Nuclear is where we are now
And what we have to show
Happened so quick and so fast
Who knew the results would last
Months
Years
Decades
Now I realize
That what I was seeing on the TV
Was only make-believe
Movies, media all of them
Made me think that I could be one of them.
The honored ones, the ones who can survive anything.
Only now do I know that it was only fake blood
Fake guns
No one fighting for a real cause
Real guns
Real blood
Real humans fighting for a real cause
Nothing like I’ve ever seen before
Here
Now
My life has changed

Artist Statement - -

My poem is about how the media changed the face of war­­ and how it can make people believe that trench warfare is the norm and it’s heroic and brave. Even though it is heroic and brave, it’s more than what is showed on television and in the movies.

My poem is written in a style that incorporates a rhyme scheme and enjambment for effect. When a poem rhymes, it makes the text powerful and rich. When enjambment is incorporated, it can make the lines flow smoothly.

My performance inspiration is visual art because a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, a picture is worth a poem. Also, my picture incorporates a lot of the key images that appear in my poem and puts them into a visual form so the reader can know what I want them to see.

My artwork for the project - -

The Truth of War --

"The earth bursts before us, it rains clods. I feel a smack. My sleeve is torn away by a spinter. I shut my fist. No pain. Wounds don't hurt until afterwards.... I open my eyes, the shelling is stronger than anything. It wipes out the sensibillities"

Essay: 

Weapons Fly.. Good men die.. Airplanes drone and bombs drop when the question is asked: “Why are we doing this?”.... War is terror, war is hope, war is fear and war is power. So much truth and so many lies. War built us up from the bottom, giving us the power to move up higher, but has made us fall so much further. War is the truth. War is us. War is dehumanizing. Dehumanizing because of the thoughtless killing of people.

The truth of war for a soldier is that the overall process of dehumanizing. The process starts with training. In Remarque’s book All Quiet on the Western Front, Himmelstoss says, ”What’s that, you muck-rake, you dirty peat-stealer? Stand up there, bring your heels together when your superior officer speaks to you.” (82). He is making every soldier the same. No one can make a mistake because it shows who they are and they are trained to be the same. Training makes them the same by taking away their personality

            Once they are in in battle, the process of dehumanization continues. He shows no emotion when killing other soldiers. That killing is another step in the process of it all. Once he becomes involved, there is no going back. Every man is exactly the same as one another, he can’t express himself as an individual and he must be the same as everyone else. Wardrobe, haircut, hats and boots, all the same. Personality? They can’t show it. They must be brave, they must be fearless. Showing no emotion to the opposite side. In Remarque’s book All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul says “We are so close on the heels of our retreating enemies that we reach it almost at the same time as they.” (116)

They aren’t showing any fear toward the enemy because they where taught to be fearless. The army teaches them to be fearless so they are more willing to go forward at the enemy. That fearlessness is used because they were taught that in training.

            Another effect on dehumanization is manslaughter. War tells them that it’s okay to kill people in mass. They take away the human knowing of what’s right and wrong. They just blindly kill. Not knowing who he is or what life and family he has outside the war. In Remarque’s book All Quiet in the Western Front, Paul says, “At once, stab him clear in the throat, so that he cannot call out; that’s the only way; he will be just as frightened as I am.” (215)

He is using what he was trained to use in battle: kill mindlessly. That’s all he knows how to do in the midst of battle, he has no other battlefield knowledge.

Although soldiers have been dehumanized in war, there is still miniscule bit of humanity left in them, just enough to make them feel the guilt after the war is over. In Remarque’s book All Quit on the Western Front, Paul says, “But every gasp makes my heart bare. This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts.” (221) The author is saying that even though that they are brainwashed, they still have some feeling in all of them, very deep, but there still is some human left. That remaining human is all that keeps them going forward. Just enough human to keep them alive. That little piece of humanity that keeps him alive is so small compared to the rest of his dehumanized self that it’s there to make him feel guilty of what he’s done to the other soldier.

          

Suicide rates after raised because the soldiers couldn’t cope with all that happened during the war. “Although the government doesn’t keep tally of veteran suicides, the VA last year said that veterans account for roughly 20% of the estimated 30,000 suicides annually in the Unites States.” (Rob Hotakainen) The little bit of human that they had left in them was being overpowered by the inhuman forces inside. They didn’t know what else to do with themselves. They weren’t human enough to continue on. Once the soldier returned from war, he couldn’t function correctly in the non-war world because it was so different from the world he knew. The world he knew was a world of hate a fear, fear of not knowing who may be there when he turns the corner.

Reflection --

The Truth of War has changed me by showing me what war is really like and how it changed the lives of the soldiers. It has made me see all that our soldiers have done for us in the past and how they have helped be who we are today. When I was reading AQotWF, I was seeing that a lot of war is friendship and waiting for a battle to happen and what to do when a battle does happen. The most sagnificant thing that I see in the truth of war is that the truth is a lot differrent than most people think, it looks like there is more waiting that fighting.

The wars that we have won have helped us become who we are, the truth of war is that without those wars, we might not be who we are today. We might be a part of Germany if we didn't have the many men that fought for our country and the allies that helped us out during the war.

The painting of the horse and soldier is an image that shows a scene of what war would look like, bombs going off and people everywhere. The scene shows that in every war, no matter what the fight is for, are alike in scenes.

Veteran's History Project --

The Veteran's History Project is where we take a war veteran to interview so we can gain knowledge of the truth of war. The war that we were studying was the Vietnam War, so we found a veteran from that war to interview.

Reflection

The interview changed my perspective of war by learning about what it was really like out on the field. Battles, depending on where you were in Vietnam, were either common or uncommon. Where our veteran was in Vietnam, battles weren’t as common and it was mostly waiting for the enemy.

    The most interesting thing that I learned from the interview is that war is not only physically harming, it’s psychologically harming as well. The many days and nights of waiting for the enemy can be a challenging endeavor. He got little sleep during the duration that he was in Vietnam because he had to keep watch during parts of the night and during the day. Most of the time he was in Vietnam, he was keeping watch and he was almost never in a battle. When he was in a battle, he was hiding as the enemies were attacking their lookout.

    As a historian, I could be able to use this interview for educating future generations about war. Also, I could use this interview for filling in the missing blanks of the Vietnam War, I could fit this information in like a puzzle piece in the story of the Vietnam War, this is just another piece of the war that no one else would know about without this information given to us.

    The most valuable part of the process to me is group work. Because this was such a big project, I couldn’t have done this alone. And everyone did so well at their roles that we actually got done with our project a week early. Everyone was on time with their work and did their work well. As a group, we succeeded at this project.

Gulf of Tonkin Writing

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was caused by northern Vietnam, no one knows why.

Northern Vietnam attacked southern Vietnam along the Tonkin Gulf during a quiet time during the war. No one knows why they attacked, but LBJ thought that the US had been playing around and not paying close enough attention to possible attacks from the north. Making south Vietnam more vulnerable to attacks. (Document #3) What this tells us is that maybe we weren’t paying enough attention and that led to the attack.

That attack on south Vietnam had no reason, everything was quiet and the south wasn’t fighting. The attack was unjustified because no one knew why they did it. People want to know why the north attacked because it affected them directly, some people were at the bomb site that day. Those who lived through it want to know why. An interviewer asked someone who was there if they have any idea on why the north attacked, but he said “Well, I haven’t been able, quite frankly to come to a fully satisfactory answer.” (Document #2) This tells us that there is no real answer to what happened and even people who were there don’t have an answer.

Looking deeper into it, maybe there can be a logical explanation to why they attacked on the Tonkin Gulf. The south hadn’t attacked them in some time and maybe the north decided it was time to start fighting again, therefore, attacking them so they start fighting back. Evidence for this is that once southern Vietnam was celebrating, and not fighting, north Vietnam wanted to continue fighting. So they attacked and started the fighting again.