CHAPTER 1:
“Well, I
know. You’ll pretend you were men
instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John
Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so
we’ll have a lot more of them. And
they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs,” said Mary O’Hare.
(page14)
When
I read this quote I was struck by the truth behind it. Our society glorifies war through
media, whether its movies or songs or books. The characters are deemed to be “war heroes” and in return
we idolize them. Movies, in
particular, focus on showing scenes of bravery and triumph. The audience hardly ever sees scenes depicting
cowardice and defeat. The reason
for this is simple; people do not want to have such a horrible and scary truth
on their conscious. The common
saying, “ignorance is bliss,” describes this perfectly.
The
majority of people do not know, nor will they ever know, how truly horrible war
is. The government and the media
tend to hide the true horrors from us.
So many soldiers come home from the war suffering from PTSD, which is a
testament to how little we understand of what truly goes on in the battlefield. Vonnegut, a veteran, wrote his book to
enlighten society on a side of war that the majority of people never see.
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