Morality and Relationships in Soldiers (The Things They Carried Essay Example)

No matter how many wars have happened throughout history, they continue to tear the world apart. With war, there comes people volunteering or being drafted to fight for their country. War comes with other things too including violence, guilt, grief, and loss of right and wrong. With soldiers going into war to fight for their country, things like PTSD, the disappearance of morality, and relationships almost become nonexistent. The young men who got drafted into the war lost part of who they were, along with great emptiness and regret that followed. PTSD in soldiers is talked about a lot, so instead I wrote about morality and relationships with soldiers. Soldiers experience weakened morality and relationships due to war.

After the war, soldiers feel disconnected from their relationships. Tim O'Brien explores how isolated soldiers feel when they return home through the character Norman Bowker in his fictional memoir The Things They Carried. Bowker suffers, acclimating to his old life after the war. He wants to reach out for help - he wants to talk to his family and friends - but he doesn't know how. He recognizes "[i]f Sally had not been married, or if his father were not such a baseball fan, it would have been a good time to talk.” (O’Brien 596). Because Bowker went to war, he lost his opportunity with Sally since she got married. Life carried on without him. Bowker stopped his life to fight in a war, and now he feels as if he lost it all. He lost his identity. He can’t even connect with his father, someone he could easily talk to before the war. O’Brien continues to explain how Bowker felt disconnected from more than just people. He even felt disconnected from his town, the place where he grew up. The town “did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know” (O’Brien 598). He fought in war and risked his life and yet no one in this town knows about the violence and trauma he had to experience for their freedom. Bowker notices that his relationship with his town has disappeared similarly to the journalists in the documentary “The Good Soldier”. A former soldier from WWTT, Edward Wood, noticed that his relationship with someone he loved was completely affected by his decision of him going to war. He recalls how it “didn’t last. He didn’t make it. He got hit. And [he] didn’t understand it then, but that started a decline in our relationship which spiraled downward and downward and downward” (“The Good Soldier”). Both soldiers in The Things They Carried and “The Good Soldier” have an awakening realization that fighting in the war destroys the important parts of their lives and they regret this. They realized being focused on war they were so focused on war and fighting for their country they come back to the people who were previously in their lives and they don’t know how to make a new normal or fix the damage that was done to them.Wood uses the phrase “spiraled downward” to suggests the ruin war creates for soldiers. They lose their identity, their relationships, their connection to civilization. Unfortunately, many soldiers feel disconnected from themselves and others as a result of fighting for the rights of everyone in their country.

A soldier’s sense of morality is majorly decreased and almost erased after the war. Bruce Springsteen displays the mentality soldiers develop from after fighting in the war in his song (Devils and Dust). Springsteen wasn’t talking about it from the first person, but from his dad serving in WWII and seeing how it affected him. Springsteen wrote about how his dad thought to survive through the war which included “kill the things you love, Fear’s a powerful thing, baby, It can turn your heart black, you can trust” (Bruce Springsteen Devils and Dust). During and after war, it changes a soldier's perspective on things. They can fear things, for example, certain things can bring up trauma from the war. Killing a person has a lot to do with the traumatic flashbacks of war. With the song Devils and Dust, it talks about how your heart can turn black and you lose a sense of all morality and in the song Civil War it contrasts a little because it is saying the soldier doesn’t have control of what he is doing. “My hands are tied ,The billions shift from side to side ,An’ the wars go on with brainwashed pride, For the love of God and our human rights” Civil War, Guns n’ Roses. Civil War is not just another repeat song about war, it instead lays out the history of what war has done to our world. There is repetition of the artist of the song clearly saying they want no more civil war. It also tells a couple of examples of what war does to the soldiers. Finally, the last lyric of this song says “whaz so civil ‘bout war” really surprised me and made me go how have I not thought about this? It's a way of saying that the soldiers that are thrown into the war are brainwashed, and they are just doing what they are told to. (In Civil War, the soldiers don’t recognize the people they have become and feel like they aren’t in control and in Good Soldier, the soldier says killing people gives them a sense of accomplishment. A previous soldier from the Vietnam War admitted, “I[t] [felt] good at the time when I did it. It bothered me if I didn’t get the chance to kill someone.” (Good Soldier) War itself takes the innocence of people knowing the difference between right and wrong and turns those people into puppets who just kill and that’s their only purpose. 

A soldier’s loss in morality causes their relationships to fall apart. Norman Bowker thought about “how he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be.”(The Things they Carried pg.605) Norman Bowker blames himself for not being able to save his friend so then he doesn’t feel that anything else he did in the war really mattered anymore. War changes people mentally because of having to kill to defend their country and losing people because of it. (In the things they carried, the soldier felt guilty because he had been so brave, but not brave enough to save his friend Kiowa from dying. In Journalists in Combat a soldier mentions he has wonderful relationships but he can’t maintain a long- term relationship. “I mean, I’ve had wonderful relationships that have ended because of what I do. And the difficulty of maintaining a long term, serious relationship has proven too difficult for me to be able to do.” (Journalists in combat) Journalists in Combat show how long- term relationships can disappear because of war and also show how war only mattered to people if they were fighting or they lost an important person because of it. A soldier coming back from war “remember[s] coming back and being at a dinner party with people who [they] had been at university with and talking to them about Afghanistan and all the terrible things that were happening, and [they] could see that people were just not very interested at all. It didn't matter to them.” (Journalists in combat) This part of Journalists in Combat similarly links back to when Norman Bowker notices that the town doesn’t care about war. 

This essay explored how war affects mortality, relationships, and how soldiers feel disconnected from the people that were close to them before the war. The subject of war is explored in art, music, and writing, but there are always different interpretations and thoughts about war. I know we have all thought once in our life why can’t war just not be a thing or happen at all? Unfortunately, this is reality and sadly, it is a thing that creates chaos and kills many innocent people and just makes us more violent. We have learned over history though that if we try to be better people that maybe war could be prevented. I hope people keep trying to prevent more wars from happening so humanity can start being better.