// War Literature

What stood out to me in How to Tell a True War Story was one specific paragraph.

“For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel – the spiritual texture- of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You cant tell where you are, or why you’re there. and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.”

Although Tim O’Brien is speaking about his war stories, I feel that this paragraph could have also served as a quote from Jarhead as well. In the movie, the protagonist is constantly on the edge from the mind games that war plays on him.  From the time that Swofford enters the military, this blend of emotions becomes his life. This easily causes love in his mind to fuse with hate, whether it be from tears due to his doubt of his girlfriends monogamy to pointing a gun to one of his “brothers” from war. The idea of beauty is also transformed in war. In Jarhead, beauty could be considered seeing your target die after pulling the trigger from your rifle, something that would be disgusting if not in a state of war.

I feel that O’Brien does a fantastic job of pulling the reader into his story and is effective in demonstrating his emotions during combat. If you take this quote from O’Brien and accept it as true, then it sheds light into the characters of Jarhead. It explains why its possible for there to be so much destruction in war(chaos), yet still be a strong chain of command in effect(order). It can explain why the producers of Jarhead wanted to make one of the last scenes in the film just a bunch of pointless shooting into nothingness. Its quite possible that this chaos is needed order to remain sane in ways only they could understand. To turn away from the film, but stick to the quote, it can also explain why horrific war crimes have been committed during history. The event that comes to mind is the My Lai event in Vietnam. Hundreds of civilians were killed by US soldiers in ways so terrible that at one point, many were thrown in a ditch and then had the soldiers open fire on them. Like O’Brien says, “The old rules are no longer binding,” but what I am left wondering is at what point does the “blend of emotions” that lead to the violence and chaos of war become morally unacceptable?