// War Literature

The animation movie, “Waltz with Bushir,” recaps the Lebanese-Israeli War with flashbacks and nightmares of the fearsome memories.  It begins with a pack of twenty-six wild dogs running frantically. The only colors of the background are black, white, and gray, while the dogs’ eyes are yellow, depicting a “ready to kill” look.  By having this color scheme, the dogs seem that much more threatening and aggressive as they violently parade through the streets and growl at the citizens.  This is a recurring dream one of the characters has had for the last two and half years that correlates to a war memory the soldier has.  Twenty years ago, they were sent to the Lebanese villages to look for Palestinians and the character shoots twenty-six dogs to keep them from warning the people of their presence.  He couldn’t bear to kill humans.  It is interesting that this soldier keeps having this same nightmare because of how traumatic his experiences at the war were.

The filmmaker, Pastouchli, has a flashback for the first time after conversing with the other soldier.  As the movie mentions, memory is dynamic; it is alive.  All war experiences can be so intense and distressing that a soldier blocks out his memories from his consciousness.  Pastouchli’s young son asks him whether he has ever shot anyone, but Pastouchli cannot recall.  Most of the soldiers cannot remember anything, specifically discussed in the movie about the massacre.  It is not stored in the characters’ systems, even though both were in Beruit at the time.  He talks to fellow soldiers to try and recall his own story.  He finally admits to his own denial and tries to seek the truth of his involvement in the massacre in Beruit.

I believe the movie depicts how awful and treacherous a war can be.  As Pastouchli begins to recall his past experiences, he remembers the fear invoked.  The soldiers were all clueless and were just teenagers thrown into this war.  As shown when Pastouchli recalls his first day of war.  The soldiers are blazing fire as they arrive on their shore, only to discover they massacred an entire family in a car they shot at.  The soldiers are constantly just shooting everywhere nonstop without looking.  They then had to load and dump the countless dead bodies.  He reveals that the soldiers acted robotically, as if they were not connected to their bodies or actions.  They had not entered the war determined to display valiant and heroic actions or be engrossed by a passion for fighting; these teenagers were terrorized by fear.  Frenkel, another fellow soldier, recalls a child with an RPG that was firing at the other soldiers.  Clearly a child has no business being in the midst of the war with a weapon.  It further depicts how ill-informed the soldiers were, portraying the Israeli government in a negative light.