Vices & Virtues:
Ethical Dilemmas of a Fading Man
When Sidney Stewart was freed in Manchuria in 1945 after 3 years of imprisonment by the Japanese, the 6’3 American weighed 65 pounds (Goldstein). Stewart was an Army private stationed in Manila in 1942 when they were overpowered by the Japanese. The 21 year-old wasn’t the killing type of soldier. Of course he killed when required, but he wasn’t murderous. He’d been sent to Luzon on the Bataan peninsula after the Japanese invasion and was soon captured after his group surrendered. The deaths began immediately—surrender is not an option to the Japanese who told them “you are not honorable prisoners of war. You are captives and you shall be treated as captives” (Stewart, 84). Treatment was horrendous beginning with the Death March where Stewart and 75,000 others walked 65 miles over 6 days with almost no food or water from Mariveles in the south of the Bataan Peninsula San Fernando in the north (History). Those who attempted to reach water or were too weak to keep up with the group were savagely murdered (History). Stewart arrived at Camp O’Donnell, a Japanese prison camp. In Sidney Stewart’s Give Us This Day, Stewart shared the ethical dilemmas that challenged him during his 3 years of captivity by the Japanese in WWII.
Stewart wasn’t a killer and encountered an ethical dilemma when he was forced to kill. Before surrendering, in a battle on Bataan, Stewart and a Japanese soldier both dove into the same hole to avoid a falling mortar shell. Stewart was able to reach his weapon before his adversary who then surrendered. In the battle, Stewart knew that taking a prisoner wouldn’t be possible. But, he wrote, that he couldn’t make himself hate him (Stewart, 52). “I ha...
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...ory isn’t a typical WWII experience or even a typical prisoner-of-war experience. There was no “shame” (Hynes, 233) or “adventure” (Hynes, 236) as Hynes mentions in The Soldiers’ Tale. And conditions certainly weren’t “surprisingly comfortable” (Hynes, 237). Hynes wrote that “there wasn’t much scope for heroism in a Japanese prison,” (Hynes, 256) but Stewart’s ethics were heroic representations of the righteousness of humankind.
Works Cited
Goldstein, Richard. Sidney Stewart Is Dead at 78; Bataan Death March Survivor. The New York Times. April 5, 1998. Web. 06 April 2014.
History.com Staff. Bataan Death March. History.com. Web. 06 April 2013.
Hynes, Samues. The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. Viking Adult. Print. 01 April 1997.
Stewart, Sidney. Give Us This Day. W. W. Norton & Company; Revised edition. Print. 17 April 1999.
O’Brien, Tim. “How To Tell a True War Story.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2003. p. 420-429.
The soldiers in the Australian camp were not mistreated. On the contrary, they were well cared for. Despite their treatment by the Australians, a Japanese soldier would follow his leader's orders regardless of the final outcome. The idea that being captured meant dishonor to a soldier and his family was enough to drive him to die needlessly.
Hynes, Samuel Lynn. "What Happened in Nam." The soldiers' tale: bearing witness to modern war. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: A. Lane, 1997. 177-222. Print.
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In Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America, Steven M. Gillon is called on to define the impact ten days in history had on America. Each day was chosen for a variety of reasons, and each, no matter how obscure, helps define the course one of the world’s greatest countries took. Gillon had no control over the days chosen but his thesis, his equation for change, and the way the days reinforce his thesis, all create an excellent learning experience that seem like he chose each day personally.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain ...
23 .Roger Daniel, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in the World War II 1993, Hill and Yang.
The Forgotten Soldier is not a book concerning the tactics and strategy of the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Nor does it analyze Nazi ideology and philosophy. Instead, it describes the life of a typical teenage German soldier on the Eastern Front. And through this examined life, the reader receives a first hand account of the atrocious nature of war. Sajer's book portrays the reality of combat in relation to the human physical, psychological, and physiological condition.
O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.
Trapp, James. The art of war: a new translation. New York: Chartwell Books, 2012. Print.
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King, Rosemary. "O'Brien's 'How to Tell a True War Story.'" The Explicator. 57.3 (1999): 182. Expanded Academic ASAP.
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