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Essay living in a small town
Family life during war
Family life during war
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Soldier’s Life. A memoir.
I worked in the farming industry for several years, with my wife Sarah behind me with all that I did. My two sons accompanied me in my endeavors to keep the farm up and running. Rowland, who was 16 at the time, helped with milking the cows and making sure all the animals got fed on time. As well as milking and feeding he was in charge of cleaning up after the animals and his younger brother of course. James, who was 10 at the time, didn’t really help much. He stayed off to the sidelines helping Sarah gather food for supper each night. Myself, being a middle-aged man in his 30s, was at my prime. I considered myself as one of the most athletically fit person in the small Northern town of Calamine, Massachusetts.
One day around dusk Sarah and James came running from the gravel road off to the southwest of the farm yelling and hollering that I needed to go to the post office in town as soon as I could. “What are you talking about?” I asked them in a confused voice. James blubbered with tears filled in his eyes, “They are going to send you away to fight in the war papa!” As soon as I head that I readied my great horse and stormed into town when several of the local men were gathered. A bunch of them were protesting that there was “no way in hell we are leaving our families to serve in a war” in which they had no interest. With many of them in such an outrage they decided to avoid the law and skip town that night. Romulus Scott, the richest man in town had a plan to bribe his neighboring household for one of their sons to take his place. Seeing that the boy’s family didn’t have very much to live on, they accepted. I left town and headed back to the farm. I told the boys that there was no need to worry about me...
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...t camp. I asked a nurse what had happened to me. I remembered that I had been shot, which had proven true by my bandaged up leg. “A young man, about 18 or 19 came up and shot the guy who had shot you and saved your life!” Confused by what the woman had said I asked her to repeat herself. After fully understanding what had happened I ask her if he knew who this man was. I wanted to thank the man for saving my life. She told me that the man had died from severe blood loss. “Before he passed he asked me to give a message to you.” She gracefully handed me a blood stained piece of paper folded into four quadrants. ‘I love you, the best father I could ever have.’ I couldn’t believe what I had read. I started crying, the nurse to me told me that I was to be sent home. They had more than enough soldiers to cover for me. I asked to be left alone. She left without hesitation.
Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier is a work notable not only for its vivid and uncompromising account of his experience as a member of the Wehrmacht in World War II, but also for its subtle and incisive commentary about the very nature of war itself. What is perhaps most intriguing about Sajer’s novel is his treatment of the supposedly “universal” virtues present within war such as professionalism, patriotism, camaraderie, and self-sacrifice. Sajer introduces a break between how war is thought about in the abstract and how it has actually been conducted historically.
More than 25,000 letters and 250 private diaries from men on both side of North and South. Talking about the soldier's ideals for which they fought over conflicts and beliefs of each side. McPherson took all of the soldier’s ideas and beliefs and made this powerful and important book on an often-overlooked aspect of the Civil War. Also, it brought great honor and powerfully moving account for the men that fought in the civil war.
A prominent theme in A Long Way Gone is about the loss of innocence from the involvement in the war. A Long Way Gone is the memoir of a young boy, Ishmael Beah, wanders in Sierra Leone who struggles for survival. Hoping to survive, he ended up raiding villages from the rebels and killing everyone. One theme in A long Way Gone is that war give innocent people the lust for revenge, destroys childhood and war became part of their daily life.
“The saddest thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies”-(Unknown). In the book Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt she wrote about a nine year old boy named Jethro Creighton and his family. A war started to arrive in mid-April 1861, because of the north and south wanted to either keep slaves or to free them but that decision caused chaos to start to emerge. This chaos jumped into Jethro’s life when some of his brothers joined the war almost all of them joined the north but one joined the south, which in their case was the enemy. This left Jethro with the job of plowing the field. He got help from his fourteen year old Sister Jenny. Jethro’s mother Ellen and his father Matt were left worrying about their sons John, Tom, Bill, and their cousin Eb, and Jenny’s boyfriend Shadrach Yale. All this chaos with the war left the Creighton’s family worried sick, through all this they had to deal with the consequences of betrayal, and death on their minds.
William Faulkner tells his novel The Unvanquished through the eyes and ears of Bayard, the son of Confederate Colonel John Sartoris. The author’s use of a young boy during such a turbulent time in American history allows him to relate events from a unique perspective. Bayard holds dual functions within the novel, as both a character and a narrator. The character of Bayard matures into a young adult within the work, while narrator Bayard relays the events of the story many years later.
I walk into Valley Forge. Winter 1777-78. As I walk in, an overwhelming feeling of emotions comes over me. Sadness, anger, hope, unwillingness, and happiness. I walk in a little bit further and I am greeted with many huts. These huts have no windows and only one door. I decide to peek into one of them and see 12 men inside. The huts are hard to see in because smoke has filled them. From another direction there is many men talking. I walk towards the noise and am surprised to see men sitting around a campfire eating small amounts of food. The men are talking about various things. Some are talking about their family, how they are excited that their duty is almost over, and some of the strong willed patriots who are willing to fight for their country are talking about how they are going to stay longer than they were sent to. As I keep wandering around the camp I find myself at an area with many men. These men are different than the men at the campfire. These men were the unlucky soldiers who had gotten sick. There is a soldier who is crying over another soldiers still body. Again I hear talking but this time it’s about how they need help caring for the sick and the soldiers that want to leave shouldn’t leave so they can help the sick. I shake off what I just witnessed and made the tough decision of staying. I would stay because they would need my help,
In James McPherson’s novel, What They Fought For, a variety of Civil War soldier documents are examined to show the diverse personal beliefs and motives for being involved in the war. McPherson’s sample, “is biased toward genuine fighting soldiers” (McPherson, 17) meaning he discusses what the ordinary soldier fought for. The Confederacy was often viewed as the favorable side because their life style relied on the war; Confederates surrounded their lives with practices like slavery and agriculture, and these practices were at stake during the war. On the other hand, Northerners fought to keep the country together. Although the Civil War was brutal, McPherson presents his research to show the dedication and patriotism of the soldiers that fought and died for a cause.
Simpson, Brooks D., Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, eds. The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. New York: The Library of America, 2011. Print.
The boys were called out to help shovel free a troop train trapped by snow-blocked tracks. The experience "brings the war home" for all of them, and they realized they would have to face a crucial decision very soon.
I found this story not only good but, it was also a little disturbing because, the connection between the text and my own personal life is I remember when my father came home after the war was over suffering from Post-Traumatic Disorder. He did not return the same man that had left to go off to war. We lived in the backwoods of a small town and he would always be staring at the tree line waiting for Charlie to make his presence known. I thought that this story would go along nicely with the movie Full Metal Jacket because, that movie was the most realistic war movie ever made about how they trained the people that was being sent to
Thesis: The war overseas, but there are millions of veterans still fighting the war at home.
Many people question if Guy Sajer, author of The Forgotten Soldier, is an actual person or only a fictitious character. In fact, Guy Sajer in not a nom de plume. He was born as Guy Monminoux in Paris on 13 January 1927. At the ripe young age of 16, while living in Alsace, he joined the German army. Hoping to conceal his French descent, Guy enlisted under his mother's maiden name-Sajer. After the war Guy returned to France where he became a well known cartoonist, publishing comic books on World War II under the pen name Dimitri.
At the beginning of the civil war there was a lot of pride upon both the north and the south. Many young men signed up for the army and were told of the great pride there would be on the battlefield. While there were not enough volunteers to build an army for the north, they were forced to draft young men to fight. White men represented the primary source of recruits, and men in all states resented the draft, which had been imposed in an amended fashion in the North. States were given quotas, and had to do what they could to fill them, including paying bonuses (“Soldier Life during the War”).
Growing up in Southern California prevailed its beauty yet, growing up in a military family is something I'll forever gratify. For 20+ years my father was a marine and out of those years, I experienced 13 of them. Let me tell you those were the best years of my life. However, I will only tell you the story that has made me who I am.
In the battlefield, innocence is lost and men are transformed; yet all soldiers go through a three-step transformation that turns them into better soldiers, but worse men as well. In the novel “ All Quiet On The Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, and in many war-time poems, a transformation among men is noticeable in which they lose innocence, become beasts and most importantly, they abandon all civilized sensibilities.