The Absence of Honor in War - Essay Example

The Absence of Honor in War The death of a soldier in war is often rewarded with a stately funeral and a gun salute. However, this cultural practice does not reveal at all the truth about how a soldier really dies in battle. The lack of honor in death during the war is demonstrated by Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” as well as revealed by the imagery and irony in Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est” and the imagery in Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The imagery of death in “Dulce Et Decorum Est” is a powerful tool that Wilfred Owen uses to convince the readers of his point – that dying in war is brutal and such death is actually futile. As a soldier himself by profession, Owen describes this imagery using a strong first person point-of-view: “[The dying soldier] plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning,” and “[from my gas mask, I] watch the white eyes writhing in his face,” and “[I could hear] the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” From these graphic and horrific descriptions of a soldier slowly dying in front of his comrade, Owen is trying to show the reader that, as a soldier himself, he has witnessed how a fellow dies in cold blood – but the reader hasn’t. Owen’s own eyewitness account obviously lends credibility to the truth of the poem and to the truth of its theme – that death in war is not only brutal but also void of honor. No matter what people say about the honor that is given to those who have died in war, no sixteen-gun salute can ever make up for the gore and pain that a dying man experiences as he holds on to life before he slowly slips away. In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” the brutal and horrible death of Ted Lavender – “with his mouth open,” “teeth…broken,” and “cheekbone…gone” – makes everyone realize that the same thing is going to happen to all of them soldiers regardless of everything that they carry and regardless of the courage that they have. At the same time, the VC corpse, who was so young and whose thumb was taken by Mitchell Sanders and given to Norman Bowker, somehow reminded the soldiers of the fact that there is indeed no moral in death. Death has no value and it ends where it is – and death in war is just as useless. Aside from the imagery, in “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” Owen’s also uses irony to illustrate the dishonor of death in the battlefield. The unusually sharp and unexpected irony” in “Dulce Et Decorum Est” has the purpose of showing the reader “a random, futile and meaningless death, whose memory offers neither comfort or heroic assurance.” In fact, in the poem, Owen portrays an image of soldiers who are rather least heroic and most ironic image of soldiers in the poem. The soldiers in Owen’s poem are described as tired and dirty, and they falter as soon as they are attacked by gas shells. In the poem, these soldiers are regarded as “old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags” who “marched asleep…lost their boots/ But limped on blood-shod. All went lame; all blind.” The reader is then forced to ask himself: Where is then the honor in this? No, there is no honor – and the irony of all ironies is that “Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori,” which literally translates to “It is sweet and right to die for your country” – is actually an “old Lie.” This instance of irony is meant to sarcastically tell the pro-war activists one thing: That when one joins the war and dies in battle, one thing is sure – he dies a bloody death and that is all there is to it. There is no honor in it, no pride and no glory at all – just death, which is no different from the death of old beggars and coughing hags who never did anything honorable in their lives. In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” the very things that the soldiers carried physically in their bodies and emotionally in their hearts were actually basically only excess baggage- utterly useless just as the whole war is useless. The “pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal” that the soldiers use to pretend about the goodness of war is actually nothing but “emotional baggage of men who might die.” In short, these things are not real and are merely used to ironically cover up for the other less honorable things that they carry: “shameful memories,” “cowardice,” “the instinct to run or freeze,” “infections” like “lice and ringworm and leeches,” and “diseases [like] malaria and dysentery.” These are the shameful things that the soldiers actually carry too in their hearts aside from the fake loftiness and sense of nobleness that they hypocritically show everyone. In the same way, Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” the futility of death in war and the absence of honor in it. Through the first lines of the poem, fear is evident in the narrator, who is most likely a young man called in to render military service during the war. He is somehow forced to leave the comfort of his home and family as he is called to become a soldier: “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State.” After that, he becomes a soldier in the Air Force for he says he is “six miles from earth” and he is wearing a “wet fur” which members of the Air Force usually wear in combat. However, no matter what has happened, the young soldier dies and he concludes his narration after saying, “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” This simply means that death is all there is to war, and when a soldier dies, he is simply “washed out with a hose” and the battle goes on. The soldier is not human or at least is not treated as one in any war, and surely there is no honor in this. It is the same thing in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” for there is no mention of honor after the death of Ted Lavender and with the teenaged VC corpse, his thumb was even cut off by one soldier and given to another as a souvenir. Truly, there is no honor when one dies in war. Through Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” and Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” one can realize that there is no honor in dying in battle no matter how much honor is given to soldiers and their families afterwards. Through the story and the poems, death in war is portrayed as something brutal and gory, and that people who die from it are merely “washed out” like dirt or dead animals. Moreover, the pride and honor that soldiers show are merely a façade to cover up for the fear and instinct to run and hide. Truly, all wars end in death and no death ends in honor. Works Cited Jarrell, Randall. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” Print. O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” Print. Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” Print. Read More