Ronald Reagan's War What Is It Good For?

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War is defined by the emotions and lack thereof. The soldier’s lives are not put on hold so a war can take place. Instead the government willingly puts their own peoples’ lives in danger and fosters fear in their society for the possibility of a gain in material goods such as money and land. Why does the government get to decide the worth of peoples’ lives and the well-being of their society? These ideas are shown through Tim O’Brien’s In Cold Blood, Ernie Pyle’s “The Death of Captain Waskow,” Ian Morris’ “War What Is It Good For? These Four Things Actually,” Ronald Reagan’s “Remarks at a Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, D-Day,” Rick Loomis’ “Imagine Dying,” and Winston Churchill’s speech, “Blood, Toil, …show more content…
In Rat Kiley’s unit, Mark Fossie brought his girlfriend, “this cute blond- just a kid, just barely out of high school” to Vietnam but while Mary Anne still wore “her culottes, [and] her pink sweater” she also wore “a necklace of human tongues” (O’Brien 110). War takes the innocence and naivety away from the people involve. She lost her personality to the war and was able to find peace in the violence. Mary Anne became part of the war and what they considered to be the living Vietnam. The war lead her to uncover a part of her personality that would have gone unknown. The soldiers carry many material goods but the lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried “the responsibility for the lives of his men” (O’Brien 5). The things the soldiers carry show their connections to their home whether it is their family, significant other, or their dream. The people at home move on without them while the soldiers believe that they while come home to their life on pause. They need to use these items to ground their selves. It shows them what is real in war because it becomes easy to distance yourself from the real world. Their world is defined with long, boring stretches of time and sudden bursts of action and violence. They do not experience relationships and the emotions that they have grown up with. It is unfair to put the well-being of an entire unit of one man’s shoulders. Their experiences in war have revealed that war is risky and anyone, no matter how moral or immoral, could die at any time. Their experiences have also demonstrated that each soldier will blame themselves for the death of their comrade, whether or not it is actually their fault. The declarations of war have a very similar composition, however, Churchill differentiates his in that he acknowledges that they have “before [them] many, many long months of struggle and suffering” (1). He unites the people of the nation with the fear of war. Instead of using