The Truth of War

Link coming soon

Flash movie 

Project Reflection

                This project revolved around the truth of war of a soldier and how war affects a soldier once he leaves the military. Our class read a book called All Quiet on the Western Front; this book was about the life a soldier in combat and went into extreme detail with all of the horrors of war. In our project and essay we had to represent what we thought about the truth of war for a soldier, and how these things affect his everyday life.  We learned about how war will change the truth of war of a soldier for a little while before we started this project

                During my project I perseverance in my project, I had to persevere learning adobe flash CS4 in order to complete my project. Adobe flash was a very hard program to operate and I struggled a lot with finishing my project on time. There were several times during this project where I wanted to give up and start working on a new project. This is when I became really far behind in my project. I kind of fell into a downward spiral. When I realized that that wasn’t helping me I decided to sit down and finished my project and eventually that happened and when it did I was very proud of how it turned out in the end

                One of the first things that I revised in my essay was to integrate more quotes into each individual paragraph the reason I did this was to make my essay have more evidence. This was surprisingly difficult for me because I struggle with all forms of evidence and especially when trying to incorporate it into an essay these revisions make my essay stronger by of course providing more evidence for my theses statement on the initial subject. The reason I need this evidence is to show where I am coming from, and why I chose to wright about what I wrote about.

                If I had another weak to work on this project I would first start writing more drafts on my essay. When I first wrote my essay I only wrote one draft and I kind of think that that isn’t smart. Writing multiple drafts gives you more room to make revisions and even find more places to write these revisions. This is important because revisions almost always make your essay better. The second thing that I would do If I had another week to work on this would to add more scenes to my flash movie and maybe to spend more time on YouTube trying to figure out more things that I could add to my movie. I feel like in the end of this project that my movie was too short overall but it still got out what I was planning to say.

The truth of war for a soldier

            The difference in the opinion of war between a soldier and a civilian can be surprising. This is because a soldier experiences all the physical parts of war were as a civilian can only watch from the sidelines. A civilian gets all of his/her information about the war from the media or propaganda. This is significant is because the media is not always correct and even if it is it can be interpreted differently between different people, therefor causing incorrect assumptions about what is really happening. The benefit of being a civilian over being a soldier in the war is that a civilian gets to see the overall picture of the war, they get to see build their opinions of war off the ability to have a neutral stance in the beginning, they are not told what to believe or what to fight for but only to follow their country. A soldier needs to know what’s he is fighting for or he will have no incentive to continue on. This limits a soldiers freedom to make his/her own opinions.

            No matter what is said, a soldier witnesses more about the war than someone who is not there in person. A soldier has to personally see all the horrors of war.

All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque chapter 7 page 239

 When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual." when a person dies in a civilized aria such as a city for all the people treat it as something that doesn't happen every day. They treat the death of that person much more severe. But in war a soldier witnesses death all the time, they are surrounded with death. They may even be the cause of the death. When a soldier is in war he has to desensitize himself to prevent him from going crazy

            All a civilian has to base his/her opinion of war off of the media and the words of other people. And the media can skate around some important things, things that may or may not be large enough to change someone’s idea of war. But these things are usually inhuman or bad.

All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque chapter 7 page 239

            The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy. This quote states that people with the wealth to keep up with the media are able to put war aside in their lives. Because they don't know about all the bad things in war

            Someone outside of the war can never really understand what a soldier has to go through and what a soldiers true thoughts about war are.

 All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque chapter 10 page 263

"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another." A soldier is going to witness things that brings him to the same spot at Paul was in. Thinking back on all the slaughter that's taken place during the time he was there, And why the conflict was there in the first place. It is much more unlikely that a civilian will go through the same thought process. Because they were not there risking their lives for someone else’s conflict and told that they were doing it for the country

            Most things witnessed in war can be unforgettable; they can be haunting or scary for the rest of the soldier’s life. This makes a huge difference between veterans and people that never served in the war because they didn’t have the same things happen to them

Slaughterhouse five By Kurt Vonnegut chapter 3 page 75

‘Billy was under doctor’s orders to take a nap every day. The doctor hoped that this would relieve a complaint that Billy had: Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist.’’ This quote suggests that the war has done something to Billy that the war has changed him in a negative way. Billy was had to experience horrible things when he was n the war and he didn’t end up coming out of the war unaffected

            In conclusion people in the war have completely different beliefs about war than someone outside of war. Soldiers can never be completely understood by civilians because war is an entirely different situation for anyone outside of the war. The things that a soldier has to go through cannot be 100% correctly portrayed because everyone understands things differently. Different soldiers witness and are told different things therefor allowing them to have different conclusions. A civilian rarely ever knows all the facts about the war because the media and surrounding propaganda only offers certain pieces of the war to the public