Wars are Different, Wars are All Alike

I think I mentioned how much I disliked the book club's selection of The Things They Carried.  I vowed to read a "good" war story and went back to last year's bucket list to All Quiet on the Western Front.  I really to want to write this blog as a good old school compare and contrast essay, because both seem so entrenched in the specific warfare prevalent in its time and with perceptions of the enemy determined by how far the fighters were from neighboring states.

The introduction to the version I had succinctly summarized the author's intent to concentrate solely on helpless human beings, buffeted by chance, exploited by martinets, unable to exercise any intelligent control over their destinies.  To me, the story shows a disillusionment of an entire age of men, men who were about to entire the mainstream of life but who became completely exiled from their community, heritage and values by the front.  Unlike Tim O'Brien and his displacement in a country he doesn't understand, Paul is a soldier with his fellow classmen, often with former teachers as their military superiors:  ..." For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future.  We often made fun of them ... but in our hearts we trusted them.  The idea of authority, which they represented was associated in our minds with a greater insight and manlier vision.  But the first death we saw shattered this belief ... They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness.  The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces."

What I find more readable than O'Brien's book is Remarque's identification with all his fellow soldiers; O'Brien, despite his descriptions of his comrades high jinx or injuries, seems to write more as a cathartic exercise in PTSD.  Remarque wants his audience to know what the war did to a generation: ..."I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality case over an abyss of sorrow.  I see how people are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.  I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring.  And all the men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world, see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me ... What will happen afterwards?  And what shall come out of us?"

Why has the military complex now decided to nation-build after a conflict but to do nothing to repair the souls and spirits of its disillusioned, depressed soldiers?  Today, our newest employee returned to work after two or three days off to go home to a friend's funeral.  When I welcomed her back today, she told me it was a boy who served who committed suicide.  Will drones be better or worse?