Who's The Real Victim?

Without a doubt, in times of war, everybody is a victim. We hear about injured civilians, genocides, torture, etc.  And we think about the soldiers as the bad guy. But in reality, they are as much a victim of war as any other civilian.  

“We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.”Often the army is composed by teens who know not what they’re doing, and whose life after the war turns out as disappointing and sad as one never expected. Yet we don’t hear a lot about them. “Heroic” acts in the war often obscure the rest of the veterans’ lives. Governments don’t want us to know what happened to the soldiers after the war. They want to promote service, and there’s no way anyone would enlist in an army knowing the side effects war has upon you.

“Most of the privates on Billy’s car were very young-at the end of childhood.”

As ironic as it may sound, soldiers in war are not fighting the enemy, they’re fighting themselves. A student from Oklahoma fights a student from Frankfurt. A chef from New Orleans shoots a chef from Berlin. American plumbers fight Russian plumbers. So it goes.

The uniform these men wear hides the identity of an individual. Want it or not, if the boy survives, life will go on, and he will have to go back to society, unpleasantly realizing everything’s the same, except for him. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is one of the common post-war syndromes, but there are thousands of traumas that hunt the private’s life forever.

  War makes us forget about the individual. Vonnegut recognizes the humanity of the privates “Human beings in there were excreting…When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.” Chapter three reminded me of the Buddhist monk that spoke to us earlier this month. His name is Claude Anshin Thomas, and as a veteran, he had to face all the demons war left on him.  

Kids go to war for various reasons: they want to stand up for their country; they are told it’s the best thing to do, they have heroic fantasies, or they simply think it’s the only way. In Billy’s case, he was “needed in the headquarters company of an infantry regiment fighting in Luxembourg.”

In Claude Anshin’s case, he thought it was the only way to go. He thought no further, “I volunteered to go to Vietnam because I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn’t understand the nature of war or violence” (Pg. 5, At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace, Claude Anshin Thomas, 2004)

But soon enough they realize it’s not the adventure everyone portrayed it was. War is useless, war is anarchy. People need to realize that. Vonnegut says, “There were about twenty other Americans in there, sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, staring into the flames-thinking whatever there was to think, which was zero” War is a simple as that, zero.

Billy’s life after the war is sad as well. Even though he achieved some wealth (which is not the case for most veterans) he is an alcoholic, he is “unenthusiastic about living”, and has to live with a burden on a past, a present, and a future that he cannot change.

The older Billy has a hard time sleeping and spontaneously starts to cry. In one of those sporadic crying attacks, Billy becomes unstuck in time, he blinks and is back in the war still crying. “It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes.” War may end, people may move on with their lives, but anywhere these soldiers go, they will feel the harsh winter wind blow in their faces. 

The Gunner's Dream-Pink Floyd