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Memoirs of The Four Wars Abstract: The below paper attempts to analyze the four war memoirs: A Rumor of War, Goodbye, Darkness, The Road to Richmond and Ordinary Courage: The Life of Joseph Plumb Martin. The four books narrate about 4 different wars in the US history, yet all 4 authors portrait war as something very evil, inhumane and mostly pointless. Outline: Introduction Body A Rumor of War Goodbye, Darkness The Road to Richmond Ordinary Courage: The Life of Joseph Plumb Martin Conclusion SEMPER FIDELIS ALWAYS FAITHFUL (Latin) History can be learnt from history books, classes, film chronicles, etc. The best way to learn history, however, is to listen to the people who saw it happening, participated in it or even influenced its course. This can be done through reading first-person memoirs. The memoirs might not always be objective as to the numbers, events, or conditions.
Their value is more in the real human view on the event, emotions, thoughts and feedbacks that no dry history chronicle can give. Even though A Rumor of War, Goodbye, Darkness, The Road to Richmond and Ordinary Courage: The Life of Joseph Plumb Martin are memoirs about different wars, they all resemble each other, as well as the current war in Iraq that the US is engaged in. The below research will argue that it is not important what armor the war used, which time and place it took place at, and what the motives of it have been. The authors of the four memoirs proved by their personal experiences that the war is always about death, destruction and breaking peoples destinies. Philip Caputo is the author, the narrator and the main character of A Rumor of War. Coming from a small mid-western suburban town of Westchester, Illinois, Caputo enlists in the US Marine Corps hoping that will change his life.
Before he goes to Vietnam, he is sure the war will be over within a short period of time. He fantasizes about his return home being a hero for his fellow countrymen, taking part in patriotic parades, where everybody will ask for heroic poems. Reality of the war, however, turns out to be completely different. He finds himself in the middle of jungle with Viet Cong. This new reality refuses to follow and rules from before the war life. Throughout the novel, Caputo struggles to find out what he really is.
The readers feels as if Philip needs to feel that danger of death that he never felt living in a safe country, in a safe neighborhood. The author also shows great deals of patriotism by stating numerous times that Americans need to fight to save their country and Vietnam from communism, that he personally is at war because it is his duty as an American citizen. The young boy in the novel is in constant search of his own identity, trying to prove to the world that he is a real man, a real Marine. Yet during hand-to-hand combat the young man finds that neither of these two really answers who he is.
Philip is determined to be brave and honorable even though all of this ethical and moral beliefs crash around him. Through rising deaths numbers, illnesses, endless days of waiting, frustration Caputo discovers that even though all men that serve with him came from different backgrounds, there is a mutual side they all have. Those young boys know that it if they do not kill the enemy, the enemy will kill them. They are all cruel, angry, sad, and mad now, even if they have not been like that before the war. As the novel progresses, Caputo grows beyond his previous romantic understandings of war, seeing what it really is about. The author understands how pointless fighting really is, that all those lives have been wasted for nothing because no idea is worth so many human lives.
All those thoughts drive Caputo to temporary insanity: he orders the capture of two VC, hoping they will be executed. He cannot resist this pressure he is under - to kill in return for the killing. The military courts tried Philip for five months for this infraction of what war is about. Caputo has come to see what his mistake was.
It turned out that it was not in ordering the capture of the VC, it was not in thinking it was okay to kill them. It was not in being filled with anger or rage from a war. Rather, Caputo realizes his mistake was in believing that American men should go to war for a country that did not understand what that war really meant. As result of this understanding, Caputo is able to return to Vietnam ten years later. He comes back and takes one final look at the destruction of Vietnam. Countless numbers have died or wounded people, countless civilians who lost their homes.
The fighting continues, but nothing has changed and no hope it would. This final deep look at Vietnam gives Caputo a sad understanding that he and thousands of Americans and Vietnamese simply played a part in a chess game of conflicting governments and regimes. Goodbye Darkness by William Manchester portrays the Americans fighting the WWII in the Pacific region. The title of the book was inspired by Joseph Conrad's famous short story, The Heart of Darkness. Manchester, describing the island jungles says: Conrad, writing of Africa, put it well. It is the heart of darkness, the lividity at the core of the most magnetic light.
There is a then and now format in Goodbye, Darkens, which enforces the feeling that this is a memoir of one man and that events described in this memoir is a very traumatic episode in his life and the life of USA. William Manchester was a Marine Corps Sergeant in an unorthodox front-line Intelligence unit during WW II, he was also a prominent journalist and story-teller. His baptism of fire was in Okinawa where he was wounded twice during two months of combat. Most of the men in his squad were killed. Manchester proves that US Marines in World War II were among the finest combat soldiers that ever existed. Manchester takes readers back in time, giving them a wonderful image of his early years and personality, then shares what it was like being a new Marine Corps recruit engaged in island-hopping campaigns in the exotic South Pacific, terminating in one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of WWII Okinawa.
He describes the Marine fight in muddy foxholes, 5 yards from Japanese foxholes, and attacks and counterattacks, day after day, that often involved reciprocal taking and then losing, and taking again, the same piece of bloody ground, often in hand to hand combat. Manchester tells the readers that the Marines were not fighting for their country, or flag, or even their families they were fighting for themselves and for each other. No infantryman fought on all, or even many, of the Pacific islands. Deployment of troops, casualty figures, and tropical diseases laid down impossible odds against that describes very well the living and death in the jungles and battlefields of the Pacific. There is no definite timeline in the book, dates and battles move around as the author travels island to island recalling or retelling events that happened. There is lot of death - countless stories of friends and other Marines who met their end.
One might think he / she knows what the war is like, but if they have not been to the war, they are undoubtedly wrong. Manchester gives his readers the gritty and awful scope of a battlefield. For example: 250 Men charge up a hill and two come back. Manchester has the skill and the insight to express events and emotions far beyond that of the ordinary soldier describing his experiences. In the final pages of the book, Manchester gives his insight about the reasons the Marines were always doing more than humans are capable of. First, they had been raised by the hardships of the depression.
Secondly, in WWII the whole country was in the war together - most of the Marines in his squad were Ivy League college graduates, Presidents sons were also in uniform, and the sons of important politicians were being killed together with the sons of farmers. Thirdly, it was nationalism, the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous. Some thirty-five years after the end of the war, Manchester embarked on a journey to retrace the Pacific War and, in a sense, find something he lost there as a Marine who witnessed some of the war's fiercest fighting and shed the darkness that has remained after all those years. He visited all the islands, from New Guinea and Guadalcanal, north to Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, onto Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
In the process, he not only describes his travels but also chronicles his own wartime experiences and gives a bit of the history with generous attention given to MacArthur. Manchester also concludes that the war was extremely ugly and inhumane. The Road to Richmond by Arbner R. Small is not one of those boring, slow-reading books about Civil War.
In fact, the book really fascinates at times and keeps readers interest till the very end. The book has been written nearly a generation after the war ended. It is based on the notes of Arbner R. Small together with an official history of the...
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