The first reading I chose was John Garcia. He experienced the war at the age of sixteen- year- old Hawaiian. He worked as a pipe fitter apprentice at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. In the beginning of the reading Garcia talks about his experience with Pearl Harbor when the war started with the Japanese. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and since Garcia worked for them he was to report to work immediately. He refused to obey orders fearing his life was on the line. But luckily the charges were dropped due to being 16 and not a service personnel. During that time, he worked on bringing out sailors’ bodies out of the water and fixing the ships. After Pearl harbor his job was to rescue people from the tragic bombing that occurred. That day he spent pulling people out of the water. He rescued dead and alive sailors. Among the many war casuals, he expected some shell casings that blew up the neighborhood he lived in which included his girlfriend’s house. His girlfriends house was bombed by an American shell which killed her. Garcia then wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, to get the okay to join combat. After writing the letter to the President a second time he did not follow the chain of commands and was then ordered to wash dishes for 30 days. In combat he experienced lots of deaths and these deaths affected his conscious. Certain deaths affected him, and he began to drink lots whiskey to be able to shoot the Japanese to numb his feelings. Garcia experienced …show more content…
Some experiences were so strong and lasted a life time. For instance, he remembers shooting the innocent civilian woman with her baby. The changes left him negative permanent memories that he will always remember. The war left Garcia with a negative impact on his entire life due to the violence and death he experienced during the war. He also experienced racism against the Jewish
This shows that he had experience with the United States military services and knew how to handle the Pearl Harbor situation. Roosevelt?s speech is short, but it still utilizes pathos, ethos, and logos and has just enough detail to let the world know what was going on. The author of this essay is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was the president of the United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. The purpose of this speech was to inform the entire United States about what had happened the day before Pearl Harbor.
War changes a person in ways that can never be imagined. Living in a war as well as fighting in one is not an experience witnessed in everyday life. Seeing people die every time and everywhere you go can be seen as an unpleasant experience for any individual such as Henry. The experiences that Henry had embraced during the Vietnam War have caused him to become an enraged and paranoid being after the war. It has shaped him to become this individual of anxiety and with no emotions. The narrator says:
The war had a lot of emotional toll on people it destroyed their personal identity, their moral/humanity, the passion to live was lost and the PDS they will suffer post war, resulting in the soldiers to understand what war is really about and what is covered up. There are scenes that support the thesis about the war like "As for the rest, they are now just names without faces or faces without names." Chapter 2, p. 27 which show how the soldiers have emotional detached themselves from life. Also, when the novel says “I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead.” Which to me again shows how the soldiers are change throughout the war losing the moral and humanity. Lastly what he says “ I’m not scared of death anymore and don 't care whether I live of die” is the point where I notice Phillips change in
Gailey, Harry. The War in the Pacific: From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay. Novato: Presidio, 1995.
Tim O’Brien shows that the effects of the Vietnam War can differ depending on the person. For Rat, those effects meant loosing his innocence and his exposure to death sent him into a sad mental state. For Azar, it can be concluded that the effects of the war and his exposure to death made him realize that not everything was a joke and that it is not always best to be cruel and bitter. These soldiers experienced turning points, ultimately shaping them into different men with different personalities.
John Garcia’s sense of the absurdity of the war is particularly keen. It is first evident to him in a request to board a battleship with fires near the ammunition. He refuses, but escapes punishment because of his role in rescuing people from the water. This same value for human life and knowledge of the futility with which it was often lost in the war pervades his story. He recounts a man being killed by friendly fire after lighting a cigarette, the death of his girlfriend from American artillery shells fired at planes, and the Japanese woman and child he shot in the pacific. John is eager to fight in the war at first, taking a cut in wages and even petitioning the president to be allowed to serve. This patriotism is replaced by a sense of guilt and fear once he must actually kill people. He thinks he committed murder when he shot the Japanese woman and child, and is haunted by the grief of the families of the soldiers he kills. He says he drank because it was the only way he could overcome the guilt and kill someone. Once the war was over he no longer needed alcohol and stopped drinking, but a permanent change in his view of himself and warfare is evident. He is still continually troubled in his dreams by the woman and child he shot, and while he was initially eager to join the war, he refused to use violence as a policeman afterwards and thinks that if countries are going to war they ought to send the politicians to fight.
I picked four instances, which truly represented how the mind changes. When Dave Jensen broke Lee’s nose, he became absolutely paranoid about every aspect of his life. The young lady who began going on ambush's with the green berets also shows how people can be reconditioned by war. Bobby Jorgensen cowardly hesitated and nearly cost Tim his life, but it was later learned that he had matured through experience.... ...
The men stationed in the Pacific Theatre of World War II faced many challenges and hardships. The fighting that occurred with the Japanese far surpassed the level of brutality in the European theatre. Some American military units faced relentless fighting throughout the entire war, while other units waited for the entire war for orders to deploy into combat, and never actually saw any action. Only a few stories surrounding both ends of the spectrum of men in the Pacific Theatre exist, and even a fewer number do the men and women that served during that time justice. One of these authors who captured the nature of life during World War II in the Pacific Theatre, James Michener, did so in the novel Tales of the South Pacific. Michener not only offers an in-depth perspective of life during the time, but also brings up key themes of issues that existed during that period. He introduced a new outlook on the South Pacific during World War II, showing that a variety of people scattered around the Pacific joined for the common goal of a successful military operation. The primary purpose for this collection of tales from around the South Pacific focused on telling the tale of everyone who spent the war there. Michener used varying points of view within the plot line to strengthen this point. Within the main focus he brings up three themes: the first being of camaraderie and fellowship, the second the issues of power struggle, and finally racism in World War II. Michener utilizes diction to help characterize individuals to help literary convey these three themes. James Albert Michener brings up the issues of racism and power struggle in the South Pacific, while portraying the men that lived there during that period and the fellowship they s...
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, editors and contributors spoke their minds regarding the war effort. When the first issue was published, after war was declared, it was clear that individuals’ minds were in a state of unrest. From the first notice of the attack while listening to the game or by using literature to express the feelings of their troubled mind, it is not difficult to see how “The Talk of The Town” shows the emotional side of the individuals who contributed during this time (The Talk of..). This is in turn shows the allure of “The Talk of The Town.” Not only does it inform the reader of what is going on in the world, it does so by truly connecting with the audience on an emotional level.
The ones that are primary are mostly newspaper articles and memoirs. I researched one of the book’s primary sources, Dorinda Makanaonalani’s Pearl Harbor: A Child’s View of Pearl Harbor from Attack to Peace. I found her website, which talks about how her book is her memoir of what happened that day in Pearl Harbor, the attack she witnessed when she was a young child. Every person has their own unique experience of the war effort. For children their experiences made them feel pride and grief. Everyone made attempts to contribute to the war effort, by buying war bonds and stamps, and recycling. For example, Dorinda Makanaonalani’s family planted a victory garden for fresh food and even raised rabbits for meat, which made her more determined to work in the
Events that occur in the world around us shape our personalities. The experiences that a person lives through, both good and bad, have a direct relationship to that person’s growth as an individual. It could be argued that a person is the sum of their experiences, or more accurately the sum of their memories of those experiences. The memory of an experience does not always reflect the literal truth of what occurred, rather it will reflect how the experience affected the person who remembers it. Two different people who have the same experience can remember it in two very different ways. The differences in their memories will show how the experience affected them differently. An experience as large and life-changing as living through a war will affect a large number of people, who will each remember it and be changed by it in their own way. Literature written about such events will reflect the affected individuals and societies. Some of the effects of World War II on the average German person can be seen through an analysis of the different memories and experiences of the war represented in a selection of post World War II German literature including Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and Heinrich Böll’s And Where Were You, Adam?.
Schrijvers, Peter. Bloody Pacific: American Soldiers at War with Japan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston is a riveting about a women who endured three years of social hardships in camp Manzanar. Jeanne Wakatsuki was born on September 26, 1934, in Inglewood, California, to George Ko Wakatsuki and Riku Sugai Wakatsuki. She spent her early childhood in Ocean Park, California, where her father was a fisherman. On December 7, 1941 Jeanne and her family say good bye to her Papa and her brothers as they take off on their sardine boat. The boat promptly returned and a “Fellow from the cannery came running down to the wharf shouting that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor” (Wakatsuki, 6). That very night Papa went home and burned anything that could trace them back to their Japanese origins paper, documents, and even the flag that he had brought back with him from Hiroshima. Even though Papa tried hard to hide his connections with his Japanese heritage the FBI still arrested him but he didn’t struggle as they took him away he was a man of “tremendous dignity” (Wakatsuki, 8) and instead he led them.
Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept - The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. 1991 (Penguin Books, New York, NY 1981, 1982, 1991),725-738.
War changes everyone involved in one way or another. For some it physical changes them because they get physical deformed, but for most people, war changes their mental state. War changes people’s mental state because of the duties that they have to perform and the experiences that they have to see. Tim O’Brien shows how the characters mental states changed throughout the book, because of the war.