Researching War

So, I just wanted to share an update of what my classes ending up doing with their study of The Things They Carried.  First off, I want to share that one of the reasons I am so passionate about this unit is that my best friend is a veteran of the Iraq war, and he is being deployed to Afghanistan this coming spring.  He has shared some of his experiences with me, and while before hearing about this, I knew war was "bad," I never before really thought about how bad.  There's a passage from The Things They Carried where Tim O'Brien writes about his feelings about war before he went which I can completely relate to:  "[My anti-war thoughts] were almost entirely an intellectual activity.  I brought some energy to it, of course, but it was the energy that accompanies almost any abstract endeavor; I felt no personal danger; I felt no sense of an impending crisis in my life.  Stupidly, with a kind of smug removal that I can't begin to fathom, I assumed that the problems of killing and dying did not fall within my special province."  While reading and preparing for class, this quotation really resonated with me.  Most of my students are "anti-war" -- I mean, who's pro-war?  But it's a distant kind of anti-war... there's nothing personal, nothing invested about it.  So I was wondering what I could do to change that.  The best thing I came up with was education.  So, that's where their writing assignment came from.

My students were tasked with basically proving that the problems Tim O'Brien and his fictional comrades faced in the Vietnam War are not too different from the issues faced by current soldiers.  Together, we brainstormed things O'Brien is concerned with in his book -- people's motivations for joining a war, psychological impact of committing murder, training people to be killers, desensitization to violence, the difficult transition back into home life, finding a job and purpose upon returning to civilian life, the prevalence of suicide in veterans, amongst other things.  I told students that the point of the paper was to learn about the reality of war -- if we are going to send young men and women to such a thing, we have an obligation to know what it is we are sending them to.  I feel so passionately about this... if people were more aware of the reality of war, I believe they would be less willing to support it.  I know there's some truth to that, since talking with my friend Mario and hearing what he saw (and seeing it, too) truly changed my life.  No one should have to go through what he did, and I'm trying to do my small part to encourage that change in the world.

As an extension, I think I'm going to ask the kids to write some sort of piece researching what they can DO about the issue they chose to write about.  They can research organizations who are helping ameliorate the issue, then just write a reflection about what they've learned.  Yep, I think that's going to be the goal.

Here is a link to the assignment in case anyone wants to check it out.  Thank you again for your continued support! :)

Link to Researching War Assignment