July 03, 2011, 4:33pm / 51
Once Upon a Time in War is a photographic retrospect of the Great War, World War II, the Cold War, and the War on Terror ++about
Owner: Lux, UCF student of history
Questions? war@swallowthesky
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Owner: Lux, UCF student of history
Questions? war@swallowthesky
donate to keep us running
July 03, 2011, 2:42pm / 31
Some carried themselves with a sort of a wistful resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it.
They found jokes to tell.
They used vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they’d say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zapping. It wasn’t cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs. They talked grunt lingo.
— The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
July 03, 2011, 12:54pm / 37
They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same.
They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous.
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
July 03, 2011, 2:46am / 77
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