“War is a 5-second moment to a soldier’s eyes, but an everlasting experience to his mind.”

The traumatizing experiences that soldiers in the war go through will never be forgotten. Even the small, seemingly insignificant moments will be burnt forever in their memory. Their awareness is heightened to where they find appreciation in the simplicity of daily life. Though they feel the urge to always share their stories, no one can truly understand the challenges they faced. These life or death moments can happen in just the blink of an eye, but it’s impact is infinite; it’s less of remembering, and more of reliving. This visual brings the viewer in the perspective of the soldier. The artwork lets one live in the eyes of what a soldier sees when they visit a location where war happened. This shows a present day scene of the Nagasaki Ground Zero Memorial of World War II where the atomic bomb was dropped. Despite the sunny weather, there’ll always be this dark haze of sadness looming over the city because of those who were harmed during the devastating attack. The hands that hold the photograph are American, showing that both sides have vivid memories of the event. The drawing has rough sketches to represent that these moments are never traced out perfectly even if they follow the same outline. The perspective will always be different, yet the emotions will nonetheless be the same. The area itself acts as a reminder, which is why the man’s photograph more vivid in comparison to the dull background. In the book Redeployment, Sergeant Price returns home to his wife and sick dog. Every time he would see his dog, he would recall the times where he had shot other dogs purposefully. Price always connects this memory with Operation Scooby, which began as an instinct but became a routine. He begins and ends this chapter with the memory he had with his dogs and the ones he encounters during the war. This may seem irrelevant, but grows to be a very important point in the story. In the The Things They Carried, O’Brien visits Vietnam with his daughter and goes back to the death site of Kiowa, the “shit field.” Though the land had become more dry and the Vietnamese farmer, as well as his daughter, looked at him with confusion, he knew he was there to fulfill  a purpose. This place meant more to him than a shit field because in his eyes, this is where his fellow soldier and friend died. Lastly, O’Brien proves this theme when he mentions, “The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.”