War is... making a difference one second and being gone the next.

"Having Breakfast on the day of battle

Will it be his last?

Aiming one’s gun into a vacant building

Will it be his last?

Walking down the isolated street

Will it be his last?

Picking up a dying friend

Will it be his last?

Saying goodnight to your kids

Will it be his last?

Here one second, gone the next" -Jeremy Allen

Dating all the way back to when the Europeans first came to America, young teenage boys have had to sacrifice their lives to fight for our country. Everyone has their own role in combat. There are the leaders, the followers, and those who choose to be independent. No matter what your role is, once you can not fight anymore you are replaced by another soldier. Throughout the war thousands of fallen soldiers are replaced by soldiers that are straight out of training. Fellow soldiers and members of your platoon will always remember the people who they lost, but war is not about individuals. In the book The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes, “There was a noise, I suppose, which must have been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Lemon step from the shade into bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp grey eyes, lean and narrow waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms”. Here, O’Brien shows that war is the unexpected, one misstep can change the outcome of everything. What Curt Lemon once was is nothing but his mutilated body scattered across the green Vietnam mountains. As significant as O’Brien makes Lemon’s death, he is just one fallen soldier out of the 1,450,000 that died in battle trying to make a difference.