There are more battles in war than just the ones fought against the enemy. The battles however cannot be seen unless you look at an individual level, the battles fought by each soldier. War is almost an other worldly-event, and to throw regular people into that can cause an astronomical amount of stress, both physically and mentally to that person. This can be seen in my visual, which is a soldier being photographed during a time of stress. The main point of this image is that we do not know what type of battle is causing his anxiety. It could be the battle that soldiers wage with the environment that they are placed in. The environments that soldiers have fought in throughout history have been unforgiving. For example, the jungle of Vietnam. During the Vietnam war, the soldiers had to fight off all kinds of threats such as bugs/animals, weather such as monsoons which caused non-stop torrential downpours for long periods of time, and all of the heavy supplies that they had to carry with them through that hazardous jungle. In Tim O’brien’s The Things They Carried, O’brien gives an example of how harsh the environment was when his platoon had to camp out on the banks of a polluted river “Lieutenant Cross wished the rain would let up. Even for an hour it would make things easier. But then he shrugged. The rain was the war and you had to fight in it”(156). It shows how even the soldiers knew of the different battles that they faced there. By saying “the rain was the war” it shows how the rain was as much part of the fighting as the guns and the bombs. However, there was another battle that was also being fought, the emotional battle. In the picture, there is what looks like a letter in below the soldier. An emotional battle is another one that the soldiers also fought in. Being homesick, such as what the soldier in the picture could have been feeling, plagued many soldiers. There were many causes of emotion during war, the main two are the shock factor of war and being homesick. The shock factor occurs when the horrors of war start to break down their emotional strength. For example, in The Things They Carried, Rat Kiley starts to experience nightmares due to the amount of blood and gore that he has seen as a war medic. It rattles him so much that he ends up shooting himself in the foot in order to escape the war. The fear that war strikes into the heart of soldiers puts on the same amount, if not more stress than the bullets constantly flying past them. Almost anyone can be trained to shoot a gun or throw a grenade. But very few people are capable of fighting the internal battles that these soldiers face every time that they go fight."C. Rank: PFC Soldier Description of Service: Aw... by Ana Castro." C. Rank: PFC Soldier Description of Service: Aw... Web. 22 Mar. 2016.
Initially I was really drawn to this post because the image is different. Instead of fighting and gore it shows a soldier holding his head. He appears to be in pain but a different sort of pain. The internal conflicts that you talk about are very real and yet somehow recognized enough. People always consider the soldiers who have lost limbs and have scars but this post opened my eyes to the soldiers that have been altered mentally. These soldiers are hurt too. They are battling another battle, from the inside.
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