In “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” Yeats captures the throbbing, incessant, truth that the heart of war is young scared men and women killing other young scared men and women who they do not know, dislike or hate over disputes from which they are far removed. Moreover, these disputes invariably are inexplicable years later to even those who sent the young men and women to the battlefield The “Irish Airman” knows he is going to die fighting and bombing people against whom he has no quarrel. The futility of his participation and impending unavoidable death is magnified by his acceptance that he obtains no solace from the false notion that he will die protecting something he loves. Instead, he concludes that his fighting does not help the people he grew up with, but, instead, is over some political or strategic notion that holds no weight over the lives of those he calls his own. The Airman reasons that his inevitable death at the hands of war erases him from the face of the earth, revealing all that came before for him and all that might have taken place in the future as a “waste of breath.”
Yeats’ poetry captures the reality of war as seen from the only true lens – the eyes of the soldier. It is only by immersing oneself in “true war stories” such as those written in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien that this reader begins to understand the Irish Airman’s lament that he is fighting and dying over something that has no meaning for him against others towards whom he harbors no ill feelings. The poems and the stories incite this reader to scream: “Why do we allow politicians and supposed leaders to send boys and girls they do not know off to die in wars the cause of which are inexplicable to the boys and girls, their families and often the politicians and leaders themselves?” O’Brien interweaves the mayhem and pain and futility of the death of his friend Kiowa and of Rat’s best friend Curt Lemmon and others, with insight into how he ended up in Vietnam. As he contemplates responding to his draft notice by taking “off for Canada” (43), “O’Brien writes, “it was easy to imagine people sitting around at the old gobbler café on Main Street, coffee cups poised, the conversation slowly zeroing in on the young O’Brien kid, how the damned sissy had taken off for Canada. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d sometimes carry on fierce arguments with those people. I’d be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simple-minded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love it or leave it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand.” (43). O’Brien’s fear of the reaction of others compels him to comply with his draft notice. He writes that he traveled to Vietnam, “where [he] was a soldier, and then home again.” He adds, “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war.” (58). When he returns years later to Vietnam with his daughter Kathleen, she asks him, “This whole war,…why was everybody so mad at everybody else?” O’Brien answers, “They weren’t mad exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing.” She responds, “What did you want?” And O’Brien explains, “Nothing….To stay alive.” The dialogue continues with Kathleen asking, “How come you were even here in the first place?” O’Brien can only shrug and respond, “I don’t know. Because I had to be.” (175).
Yeats’ poem captures in a few lines the message that leaps out from the pages of The Things They Carried. The reality of War is not some strategic decision made in a room at the White House or Pentagon or a promise made on the campaign trail. War is about young men and women being sent to kill other young and women they do not know or hate over issues that have no value or meaning to the very individuals subjected to this atrocity.
Bibliography
Flickr. Yahoo!, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.
Klay, Phil, and Phil Klay. Redeployment. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2016
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction. New York: Broadway, 1998. Print.
Yeats, W. B. The Wild Swans at Coole. New York: The Macmillan company, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999
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