Hello readers,
the school year is coming to an end and I just wanted to stop and take a moment to say how crazy my first year as a university student has been. The number of people and professors I have met, and the knowledge I have learned have all been memorable. I definitely did not expect my first year to be anything like this and am glad that I survived as a first-year student while living it to the fullest.
For my second last blog post of the year, I am going to be talking about Phil Klay’s Redeployment. There are an abundant amount of texts in the story where they represent/demonstrate how a soldier is characterized after returning from a battle zone. On page seven and eight, for example, it describes Sgt. Price reuniting with his wife and how he is not entirely sure as to what to do when seeing her: “I moved in and kissed her. I figured that was what I was supposed to do” (7) and “she put her arms around me and pulled me into her…… I hadn’t felt anything like her in seven months……here was this new feeling that made everything else black and white fading before color” (8). Immediately after reading these passages, I reflected on how soldiers act after coming home from a tour of duty. I have heard many cases of soldiers coming back to their families with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and have become as Isiah stated in class “robotic/generic soldiers after boot camp”. This training that soldiers obtain designs them for combat situations in hostile environments but when soldiers return home, all they can think about a majority of their time is war: “In Wilmington,…… you don’t even have a weapon. You startle ten times checking for it and it’s not there. You’re safe, so your alertness should be white, but it’s not” (12). Unfortunately, this has led them to dwell in the thought of war and not many other aspects seem to concern them; making the lives of veterans a difficult one. Although there are programs to assist veterans of war such as the “Veterans Independence Program (VIP)” in Canada, I am hoping for citizens (all over the world) to be more aware of the prevalent issues that arise from retired veterans of war and take action in attempting to help them in any way, shape or form.
Martin
