My cousin was in the military, he is quite a bit older than me and did three tours in Iraq. Me and my cousin have never really been close. Movies and books about war have never been an interest of mine, I normally try to avoid them actually. The genre of American war hero has always been too obviously hyper-masculine and focused on the American perspective for me to be able to watch them and enjoy it without being obnoxiously critical. Since I never actually taken a deep look into what a soldiers life is like in and after war, most of what I assumes soldiers lives were like were based off of things I’d gathered from memorial sites and history lessons. Things that I’d seen on the news or passed over on social media.
On fourth of July when I would see the casusionary advertisements that talked about being quiet for the sake of scaring dogs and war veterans I was not very understanding as to why veterans were mentioned along with dogs. I could understand dogs, I had seen my own get upset on new years and the Fourth of July from the noise of the fireworks. I had a misunderstanding about the veterans. I still have a misunderstanding about them, but what I was thinking was that since they were home and not in a war environment the sounds of explosions shouldn’t bother them. They were not in the war and so they weren’t in a war mindset anymore, or at least that’s what I was assuming.
After reading Patrick Deer’s “Mapping Contemporary American War culture” and then watching American Sniper and Phil Klay’s “Redeployment” I realized that I have really no understanding of what life for a soldier is like, especially once they’re back home. I had only really looked at the “strong war man with a big gun” narrative, where they “go and get the bad guys” and from being so focused on critiquing this one narrative of this one aspect of war I in a way blinded myself from understand other parts of the war veteran. In all three of the pieces above my attention is directed toward apart of the war hero that is not shown in high school history lessons or memorial sites. Reading both of the pieces of writing and watching the movie, all things that I probably would not have done on my own, changed how I understood my cousins homecoming and helped me gain a new perspective in understanding the ways in which his life is functioning now.