Un-Heroic Un-Noble War

O’Brien leaves no doubt as to his chosen genre, “war wasn’t all terror and violence” immediately establishes for the audience the subject on his mind. However, conspicuously absent from this war tale is a hero with a noble cause, fighting against a vicious enemy. Additionally, O’Brien inserts imagery that is contradictory to war and a battlefield.
Our soldier jealously eyes a game of checkers, which, seemingly unlike their war, “You knew where you stood… there was a winner and a loser. There were rules.” O’Brien does not present the reader with a clear enemy; the soldier does not profess a purpose for his presence in the war. Instead, we know only of his “monotony” and of the severe “boredom”.
The only enemy that O’Brien introduces his reader’s to is a “young man… frail-looking, delicately boned”, hardly a threatening adversary. We see this foe “scrambled… laid out like Shredded fuckin’ Wheat” and the descriptions of his grotesque state are repeated multiple times, eliciting pity. But, O’Brien wants us to pity the ‘victorious’ soldier too, who is obviously so distraught over the death of this young “citizen and soldier” that he cannot talk. Unlike our typical war variety, O’Brien leaves his readers confused as to the clear victor and a clear noble purpose.
Furthermore, O’Brien presents images, contrary and out of place in a text of the war genre. A soldier says about himself “I’m just a boy” destroying the reader’s illusion of a virulent Matt Damon in uniform. O’Brien attempts to convince his readers that the soldier’s barracks have a “playful atmosphere” comparable to a “sporting event”. He places “flowers” next to the head of the dead mangled soldier and we are asked to remember this enemy’s childhood on the “playground”. These images are out of place and the contrast works to compound for the reader the atrocities of war, with which we are all familiar.
O’Brien’s breaks with typical war stories, effectively intensifies the tragedy of the war. As much as he tries to make light of the situation, such as reflecting on the one-legged boy that “some poor fucker ran out of ammo”, only further horrifies the reader. We come to understand that this soldier too, is forever affected. Even years later, he can only think of the war. “The thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life.” He cannot escape from his involvement in the war, even “twenty years later I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief”. O’Brien’s protagonist is not only anti-heroic; he is also permanently scarred.