Morality of war
; Sydney Sneed Lessons learned in the military services can change a person's perspective of morality and teach a sense of empathy and understanding through humiliation and shame.
The feeling of shame changes the way the world is perceived, we feel shame when we know our actions are wrong. After the war you're ashamed of what you did but proud to have helped when to serve is your obligation. Going into war as a toy soldier is depicted as bravery. The billboard says there's strong and there's army strong. This stereotypes a soldier as physically fit, tough killers. ‘'War is nasty: war is fun. War is thrilling. War makes you a man.''(P.80 the things they carried) These men are proud of their actions of heroism, not of…show more content… After the war, the psychological burdens the men carry during the war define them for the rest of their life. Those who survived carry guilt, grief, and confusion, and many of the stories are about the survivor's attempts to come to terms with their experiences. In their mind, a story truth is truer than the happening truth. They separate themselves and only pin certain truths to objectify their experiences, all other truths are made up. The feeling of empathy is taught through the emotional experiences they describe in every story they write. War changes who you are for the better, but for all the wrong reasons. Before the war, Tim was a thoughtful person, a college grad, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, all the credentials. After 7 months, he turned mean inside. The shame every soldier felt eats away at them, a splinter of the mind driving a man to madness. In "The Man I Killed" Tim describes the boy he killed with a grenade using a concrete description as if facts are the only way to negotiate committing the unthinkable. He wrote The Man I killed as a protagonist rather than a narrator to disguise the way he felt. He elaborated on physical features like the sunlight and flowers growing in the ground because he found safety in his own guilty conscious. He feels remorse but finds no moral in
