The Effects of War on Soldiers

The Effects of War on Soldiers

War is the most powerful threat we have on the earth today. War can accomplish a variety of things in a variety of ways and it is entirely up to the government to decide a country's war status. It is up to people that will never have to experience what they create, but what happens to the soldiers they send in to battle for them. For the soldiers they are stuck with an experience unlike any other known to man, stuck with memories and images of what it's like to be hunted by another man. Different people take different things away from war and are affected in different ways, but a change after a war is inevitable. In the stories The Red Convertible and Home Soil, the authors tell what its like for people that come back and what kind of change they experience. These stories tell of the psychological changes that take place in soldiers and how war affects personality and behavior.

Home Soil is a story of a father and son, who were both soldiers in two different wars and tells of the changes that took place in them after their war experiences. Before going to war the son, Bohdan, was an outgoing young man. He was just a regular guy that liked to have fun, in high school he took up the bongos to try to make himself more popular

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with the girls. He learned it by himself getting all of his basics of a record called "Lets Swing the Bongos". He took them both to war when he went, and both returned broken symbolic of the changes in his personality. His fathers points out that he now walks like a soldier with a stiff gait and that all his baby fat is gone leaving a tall lean soldier. Bob as he is called has also taken up smoking and smokes them in fear, as he would on the battlefield in fear of what's around the next corner or what could happen next. Bobs father however lives with a different experience of war. He grew up in Ukraine wanting to be a poet, but with little interest in his poems he began writing propaganda pamphlets for the Nazis. Then all in once in one day he became a soldier, forced to fight a mob of people and force Jews on to a cattle trailer. He says once he was handed a gun he felt the power it contained and it made him do things he never thought he would.

The Red Convertible is about two brothers that start off with a red convertible and just go. They drive this car around all summer together having fun and doing whatever happened, starting in North Dakota and ended up in Alaska before they go back home at the end of the summer. This car is special though the oldest