Ben Lyday’s Written Component

A study found that from 1965 to 1975 showed that The New York Times mentioned the

names of only 726 of the 58,220 American military personnel killed in Vietnam. This was

conducted by going through every New York Times article from those years with the word

“Vietnam” in it, surprisingly, it only found biographical information about 16 dead service

members, and photos of 14. This felt like the first moment in the U.S where journalists and

outlets were not the side of its military. This project explores whether or not the depiction of war

has changed from both a veteran and journalistic standpoint. Looking at questions such as: What

is the author's role in conflict response? What does it feel like a suitable amount of time before

an artistic response to war? Who should we rely upon to write about war? What do we accept

today as war literature and how its context and changing global situations influence it? How can

we capture the war's human experience?

A small problem with writing about history is that there is a lot of it, and there is always

more of it every year. For the sake of time, this study will attempt to cover the portrayal of every

major military conflict from the last one hundred years as of 2019.

There is a new type of war developing, one unlike the first and second world wars.

Within these wars, governments would transport millions of resources and men to fight on the

front lines. Today, wars have gotten a lot smaller, yet are equally, at times, more violent and

terrible as the past.

Full Out invasions of other countries have also become less common in recent history.

The most recent one to date would be the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003. This of course

did not go so well. Details of that Conflict here. This large failure has made it hard for

governments to repeat similar operations.

 Wars these days are to a greater or lesser extent proxy wars, and this trend may grow

because it is more attractive to voters back home. A prime example of this was the 2011

overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya. This NATO-backed campaign in which the Libyan rebel

militiamen, who dominated the TV screens, acted as a mopping-up force following devastating

air attacks.

Abusses of human rights have become a standard justification for foreign interventions,

and accounts of such abuses may be true. But media reporting tends to be unbalanced, often

misleading, and sometimes manufactured. In Libya, human rights organizations exposed the

well-publicized story of mass rape by the Libyan army as a fake.

From the perspective of anyone who has witnessed and survived war, the emotion evoked

from it is relatively consistent. Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Dormeur Du Val (The Sleeper of the

Valley) was written when he was 16 during the the war against france and Prussia in 1870. He

was frequently running away from home and traveling on foot, he recalled what he saw through

poetry. Sadly some the linguistic impact is taken away in translation, but most of its rawness and

honesty is still there.

C’est un trou de verdure, où chante une
rivière
Accrochant follement aux herbes des
haillons
D’argent; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
It’s a green hollow, where a river is singing
Crazily hanging on the grasses rags
Of silver; where the sun, from the proud
mountain,
Is shinning: it’s a little valley bubbling with
sunlight.
 Luit: c’est un petit val qui mousse de A young soldier, his mouth open, his head bare,
rayons.
And the nape of his neck bathing in cool blue
Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue, watercress,

Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson Sleeping; he is stretched out on the grass, under
bleu, the skies,

Dort; il est étendu dans l’herbe, sous la Pale in his green bed where the light falls like
nue, rain.

Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut. Feet in the gladiolas, he is sleeping.Smiling like

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant A sick child would smile, he takes a nap:
comme
Nature, rock him warmly: he is cold.
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un
somme: Fragrances do not make his nostrils quiver;

Nature, berce-le chaudement: il a froid. He sleeps in the sun, hand on the breast,

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa Peacefully. He has two red holes in his right side.
narine;

Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa

poitrine,

Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté

droit.

A large theme within this poem is nature, while describing this dead soldier, he

also goes on to describe the environment around him. It almost gives a sort of peace to the poem.

Had one never known what the context of this poem was, you might have never thought this was

describing a dead person.

Another way of how writers are influenced is also by the Military institution itself.

Specifically within American culture, the Vietnam war was a very notable moment in which

journalistic integrity had noticeably inconvenienced how the Military operated.

 One way military was changed was how it honored its members with medals. Officers

have always used medals to reward and identify behaviors that they want to emulate their troops.

The Medal of Honor, the highest award given by the U.S. before Vietnam, usually went to those

who lost their lives or risked their lives by going on the offensive to kill enemy fighters.

Nowadays that's not the case. Instead the award is now centralized around displaying acts of

Valor. There was a change to awarding those who saved lives rather than took them. There

doesn't seem to be a problem with this however, wanting to emulate acts of valor is a great thing

to want to institute amongst th ranks. Yet most importantly, this shift echoed changes in the

1960s and 1970s ' wider American culture – a shift toward celebrating individual autonomy and

self - expression. In news photos of service members in Vietnam, civilians saw this new attitude

by wearing buttons saying "Love" or "Ambushed at Credibility Gap”. This was how soldiers

cried out against both the mistreatment of the media, and both their own country.