Dec
6
Intro and Epilogue
Filed Under Uncategorized
Gambone’s introduction was a nice overview of what we have learned during this course. He really emphasizes the fact that many veterans go on to play important roles in politics. I personally find this interesting because when I stop to think about it, I really do see veterans in a different way than other politicians. When there is a candidate for president who has served in a war, I automatically have more respect for him than the other candidates. This is both good and bad. The respect I have for them often covers other qualities in their personality that I might not agree with, and I, therefore, expect them to basically act honorably and do nothing wrong. This is not always the case, and I feel like many of them use this cover for such a purpose.
The epilogue basically sums up what we have already figured out from the entire course—that if they only remembered the consequences from past wars, the veterans of the recent wars would be treated better. It is the ignorance that makes it so that veterans are never treated as they should be. The Revolutionary War veterans should have been the first eye-opener to society, but society would rather just let the mistakes fade away without doing anything to fix them. There was improvement with the World War II veterans, but then we relapsed when it came to the Vietnam veterans. I think it is so sad that the Vietnam veterans are still having trouble even after all the movies that have been made to portray the veteran’s plight. I feel like now, more people know about it and that it is wrong, but we still do not do anything about. It was really nice to see Severo and Milford make an overall summary of the Veteran’s Administration, though I do think they were a bit harsh about the way they went about doing it.
The very end of the epilogue was very well done. For the first time, I saw a new reason for why Severo and Milford wrote Wages of War. I expected them to end glorifying the veterans, but they actually focused more on how we should take their experiences and learn from them. Then, what surprised me the most was the fact that they used it to show people that we should not make war unless we are completely sure that it is necessary. It really just made me think of Iraq, which I am sure they were not intending on since it was written long before it. I really just want to hand our government a copy of it and see if anything changed. I am not really sure anything would.