Half way through the semester

Mrs. Cline,

      As we have passed through the half way mark in the semester I have to admit I am pleased with myself and the work I have done. English class has always been a struggle for me, and I am not going to lie, literary analysis has challenged me. With all that I feel I have grasped the idea of literary analysis fairly well. This type of writing makes you really dissect the literature, and look passed just the words to find the true meaning or reason for the author's writings. I felt like I struggled with the concept of a literary analysis at first. On our first essay I kept writing what I thought was more of a review of the reading. I must have had to go back and delete everything I had wrote several times before I got the hang of it.
  
      I have never been a strong reader, but I think with having to do this type of writing, it has really helped improved some of my reading skills. I hope to finish up this class as strong as I have started it and continue to get better at reading and literary analysis. It would really give me a sense of accomplishment, given my past English class struggles, to end the class on a strong note.

Sean Huze's "The Sand Storm"

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-invasion_Iraq,_2003%E2%80%93present

The writings of this play bring us into what war is really about. Sometimes it can be hard for someone like me, who has never experienced and probably never will experience war, to fully understand what war can be like. Even with the written words like that of this story, we can only begin to imagine the true horror that goes on during war times.

In this play you can see how hard a war like this one can be extremely hard on a person. Faced every day with death and things we can't even fathom. One connection I made from this war story and others is the soldiers reactions to death itself. Often I see them describing how surprisingly they feel little emotion at first to the killing of other men. They often talk about how they wonder if there is something wrong with them, they feel almost non-human. They know what they are doing and feeling should be wrong, but they can't feel that. It is like the mind blocks the realness of the situation. The body and minds natural response is to avoid stressful situations and things of such horror, and I believe the lack of emotion a soldier speaks is the bodies response to the situation.

This particular war story hits home for me more than others because of my age. I was a freshman in High School when we went to war with Iraq. Most other war stories you read about are from a different generation such as Vietnam, and while I can still feel for those who lived through that, it was before my time. This was the war of my generation, at least so far, the soldiers that were involved in this War were not much older than me. I will be honest, until I read this story, I really didn't even look at the attack on Iraq as much of a war. It seemed to not last very long, and according to the media it almost seemed like we took Bagdad with ease and not much resistance. By seeing the stories of these soldiers paints a much different picture for me.

Even though the numbers of our troops that were killed was low in comparison to the enemy, the events that happened were still just as horrific for the soldiers as if they had been in WWII. The way they speak of how many civilian casualties there were, bodies all over the town, knowing that they did that. I couldn't imagine. This is something that will weigh on their shoulders forever. I think this play did a great job in delivering its message, and portraying the image in our minds about the events that occurred in Iraq.

If you would like to read more about Sean Huze and his experience with the war, please visit the link below
http://www.alternet.org/world/20358/