After finishing Sand Queen, it strikes me again how similar the war stories are, that we read the semester. While Sand Queen added new information in the plight of women in war, it continued to support the struggles of a soldier described by O'Brien and Turner. The breakdown of command, need for vulgarity in a true war story, fear of landscape, and enemy paranoia holds true in Sand Queen. The descriptions of the dead that haunt soldiers and shame of blushing holds true in all the novels.
What I take from these stories is the struggles of soldiers in the modern war regardless of the time and place is similar. War stories are crass and ugly. They describe destruction, death and foreign places.
I agree with you. Every war story we have read this semester reveals similar major themes and at times duplicating scenes, but in different wars. The stories prove to us that tactics of war have changed, but the inhumanity that soldiers and innocent civilians undergo is unchangeable.
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