Survival on the Battle Field

6 word slant:

War survival comes with a price

140 Character Claim: 

After taking a chance to protect freedoms, war survivors find themselves coming back from a predicament impossible to overcome completely.

    Essay:                                                     

Survival on the Battle Field

              In Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Buck, the main dog character of the story, goes through many hardships and finds several different ways to survive, doing any possible physical action in order to do so.  Buck, ferine and ferocious, is very stubborn and hates to fail, but when his newest owners take him to the extreme to where he could lose his life, he chooses to go no further and to fail for the first time.  For him, the decision was huge, yet this decision saved his life.  When in a near death situation surroundings can lead to extreme survival techniques, which could scar them, but also help them in their future. 

One characteristic of war is the persons surroundings; the messier the surroundings, the more chaotic and traumatic the events may seem to be.  When reading CStraight’s article “Stories from Women,” he describes a mother during the Rwandan civil war, and her story.  While the war was going on, she had to find a way to protect her children without the help of her husband who was killed later in the war.  “There was shooting going on, and people were falling on others and dying everywhere,” she tells the interviewer.  Like a dear beset by wolves, she found herself in a travail situation, yet miraculously she found a way to overcome the situation.  When people are dying all around, would not that type of surrounding be traumatizing? Although everything around might be what makes everything worse, sometimes what worsens the situation is what is not around.  In “A Personal Story” told by Dr. Hal Kushner, he tells of himself being in captivity.  Before being captured though, he and his fellow soldiers were shot down in a helicopter.  After surveying their surroundings to see what supplies they had, they realized they had ‘no food or water, no flares, no first aid kit or survival gear.’  The situation is bad enough to have been shot down and wounded with buddies either hurt or dead, but they also had nothing to help them get out of the predicament they were in.  One’s surroundings play a huge part in survival because surroundings can worsen one’s chances of survival in just a simple second.

When stuck in a life or death situation, a person might go to very extreme survival techniques in order to survive.  In CStraight’s article he explains that when the violence started picking up, ‘she fled to a nearby church where she thought she and her family would be safe.’  Sadly, they ‘walked into a nightmare.’  They were under attack.  In order ‘to survive, Violette was forced to lie down in the aisle and smear blood on herself and her children.  Pretending to be dead, they hid among the corpses.  ‘Afraid to move, to cry, to even breathe, they lay there for an entire week until the Rwandan army came to liberate the area.’  She had two children with her, one being 4 years of age and the other 5.  People’s reactions are amazing just in how far one will go in order to ensure survival, or even to just get out of an awful situation.  Sometimes war is smaller than a country, but is actually within a building.  In his article “Harriet’s Story: Ugandan survival, British Prisoner”, Jason N. Parkinson describes Harriet’s stands to be freed.  Harriet ‘was persecuted, accused of supporting the LRA.’  So she ‘caught a flight to Heathrow airport’ and ran away from what she presumed was her death.  She was then captured and put in an asylum.  To try and get out, ‘she started refusing food.’  She became so sick and weak that they let her go after 5 weeks of no food.  She was so determined to get out after being treated so badly that she just stopped eating!  That just fascinates me that she would go to such extremes to get out of a situation that could lead to her death.  She kept on fighting, proving that one will go to extremes in order to survive.

               

After surviving some kind of life or death situation, there is always an after effect.  CStraight’s article explains that Violette ‘tried to rebuild her life.’  After working for others by farming, she eventually decided to try something else so that she might be able to pay for her children’s education along with food for her family.  Someone decided to sponsor her and now she has ‘learned marketable job skills and honed her innate leadership abilities.’  She is now the ‘local businesswoman and a leader in her community.’  She has truly found a way to overcome her past and has continued to show her strength.  While Violette found a way to overcome her past, Kushner, as explained in his article, found a way to learn from his captivity.  He ‘learned about the human spirit…. Confidence in yourself… loyalty to your country and its ideals and to your friends and comrades.’  He believes that he was very fortunate to have survived and knows that he very easily could have been one of the men that died to protect our freedoms.  Even though both Violette and Kushner went through very tragic events, they have overcome them in the best way that they could and have found a way to progress in life.

Life or death situations can show a person’s character through their reaction.  Dictionary.com defines a survivor as ‘a person or thing that survives.’  Although I agree that that defines a survivor, a true survivor must overcome the incident, otherwise reliving the tragedies may occur.  That is true for all situations.   Imagine just how hard this would be, how much would have to be accomplished, to do so.  In my own opinion, survival is one of the hardest things to overcome. 

Works Cited:

Kushner, Dr. Hal. "Vietnam War-Stories: Personal Story." (2000): 6. war-stories.com. Web. 17 May 2012. <://www.war-storieshttp.com/aspprotect/pow-kushner-personal-story-1967-2.asp>.

Parkinson, Jason N. "Harriet's Story: Ugandan Survivor, British Prisoner." (2005): 5. opendemocracy.net. Web. 17 May 2012. <http://www.opendemocracy.net/people-migrationeurope/uganda_3114.jsp>.

Straight, C. "Stories From Women." Women for Women International (2008): 9. womenforwomen.org. Web. 17 May 2012. <http://www.womenforwomen.org/global-initiatives-helping-women/stories-women-rwanda.php>.

“Survivor.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 17 May. 2012. <Dictionary.com

            http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Survivor>.