Hugh Martin

Stick Soldiers greatly differentiates the people in the home country with the soldiers. Children at home do not understand the severity of war and death but simply hold it as a side note in their lives since that is what everyone talks about. However, it is coupled with Christmas toys and feasts that take away from the significance behind those colored stick soldiers. This relates to The Things They Carried as death and responsibility become more divided. Stick soldiers hold guns and RPGs but they are just stick soldiers that are not associated with the death those machines will ultimately cause. The children and people at home are even more unassociated, which shows how isolated soldiers are while at war. This isolation can change a man and his mentality as seen in The Things They Carried and Slaughterhouse-Five. These depictions of American soldiers throwing grenades at Iraqis and the Iraqi soldiers shooting at American Humvees display the “us-versus-them” mentality that Sanders in The Things They Carried developed. With the Iraqi children, however, it is more clearly seen as the American soldiers’ deaths are, “what the children want for Christmas, or what they just want.”

             In “Full Moon, M2 Machine Gun” it goes into the last night before the men in the Carolinas leave for war. The soldiers and their families are trying to have hope that things will get better; however, the soon-to-be soldiers already know that it is unlikely. They can only think about Saddam’s sons and their “misshapen faces / on the TV screens” as they wait in line for their immunizations. This poem differs from many of the novels that we have studied because it goes into the detail about the mindset and fears of soldiers before they depart for war. They know that nothing good lies ahead, yet they still try to hold onto some hope. The boys do not know what awaits them except for the images that flashed across the TV screen. The broken up lines and stanzas display the soldiers broken up thoughts and unsureness, something a soldier in combat doesn’t have the opportunity for if he wants to live. The soldiers also know that they cannot escape their fate as everything around them stands “defiant” and unmoving. They know that their fates are sealed but still have not undergone the full mentality change seen in so many of the other novels that we have read.