Yusef Komunyakaa, Brian Turner Comparison

 Overall Yusef Komunyakaa and Brian Turner's main intentions of their poetry is to give the audience insight into the heart-breaking life of a soldier. Although there style choices may be different, the general theme of the poems is how quickly life can be taken away by war's destruction. Yusef's poems has a more metaphorical tone with shorter disrupted stanzas. His poems also have a feeling of a faded past, as a reflection of his time lost in war. Turner is a lot more descriptive in what he actually means, which makes it easier to understand and he has a more present sense; what he describes appears to happen in the moment, a moment in the future, or a moment in the past. Both poets have a disapproving tone of the war each fought in. 

     For the most part, little has changed since the Vietnam War. The only two things I can see that can change about war is the advancement of technology and how the media covers it. The mental and physical scarring of soldiers during and after war will never change, the sorrow of losing someone to war will never change, the deaths and fatal injuries of innocent bystanders will never change, nor the social tension between people on their views of war. However, the media can be an influential part of the politics of war. While in the Vietnam War the media covered the situation as a matter of win-lose. The Iraq War was covered with little detailed information. In both wars there was confusion about the purpose of the war, but the basic idea was that there were "bad guys" controlling a country and needed America'as help. In Vietnam it was the Communists and in Iraq it was the terrorists that attacked America. In both cases the media had influence over how the other country was viewed. Vietnam was a portrayed as needing America's democratic help from the evil communists. While Iraq, although did not have as much coverage, was still portrayed as a country of Muslim terrorists who hated America's democracy; in this case the media also twisted not only people's view of a race, but also of a religion.