Is Getting Shot at Really Fun?

In a critical essay on The Red Badge of Courage, Sharon Cumberland talks about the difference between a realistic and romantic telling of a war story. I found it very interesting and even comical how, while researching for my junior theme, topics we are discussing in class was discussed in documents I found. It really does prove that Lawler and Logan control the universe. But the point that Cumberland was making was that The Red Badge of Courage tells a war story from the realistic point of view, where war is not glorified and soldiers have problems. Cumberland states, “A romantic telling of this story would have emphasized courage, heroism, and the glorious death rather than cowardice, fear, and rotten corpses. A romantic telling of this story might also have implied that the soldiers were dying in a glorious cause of which God approved, and their souls were going straight to heaven.” I found this very interesting because I have read both types of books, and considered both ones believable, and never questioned how they contradicted each other. I started to think how war is looked at nowadays and I believe it is still romanticized. I think army and navy commercials do this the most, where they show the exciting parts of being in the army or navy, and completely skip over the hard, challenging parts. In one commercial, it tries to draw you in by showing exciting footage of people riding motor boats and jumping out of helicopters. The last picture you see reads, “Navy, accelerate your life” implying that if you join the navy, you’re life will become exciting. These skips over the hard training and work involved even to get to the point where you can jump out of a helicopter. I have a friend whose older brother enrolled in the navy, and dropped out after a month because it was so hard and, as he said, “inhumane”. This shows that the navy romanticizes what they do because it’s not solely excitement and glory, there is also hard work and dedication, neither of which they show in their commercials because those aspects of the navy are unappealing.