A college essay

Cindi Cunnius

Professor D...

English 101

30 June 2017

War is Hell

On the eighteenth of June in nineteen sixty-five, in Vietnam, a photographer named Horst Faas, captured a simple but, clear and accurate black and white image, that later became a famous photo known to everyone worldwide. This photo was of a young soldier posing for Faas’s camera, during the Vietnam War. That young man was Larry Wayne Chaffin from Saint Louis, he was in the one hundred and seventy-third Airborne Brigade Battalion. 

When anyone looks at this photograph they are than gravitated, at how Chaffin’s eyes are so bright. Then the viewer glances up and looks at Chaffin’s band on his helmet, that is where he wrote, the iconic and accurate description of the war, in three simple words “War is Hell.” In Faas’s famous photo, there are other things that also stand out in the photo after those three iconic words. 

First, is that Chaffin is wearing his identification card, there is a gash on Chaffin’s helmet, indicating that he has been engaged in battle and then included on his uniform, there is a patch above his military branch insignia patch it is not clear but, my guess is that it might be an Airborne patch. His helmet gash achieves the purpose of his message.  

Chaffin is not the first person who stated that war is hell. It was stated by William Tecumseh Sherman to the graduating class of eighteen seventy-nine of the Michigan Military Academy. He said to those boys “I tell you, war is hell” in regards to the Civil War.

I can support Chaffin’s opinion along with William Tecumseh Sherman’s about the accurate message, of war is hell, simply because during the battles and the conflicts they have been thru, it was truly hell. Chaffin’s description is accurate and precise. 

During the battles and conflicts; there were explosions, fire, gunshots and his comrades were dying by his side. Those are just some of the terrifying images that he had accoutered during the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, Chaffin could not adapt to civilian life and sadly died at a young age of thirty-nine years old. 

Along with him, the men and women, who have survived the war, live with the terror that they have seen and been thru. They will live on with that terror for the rest of their lives, taunting them leaving them with fear, until their last breath. For all of them, their thoughts were and are this is hell. The survivors of war living today left something there. On the fields, in the trenches, in the skies, and on the ocean, they left themselves behind. Just like Chaffin did. Being in the army, in those battles during the Vietnam War, that is what killed him.  

This image affects me because I am a Civil War Reenactor. I began reenacting after finding out about the heroic men in my family who fought in wars and battles that America has been involved in. From an ancestor, who was a lieutenant in the Revolutionary war, to countless men in the American Civil War and then to my great uncle George Heiney who died on Omaha Beach on D-Day. George was a messenger for the army; while he was carrying his bicycle ashore, he was killed. Recently, my cousin had done two tours overseas; he currently suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and suffers to do everyday activities. All of these men were taught how to fight in the war but, they were not taught how to come home to civilian life after their job was done.

In my opinion, no one actually comes home from war; everyone is sort of killed in action, after they’ve seen the elephant of war, because of post-traumatic stress disorder. From seeing the terror of war that person comes how completely changed. The men and women, who have survived the war, live with the terror that they have seen and been thru. They will live on with that terror for the rest of their lives, taunting them leaving them with fear, until their last breath. “Only the dead have seen the end of the war.” (G. Santayana) Most people can agree with me that war is hell.