CANCELLED Struggle and Sacrifice: Four Novels and Three Films About Soldiers at War

The soldier’s point of view will be our focus as we read four novels about America’s wars after WWII. We will begin with The Hunters by James Salter (Vintage International, 1957), the story of a fighter pilot in the Korean war confronting the ambiguities of what it means to be a hero. We will discuss Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (Crown, 1999) in which a soldier tries to process the combat experience and come to terms with his anxiety about whether he measures up. Through the eyes of an Iraq War veteran, The Yellow Birds (Bay Back Books, 2012) by Kevin Powers, examines how the combat experience forges bonds among soldiers imposing duties of obligation and sacrifice. We will finish by discussing Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Ecco, 2012) and explore the public’s obsessive need to create war heroes from the perspective of a group of accidental Iraq War heroes as they try to understand and maximize the benefits of the adulation. We will round out our exploration by viewing three films about the effects combat on soldiers.