“You are a United States
Infantryman.” One sentence into the story When
Engaging Targets, Remember and the reader is already sucked into the
setting of the story, placed in the position of a real soldier in a real unit
in a real war. That, to me, is what makes this story in Fire and Forget so memorable.
At least for me, it’s been really
easy to judge characters while reading all these war stories. I think, Well, that was a dumb choice, it was obvious
he should’ve done something else. However, after reading When Engaging Targets, Remember I feel
more sympathetic towards characters, knowing that they were thinking about the
consequences for all of the decisions they made, and realizing that I wouldn’t
always know what to do in such situations either.
Another similar feature unique to
this kind of story is that the reader can always go back and read the paths
they didn’t choose the first time. I did this and saw what happened when you
didn’t fire on the BMW and let it pass into the convoy. Though it is also
necessary to leave the different storylines open like that for those who choose
them the first time, I think it parallels another aspect of being a real
soldier and making real decisions. We as readers can flip a few pages and see
what could’ve been. Soldiers, on the other hand, have hours of free time to
muse about the events leading up to a certain choice and to imagine what would
have happened if you had made the other choice. The difference between a reader
and a soldier is, of course, that the former is reading about realistic events
and the other is experiencing real events.
While stories will always do
their best to make us feel like the latter, it will never be exactly the same.
That being said, the choose-your-own-adventure style of When Engaging Targets, Remember came as close as any story to
replicating that experience for me.
This story was very memorable for me as well. Partly because of how unique its structure was, but mostly because of the experience that it takes you through. Like your title suggests, you really are in the place of the soldier, and you feel the guilt, the anxiousness, and all the other emotions that a soldier goes through. I definitely enjoyed making my own choices and seeing if what I did resulted in good or bad. Fortunately for us, our choices don't have lasting impacts on peoples' lives, unlike real soldiers who actually have to make these on the spot decisions, knowing the whole time that they could be making a huge mistake.
ReplyDeleteI really liked this story as well. I was being a little judgey of the choices some of the characters made in the book while I was reading it as well, Timmy. While I was reading this story, I feel like I got a better sense of while you're in these types of situations, you can never know the outcome of the choice you make and how it will affect you in the future. You made a good point about how we as readers, being given an opportunity to "experience" this through writing, we were even privileged in doing so because we had all the outcomes at our fingertips while soldiers can spends lots of time imagining how it could have all played out. After having read this story, I felt like I could better understand why some of the decisions the characters made happened and know that they'd hoped for the best each time.
ReplyDeleteWhat this story did for me was to drive home the difficulty of the split second decisions soldiers have to make. I took a good five minutes going over the choices and the situation before continuing with the story along the path of opening fire. While a real soldier would have time to consider what he would do if placed in such a situation, a real soldier would also be under much more stress than me sitting in my living room reading this book. This story in particular made me respect our soldiers and not be too hard on them for the consequences following such a split second decision.
ReplyDeleteThis was one of the most memorable chapters for me as well, Timmy. I like the freedom the style it was written permits as well, although I'd like to add that for me isn't quite like a choose-your-adventure type story. By framing it as such, and then not actually offering a whole lot of choices, it really struck home the inevitabilities of war for me.
ReplyDeleteYour comment about judging characters was interesting. By seeing what other choices characters could have been made, are they always made sympathetic? In this story, we may find that that no matter what the character chooses, it's for the wrong reasons, or results in an ending that makes us say: why did you get here in the first place? Or: why couldn't you think of another way? Neither of the endings are exactly happy.
What struck me was the character's backstory because he seems so similar to us. In the first couple of paragraphs we learn that he's just a regular college kid. He seems closer to one of us than a soldier. Even when he's at war, he's thinking about college, his sex life and singing Jay-Z songs. This story really made me look at soldiers as regular people, like me, rather than another species with an otherworldly sense of dedication to our country.
ReplyDeleteThis story really stood out for me, as well. It's a great example of second-person storytelling--which literally places the reader in the narrator's shoes--but even more strongly in the case, as we are placed in his specific (and really impossible) dilemma, with the deceptively simple structure of the "If this . . . then this" quality of the "guidelines." As the story unfolds, of course, we realize how inadequate such guidelines are to the split-second timing of a real situation--and, by extension, how hard it is for anyone not involved to judge another's actions in a real situation.
ReplyDelete