Unmaking War, Remaking Men by Kathleen Barry
In Unmaking War, Remaking Men, author Kathleen Barry discusses and explores obvious social importance regarding our military, soldier’s experiences, trainings, family life, and our nation. She expresses her feelings about politics and goes into detail on revealing how men’s lives are made expendable for combat and how the military training drives them to kill without thinking and without remorse. She explains how the soldiers suffer from both trauma and loss of their own beings. Witnessing an accidental death while spending a day at the beach made Barry think about the significance of empathy and how it draws strangers together. Humans have an automatic understanding of pain and compassion towards complete strangers when depressing moments like death happens, an act that Barry calls human consciousness, which is the most normal reaction. It was then when she aimed to figure out how human beings value lives in everyday moments but the killings in wars considered to be expected. She focuses on three concepts that she believes are the answers to our dilemma of making war and also to unmaking war. These concepts include expendability, empathy, and core masculinity. I will go into detail explaining Barry’s assertions on these three concepts while also providing information on the connections between economics, culture, religions, and personal factors have on making war.
Expendability is explained by Barry as someone’s life that is no longer useful and is disposable. In other words, being expendable is being replaceable, unimportant, unnecessary, insignificant, and so on. Barry reveals how men’s lives are made expendable for combat, by discussing how the military trains their soldiers to kill without thinking and without remorse. She states in her book that:
The purpose of military training is to wipe out the recruits’ identities, to disconnect them from how they knew themselves before joining the military, and to...