Exploration 3 - Christine Cozzo

1. I have been keeping up with my active reading but sometimes I think that I miss key passages or ideas, because I read a story and then go back and write things down. It may be more helpful for me to write as I read, so I don't forget to jot my thoughts down.
    I do think that active reading has helped me to pay more attention to the story, however. There aren't and pages that I'm bored, because I'm expecting something fascinating to come out of every paragraph.
    Something that I wrote for today's reading is the sensory details in "How to Tell a True War Story." The second paragraph on page 67 was packed with sensory details of sound, smell, and sight. It was a very crisply described scene.

2. "How to Tell a True War Story" is the story that has meant the most to me so far. It emphasizes that war stories aren't supposed to make sense because war doesn't make sense. It's full of contradictions and things that will never quite become clear. I felt this was best illustrated when O'Brien says:
    "War is hell, but that's not the half of it [...]. War is nasty; war is fun. war is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead." (76)
     Because of these contradictions, the moral of a war story isn't going to be that it's nasty, because it's also fun. Someone telling a war story won't claim that war made them a man, because it also made parts of them dead. I really enjoyed this concept.

3. So far in the book, Dave Jensen has stood out to me the most. It seems clear that he has some inner demons that he has yet to tame, and he lets them show more potently than the other men. There is no doubt that Jensen has issues with guilt and promises, especially in the stories "Enemies" and "Friends." I think that these issues make him both interesting and relatable, as all of us struggle with the same things from time to time.