Vietnam: Historical Thinking and Veteran Interviews
Vietnam Project: Artist Statement
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For our vietnam project art piece, I chose to express my feelings toward the draft and it's effects on young men in America during the war. To do this, I have created a mason jar covered in images of the effects of the draft. While the inside of the jar shows how the draft worked with index cards that recreate a draft. My pictures on the outside represent the research I put into this project and how it affected my feeling towards this subject. When I was young, I watched the movie "Across The Universe", a Beatles movie which took place during the Vietnam War. During this movie, one of the main characters, "Max", gets drafted into the war. The movie shows how dramatically he is affected before he even goes. Watching this shows how much fear was injected into young men when the draft occurred. I also took what I read from the book "The Things They Carried" that we read in class and used it to my benefit. The author of the book not only describes his reaction to being drafted into the war, but also what he experienced while in Vietnam. The hot heat stroking his forehead as he would watch his friends each die off into some kind of evil state of mind, even if their hearts were still beating. My images on the outside of the jar were images found from different sites online who showed the effects that the war and the draft had on people, as well as some propaganda for the draft system. This piece expresses that I feel very strongly that the war and the draft were horrible events in our history.
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I would say that through this project I refined my project extensively. The requirement for the number of drafts that we needed, was at least three not including our final draft. Even though I worked vigorously through the process of this project, I did not extend the required number of drafts. I have three rough drafts and a final draft. My first draft of this project was a drawing of what I wanted to portray. I was thinking of just drawing a jar for my project at this point. My draft was just a piece of paper with a drawing of a jar on it. I definitely needed something different for my final project. So I figured, why not use an actual jar. My second draft was made up of a small mason jar. Which I spraypainted white. Soon after the paint had dried, I learned that it did not stick onto jars, when almost half of it came off into my hands. My draft was falling apart in my own care. This was the day that we did the big peer critique, which gave me mostly all positive feedback. People gave me ideas to explain the jar more, and to adjust my perspective statement, ( The fog of war, a melancholy cloud, wipes away any justification of a draft and a war), to fit my project more. This really helped me. For my third draft, I decided to get a brand new jar, one that was more square and easy to work with. For this draft I decided that I would be tracing a few photographs for the art portion. I felt very challenged by this because I couldn’t seem to make it look neat. I had Risa critique my project with the critique sheet we got from class, and with a lot of constructive criticism, I created my final draft! I am very proud of my refinement through this process and I feel that it was very crucial to create my final product.
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My inspiration for choosing the draft, was as I mentioned before, “ Across the Universe”. I remember being a little kid watching this movie and never really understanding any part of the movie except for the draft. During this movie, Max, a stoner hippie living in New York City during his 20’s, get’s drafted into the war. Walking into the office to register seems very natural. Until he looks up at a sign of Uncle Sam. When Uncle Sam starts talking to him, the beatles song “I Want You” starts playing. Max goes through all of the training and hardships of the war. He is greatly affected by the war and by the end of the movie, he is laying in a hospital, very mentally sick singing the song, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”. This always had a very big impact on my view toward Vietnam and the war. This really inspired me to research the draft more than I already had and form a project around it. I am very happy with my end results.
(I have been excused from the video because my presentation was not recorded..)
WW2 Reflection
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During this project, we researched many different things to lead up to writing an original story. We started by learning about WW1, and read the book, "All Quiet on the Western Front", a book written about a soldier's experience in the war. Throughout this process, we thought about the truth of war. To wrap up this part of the project, we did a socratic seminar. During the seminar we were asked many questions including, "What is our truth of war? Many of us were intrigued by this question. I came to the conclusion that my truth of war was very different than the author's truth of war. I didn't really believe that there is one. After the seminar we moved into WW2, learning about dictators and their strategies. We read the book "Slaughterhouse 5", written by Kurt Vonnegut, a veteran of WW2 who shares his story through his character Billy Pilgrim, a soldier who time travels to escape his harsh realities. This book also questioned the truth of war. The end part of this project was our stories. My story was about a young french girl, Camille. Her life takes place in WW2, as she pretends to be a young man so that she can be a soldier. During the Battle of France, she injures herself and has to have her leg amputated. Surely after this, her and her friend Alexandre are captured by Nazis and live in a concentration camp for 4 months, separated. When they finally realize they have been together the whole time, love sparks and they endure the harsh realities of the camp together. I was very proud of this story and felt that it was a great way to show what I have learned about WW1 and WW2.
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A) In my story, I believe that round characters are integrated best out of all of the literary elements we studied. My character Camille, starts out very pessimistic, in her world, absolutely nothing was going right. Her father had lost her job, she had to be a soldier, and then she loses her leg. There are many times that she imagines dancing around in her flowing dress in the flowery fields behind her house, with her sister Genevieve. Desperately, she looks at every situation with a cold heart. By the end of the story, Camille is dying, but she talks of being so very grateful, because even though she has gone through so much loss, she found love along the way, and that is all that she could have asked for.
B) "December never felt so wrong, they were not where they belonged. But one thing was as it should. They were in each others arms. As they floated up to the heavens, leaving the mess of what was left of them, one thing was the same. Love was alive, even if they weren’t." This quote shows that even though the situation is a mess, Camille handles it with grace and optimism.
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A) During my story I struggled with the literary element of plot, in my opinion. I felt as if I kept having different plots.
B) When I first started revising my story, it had a ton of climaxes, the first one was Camille losing her leg, which she never really dealt with. Then it goes to her being in a concentration camp, which she gets out of and I didn't make that as big of a deal as it should have been. Finally, when Camille and Alexandre find that his house is destroyed, that problem is immediately shown a solution. Instead of having many different small plots, I needed one big one, with a big solution. I re-wrote half of my story to fix this. Now, my story represents the climax near the end of my story, and isn't completely fixed, and doesn't have a happy ending, which I am proud of. No body gets a happy ending.
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Revisions 1: Changing the plot of my story
As I talked about earlier, I re-wrote the second part of my story. To do this I had to think of a way to leave the reader with some sort of contentness about what happens. Everyone always thinks about a happy ending, they are easy to pursue, and write about, but the thing is, they never become a reality. So I ended my story with an ending that resolves the conflict but doesn't sound crazy. This makes my story way stronger because it shows that I am not someone who dreams of the impossible.
2: Making sure that each new speaker had it's own paragraph
When I finished my first draft of my story, I was very confident in my punctuation. Ever since I was little I was very confident of my spelling abilities, and they were fine. But my punctuation wasn't. I didn't know about the rule of having a new paragraph for each speaker. This rule does make complete sense to me though. This shows the reader how to not get lost in the words on the page and I think that it can help to make the story easier to read.