Passos begins this piece by formatting his words into clumps instead of spacing them normally. This interesting technique immediately drew my attention in. I had to really focus on each word and read them out loud to be able to piece the sentence together. This brought a deeper level of thought to the words that I may not have gotten if they had been formated traditionally. The piece goes on and it immediately takes on a dark tone. The narrator is tasked with making sure the remains of a body do not belong to a “guinea” or a “kike” which are derogatory terms for African Americans, Italians and Jews. The narrator worries, “how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones..” (2346) Besides the obviously disturbing image of a corpse, it is disturbing to see that making sure that the corpse is white is referred to as a guy being a “hundredpercent”. There is this dehumanizing tone that begins to take place in the piece. Names like Richard Roe and John Doe emphasize this impersonal aspect with which human beings seem to treat each other. When a man dies, people no longer mourn the man, but they mourn him as a symbol of the country that he died fighting for. The impersonal tone is brought in again,

“Naked he went into the army; they weighed you, measured you, looked for flat feet, squeezed your penis to see if you had clap, looked up your anus  to see if you had piles, counted your teeth, made you cough, listened to your heart and lungs, made you read the letters on the card, charted your urine and your intelligence, gave you a service record for a future (imperishable soul) and an identification tag stamped with your serial number” (Passos 2348)

First and foremost it is interesting to note the shift from he went into the army to they weighed you. With this shift, the reader begins to see themselves in the situation being described. There are no personal boundaries when they are being evaluated and likely no privacy. It was haunting to make the connection that these kinds of tests and measurements are generally done in doctors offices privately to make sure you are a healthy human being. These tests are to evaluate how useful their bodies are to whatever agenda is being followed. It is completely dehumanizing, they are being treated worse than animals, they are treated like parts of a machine or more specifically, a weapon. They do not even have names, they have numbers. This image seems very disturbing, but Passos takes it even further, “The blood ran into the ground, the brains oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a generation of bluebottle flies…” (2349) Even just reading this makes me cringe, and that is the intended effect.

Many innocent young boys are not told about the horrors of death and war when they are being recruited to fight in war. They are only told how great and brave they could be. They set young men up to need to prove themselves, to thirst for honor, and then they hand them a death sentence. Sure they tell them they will achieve honor, which isn’t a complete lie. However, they leave out that the honor will likely be bestowed on their coffin at their funeral. This piece is a clear statement on the truth behind the dehumanization and animalistic nature of war. Taking on war is not as light as it is made out to be in many situations. PTSD and many other ailments can come from fighting in a war, assuming death doesn’t occur. No one can come back from fighting in a war the same person they were as when they left, and a person has a right to understand that before deciding to fight in a war.