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Britney Szeto

Professor Johnson

Writing 2 ACE

24 May 2018

Letter Back Home Analysis

The media portray soldiers of war to just being all about “just medals and scars” (Rise

Against), but the rock band, Rise Against, understands that it’s about more than just that. In order

to show listeners the hardships war veterans of war go through, they dedicated their song “Hero

of War” to war veterans. For this assignment, I translated their song into to a letter from a soldier

going through boot camp explaining what he has seen and heard about soldiers of war. Families

with members in the military or people wanting to get insight into what soldiers go through

during war was the song’s main audience, but changing the genre from a song to a letter changes

the main audience to the families of soldiers going through boot camp.

There are many different genres I could have translated this song into, for example: a

children’s book, a news article, or a recipe, but I chose to translate the song into a letter, because

I felt a letter made the most sense. If I translated the song into a children’s book, the book would

have been too gory-filled, into a news article would not capture the whole meaning behind the

song since it would only focus on only one part of the song, or into a recipe would not get the

whole meaning behind the song. With the song as a letter, I was able to capture the whole

meaning behind the song by summarizing each verse of the song. The letter went into deeper

analysis than the song because it was able to give context to each verse by connecting each verse

to a person.
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Writing the letter was tricky, because according to Kerry Dirk’s “Navigating Genres”, I

had to have “an awareness of how genres function by taking what is often quite theoretical in the

field of rhetoric and composition and making it a bit more tangible” (250). In other words, in

order to manipulate the song to form a tangible letter, I had to understand how the music genre

functioned. In order to understand how the song followed the music genre, I read the lyrics of the

song like how Mike Bunn explains in his article “How to Read Like a Writer”, by “carefully

[examining] the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide

if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing” (72). To do this, I

understood the song better by reading the lyrics of the song, verse by verse, and it was only then

did I realize that each verse was related to a different event.

The first verse of the song relates to the time when the soldier was being recruited during

the enlisting period. I was able to convert the lines, “He said, ‘Son/ Have you seen the world?/

Well what would you say/ If I said that you could?/ Just carry this gun/ You’ll even get paid’”

(Rise Against) from the song into “Do you remember when we went to the recruiter’s office

together and the recruiter told me I could get paid to travel the world just by holding a gun?

Well, it turns out I get to do that after graduating from boot camp.” With this translation, I was

able to keep the meaning behind these lines regarding the soldier’s recruitment. In the last part

of the verse, the song talks about what usually happens in boot-camp, “Black leather boots/ Spit-

shined so bright/ They cut off my hair/ […] We marched and we sang/ We all became friends”

(Rise Against), and so, I was able to use these lines to explain in the letter how the soldier made

new friends and got a haircut. With this verse, I used one of the writing conventions of a letter to

explain to the soldier’s friend how everyday life was and the things the soldier has done.
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In the second verse, the song talks about Iraq soldiers following their commander’s

orders of raiding small cottages to arrest the enemies, causing the soldiers to, often times, forget

the person they are arresting has family and friends, “We took him away/ A bag over his face/

From his family and his friends” (Rise Against). In this verse, the lines, “We beat him with guns/

And batons not just once/ But again and again” (Rise Against) talked about the human rights

violations that American soldiers committed towards prisoners in the Iraq war, which was

translated into the third paragraph of the letter to be about the soldier’s friend’s dad’s time

oversea in the Iraq war. This paragraph in the letter used the writing convention shown in letters

from soldier’s in boot camp of introducing people they have met.

In the third verse, the song talks about a soldier accidentally firing at a woman who was

surrendering, “So I lifted my gun/ And I fired away/ […] That the blood now had soaked/ She

collapsed with a flag in her hand/ A flag white as snow” (Rise Against). The soldier fired at the

surrendering woman because he couldn’t risk her being a suicide bomber and harming his camp.

This verse flowed into the last chorus,“And I brought home that flag/ Now it gathers dust/ But

it’s a flag that I love/ It’s the only flag I trust” (Rise Against), explaining how the soldier brought

home the flag the surrendering woman was holding because he has lost faith in his country and

now only believes in peace. I translated this verse into the second paragraph of the letter to be

about a drill sergeant that is traumatized by this event because it kept the meaning behind the

verse of a soldier committing this traumatic act and losing faith in his country. I chose to write

about a drill sergeant because they have a lot of influence on soldiers in boot camp and they are

one of the most intense people soldiers meet in boot camp, so it would seem likely that they

could have had a troublesome past. Since the drill sergeant has lost faith in his country, with the
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role of being a drill sergeant he is able to have influence on the soldiers he is training so they do

not commit the same mistakes he did and therefor the soldiers keep their faith in their country.

Since the song and letter are in different formats, it was difficult to transfer every line

because the ways of writing each one are different. In order to translate the song into a letter

from a soldier in boot camp, I needed to look at example of letters from soldiers in boot camp.

Although every letter is different, the soldiers often use the same writing conventions in their

letters: how everyday life is going, things they’ve done, and people they’ve met. After seeing

how a standard letter was structured, I was able to translate the song into the same format. With

the song and letter in different formats, the song written in poem form, with each line flowing to

tell a story, and the letter written as an essay, I summarized each verse of the song to translate to

a paragraph in the letter. From doing this assignment of translating genres, I learned that a

different genre means different writing conventions, formats, and audiences.

Works Cited

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,Volume 2.

Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor, 2011. pp 72.

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,Volume 1.2010. pp 250.

Rise Against. “Hero of War.” Appeal to Reason, The Blasting Room, 2009.

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