Spin

“All that peace man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.”

                I think what this means is that while the soldier was in AWOL (Absence Without Leave) he was at peace. Hitting it on with a nurse and getting everything he wanted. He thought he knew peace, but once he came back to the war ready for combat he realized it wasn’t really peace. It wasn’t peace while his mates were out there in the war, possibly getting killed while he knew that it wasn’t fair. Peace is freedom from disturbance, and while his body was resting, his mind wasn’t. The peace he felt then wasn’t really there. Back in the battlefield wasn’t peace either because it was still war, there was still fear and pain and grief. Peace then would be defined as something that has absence of conflicts, but there can be conflicts within the mind while not physically, so then peace would practically be nonexistent. It only comes with death because both your mind and body are now free from everything; every wound, every thought, every conflict is now lost into death. I think this relates to the war in the sense that it changes the soldier’s perspective of peace, because they gain a new definition for it. They realize that peace is something harder to achieve than they thought, and that peace could also be war’s greatest lie. Because war brings death and death eventually brings peace, but post-war or out-of-war life isn’t the same as death. Post-war or out-of-war life could be the farthest thing from peace, because while your body isn’t at war, all those things you went through, all those feelings, wounds, and horrible sights will be engraved in your heart and mind. I think that what O’Brien could be saying about the war is that once you see it and you experience it, the rest of your life will never be the same and what you thought was peace before was a lie, and you’ll want to hurt that lie back.