ABSTRACT
The above quote dramatizes how war complicates the meaning for which its warriors fight. When the soldier writer of this letter keeps returning to the civilian’s reaction to his actions, he reveals a genuine confusion. And, in his appeal for understanding, he voices a cry for absolution. To understand such a writer is to follow Samuel Hynes’s dictum that to “understand humankind’s most violent episodes, we must understand them humanly, in the lives of individuals. . . . to give names and faces and feelings to the anonymous armies and so to discover what it was really like to be there, where the actual killing was done” (Hynes 1997, xvi).
