Personal Research Article, also I'm an insane Harry Potter nerd.

For the article I'm talking about, click here.

This article is entitled Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost, but I'm only really looking at the second chapter Innocence, because the full article is about 233 pages long.

I typed that and went back to the article's tab in Safari and now it wants me to pay for the website, so I'm just going to talk about what I actually got to read.

The first few pages were all about the Vietnam War and how these men where so young that they had to grow up in combat. One quotation stood out to me immediately, "innocence savaged and destroyed". As soon as I read this small phrase, I saw the image of a young boy in an army uniform too big for him with a helmet falling over his eyes shooting a gun. Fighting in a war. And in many ways, I do believe that's what the draft did. It took young boys, not truly even men yet except by the the legal age, and thrust them into what I could only call perdition. I assume that going to war would take every scrap of youthful vitality out of you, leaving an empty shell of a person, totally different from the one that left home. Sorry to be a dork here, but in my mind I relate it back to Harry Potter. For Tom Riddle to become the immortal Lord Voldemort, he had to create these Horcruxes. To do this he had to kill people, in the books it was called 'splitting his soul', I mean that's why he didn't have a nose anymore, because he had dehumanized himself. By making those young boys become soldiers, forcing them to kill, are we not doing the same to them? Dehumanizing and splitting the very soul that keeps them together? I think this article will stick with me because my concentration is about innocence and how you can lose it. Most likely, my next piece when we come back from Christmas will be that small boy who doesn't know what he's doing but is fighting nonetheless.