Into the Valley of Death Assignment, by Nick Cellino

In his article, Into the Valley of Death, Sebastian Junger attempts to put into words the experience of war that he had when he spent several weeks with Battle Company in the Korengal Valley. His account of the experience, in many ways, mirrors the account of events of the Trojan War in the Iliad. In particular, the way in which Junger attempts to maintain the humanity of the soldiers by giving snippets of their life stories mirrors the way that Homer often tells the story of a soldier and his family before he is struck down. For example, Junger writes about soldiers who turned down college scholarships to join the army and some who simply needed to make a change in their lives because they were heading down a bad path. In this way, when one of these soldiers are wounded or killed, they are not merely considered to be numbers or casualties, but rather humans and fallen comrades. Homer uses the same technique in the Iliad when he goes through and describes a soldier's entire lineage and why he came to be in the war, before he is killed by another soldier. By reminding the audience that every soldier has a story and has friends and a family, the authors make each soldier's death a very significant event, as it should be when a human dies. Without remembering that everyone has a story and friends and a family, it is easy to dismiss the deaths of people you don't know as insignificant.

One way in which the portrayals of war differ heavily is in the way that the soldiers themselves are effected by the war. In Into the Valley of Death, Junger describes how many of the soldiers are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and how one of the soldiers frequently wakes up on his hands and knees, searching for a grenade. This is the more realistic, depressing side of war that we often think about today, but apparently was not really considered during the time period of the Iliad. This is because in the Iliad, soldiers brag about the number of men they have killed and the number of cities they have plundered, and there is seldom mention of any type of remorse on the soldiers' part for the men they have killed. This seems to reflect vast differences in the perception and value placed on human life between our culture today and the culture of Ancient Greece.