Regarding the Pain of Iwo Jima

            In war, people do not think of “the other” as real people with families and their own lives because it would make fighting them almost unbearable for a moral person.  In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag writes, “It is easier to think of the enemy as just a savage who kills, then holds up the head of his prey for all to see.”  Sontag is saying that when we think of those that die on the “other” side we think of them as not the same as us.  We picture them instead as a savage because that makes it easier to justify the murder of them.  If you sit back and think about war and the tens of millions of deaths that coincide with it, it is really astounding the brutality that humans do to each other.  You have to wonder how it is possible for people to kill that many people just like themselves.  The answer is that they do not think of them like themselves, but as savages.  In Letters From Iwo Jima this concept is illustrated in two ways.  The first is when the American soldier burns alive the Japanese soldier in the tunnel with a flamethrower, and then attempts to kill the others with a grenade.  The Japanese subsequently capture him and they beat and stab him to death.  While they are doing this one of the Japanese soldiers yells at him, “So you thought you could blow us up, or burn us alive, did you?”  These brutalities on both sides I believe highlight the mutual feelings towards each other that they think of each other as savages.  Perhaps an even better example is when Shimizu says, “I don't know anything about the enemy. I thought all Americans were cowards. I was taught they were savages.”   These sentences show that his leader understood the concept that in war people think of the “other” not as real people with real lives because it would make it harder to kill them.  Since he understood that he told those under his command that the “other,” in this case the Americans, were savages so that they would succeed in battle.