The romanticism of war is separate and opposed to the romanticism of life. They cannot exist at the same time. War means death and destruction and life is the opposite. There is a constant clash between the love of decency: courage and devotion towards one's fellow men, and the love of life free from the horrors of war. War, and all the things that prompt it, are inherently evil. Beliefs in heroism, honor, and dignity are all idealistic. For the soldier on the battlefield his only goal is self-preservation. The only way soldiers can persevere despite the horrific chaos of war is through brotherhood among soldiers. This connection does not negate the hypocrisy of war; instead, it allows men to survive. Brotherhood is love for the sake of self-preservation. Basically, war dehumanizes people and one cannot have love for life if they are less than human. War is a machine that extracts young men and women from reality. It distorts their morals until they no longer know what is right and what is wrong. This level of dehumanization and objectification is clearly supported in Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July: “To them he had never been anything more than a thing, a thing to be put on a uniform and trained to kill, a young thing to run through the meat grinder, a cheap little thing from which to make mincemeat” (165). War is the “meat grinder”. Soldiers only matter because they can kill. War tears apart the people who fight it. After the war Kovic doesn't know what to do. It's lost. This aimless feeling is similar to the experiences of Jake and the Gang in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. The protagonist, Jake Barnes, and his entourage wander aimlessly through the streets of Paris and Madrid. After the war, the real... middle of paper......not applicable in reality. This is a problem that Jake, in The Sun Also Rises, faces. He doesn't like his group of friends, is jealous of Cohn, and despises Mike. Stay with them, not out of friendship, but because they share the experience of war. Because of this, the bonds forged have no real value outside of war. In a way, this brotherhood is harmful to the soldiers. It follows them for the rest of their lives. They will never be able to forget the pain of war. More importantly, they cannot fully accept the reality after the war because they are surrounded by people stuck in the same absurd world of war. It is difficult to escape from this absurd reality if you constantly follow it. The so-called "love" between soldiers allows them to survive on the battlefield, but it is yet another hypocrisy of war because it maintains the absurd reality in which they are trapped..