Anaylsis Essay

Mauricus Webb
Wendy Sumner Winter
September 25, 2007
Analysis Essay
“Prime Directive”
Prime Directive is the ideal story for analysis. There are a couple of themes that work together to make one overall theme. The author, David Griffith, does not support the war in Iraq. Although his actions make you think twice about his standpoints, they are essential to the overall theme.
The story begins the Saturday before Halloween, outside of his nearly empty apartment. His wife has accepted a new job in another state, and he cannot move until the end of the year because of school. This simple setting relates to the war in many aspects. The loneliness and the concept of being separated from family are just a couple of similarities. Griffith proceeds on to talk about the different parties that he attended and his costume of choice. He is dressed as Captain James Kirk of Starship Enterprise. This character plays an important role in the plot of the story. Dave begins to describe the conversations about Star Trek with the other party-goers.
He tells his readers how they relate it to the war in Iraq. “It’s like the United Nations! The Klingons are the Soviet Union! Someone else breaks in, ‘It’s like trying to introduce democracy to Iraq!’ Bush is a war criminal! Iraq is another Vietnam (Griffith, p. 128)!” He brings up the fact that no one seems to mention Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib was where soldiers held Iraq detainees and killed them. They threw their naked bodies on top of each other and left them in the open. The next party again verbally relates something to Abu Ghraib. He uses the rap music and how Outkast has given way to Chingy to help connect to the war. He describes the music video where there are half naked women. “I weigh the blurred faces and genitalia of Abu Ghraib detainees against the near-naked, big-breasted, big-assed women gyrating on the subway (Griffith, p. 130).”
The final party Griffith describes brings everything to a head. He encounters one of his former classmates who is dressed as Charles Grainer, the leader of the massacres in Abu Ghraib. He happily greets his classmate and quickly notices that he has many photos of himself posing with “dead people” with bags over
their heads. Dave then takes a part in it and poses for a similar photo.
The next morning he awakes and recollects on the previous night’s events. He quickly remembers the picture and goes to retrieve it. Soon after, he calls his wife and tells her about the Graner costume. She is horrified and thinks that the man is sick. The next passage explains a lot to the readers. “I decide not to tell her about the picture. I’m too ashamed. I put it in a shoebox in the empty closet and try to forget about it. But I can’t. I lie back down in the army cot and analyze what I’ve done from every conceivable angle (Griffith, p. 134).” He is very disgusted by his actions and is upset with himself. It seems as if this was a humbling experience for him. Soon after, he begins to stereotype soldiers as a whole. “Those soldiers were hicks from the sticks; something in their environment made them this way. Have we come to expect nothing more from people like Graner and England, who we imagine to be from tacky trailer parks in dead-end hollers? Don’t we rest assured that these are the kinds of people who join the army because they are easily manipulated by promises of cars, money for college, patriotism and simply getting the hell out of Nowheresville USA? Educated, metropolitan people could never do such things; we are too
aware, too aware of the ways in which we must respect another’s differences (Griffith, p. 135). Right after he has this confrontation with himself, he soon ties this experience to a previous one. This put everything into perspective. His final analysis sums up all of his observations. “When we deny that we have anything in common with Graner and the others who are pictured in the photos, we allow all that is most despicable and ugly in our nature to thrive. If we are too proud to see ourselves in those photos, to realize that, as Sontag wrote in the New York Times, the photos are us, then we have no hope of finding any meaning whatsoever to them. They will simply haunt us, without any understanding of why (Griffith, p. 136).”
David Griffith takes you through many events over a short period time. His unique way of relating his message to the readers allows him to use metaphors as an essential to making his overall point.