Similarly to most other people, Addario experiences many different conflicts within her life regarding her work and personal life, but considering her career, one wrong decision can be the difference between life and death. One specific conflict arises when she returns to Istanbul after the soldier’s mission in Afghanistan. The blindness that many people possess to the conflicts occurring around them simply because they have never experienced it themselves evokes quite a bit of introspection on Addario’s part, as seen when Peter asks about her latest mission. Although she witnessed the events, Addario had no idea how to relay them to someone who watered the whole situation down to only her near death experiences, which is emphasized when Addario thinks, “And suddenly I felt as if words were completely inadequate to describe what we had endured” (Addario 188). She has so many rich memories, yet due to the limited experiences the audience have, they cannot comprehend the dire situation in the strife-striken countries that Addario photographs. To help communicate the feeling of having a loss of words to the audience, Addario continues the paragraph by asking several rhetorical questions with heavy imagery about how she would articulate the intense emotions she felt on the combat zone. While most readers have not experienced war like she has, they can relate to the inability to convey a certain message or topic to someone who does not listen and cannot understand, which is ubiquitous.
In my own life, I sometimes have trouble communicating with other people because I have such different experiences from most people whom I meet, which aligns to Addario’s challenge with talking to those who didn’t experience the war zone with her. I’ve already mentioned the slight cultural conflict in Japan due to their tendency to shun outsiders a little bit in my passion blog, but I hope to inform my audience of what they’re getting into when they travel to certain countries in terms of national conflict so they have a better idea of the history and a more collective view of the nation rather than just the pleasing scenery.