The Bits They Leave Behind

The description in this story is good and the characters are fine. There's plenty of emotion. That being said, I'm not sure this story really is a story. There's a definite feeling involved, which is a pervasive sense of gloom and sadness. There's also a definite point- the futility of war, the waste of lives in their prime, and so forth. There doesn't seem to be enough attention paid to structure, though. The story is interrupted, seemingly randomly, by more description of a battlefield after war, some of which is repetitive. Also, the ending point seems arbitrary. The main thing that bothers me about it is that it seems to be a moral without a story. Everything in the story seems somehow inevitable. He must go to war. His father, of course will want him to stay. His girlfriend, of course, will cry. Of course he will pop the question before he leaves, so he will have her love to think about when things get bad. Of course she says yes, who wouldn't? The only part that isn't obvious in advance is the part in the bar, mainly because it doesn't seem to logically follow. The writing is heart wrenching, to be sure, but I don't see the story in it. The tiny glimpse of conflict I saw- where the father holds on to the son- isn't real conflict because the character has to go anyway. If there is no freedom of choice for the characters there can be no real conflict, therefore no drama. There is also no plot per se. By that I mean there is no conflict-tension-resolution arc, etc. If he had even thought about trying to avoid the draft, if the girlfriend had even considered not accepting his proposal, or if the father had turned away from him instead of clinging to him, there would be a story. I think this has a lot of potential. The writer should maybe focus on getting a structured storyline and some real conflict or tension in the story. Also, the passages about the wasteland would be more intense if they were condensed with some of the redundancy edited out. Repetition usually weakens prose unless it's done very skillfully. Overall, I'd read a second draft of this if one is posted.