and only went through the motions of carrying the guns and the generals disregarded the soldiers' exhaustion. The soldiers generally believed the army didn't see them as people and that "they don't care if you live or die here [the infirmary]. All they want is to get you back where you can stop a bullet". Mailer described The Naked and the Dead as "'an odyssey of fear, exhaustion, and death,'" and presents the natural world as "uncaring, unyielding, implacable, and occasionally, beautiful." He adds insights into soldiers, like Martinez, in this context. Mailer writes that on his scouting mission, "Martinez was functioning more like an animal than a human." Mailer also distils how dehumanizing the enemy was an essential aspect to the structure of war. Mailer writes, "Martinez had a sense of unreality . . . They were men. The entire structure of war wavered in his brain for a moment." Mailer concludes the platoon's climb of Mount Anaka, reinforcing the loss of the individual within war, writing that "[the soldiers] did not think of themselves as individual men any longer. They were merely envelopes of suffering. They had forgotten about the patrol, about the war, their past, they had even forgotten the earth they had just climbed." Loneliness: Loneliness acted as an equalizer among soldiers and officers during the Second World War. Despite divisions of rank, economic, political, sexuality, or class, loneliness was a universal phenomenon among soldiers and officers during the Second World War. Furthermore, this factored into the construction of brotherhood in wartime. In The Naked and the Dead, Goldstein feels a connection and a sort of alliance with Roth in their Jewish heritage. Although the men in the platoon do have a sense of brotherhood with one another, they still feel alone during their deployment. Throughout the novel, the men long for women and deeper friendships. Roth, for example, wishes to have someone whom he “could talk to seriously.” He realizes that he doesn’t know his own comrades very well, since everyone he met when he initially entered the Army was either killed or reassigned. The men degrade women through the narrative; however, the absence of women factors into their reaction to disparage women, whose presence on the front lines was limited. Death: The men are faced with unexpected deaths, such as Hennessey's, Wilson, Hearn, Roth, and Gallagher’s wife who dies during childbirth. It is clear