Blog 10A

Book: Sunrise Over Fallujah
Author: Walter Dean Myers
Pages read this week: 89
Pages read this semester: 1421
Weekly Style: Quotation
Summary
The troops are feeling the heat of the sun and war as anything can kill them. They do not want to get out of Green Zone. Robin receives a letter from home and thinks that he lacks valor. A marine patrol vehicle is wasted by an IED. One of the soldiers, Victor receives a dead monkey as a gift from somebody in Wyoming. The First Squad names it Sergeant Yossarian. The monkey accompanies them everywhere. The first squad helps out some Iraqis who were injured in an air strike. Few days later, they hold a soccer game with the kids of that place. Jonesy and Sergeant Harris almost got into a fistfight. Random changes and rules were not helping the soldiers. And Pendleton gets killed in another ambush later, saddening the whole unit, especially Robin.

“It’s hard to be brave when you can stumble across a world of hurt any corner, where dying becomes so casual you don’t even notice sitting it next to you.”
Robin Perry is remarking about valor and new developments in war after receiving a letter from home. He is trying to present a real picture of the sophistication that had recently entered into the Iraq War and how it affected the state of mind of a soldier. The beauty of this sophistication is its simplicity. Simple and homemade weapons like IEDs are getting on nerves of the greatest army in the world there. You may think that you are safe, but death can be hovering overhead. And as a soldier, you are not sure if you will be ever back alive. The thought of dying in an actual full-fledged war can and does make a soldier proud of him serving his motherland. But, in Iraq, it is a proxy war, a hidden war. Death can come in any form. But just like Vietnam, Iraq is becoming a burden. Not just a financial burden, but a moral and mental one too. Soldiers don’t know who is friend and who is foe. They are unsure about the plans and motives. And to add fuel to the fire, the apprehension of an untimely ambush and death gives a strong setback to their morale.