Sunrise over Fallujah

In a book I read last year, Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers, you can clearly get what its like to be in a war zone. The book is actually hard to read at some points because it is so descriptive. It’s always an emotional part of a book when a good friend of the main character dies. I almost felt like I was there with everybody fighting. It was definitely a page turner and throughout the book you could always find tears, hurt, anger, sorrow and death. You learn to be more thankful for what you have back and home and you realize how lucky you are after you read it and see what they go through.
In Sunrise over Fallujah also by Walter Dean Myers, you can see what it would really be like to be in a war and you learn not to take for granted what you have. Robin’s main exterior conflict is actually pretty obvious. He is in a war against the Iraqis. And he knows that he might be killed at any second. The war is looking in Americas favor but they Iraqis do have advantages. The Americans have rules of engagement. They are only allowed to shoot at someone if they appear to be a threat or if they shoot first. The Iraqi soldiers don’t have any rules of engagement at all. They can shoot whoever they want to shoot and kill whoever they want to kill and nobody is going to stop them. This makes it even worse for robin knowing that he is basically fighting an army of radicals. Robin’s main interior conflict is that he is terrified of the war. He wants to go home and leave it all behind but he knows he can’t do that. He has to stay and fight and work through all the pain he is enduring from loss of close friends he has gained along the way.
At the beginning of the book Robin was excited to leave home and go to the army to show his dad that he is the one who controls his life. Later on in the book you learn that robin used to always ask his uncle who was in a war what it was like to be in the Vietnam War. His uncle never wanted to talk about it. Once he gets into war and learns that war is brutal and that he shouldn’t take for granted what he had back at home.
I thought this book was excellent and would recommend this book to anybody who likes intense, deep war books.