A Personal War
Joyce Adams Burner, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 3/3/2009
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Listen to Walter Dean Myers introduce and read from Sunrise Over Fallujah
Body counts, peace negotiations, troop deployments, deadly skirmishes—the drumbeat of war thrums through the media, colors conversations, and permeates politics. The continual coverage numbs us to the tragedy of war, and tempts us to hold it at an impersonal arm’s length. But here’s the catch—it’s not impersonal at all. Just ask the Iraqi mother, searching local morgues for her son’s body. Or the teenager that has only known life as an Army brat. It’s a very personal war. Recent titles for teens and tweens engage varied literary forms to explore war’s heroism, chaos, ethics, and ambiguities through individual stories.
Crisis in the Middle East
U.S. military families endure multiple and prolonged deployments of both regular and National Guard troops. Deborah Ellis investigates their experiences in Off to War: Voices of Soldiers’ Children (Groundwood, 2008), a collection of interviews with about 40 Americans and Canadians, aged 6 to 17, with one or more parents in Iraq or Afghanistan. They speak candidly of missing their parents and fearing for their safety, and of the difficulties of restoring family relationships, including the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder and physical abuse. They also express pride in their family members’ service and courage, although many state they have little idea why the war is being waged in Iraq. These provocative voices will offer frank insights to civilian students, and assure soldiers’ children that they are not alone in their stressful experiences.
“It was all pretty confusing. We had been attacked. The guys who had fired on us didn’t know us, and we didn’t know them. I thought of them getting up in the morning and having their breakfast. Perhaps they had talked about the war. Perhaps they had imagined themselves fighting heroically against us. Now they were dead and the meaning of it was somewhere in the thin smoke that rose over the buildings.” Birdy Perry, 18, is in the first wave of troops invading Iraq in 2003, in Walter Dean Myers’ novel Sunrise Over Fallujah (Scholastic, 2008), a powerful, nuanced portrayal of the heroics and confusion of war. Ugly realities of life on the front are woven through deft character development and consideration of the shifting ethics encountered in battle. Explore its themes of lost innocence, the nature of heroism, the combat experience of women soldiers, and pair it with Myers’ companion novel, Fallen Angels (Scholastic, 1988) to compare and contrast the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
“I knew all about 9/11, but I felt like it was my generation’s responsibility to do something about it,” so Ryan Smithson, facing high school graduation with no real plans and a hazy sense of patriotism, enlisted in the Army Reserves. His memoir, Ghosts of War (HarperTeen, April 2009), recounts his basic training and subsequent deployment to Iraq at age 19 with an engineering unit. Written in straightforward, often blunt prose, this compelling read traces Smithson’s transformation from a naïve idealist (“When Heather asked me why I would join the army in a time of war, I shrugged my shoulders and told her it just seemed like the right thing to do”) into a hardened, experienced GI who reflects on the conflicting ethics, loyalties, and responsibilities at play in a combat zone. Discussion starters abound, such as a scene where Smithson scavenges burned-out Humvees for armor, discovering blood stains and bits of human flesh in the wreckage, and another when his convoy first crosses into Iraq, tense with orders to shoot any children who throw rocks at them and bewildered to find empty-handed kids begging for food instead. Always careful to explain Army jargon, Smithson packs his story with mundane details of military life including tasteless meals, uncomfortable accommodations, mind-numbing boredom broken by hair-raising close calls, scatological Army humor, and the fierce bond of brotherhood shared with his fellow soldiers. Ghosts of War will prompt students to examine their own preconceptions of war and patriotism, and may lead them to collect oral histories from veterans they know.
Whose War Is It, Anyway?
Italian artist Gipi portrays three young loners drifting across a desolate, wartorn Balkan landscape in his graphic novel Notes for a War Story (Roaring Brook, 2007). Scavenging food and shelter, the boys fall in with criminal boss Felix and collect extortion money for him. Understated oil drawings depict the boys’ bleak existence, lured by money and violence. Themes of social class differences, identity, manhood, and a recurring visual metaphor of headless men will stir discussion with older teens. Consider the question raised by narrator Giuliano, “Christian, Little Killer, and I found a lot of things to discuss: the nightclub, the bombs, and what determines whether or not you believe a war is your war.”
Lessons from World War II
Historical novels about World War II address similar questions with the added dimension of hindsight. Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s The Boy Who Dared: A Novel Based on the True Story of a Hitler Youth (Scholastic, 2008) recounts the actual case of Helmuth Hübener, a Hamburg teen arrested for writing and distributing anti-Hitler pamphlets. Narrated in flashbacks from the cell where Hübener, 17, awaits his execution, the story depicts the dynamics of his family, controlled by a Nazi stepfather and riddled with resentment and fear, and follows the teen as he abandons his early devotion to the Führer, encounters the Holocaust, and dares to take a stand. Invite students to reflect on Hübener’s courage and idealism, and react to his older brother’s comment in the afterword, “I was also angry at Helmuth. He should have known better than that…He knew the laws of the land. A sixteen-year-old boy cannot change the government.”
William Durbin’s The Winter War (Random, 2008) features the 1939 invasion of Finland by the USSR. Marko, 14, joins the Finnish army as a messenger, skiing expertly behind the lines despite a polio-weakened leg. The rugged descriptions of night missions and artillery bombardments in a frigid terrain contrast sharply with the resourceful determination and courage of the Finnish people resisting assault. Explore The Winter War for themes of courage under fire and personal strength against impossible odds, especially portrayed by Marko’s sullen partner Karl, who hides the secret of her gender. Discussions of true patriotism will be sparked by the response of the Finnish villagers who must finally cede their land to the Russians to end the conflict.
Women Warriors
“I was born to be a WASP, and that is part of who I am. But I was also born to be Ida Mae Jones, that skinny little colored girl who learned to fly her father’s airplane over the fields of her hometown.” Ida Mae is fighting in two different wars in the 1940s, in Sherri L. Smith’s Flygirl (Putnam, 2009). Making it into the controversial Women Airforce Service Pilots, she supports the U.S. effort in World War II as a test pilot and by ferrying planes around the country, freeing up male pilots for combat. It’s hard enough to be accepted as a female pilot, but she also hides her African-American ethnicity and passes for white—a dangerous act in Jim Crow Texas, but it's the only way she can fly. Great character development and well-crafted aviational thrills and spills make this readable novel prime for discussions of women’s rights and race relations, offering no easy answers or neat resolutions.
Tweens will find The Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson (Dutton, 2008) an irresistible story of adventure and friendship set against the building tensions of impending war in 1939. Tally, 11, and her classmates at the progressive Delderton boarding school see a newsreel about the tiny (and fictitious) European kingdom of Bergania, whose king defies Hitler’s demands to march through his land. The students travel to Bergania for a folk dance festival, and when the king is assassinated, they smuggle Karil, the 12-year-old Berganian crown prince, back to England in an exciting chain of close escapes. The Dragonfly Pool is written in a warmly classic, eloquent manner, treating themes of social class, friendship, good and evil, patriotic loyalty, and personal destiny.
The Big Picture
War Is…: Soldiers, Survivors, and Storytellers Talk About War (Candlewick, 2008) compiles 20 pieces on the subject of war, edited by Marc Aronson and Patty Campbell. The collection includes essays, memoir, letters, and fiction, ranging from “The War Prayer” by Mark Twain to “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan to the nuanced “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” an interview with army chaplain Lyn Brown who served in Iraq. Columns by Ernie Pyle and first-person accounts of Vietnam and Nagasaki, as well as World War I letters, provide historical viewpoints, while Helen Benedict’s “Women at War: What It Is Like to Be a Female Soldier in Iraq” lends a very current perspective. Of particular interest to high school juniors and seniors is Bill Bigelow’s eye-opening “The Recruitment Minefield” about the often-misleading tactics used to recruit students. War Is… pushes no particular agenda, but looks war squarely in the face without blinking at the brutality and heroics of the combat experience.
Listen to Walter Dean Myers introduce and read from Sunrise Over Fallujah
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