Sunrise Over Fallujah

by Walter Dean Myers

While Robin “Birdy” Perry, stationed in Kuwait, waits to be shipped out to Iraq, he writes a letter (dated February 27, 2003) to his uncle, Richard Perry, who fought in Vietnam. Birdy, who grew up in Harlem and measures 6'2", is assigned to the “Civil Affairs” unit, along with Charles Jones (“Jonesy”), a fellow African-American from Stone Mountain, Ga., with dreams of starting a blues joint, and Marla Kennedy, a “tall blond” from Dix Hills, N.Y., with a sharp edge due to growing up in foster homes. Their job, as Jonesy puts it, is to trail behind the fighting soldiers, “making friends with anybody they don’t kill.” It’s a complicated task that they perform well, for the most part, and their success takes them into increasingly murkier waters. Birdy and his team, in their precarious position of aspiring peacekeepers in the “rebuilding” efforts, makes readers privy to the most treacherous areas of the war. After a U.S. military raid on a well-to-do family’s home in the Old City section of Baghdad, Civil Affairs is making apologies when Marla discovers a wooden tub full of flour in the kitchen that conceals a horde of detonators; Birdy saves one of the American medics from nearly getting raped in a hospital; and Birdy’s group comes to the aid of kidnapped children who play a surprising role in tribal and military negotiations. Nothing is as simple as it first appears. Myers, who fought in Vietnam and lost a brother there, published Fallen Angels (Scholastic, 1988) about the Vietnam War, narrated by Richard Perry (Birdy’s uncle). The author said that he wrote Sunrise because of his “disappointment that we’re still having wars…. We haven’t learned anything” (from an interview in Curriculum Connections, 15 May 2008). There is no romanticized war here, and there is nothing simple about it. No one is fully bad or fully good. The most remarkable quality these two teen heroes—Birdy (from Sunrise) and Richie (from Fallen Angels)—share is their ability to retain a kind of innocence in the face of temptations to give in to their basest instincts in order to survive.