13-14

Luke Beckman
Chapters 13-14

Chapters 13-14 were some of the most violent chapters we have seen yet. They showed how terrible war really is and de-glorified everything about it. It was brutal and disgusting.
Chapter 13 starts with the boys getting there last day off. They are playing soccer in the village, and for the first time in a while Ishmael is having fun. They then go down to the river for a swim when the corporal tells them to head up to the village immediately. They go up to the village and are ordered to service there rifles quickly and get ready to move out. When there are doe, they are told to take as much ammo as they can without weighing them down. They are put into formation, and move out into the woods. They are marching through the woods for a while when the lieutenant tells them to set up an ambush. They hide in the bush and wait. When the rebels come, the lieutenant orders one of them to fire an RPG, but one of the rebels hears it and orders the retreat. The RPG misses them and then the fight begins. At first, Ishmael is unable to fire his gun. He is in to much shock to kill anyone. Then he sees the dead body of a 11 year old who was crying for his mother a bit earlier, and the corporal tells him to start firing back. When he starts, he seems unable to stop. He shot everything that moved until the Lieutenant ordered the retreat. It was at this moment that Ishmael was broken. He didn’t care who he killed anymore, and he had lost his childhood. When they were moving out they took the guns and the ammunition off of there dead friends. When they got back, Ishmael went to sleep, and woke up from a nightmare shooting his AK-47 out his window. They corporal came in and gave him some more white pills, and he could not sleep for another week.
In chapter 14, Ishmael really becomes a killing machine. Under the influence of brown brown and the white pills, he didn’t care anymore about who he killed or how he did it. They went back into the woods on sorties and came back boasting about who they had killed and smoked marijuana. They tried to implement strategies from war movies like Rambo, and seemed to have fun going out to war. In one of the sequences he shoots prisoners that did nothing as a competition. Because Ishmaels prisoner died the quickest, he was promoted to junior lieutenant. After the killing he celebrated it.