Sunrise Over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers (Scholastic Press, $17.99, 9780439916240/0439916240, 304 pp., ages 12-up, May)
Gallows humor permeates the pages, as the soldiers in Iraq receive "ROE" cards (Rules of Engagement) that change daily. In reply to the standard, "Are you okay?" the retort is, "I'm not shot so I guess I'm okay." The narrative makes reference to the capture of Jessica Lynch, the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue on April 12, 2003, the killing of Saddam's two sons as well as Bush's proclamation of a "Mission Accomplished." 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. By placing Birdy's team in the precarious position of aspiring peacekeepers in the "rebuilding" efforts, Myers 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. No one is fully bad or fully good. Like the ROE cards, the rules are always changing. In perhaps one of the novel's best scenes, the Civil Affairs group goes to visit a tribal leader in Fallujah. The sheik tells Major Scott, who has led them to the sheik's tent, "Sir, the war you began is over. . . . What is going on now is a completely different war. . . . Do you think that people who have lived together for more years than your country has been in existence suddenly find it impossible?" Echoes of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad reverberate through these passages as human foibles play out upon the battlefield. And the image that gives this searching novel its title leaves a lasting impression: "In the distance the bright reddish gold of the Iraqi sunrise began to spread over the horizon . . . The foul smell of the Euphrates River mixed with the sweet odors rising from the sands along its banks, adding texture to the rising sun, like a chorus of strings backing up a sad saxophone. It was just another sunrise over the city that had seen sunrises from long before men wrote history." But this time, the soldier has killed a man, and the sunrise will never look the same to him. Birdy reminds us that, generation after generation, war changes us all, that one man's death is a blow to all humanity--and that once innocence is gone, we can never reclaim it.--Jennifer M. Brown