Group discussion #2, ideas.

   While discussing with my group about the book, A Long Way Gone, ideas that were brought up were ideas such as the soldier's use of drugs for energy for the younger soldiers and another idea was the idea that the soldiers only fought the rebels to relieve their pain, but did killing the killers of their family really relieve pain or was "they killed our family" just an excuse.
    In the second chunk of the book A Long Way Gone, Ishmael trains to be a soldier and accomplishes it after running from several villages who either kicked Ishmael and his friends out or Ishmael and his friends decide to leave because they fear that rebels would arrive at that village and devastate another village. Ishmael and his friends lose their family because of a man picking banana leaves who knew the direction to the village but caused the boys to lose their family. The boy's families were supposedly in a village that the boy's nearly arrived at, but the rebels beat them to the village and burned everyone there. They explained that "no one escaped" and that they thought it was fun. The boy's arrive at a different village and are forced to become soldiers to protect the village. They crush the rebels on their first encounters and two of Ishmael's friends die in front of him. This gives him the anger he needs to start being gruesome and cruel. The boys smoke drugs, watch war movies and go to war. This is their life now and they need to do this in order to protect the rest of the people of that village. The plentiful drugs they are given give them energy but makes Ishmael not hungry. In our discussion, we discussed if the drugs were good energy for the soldiers because towards the end of this discussion, the soldiers going to rehab was mentioned and they go crazy after days of not having the drugs they are addicted to. In my opinion, I think the drugs should go away and they weren't good energy for the soldiers even if it gave them energy.
    We discussed how the soldiers turned mean and started to kill. They would have never killed if the high ranking soldiers didn't mention that the rebels killed their parents, which then gave the soldiers a reason to want to kill the rebels. My group mates explained to me that the higher ranking soldiers needed to give the new soldiers a reason to kill the rebels because they really needed the recruits to fight the rebels off. This changed my perspective of the soldiers and why they did this. I believed that they did it to lie to get recruits to kill the rebels, but instead they were fending the rebels off to defend the village occupied by many people whose been separated from their family.
    The discussion allowed me to think differently of the methods of the soldiers and how and why they did what they did.