So, after reading “Baghdad Burning” I certainly cannot look at this reading exactly as I should. Throughout Burning I constantly sympathized with the Iraqis. Now I am reading about the American soldiers who put the Iraqis through that exact misery. One paragraph in particular that really spoke out to me because it involved this feeling exactly: “We haunt the streets of Balad at midnight, kicking in doors and raiding houses, separating the men from the women and children, flex-cuffing wrists and sandbagging their heads, searching block by block, house to house, in sewage sumps, animal stalls, sacks of flour, searching for all we have left behind– the missing arms, the missing legs, the dead nerves in Bosch’s hand, the blood drained from Miller’s head.” (Turner, 46). All I can say about that it, it is completely brutal.
It is entirely possible that my opinion was swayed by Riverbend but now we will never know. I do know that We would not like it if soldiers invaded our homes and started beating on our fathers if they were unprovoked. The above is a picture of Iraqi homes. They are not the stereotypical huts they live in, they are not the stereotypical huts so many people of our culture perceive them as living in, but they are homes just like ours. They are not too different from us. I was biased regarding my opinion towards this reading but I cannot help. They are by no stretch of the imagination immoral people. They are just national soldiers fighting for their country. But sometimes it is important to learn before fighting for your country.
Turner, Brian. Phantom noise. Farmington, Me.: Alice James Books, 2010. Print.
writingthepolitical 
I can’t help but agree with this post. There are certainly some boundaries now set in my mind that weren’t there before reading Riverbend. Thinking on both sides of the battle is hard, but still, Turner does an excellent job explaining his position and not deeming the common people of Iraq in his efforts. However, that picture of the houses in Iraq aren’t the only houses there, especially in Baghdad. There is desert and crumbled houses. I think that you should have researched a bit more about the photo’s of Iraq, rather than just take the first one off Google…