Riverbend Blog

The Riverbend blog really opened my eyes to how different things were from the way I expected in Iraq during the war. When we had a former marine guest speaker, I also realized that in many ways reality was different from my expectations. What really struck me about the blog was the feeling of community between Iraqi civilians, even though there were so many differences among them about what should be done politically. All of the chaos and hardship brought the civilians together, and it actually made it seem like the civilians were able to cope with everything better even than American soldiers were. I think this is because they had that internal support for each other, which, from the literature we've gone through in the course, didn't really seem like the case for soldiers. Soldiers are taken out of the social environment they grew up in or were familiar with, and are put into a more rigid hierarchy in which they are expected to meet certain ideals of masculinity and even hide a lot of their humanity. On top of the exceptionally awful things they have to witness, soldiers may also be less able to handle emotional and physical distress because they are expected not to show it or talk about it. This problem would continue when American soldiers return to civilian life, being further isolated from others by their experience of war. On another note, the girl from the blog also had an entertaining habit of calling American media out on inconsistencies and things that they were flat out wrong on. I'm not sure how old she was, but she had a really good grasp of many political and social situations, and was very informative on many subjects other than the war. She especially seemed to know a lot about America. I'd love to go through the rest of her blog, and I plan to show it to others to read as well.