LWG Ch. 11-12

Wow. This story is the most tragic story I have ever read by far. I felt my hope rise up, even though I knew Ishmael wasn't going to meet his family. And then I felt my hope crash down, as his family was killed in the village by the rebels. That is a very graphic part of the novel. Ishmael's sorrow came clear across to me. He was so close to being reunited with his family, and he is denied that reunion. The way Ishmael describes the amount of bodies just piled up, and the blood oozing from them is very gruesome to me. The part about the woman and child who were on fire was horrible, too.
When Ishmael reaches the village guarded by the soldiers, it kind of strikes me that the soldiers don't treat the villagers very well. Most of the time they make fun of them. The soldiers laugh at Ishmael when he steps into the head of a dead person. One of the soldiers shot some rounds into the air when Ishmael had just started training to scare him. There was also a part where when the soldiers came back from fighting, they just randomly shot some villagers.
When the lieutenant talks about what atrocities the rebels committed upon everyone, I felt extremely disgusted. I never knew they made those people do such things. It is bad enough that they were killing them so gruesomely, but to also pile on the other things is just disgusting. It made me cringe inside when I read these things, which was mostly my reaction to this whole section.