Battle Company is Out There

Battle Company is Out There
By Elizabeth Rubin


1. Does the writer hold your attention through a long article? If she does, how did she do it? If not, why?

- No, I wasn’t that interested to finish the entire article because the writer has used a very boring style of writing this feature. It has a very interesting topic but she failed to illustrate the story lively that I wanted to throw it away when I was just at the third page. War, especially if you are where it is happening, is an exciting story to tell, but without using appropriate words to arouse the excitement among readers then the experience would just go to waste.


2. Quote the most vivid and vigorous sentences in this feature.

- When Kearney’s moment of decision came, two of 2nd Platoon’s sergeants, Kevin Rice and Tanner Stitcher, had been shot, and the fight was still going on. Kearney could see a woman and child in the house. “We saw people moving weapons around,” Kearney told me. “I tried everything. I fired mortars to the back side to get the kids to run out the front. I shot to the left, to the right. The Apache” – an attack helicopter – “got shot at the left. Kept asking for a bomb drop, but no one wanted to sign off on the collateral damage of dropping a bomb on a house.” Finally, he said “we shot a javelin and a tow” – both armor-piercing missiles. “I didn’t get shot at from there for two months,” Kearney said. “I ended up killing that woman and that kid.”


3. Write this feature as straight news, 100 words maximum.


- More American soldiers are being killed as the Korengal Valley is raided to defeat Afghan insurgents. In the last two years, American soldiers have increased their presence in the Kunar province but Korengal was tougher than Iraq that lieutenants and captains can’t leave their posts at night in fear that enemies would attack and wash them all off.

The absence of Afghan government made the American’s work harder. Afghans were protecting the insurgents like Los Angeles people would as compared by Kearney, “And were the L.A.P.D. kicking doors, arresting guys, demanding for information about gangs. But we’ve angered them for so many years that they’ve decided ‘I’m gonna stick with the anticoalition militants, who are my brothers and I’m not gonna rat them out.”

After the 9/11 bomb attack the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have used bombs more than the ground troops and as a result the deaths of innocent civilians increase along with the number of dead American soldiers.