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JERSEY CITY — Whenever Walter Dean Myers writes a book — and he has written more than 85 of them for children and young adults — he usually asks his wife, Connie, to assemble a collage of related images that he hangs above his desk.
"I like to look up and have my characters looking back at me," Myers says in his home here. The latest collage includes images of the war in Iraq: an explosion, a tank, the desert, a street map of Mosul and pictures of a dozen young U.S. soldiers, all smiling. Their photos, most of them downloaded from the Internet, helped propel Myers' latest novel, Sunrise Over Fallujah (Scholastic, $17.99). Aimed at readers 12 and older, it's set in 2003, at the start of the war, and is narrated by Robin Perry, a 17-year-old Army private from Harlem who writes to his uncle, "I felt like crap after 9/11 and I wanted to do something to stand up for my country." Perry's uncle Richie was the major character in Myers' 1988 novel about the Vietnam War, Fallen Angels (reissued as a $6.99 paperback by Scholastic). "Each generation seems to invent its own reasons for war," says Myers, 70, an Army veteran whose younger brother was killed in Vietnam. One of Myers' sons, a chaplain, and one of his grandsons, a reservist, have served in Iraq. He respects "their sense of mission" but wanted the novel to show how the reality of war "isn't like the recruiting ads that make it seem cool, with fantastic gear." In the novel, Perry is assigned to a Civil Affairs unit aimed at "winning the hearts and minds" of Iraqis. But within months, he's full of doubts: "So how did we know if we were winning or not? And if we weren't winning, what was the dying for?" Myers says his novel was heavily researched and relied on interviews, soldiers' blogs and military "after action" reports. He acknowledges that it probably will be read as an anti-war novel, although, "I don't agree with those who say the war was an horrendous idea from the start." But he has come to see that "America believes what's good for us is good for the world. It's very difficult to understand that that's not necessarily true." Myers joined the Army on his 17th birthday, a "gung-ho" high school dropout. He served three years and saw no combat, but he developed an interest in writing. He noticed a contest for black writers in Writers' Digest, "which I knew didn't have many black readers, so I figured I had a chance." He won first prize: $500, "a lot of money for me then." That led to his first picture book in 1969, Where Does the Day Go? He hasn't slowed down since. He has won two Newbery Honors (in 1989 for Scorpions, about a gang member, and in 1993 for Somewhere in the Darkness, about a boy on the run with his father, an escaped prisoner). In 1998, he shared a Caldecott Honor with his son, Christopher, an illustrator, for their picture book, Harlem. He also has his own collection of vintage photographs, about 10,000 in filing cabinets in his basement. Most of them deal with children and African-American history, "my favorite subjects." Recently, he was browsing in a Harlem shop when he found a scrapbook of photos of the Italo-Abyssinian War, which he had never heard of. Turns out that in 1935, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, the Ethiopians recruited black American pilots to help fight the Italians. Now it's Myers' next book.
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