38 pages • 1 hour read
Patricia McCormickNever Fall Down
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
The children get a new black shirt and pants twice a year, and they are only allowed to wash in the pond every six weeks. At first, the boys are curious to peak at the girls but Arn soon realizes it’s not like he imagined: “[T]hese girl, they not like the apsara dancer with round breast carved on temple. They like old women. All bone. Skin like paper. Some with hair falling out. The boy see this, they don’t want to look anymore” (98).
Arn sees more infighting between the Khmer Rouge soldiers. A new leader takes Sombo away, but after that leader is deposed, another leader sets Sombo free. Sombo lets Arn listen to his radio; the voice of Angka says the country is preparing for a great harvest, but Arn knows that both the rice crop and the child laborers are sick and dying. The Voice of America reports that Vietnamese soldiers are entering the country and Arn is excited because he thinks these “devil soldier” might be able to rescue him (103).
Arn is given more duties by the Khmer Rouge. At night, when he buries the corpses, he is now made to urinate on them. Arn recoils from this shameful act but he does not have a choice. Arn becomes an assistant to a camp leader and delivers messages to another camp on horseback. When a guard refers to Arn as “comrade,” Arn realizes that though he is only thirteen, he is becoming Khmer Rouge.
Chapter 8 Summary
The radio reports that the war with the Vietnamese has begun and the camp turns into chaos. Children who haven’t escaped are strapped with bullets and given guns. Arn considers running but realizes he has no family or friends except Kha, Siv and Sombo left. Sombo leads a group of child soldiers called “Little Fish with Big Sting” (111-12). Their mission is to hide in the tall grass and sniff out Vietnamese in the field. Arn suddenly feels patriotic because he is fighting for his country.
Twenty child soldiers go on the first mission, but only six return. Back at camp, the soldiers congratulate each other and say they need more children because the little fish “are good for catching the big fish” (117). Arn realizes that he and his friends aren’t real soldiers, only bait.
After killing enemies in combat and surviving, Arn begins to feel invincible. The child soldiers are given machine guns from the dead Vietnamese but no one shows them how to use them. One of Arn’s friends shoots himself. Arn holds the boy, singing to him until he dies. He is covered in blood, but instead of washing it off, he smears it on his face like war paint.
Chapter 9 Summary
Sombo takes Arn to a new regiment, away from Kha and Siv, and Arn knows he will probably never see his friends again. Sombo looks out for Arn, like a big brother, even when their camp is ambushed, and other children are injured. A girl soldier in their group gets her leg blown off by a landmine, and Sombo pulls Arn away from the blast. This is the first time Arn has encountered a landmine, a “coward weapon,” Sombo says, for making them “afraid every step” (126).
The group marches endlessly from battle to battle, following Angka’s instructions on the radio to head north. They pass another group of soldiers and Arn realizes to his surprise that the girl carrying rice for them is his little sister, Sophea. He sneaks to her camp at night to talk. They are both skin and bones and Sophea looks very ill. Seeing someone he loves brings back Arn’s humanity and gives him hope that more of his family might still be alive: “Long time ago I kill all hope in myself. And live like animal, survive one day, then one day more. Now here is my little sister” (129). He promises he will stay alive and find her when the war is over.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
The paradox of Arn’s situation is that in order for him to continue to live, he must become comfortable with, and even embrace, the horrors of killing and death. This is true for anyone who lives through war, but the sacrifices Arn makes are even more poignant and heartbreaking because he is a child. During his time at the labor camp, Arn buried bodies for the Khmer Rouge but never had to take a life himself. When the war begins, he is armed with an automatic weapon and told to kill the Vietnamese: “All of a sudden I’m Khmer Rouge. These people I hate, now I’m one” (112). Arn has mixed feelings, though, because he has always romanticized war. He thinks back to the times he played soldiers with his little brother, “how we hold our arms like airplane, how we shoot with our finger” (112). When the Vietnamese invade Cambodia, Arn’s hatred is turned from an internal enemy—the Khmer Rouge—to an external one, and he feels a surge of patriotism for his country.
The driving motivation for Arn’s bravery and bloodlust in the war is his feeling that he has nothing to lose. He has been separated from all of his family and friends, even those he met in the camps. He has seen countless people disappear and die and has come close to death himself. The Khmer Rouge punish anyone who maintains an emotional connection to anything other than Angka and the Revolution. At first, Arn only pretended to hide his emotions, but at one point he says that the Khmer Rouge can read his mind. In order to survive he pushes personal feelings, love, and hope so far down inside himself that he thinks he has lost them for good.
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