Gary Paulsen’s feelings regarding war death seem to closely approach rage. “If you watched Coop (a character from Woods Runner) die, you’re never gonna be normal again…It’s stupid that anybody dies in a war. There’s a cruel joke about combat: if you have to describe it to anybody they’ll never get it…if they get it, you don’t have to describe it.”
Speaking from his car on the side of the road leading to his New Mexico ranch, accompanied by a pound dog who “from the side looks intelligent, but when you look straight at him, he looks like Pluto,” Paulsen spoke with intensity of the hideous atrocities of war, and of the incredible spirit of the average soldier. When asked what had surprised him during his research for Woods Runner, the answer was immediate: “the slog, the incredible slog…that these guys kept coming back. The officers treated the guys like crap.” He paused. “Time and again, they stood to. That was the surprise – the courage of the young soldiers. They gave up everything.”
Paulsen may laud the courage and spirit of the average soldier, but he has harsh words for those who commanded them. “Washington … was horrible to his men, arrogant, slave owning …”
“Washington was not much of a general.” Indignation filled his voice as he told the story of Hercules, a man that George Washington shuttled back and forth between the capitol and Mount Vernon in order to keep him a slave – because Washington liked his cakes. A chuckle rose up as Paulsen described how Hercules eventually escaped and began a bakery; Washington’s acquaintances made it a point thereafter to have a "Hercules cake" at every party to which the first president was invited. “Just to grind it in…Washington was not likeable – this was not a man who would go out of his way to be good to his troops. But they believed what they were doing.”
In writing Woods Runner, Paulsen said he tried to show the extent of the atrocities that were common without “ruining the honor of those young men.” Though, in the book, he does hold back from describing the full extent of common war crimes, Woods Runner does contain scenes that depict the incredible brutality of the war “of the Hessians in particular.” He also describes how the British paid the Iroquois to “slaughter the frontiersmen.” He stops, and adds slowly. “Both sides – I’m not saying that the American soldiers were pristine. Things were done on both sides.”
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