The Comparison
Of War Comes to Willy Freeman
And "The Patriot"

Imagine bullets being shot all around you, people laying dead on what used to be green grass, but what is now a bloody red violent field. As you run across the devil’s territory you trip over something and land in a puddle of blood and just as you look up, to your surprise you see the most terrifying thing that will scar you forever, your own relative goes down. Time stops, everything freezes around you; in slow motion you see the bullet head straight for his chest…BOOM he goes down hard. As he lay there motionless, suddenly, at a snail's pace he turns looks at you and his face locks in place, he is staring at you; never does he blink again. This experience is what scarred Willy Freeman and Benjamin Martin for the rest of their lives.
In the book War Comes To Willy Freeman the main character Willy is constantly searching for her mother ever since she was taken away by the British during the Revolutionary War. The hardest part about finding her mother is that most people she meets aren’t willing to help her because she’s an African American girl, but she’s actually disguised as a boy. Either way during her time period, which was in the late 1700’s so even if she was a boy or a girl it would not matter because people had no respect for blacks.
War Comes to Willy Freeman is similar to the movie “The Patriot” in many different ways; from losing family members in combat to not having a home at times. Benjamin Martin, the main character in the movie, was a soldier in the French and Indian War and is a father of seven kids. Now he is trying to figure out what he is going to do when his son suddenly wants to fight in the war which, so far has caused the whole family nothing but trouble and left them homeless.
Willy and Benjamin both have had many deaths in their families during the war which probably is the reason why neither one of them gives up hope. During the war it was ordinary to see people dying, being hung, or killed which is an awful experience but when you see all those notorious soldiers coming into your home taking away your family and killing them too it would make you extremely furious. This makes you so angry that you could possibly do something idiotic or insane, put you in a situation that could possibly cause you death. Willy Freeman was one of those people that did something incredibly dangerous without thinking twice, but survive, unlike many.
After seeing her father be killed and no knowledge of where her mother was, Willy Freeman set off on a quest to find her mother. When Willy set off, she obviously did not think it through, since she a was an African American girl she had the lowest amount of respect and being as she was a freed slave that could not read, she was not prepared to go venturing all over. Either way you look at it she was a thirteen year-old girl with no sense of direction and determined to get what she set out to find.
On the other hand Benjamin Martin was just as foolish as Willy Freeman. Although Benjamin knew how to read and was indeed more wealthy than Willy, it wasn’t very intelligent to go running after his son who had joined the army and had also been accused as a spy and is taken away to be executed. These events were the events which triggers the journey to find his son and form a militia mostly to get revenge of the general who murdered his second oldest son right in front of Benjamin.
Although both characters Willy and Benjamin were clearly going with the first idea that popped into their heads, they were both involved in the war in different ways but for similar reasons. In “The Patriot” Benjamin is fighting and killing and was a person who was an actual participant in the battle. Willy was just another pedestrian watching from their window as the soldiers marched through the streets and started to conquer land. But in the end both had their victory and had accomplished what they planned.
In my opinion both the book and the movie were great but what started as a war over land turned into a violent and uncaused for battle killing families and burning down churches. So it seems to me that this war was not a good idea in the first place but after learning about it a little bit more, I'm glad that it happened.