Zeitoun-First Blog

For my first blog post I want to discuss the confusion about the "armed man". Throughout the novel we have seen Zeitoun come across many armed men and they always leave the reader confused. The first time we saw these men they were in fan boats and were completely ignoring Zeitouns waves and pleas. We have also saw them when he went to find help for the neighbors at the Claibourne house and had a very strange interaction with the first set of men and then was let down by the second set of men. Finally in the last passage we read the reader is left with a cliffhanger as Zeitoun and Nasser are held at gunpoint by these "armed men".
I really don’t understand who they are, if they are good or bad, and what their intentions are. It’s frustrating to me that they are mysterious and unexplained thus far in the novel. The interactions Zeitoun has with them don’t make sense and seemed to have a much deeper meaning. I gues that Dave Eggers is trying to keep the reader confused just like Zeitoun was when it was happeneing. I have my own thoughts about what is going on but who knows if I am remotely close. I am not sure how deep to go about thinking about this difficulty because I don’t want make up a ton of conspiracy theories and then find out it was a simple explanation to why things were so strange. I am assuming by the end of this book my difficulty in understanding what is going on with these armed men will be explained.
The reason why I feel that these interactions are so strange is that in a disaster such as this that these “armed men”, if they are soldiers or police man should trying to do everything in their power to help others. If they are not trying to help people then what are they doing? There can only be so many officers trying to take control over the looters so I feel that most of the officers should go to helping the victims. With the first incident of the fan boats I assumed that the officers just couldn’t hear Zeitoun and his friends because the boats could be loud or they were on a mission but then the second incident was just plain strange. I don’t understand why the officer in the second incident was so verbally hostile, what was he hiding? What is he afraid of? Then there was the third incident where the police officer didn’t really seem to care about what was going on. Like I said there is a possibility that all of these situations could have a reasonable excuse but to me it seem like Eggers is foreshadowing something deeper.
I am curious to see how this all turns out and I am sure that with Part 2 ending on such a cliffhanger that the next part will talk about these incidents substantially.