Hitler's Panzers
WWII scholar, Professor of History, Colorado College, uses Soldier interviews, archives & other information to demonstrate effectiveness of Armored Warfare as developed by Nazi Germany and pertinent to future warfare.
Beanies For Baghdad Putting Smiles on Faces of Soldiers by putting smiles on the faces of Iraqi & Afghani children and hence the faces of their parents.
Ace Of Spades: Why Language Matters In this article, Ace of Spades demonstrates how the writing style of "journalists" and other writers is purposely used to influence the electorate. He explains this far better than I have been able to do, but this is the foundation of why I could no longer be silent.
Reads like an action novel, but gives insight into the way a Special Forces team operates. Go Along as an SF Medic turned Team Sergeant Trains and Fights in Afghanistan and the Invasion of Iraq.
The Man Who Declared War on America
A Comprehensive Work of OBL, his ties to Iran, Sudan, and the wide Islamist Terrorism networks, regardless of name.
I am trying to raise $950 for a new, complementary photo-oriented book of my Iraqi photographs, and reportage. It will provide the backstory of many of my best images, and explain the "how" and "why" each image was created, and appears the way it does.
The primary purpose of this project is not the money - it's to show prospective agents and publishers that there is a market for Iraq-related work. So your support will help keep my work in the public eye - and provide funders with various examples of my work.
"Images and Memory" is more personal about my work itself. "Change and Conflict" provides the stories of the soldiers that I met, and their mission, during my three embedded trips as a photojournalist from 2007-09.
There are lots of rewards for project backers, including both e-book and printed versions of my work. Even at the $5 level, you will receive a legitimate product of my work!
Let me know if you have any questions at rahfa-AT-comcast.net. Hope to hear from you, hope you think the project is interesting, and I hope you can offer a few $$ of support!
To marry their dramedic sensibility, as seen in films such as “Cyrus” and “The Puffy Chair,” with their thriller aspirations, the couple (Mark Duplass and Katie Aselton) looked to the armed forces.
“For me there had to be a realistic threat,” said Aselton, "...for me, soldiers dishonorably discharged fresh from war who are damaged and not okay could be a very real threat.”
Those soldiers, played by Jay Paulson, Will Bouvier and Anslem Richardson, had been home for 17 days when they run into the girls on a deserted island.
“That information being released causes your hair to raise and the temperature in the air to change,” said Bosworth, who had turned down horror film roles in the past but agreed to this one because it “read like ‘Deliverance’.”
So, the veterans pose "real threat" that reads like the homosexual rapists of "Deliverance." That's great. Good job. And while they are ID'd as "dishonorably discharged," I wonder if most viewers will truly make a distinction about what it says on a veteran's DD-214.
In the movie's trailer - viewable here - there are a couple quick glimpses of dogtags hanging around one of the male character's necks (he's the black guy, because of course he is)...just in case the audience needed any reminders that dogtags = sexual predator/serial murderer.
Really, there's not much to say about it - obviously it's offensive, unimaginative and generally disgusting. Apparently Katie Aselton actually directed it, and it was written by her husband Mark Duplass.
I'm no prude - I like violent movies. I liked "Django Unchained" because all the bad guys got killed in violent and gruesome ways. I enjoy movies like "Reservoir Dogs" where men kill other men. I don't like violence against women in any situation, real (obviously) or fictional.
But I understand that to some audiences, the "thrilling" edge of a woman in distress is entertaining. Whatever.
According to the article, Duplass took 19 hours to conceive and write the script for "Black Rock." I'm not sure why it took that long, since it's only a copy of about 1,000 previous thrillers...the only "creative" idea he came up with was making his villains these dishonorably discharged servicemen.
I would ask Duplass why he wouldn't make the three WOMEN the veterans, and have them out of the service on a relaxing camping trip where they meet the creepy villains....nothing else would need to be changed, expect now we can pit our heroic female veteran characters against the three villains. They don't need to be fighters - they could have been helicopter mechanics, all of a sudden putting their once-ignored skills to use.
Hell - make ALL of them veterans! It would have been a cool twist to have the evil men realize - too late - that even though they were former infantry or whatever, that they bit off more than they can chew by going up against three female MPs.
So can I get my $10 million? That idea took me all of five minutes - not 19 hours.
Having not seen the movie, maybe there will be a twist exactly like that...who knows. But going only by the trailer, and Aselton's bizarre and tone-deaf interview in the Wall Street Journal above, I doubt it.
I gave this book an honest effort. I enjoy gritty stories and memoirs, and I like anti-hero narrators, and I'm from Boston. While this book attempted to deliver all that, and despite the enormous praise its gotten elsewhere, it fell flat.
At its heart, I don't think its as honest as author Nick Flynn makes the reader think it is. I think the entire narrative is built on self-justification where he goes just so far - so he can be the romantic ideal of the tortured drug user/womanizer, without any important self-reflection.
When I read this book, I didn't expect it to be this outstanding - and I
might be giving it a little more credit because it came as such a
surprise. Unlike a book like "Yellow Birds," with a massive pre-pub
rollout where we're told how great it is (and it wasn't), Katey Schultz'
"Flashes of War" comes from a small student-run university publisher,
with a sort of kitschy cover, and little/no advance notice.
I have been warily looking forward to this book - wary because it's gotten a lot of advance praise, and the last time I bought into that, I was disappointed. But, the fact that it earned that pre-publication attention made me await it all the same.
This new volume will provide a behind-the-scenes look at a photojournalist at work. I will use a variety of images - some of the best, but not always - to explain and walk the reader through choices made, and unseen stories behind the image. I think it will be an exciting and complementary volume to "Three Iraqi Summers of Change and Conflict," my nonfiction reportage about soldiers and their missions.
I will be updating the blog with names of my backers, and I really appreciate their support of independent photojournalism and creative efforts to keep the Iraq War in the public eye.
Of course, the book will be available to everyone - and if you check the Kickstarter page and realize there's a backer level that works for you, just let me know and we'll work it out.
As years separate us from World War II, the idea of the "greatest generation" becomes an easier and easier stereotype to latch on to. Instead of three-dimensional men, WWII veterans become gauzy heroes that get trotted out so we can hear their stories again, the way they've told it 100 times before.
The roadside bomb had been deployed far down a road, and I never got that close to it. The squad of soldiers I accompanied as an embedded photojournalist talked to residents, asked if anyone had seen anything suspicious, then waited for the Naval EOD techs to arrive from FOB Speicher.
While it's not specifically connected to the COP Cahill signs in the images below, one of my lasting regrets is never taking the time to photograph the graffiti-laden walls of the latrines at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait - if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about - the racism, the conspiracies, the Chuck Norris jokes, the bitterness, the anger, the in-service rivalries...It never seemed to be painted over, and some of the same graffiti was there during my embedded reporting trips in 2007, 08 and 09.
There were two Iraq essentials. If you have to ask, I guess you had to be there...
(all following photos credited to me - Nathan Webster - in case there was any confusion. Taken during my 2007, 08, or 09 embed trips with the 82nd Airborne or 25th Infantry...)
Author Richard Rubin's decade of research and interviews has provided a fitting final chapter to the story of World War I veterans - all of whom are now gone. He's covered a vast scope in this book, and while it isn't a comprehensive look at the war itself, it is a solid cultural study of that era, and a look at the senior citizens whose experiences and knowledge often pass us by.
...at a Bayji gas station, on patrol with Charlie Co., 1st/505th PIR, 82nd Airborne, July 30th 2007.
This was part of an accountability mission to check on gas station records and finances, to try and prevent some of the more obvious corruption and black marketing of gasoline, funds from which often supported insurgent activity.
I suppose the best compliment I could give a book would be that I was in the middle of another book, picked up "Class A," started skimming the beginning, and next thing I knew 50 pages had gone by.
While most of my reading and reviewing ends up centering around Iraq-related nonfiction, or historical accounts, I make plenty of time for fiction.
Some of the more offbeat and interesting novels I've read lately may not have spiked to the bestseller's lists, but each was imaginative and interesting - and worth a look at their respective descriptions.
Relevantly based around North Korea, THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON, by Adam Johnson is a book that did get a fair amount of notice. Johnson takes readers inside North Korea in a bizarre and often fantastical narrative that still works, even when it's quite hard to believe. Something about the spooky world of North Korea allows readers to suspend disbelief a little more than they might otherwise.
THE MIRAGE by Matt Ruff might have been unpublishable a few years ago - readers would not have been willing to accept the "through the looking glass" world where 9/11 was 11/9 and the twin towers were in Baghdad. As I say in my full review, it reminded me of the "Mirror, Mirror" episode of Star Trek, with the evil Spock. Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein show up in entirely different ways - as do a few dark reminders of America's recent past. Check it out!
Finally, THE YEAR OF THE GADFLY by Jennifer Miller is a cross between young adult fiction, and complex adult narrative. It works both ways. She does a good job of moving across different timelines, with a few good surprises and twists.
None of the three books are what I would consider conventional. They all play with narrative, time, mystery - and often fantastical elements. But as a reader, all three succeeded.
One of the strongest examples of Iraq+Afghanistan War-related fiction to arrive is the recent short story collection FIRE AND FORGET, co-edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher, and including contributions by David Abrams, Phil Klay, Colby Buzzell, Siobhan Fallon, and many others.
Each author is a veteran (and one spouse), and brings multiple perspectives to their fiction, both from their experience and the stories they tell.
Full disclosure - Gallagher, Abrams and Klay are contributors to my ongoing Kickstarter project! But the Iraq-Afg. writing community is pretty small, and we gotta support eachother.
Please check out the interviews! They're both fairly long, but I think both Scranton and Klay offer some unique and interesting observations about writing, and the veteran's future place in the literary world.
Michael Kelly, of The Atlantic, died 10 years ago today, the first embedded journalist to die in Iraq, in a vehicle roll-over into a canal.
He and I also both went to the University of New Hampshire, separated by about 20 years.
Last May, not on any anniversary, but because "The Byliner" was highlighting his work, I reflected about Kelly's work. He was an excellent writer, but he called some things incorrectly, and his words don't especially hold up to the harsh light of history.
I've reviewed several World War II-related books recently, including the soon-to-be-released "The Guns at Last Light," by Rick Atkinson, the completion of his 'Liberation Trilogy.'
Any of these books are worth checking out, for different reasons:
Instead, I am hoping to get publisher/agent interest in taking my current Iraq-only narrative and following up with the experiences and reflections of the soldiers that I met, in the years after their Iraq deployments.
This is what I have tried to do in my New York Times "At War" pieces, all of which offer current looks at some of these men (and woman).
But - "Can't Give This War Away: Three Iraqi Summers of Change and Conflict" has been read and publicly endorsed by a number of first-class authors.
And - brand new - businessman Albert Dunlap, a West Point graduate, and author of "Mean Business," offers his take: "This book puts you on the battle field and lets you experience the real world of todays brave soldiers!"
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