Even if it is just a mention on The New York Times's Web site, it's still great to see that my novels are being referenced and noticed in some of the mainstream newspapers.
You can find the discussion thread that brought up my novels in The New York Times's blog.:
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/shock-and-awe-a-novel/
Part of my own comments in this thread include the following.
I began writing Mojave Winds in 2002 when the G W Bush administration began preparing the preemptive invasion of Iraq.
Since then, I’ve been tracking the public’s interest in reading about the war and its politics in nonfiction and in fiction as well as in the movies.
By doing this tracking, I’ve discovered that it’s own way to observe how public opinion has changed drastically over the last 7 years, from an almost hysterical reaction to the 9/11 attack to a much broader and deeper understanding of how the W administration had used the invasion for its own previously planned agenda. In a situation like this it has taken a good five years for the facts to move from nonfiction books into the area of public opinion.
As of 2005, many movies had appeared: Rendition, Stop Lose, Valley of Ellah, Jarhead, The Kingdom, among others. Some of these enjoyed box office success. It seems that these movies helped in making the “general public” more aware of the war. Otherwise, it seems that, like Vietnam, the war was not in the forefront of the minds of the “average citizen” who is often concerned about how to pay the mortgage, rent, medical bills, and education.
Fortunately, the American citizen did come around to understand that the right-wing extremists in the White House were taking the country down a bumpy road to the Dark Ages.
One of the points in the previous comments, in the New York Times blog postings, suggests that this war in Iraq is very different from anything the U.S. has engaged before.
I believe that this is true for at least a couple of reasons. As mentioned, the demographics of the soldiers are now different and new in some ways and the politics behind the U.S. wars in the Middle East are motivated by relatively new incentives, although some historians see World Wars I and II as prompted at least partly by the much coveted petroleum (see The Epic Of Oil, Catalyst Of Conflict - New York Times January 1993).
The U.S. has seldom ventured into preemptive war, and certainly not in any way like its preemptive bombing and invasion of Iraq where substantial evidence and controversy existed before the invasion.
In the U.S. history, there have been false justifications for war, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, Vietnam—all justified by trumped up reasons of some alleged skirmish that riled the patriotic blood. Iraq is similar to these in many ways, but different in its politics of such a clearly defined and pre-documented political agenda as well as its overwhelming military advantage—not to mention an arrogant occupation of a country that so encouraged successful guerilla warfare.
It’s the politics ( and religious ferver) that seem most intriguing in this war with Iraq. Its manipulation was blatant to many. Though the U.S. public opinion was clearly manipulated by a small cabal in the White House who used the 9/11 attack as the pretext for their agenda planned long before. This is what makes Iraq so unique, revealing how the American political system went awry.
This affects how writers approach this war in novels.
As mentioned in previous comments, above, soldiers experiencing the war first hand would probably do best to write memoirs—a genre well suited for first-hand witness, such is the case for Jarhead by Swofford (the Desert Storm invasion) and later for Generation Kill by Wright (the current Operation Iraqi Freedom invasion).
Although Swofford was a sniper (who later went to writing school) and Wright, an embedded journalist, they both depict just how jaded, cynical, and disillusioned the soldiers were for the most part. Unlike most any other war, the soldiers were aware of the crass Realpolitik behind these Iraqi wars, as security operations for the oil fields (especially since, during the same time, the U.S. could have taken leadership in initiating new, innovative industries for alternative energy). As portrayed in these war accounts, the modern U.S. volunteer soldier becomes aware of the crass politics behind their mission.
On the other hand, the novel Catch 22 by Heller, focused more on the incompetency of the military bureaucracy which Heller had seen in the Korean operations after WWII, even though his story was placed in WWII.
Given the political and corporate interests in the Iraq wars, the way novelists approach this subject will most likely be quite different from Hemmingway’s view of WWII, or Heller’s depiction of the Korean (vis à vis European) War. In any case, Jarhead and Generation Kill express very new sentiments about U.S. military adventures.
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