Friday, April 24, 2009

In the Case of Iraq, a War Story Might Best Take Place on U.S. Soil

In the last few days, reports appeared about how the Pulitzer committee awarded their prestigious prize to topics like the luxury bordello scandals involving elected officials, Thomas Jefferson’s various mistresses, and international sex trafficking, among others.

No doubt these subjects are important and sizzle in the public mind, yet something feels missing—a shoe lace untied, a hole worn through a pocket by a house key, or that war lasting more than 7 years now.

The Pulitzer committee grants awards for socially redeeming art, beautiful music, or fine writing that pierces the veil of deception in high places. Plenty of journalists and writers have accomplished this on the subject of Operation Iraqi Freedom, focusing not on the sizzling sex scandals but on the more primitive forms of brutality and rape in the chaos of a destroyed country.

Does this explain why the war topic was passed over this year, the seventh of a long war?

The Pulitzer was founded on values of professional journalism and artistic merit. Has it turned its eyes to new, more important subjects than the U.S. invasion of another country?

If you consider how mainstream media and journalism have botched so many opportunities to pierce the veil of high-power deception, you’ll not be surprised that a prestigious prize for journalism shows a lack of interest in Iraq, war, soldiers and civilians dying. After all, how many newspapers, or congressmen for that matter, risked dissent from the W administration during the wake of the hyped-up, politically exploited, hysterical 9/11 reaction?

Plenty of novels and nonfiction books criticized the war and risked public outrage and the lethal label of “un-American” during the period when the native authority of W and Cheney commanded support for their own cleverly crafted, massive destruction and public deception. In this sense, the Iraq war took place more right here in the U.S. than in the bombing missions and in the Humvees where blood spills out to this day.

Perhaps Americans at home just don’t have the stomach to think of the war anymore—though the war was, and still is, fundamentally right here at home. The battleground is in the American political arena. Now more than ever, this becomes clear as the reports pile up to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the war was planned long before the causus belli –the justification and the opportunity that presented itself in the form of the 9/11 attack.

America’s political system failed—and so did its journalism. Collectively, reflecting our country’s culture, we Americans wanted to find a fast solution to an otherwise complicated situation. Suddenly faced with difficult decisions and questions, we clung tightly to our Bibles, searching for quick answers and whispering curses to the Muslims in a “crusade,” as W often called it. We did not want to analyze the facts before we reacted. We wanted to follow a leader, regardless of how nefarious and duplicitous the power brokers played their hand in a twisted plan.

Ironically, these officials, W and Cheney, were not even elected officials, rather just appointed hastily by a small group of extremists at the Supreme Court. This is why the real battleground has always been right here at home. It began as a struggle for the power to impose an ideological belief on a democracy. By grasping the power to command, the extreme American ideologues overreacted, waged a war of political passion, and thus fulfilled the greatest wishes, plans, and prayers of the likes of Osama bin Laden.

So, a nonfiction book, and especially a novel about the war, might best be situated at home, not in the smoking battlegrounds where the bombs explode. This war is all about political ideology that affects every aspect of American culture and economics. This war is not about WMDs, not about a brutal tryant, not about evil terrorists, and not about the security of our nation.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Soldiers Readapt to Civilian Life, Some Don't

Unlike any war the U.S. has waged, the urban, guerilla combat in Iraq is personal and challenges the soul’s endurance. Except for the Vietnam War, especially the later part, U.S. soldiers are faced with a more personal type of combat. An unidentifiable enemy walks around in public, indistinguishable from the civilians. Except for the Special Forces, U.S. soldiers are trained only for traditional warfare, not terrorism and insurgency.


Moving freely anywhere, civilian insurgents can detonate a suicide bomb, shredding humans indiscriminately. In March this year, the New York Times reported how, even as U.S. soldiers begin to leave Iraq, suicide bombings increase, killing more than 33 in a single day. The bloody scenes sear the spirit of anyone witnessing the carnage. 


Insurgent civilians seem like regular people one day, exchanging cigarettes with a soldier like Army Cpl. Jason Pautsch. The next day, the same friendly face can pull an AK47 and spray bullets into a Marine Unit where buddies fall with nightmarish wounds. Like a lightning bolt from nowhere, a roadside bomb can explode, taking life and limb.


Scenes of horror create the post traumatic stress syndrome that U.S. soldiers like Sgt. Stryker have to cope with when they return home after years of patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods filled with paranoia and constant fear for life.

A soldier develops personal relationships with his battle buddies or with friendly civilians--alive one day and torn apart the next.

One day an otherwise friendly civilian might appear out of nowhere working as a suicide bomber, forcing a well-intended Marine to make a split-second decision to shoot in self-defense. Mistakes happen in the strained, continuous, life-threatening situations. The extended missions exacerbate the stress. The Stop-Loss clause in a military service contract can hold a soldier in combat indefinitely.

When the soldier returns home to America after surviving by any and all means, including shielding himself with intensified paranoia and tight nerves, he can’t resolve the gap between his newly regained civilian lifestyle and the adrenaline still racing through his veins. Sometimes he cannot slow down the synaptic overload in his mind and soul. Readjusting to a whole new and alien world seems impossible, a world that used to be familiar, now turned into another planet. He loses his grip and slips into the darkness.

In 2008 suicide rates of U.S. soldiers from Iraq rose beyond the levels during the Vietnam War three decades ago.

In the novel, Mojave Winds, Kris Klug is caught in this tough transition between dangerous and extended missions and finding his way in regular American daily life. As a portrait of the human condition, the novel is best positioned to capture the internal struggle of soldiers, many bearing the burden of deep invisible wounds.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Mojave Winds and A Sufi's Ghost Mentioned in The New York Times

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.