I remember one night we camped out on the Iraq-Kuwait border on the way in. I’m there in my sleeping bag on a cot in the middle of dry, nothing desert. No landmark, no land features, nothing.Read the rest here.
If you're interested in learning more or getting involved, or know someone who is: email me.For three weeks, I didn’t know that Sgt. [redacted] and Sgt. [redacted] had been killed in action.When I found out that they were dead, it was like from that weekend on, I couldn’t sleep without some type of aid.To this day, I need medicine to sleep.
I’m standing in the dressing room of a strip club in Texas interviewing a stripper herpetologist. There are two giggling girls crammed into a toilet stall that isn’t a toilet stall, really; it’s a gold curtain hanging in front of a toilet and that’s it. A girl with long brown hair wanders around, looking for something; she’s wearing glasses and jeans but she’s topless. A girl in a pink and black polka-dot bikini preens at the mirror. Nearby, a girl pulls up her black lace top to put on deodorant. A makeup artist applies makeup to a dancer’s upturned face; “Full face with lashes $30, no lashes $25,” the sign reads. It smells like perfume and strawberry lotion and a lifetime’s worth of Aqua Net hairspray. On the other side of the wall, the music is thumping for the girl on stage.
"Frankly, I'd rather hear from the Iraqis and Afghanis whose land we've occupied and are slaughtering"[Image]
Thanks, goldmineguttd. I was wondering when some anonymous Boing Boing reader who almost certainly has never dared a single moment of physical bravery or dedicated himself to a higher cause (say, swearing to protect the Constitution with his life) would from the comfort and safety of his home or office cubicle besmirch his bettors with a simplistic, lazy, and irrelevant-in-this-context political statement. And here it is RIGHT ON SCHEDULE. -- Boing Boing
Every time we went out that serpentine, where you’re going from inside that protective area to you’re outside the wire, in that little transition, there was very few times that I didn’t have that little quick catch in my chest, where your heart kind of skips a beat, and you think to yourself, OK, here we go. It’s that little adrenaline rush.In a new post my Forbes blog, I talk about why I created The War Project.
There was very few missions that I would roll up to the gate and didn’t have that catch, because it was telling myself, OK, now you’re in combat, and now there is someone trying to kill you.
At the fundraiser, I met a young man who had accidentally driven a Humvee over an IED in Iraq.[The War Project, Forbes]
He was really a great kid. I interviewed him, and we hit it off. He had been burned over most of his body when the IED had detonated and he was trapped in the vehicle. He’d endured countless surgeries. When I met him, he had what turned out to be a breast implant embedded under the skin covering his skull. It was stretching the skin so that skin could get graphed onto other scarred parts of his body. I joked that when he was done with the implant, he could donate it to a stripper who had only one breast implant and was in need. He laughed.
I got the reputation over there as the guy who ran the .50 cal every day. ‘Cause other squads, they rotated out their .50 cal gunner, Mark 19 gunner. ‘Cause that was kind of like a very vulnerable spot. If anybody was gonna get shot first, it was gonna be the guy behind the biggest gun. Me, I had a thing about me. Angelina. I’m an Angelina Jolie fan. I had to ride Angelina every single day. She was my gun.Photos on Flickr. [INTERVIEW: Spc. Benjamin Hart Viges]
"American Standard" is a film about the challenges of a vet returning home and readapting to civilian life. We are seeking a veteran who has served in either Iraq or Afghanistan (or both) who might be interested in "acting" in this short film. No previous experience necessary, just a familiarity with his own emotions and a willingness to share his experiences with the public.You can email David for more information here.
I was in the 1-325, so we were an airborne infantry regiment, ‘cause our ancestors were gliders in World War II, and, you know, we just stand a little bit taller and talk more shit than the regular soldier, because soldier is a dirty word at Fort Bragg. You are not a soldier. You are a paratrooper.-- An excerpt from an upcoming interview for The War Project, which should be posted next week.
Two years ago this day, I was a private as part of the Canadian Charlie Company Battlegroup in Kandahar, Afghanistan - a part of the 2 PPCLI-led Task Force 1-08. We deployed on a patrol south off PSS (Police Sub-station) Spin Pir, and right away, you could tell that it was going to be a bad day. Men, women and children streaming north, pushing wheelbarrows and carrying possessions... Very strong combat indicators.-- Boing Boing commenter
Sgt. Carlos Farias served in Charlie Company, 1st Platoon, 1-508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. He was deployed to Afghanistan from January 2007 to April 2008. "I wrote [this] days after the event," he wrote in an email. "The day was hell. ... I documented it to help me get over the situation, a venting process if you will. It did help some but even at that for weeks I could not sleep fearing that either one of the members of my team or myself would die in the coming missions."An excerpt:
Well it was the morning of the 6th, D day to be in fact, June 6th 2007 and we were south of Musa Qala and the Kajaki dam. Wake up was at 0120 and that was shitty on my part cuz I couldn’t fucking sleep all night and only got a couple of good hours during the day. So damn hot that you couldn’t really sleep well and if you did you woke up dehydrated as hell.Moving forward, the site will feature interviews, letters, and photos. If you're not yet familiar with the project, visit the About page. If you're an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran interested in getting involved, here's the email.
You learn that the more force you apply the less likely you are to get the results you want and when you do hear a ‘no’ you can either drive yourself crazy thinking about how great the piece could’ve been or to trust that there’s a different piece you need to make right now.In The New New Journalism, Gay Talese, who wrote the best magazine article ever written, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," says:
I don't know who the characters are at the beginning, I don't know the story, but I do know the stage of the theater. I find the characters by simply showing up at the "theater." As I spend more time in there, they emerge. It's almost as if I imagine them, and then, they mysteriously appear.Most of the time, that's how it goes. Interestingly, I suspect this next story isn't so much a war story, but a love story, which is, oddly, fitting.
"NATO and the United States now have 143,000 troops in Afghanistan, set to peak at 150,000 in coming weeks as they take a counter-insurgency offensive into the insurgents' southern strongholds." -- The Big PictureMany times, I looked at these Afghanistan posts in the months leading up to the launch of The War Project and was inspired. I'd spent years more or less working one beat, and this would be a change of sorts. It was something I had been wanting to do for years, but it was a long time coming. Now, I think it's probably one of the smartest things I ever did.
"Hey there, Rakkasan. Thank you for telling this. I was with Charlie, 2/187 during the same time frame. A lot of what you said absolutely true to my own experience there. Again, thank you." -- Comment #9The turning point came early this year when I had kidney stones. The pain was severe enough that I spent most of two months lying on a sofa. It did force me to think. About how I got there. If everything happens for a reason, why this particular thing happened. If there was something to be understood, what that may be. Eventually, I concluded if I spent enough time on that sofa, I would die there. That wasn't what I wanted.
"The nickname 'The Rakkasans' is derived from the Japanese word for umbrella. The name was given to the 187th during its tour in occupied Japan following World War II. When a translator dealing with local Japanese dignitaries was trying to explain what their unit was trained to do (and not knowing the Japanese word for 'airborne soldiers') he used the phrase 'falling down umbrella men,' or rakkasan. Amused by the clumsy word, the locals began to call the troopers by that nickname; it soon stuck and became a point of pride for the unit." -- 187th Infantry RegimentThat made me move forward. In June, the site launched with the first story. This week, the second story went up. I hope to donate the audio recordings of the interviews to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. That way future researchers and interested parties will have a better understanding of these conflicts from the perspective of those who were on the front lines.
"All the gods are dead except the god of war." -- Eldridge CleaverIf you're an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran interested in being interviewed for this project, or if you know of someone who may be interested, email me.
Your brutal in a nice way. I feel like a shaken baby. And I've been paying attention. Your scary dead on. You reminded me I wanted to re-read "Dispatches" by Michael Herr.
I bet you could write a hell of a war story. Soldiers. Now that I'm musing about it, I guess we we're a kind'a porn star. I'll have to think about that.
Anyhow, good read. Thank you. I'll be clicking around for more.
Once we got closer to the city, we were in between two armored battalions. We’ve got tanks behind us, and we’ve got tanks in front of us. Our vehicle convoy is long, so we don’t see the tanks in front of us, we don’t see the tanks behind us, but we certainly see what they’ve done, in front of us, because they’re killing everybody on the road.[Staff Sgt. George Zubaty]
Every single vehicle we come by is shot up, burnt, tank tread down the center of it. I mean, you’re looking in a car, and there’ll be mom, dad, kids, everything’s burnt, everything’s torn up. Remember, it’s 2003. At that point, Army units, they were training to do a general movement warfare type action. The whole point of our training was, just kill people. It wasn’t soft and nice. It was, you’ve been shot at, you shoot back until the firing stops. You could see immediately it wasn’t going to be productive.
They knew that there was an invasion coming, I guess, but their propaganda, their state-run television, their state-run radio, and everything, they’re not reporting it as, we’re being invaded, there are people right outside Baghdad. So people had gotten on the interstate that morning to go see family, to go shopping, to go wherever. They drive down the interstate, and the first time they notice that there’s an American armor convoy coming is when they start to get shot at. Tanks don’t miss.
