A student journalist approached me via email to answer a few questions for an article she’s writing for the San Francisco City College campus magazine. She came up with some really great questions and I thought I would repost them here (with my answers, of course) for all to see.

She’s writing an article about the American populations current attitude towards the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and specifically focusing on the books and plays that give voice to soldiers who have fought there (Aftermath of War, Doonesbury’s The Sandbox, Letters From The Front Line, etc).

Do you think it’s a forgotten war?

I think that after five years, the war has become boring to the public. The American public gets bored easily anyway and their attention span can only take so much. I think the American people support the troops 100% and are deeply grateful for the sacrifices that myself and other soldiers have had to make, but they’ve lost interest in the daily death reports, suicide bombings, and terrorist attacks being reported by the media. I think the current public attitude was best put by Bryan Catherman in an email he sent to me which he wrote, “We’re in a season of ‘Iraq Fatigue’ (meaning the public has lost interest in movies, documentaries, books, and news about Iraq) and 2009 and 2010 are probably going to be worse.” I couldn’t agree more.


Do you feel the media could do a better job at covering such an important
issue that our nation is deeply involved with?

I think the media puts far too much effort into trying to entertain and attract readers/viewers than simply being informative to them. There’s a marked decline in the last year of news items about the war that’s continuing in the Middle East. During this Presidential election season, it’s difficult to find copy written about the war. It simply isn’t what the public wants to hear. Sure the media could push more of the news coming from the front lines, but it would be at the risk of losing their audience. It simply comes down to what the public will find more interesting to read about. In my opinion, the media could do a better job of looking past their bottom line figures and go back to providing solid and informative news items reporting on the Middle East.


Do you think collaborative projects such as this play [Aftermath of War], and books about the war (ie Letters from the Front Lines) are helping to raise awareness to the war, or do you think they just touch those who are already involved with or are interested in the war?

At this point in the war, I believe a majority of Americans will either have been a soldier, a family member of that soldier, a friend, a past veteran, or someone else touched by a person who had served their country in the Middle East. With that being said, I believe these wartime collaborations have an affect on a largely personal level with a huge variety of people; not just veterans. It’s very touching to hear the personal thoughts of actual troops and it brings the event onto a whole new level of understanding. It’s one thing to hear the news about the war and it’s a whole other thing to get into the head of the soldiers fighting that war.

Without any doubt, these projects bring a vast amount of awareness and understanding from the front lines to the home front. And I believe they’ll be equally important projects to see and read again after the war has finished and we can look back on them as historically significant.

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