One of my friends recently suggested to me Neil Shea’s Dispatches series over at The American Scholar, where the final installment was published about two weeks ago. Written over a period of two years while Shea was on assignment in Afghanistan freelancing for a number of different publications, including Stars and Stripes and The American Scholar, the stories contain what Shea refers to as “stories that seemed as if they would be forever homeless”—stories that would be deemed “too raw” by his editors.
The beginnings of the war in Afghanistan, like the September 11 attacks, delineate the very beginnings of my memories of childhood. The half-remembered images on the television have taken on a timeless quality—seen, as they were, when I was old enough to remember but too young to comprehend. Over the past 12 years, the wars in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq have become a litany of numbers, a trickle of the dead and wounded, just as the names—Kandahar, Fallujah, Baghdad—have become ingrained in our cultural lexicon, the reports from the front a quiet hum in the background of our everyday lives.
Viewed dispassionately, the war in Afghanistan seems to have a sanitized aspect. Filtered through the syntax of maps and charts, the reality of the conflict has become elusive, removed. Reading Dispatches was a visceral shock—a reminder that the figures are only the clean and comprehensible half of the war. The other half, in all of its inscrutable humanity, has been judged too “real,” too dissonant for public consumption. It has to be edited out and kept away from readers who “don’t have the time to consider their wars,” as Shea puts it.
Make no mistake, these vignettes can never be more than an incomplete narrative. But they are true, as surely as the statistics are true, and that is something that is too easily forgotten. They render the conflict more complex, but paradoxically, more tangible—something, at least for me, within my grasp. As the longest war in American history fades out (“this is how it ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper”), I can only wonder how long it will take for our memories, too, to slip away.
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