Over the past four years, the conflict in Iraq and the “war on terror” have divided public opinion in the United States. They have also created a less obvious divide – between the general public and the individuals, families, and communities touched directly by the experience of war. In this climate, voices representing the direct experience of war are often stifled or misheard or hijacked by those who seek to polarize the debate over the war.
Front Line, First Person: Iraq War Stories is a two-day conference that aims to create bridges for conversation across these new fault-lines and to understand better the capacities of different forms of storytelling to reach across boundaries and build connections at the human level.
Featured speakers include Colby Buzzell, the blogger and best-selling author of "My War: Killing Time in Iraq"; Matthew Burden (aka Blackfive), a leading military blogger and author of "The Blog of War: Frontline Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan"; former US Senator Lincoln Chafee ’75; Deborah Scranton ’84, the award-winning director of the documentary “The War Tapes”; and Newsweek Senior International Photo Editor Jamie Wellford ’84.
For more information, please visit our website at www.watsoninstitute.org/flfp. If you wish to attend, please contact Kate_Richardson@brown.edu.
Event Summary
Exploring America's Disconnect with Soldiers in Iraq
The recent two-day conference, “Front Line, First Person: Iraq War Stories,” brought together soldiers, journalists, and academics at Watson to try to understand ground-level experiences in Iraq and why so few of these stories get out to the American public. “There is a national fault line dividing the American public from the people who are directly touched by war. Bridging that fault line is our goal today,” said one of the event’s coordinators, Associate Professor (Research) Keith Brown. Discussions addressed such matters as the lack of first person war narratives, journalists’ attempts to cover various angles of the war, the incomplete nature of the coverage, and the reasons it falls so short.
The first day's panels brought together people who had played a variety of roles in shaping and observing the war and focused on how difficult it is for anyone to get a complete picture of the war there.
• Colby Buzzell, an Iraq veteran and author of My War: Killing Time in Iraq (Penguin Group, October 2005), discussed how he had kept a blog while fighting to document his experience and show how mainstream US media coverage often missed some of the events and battles that soldiers in the war found most significant.
• Noted military blogger and veteran Matthew Burden, known online as Blackfive, was not in the current Iraq War, but kept in touch with his old unit when it left to fight, and echoed Buzzell’s frustration at a lack of coverage of the war and soldiers’ stories, and the military’s limited public affairs efforts. “Military blogs fill in the gaps that both the military and the media leave out,” said Burden.
• Brown student and Iraq veteran Eric Rodriguez also spoke about the difficulty of navigating information about the war, and the lack of awareness about the military at Brown. “It’s not all black and white. There’s a big gray area. It’s a scary area. There are human beings involved in this. It’s in your best interest to talk to people who’ve been there,” Rodriguez said.
• Describing the policy perspective, former US Senator and Watson Institute Distinguished Visiting Fellow Lincoln Chafee ’75 described the post-9/11 chaos in Washington over going to war. He was in office for the votes over invading both Afghanistan and Iraq. After the US invasion, Chafee said he rarely had opportunities for open conversations with military personnel, even when he visited Iraq.
• Sgt. First Class Trevor Nunn, an author, is currently serving in Iraq and joined the conference via webcam. The politics of the war and whether it is worth the sacrifices made are not issues on soldiers’ minds, he said. Rather, they are concerned with doing their jobs well, surviving, and taking care of each other in the indescribably demanding situations of war. Discussing how hard it is to tell stories of his wartime experience, Nunn said, “Eighty percent of the time you get asked questions the first one is ‘how many people did you kill?’ There is more to conflict than the violence. [People talking to veterans] should ask what impact you had on the situation.”
• “If there’s one word I would use as the solution to all, it’s compassion.” said Jason Christopher Hartley, a veteran and author of Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq (HarperCollins, 2005). Hartley and all members of the panel emphasized the importance of truly trying to understand soldiers – in part by suspending politics or disagreement with the policies of the war to see how it affects real people. Discussing the impact of electronic media on social dialogue Hartley said, “We’ve become a confessional society, which is kind of annoying, but the advantage is that we have a wonderful wealth of raw data to look at. We’re lucky today with things like blogs. So much of what’s coming out is very, very honest.”
• Discussing yet another means of disseminating information about the war – “embedding” reporters with the military – Col. David Lapan, public affairs officer in the US Marine Corps, described it as a way to allow reporters to see all parts of military life and get the story out.
• Filmmaker and Watson Institute Visiting Fellow Deborah Scranton ‘84 , one of the conference’s coordinators, talked about how she had “virtually embedded” with the military by giving soldiers video cameras and then making her documentary The War Tapes out of that footage and her subsequent interviews with them.
While the first day of the conference had focused on empathy for soldiers in Iraq and the lack of understanding in the US of the hardships many had to endure, Saturday began with a reminder of one of the military’s darker sides.
• Tara McKelvey described her method in writing Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War (Carroll & Graf, 2007). To provide more complete coverage, she wrote not only about the military side of the war, but also included US policymakers and Iraqi civilians in her work. This way, McKelvey sought to understand the ground level military perceptions of Abu Ghraib, as well as the Iraqi experience, and the Washington politicians’ perspectives. She found it difficult to explain the situation to some of the Iraqi civilians she interviewed, telling one Iraqi who had been in Abu Ghraib, “Not all Americans are like this. We are not a nation of torturers.”
• NPR producer Charles Monroe-Kane discussed how his show, “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” tries to counter the fragmented and incomplete coverage in most mainstream US media by providing the context behind the news and highlighting individual stories. He tries to “get behind the news” and supplement summaries of events with first person narratives to let people who shape current events explain their ideas and experiences. “Years from now the details of the Battle of the Bulge will disappear, but Anne Frank will survive,” Monroe-Kane said. “Journalists need to think about legacy.”
• Author and journalist Trish Wood agreed with Monroe-Taylor about the importance of individual stories, saying, “I felt very strongly that first person narratives are the only meaningful way to talk about war.” Her oral history book What Was Asked of Us (Little, Brown and Company, 2006) tells several veterans’ stories. In previous discussions many non-military people in the audience had expressed a concern about how difficult it is for people outside of the military to talk to veterans and know what questions are appropriate to ask about an issue that is as personal and difficult as war. Wood said that she found soldiers to be very open to talking, though presenting their stories to a wider audience with a limited understanding of the military is hard. “The point of it is [to allow them to] tell their own stories, but how do you give them the tools and audience for this?” Wood asked. “Also, you know that people who haven’t experience war probably won’t know this and will take it out of context.”
• Journalist and filmmaker Brian Palmer ’86 focused on the difficulty of getting a complete picture of the military in this war, and then putting it into context with other types of stories, such as those from policymakers and Iraqis. “As a citizen I wanted to tell not just where the bullets are coming from but also where they land,” Palmer said. He embedded with a Marine unit in Iraq during 2004 and 2005, and became very attached to the men who protected him. After getting to know these marines as individuals he became frustrated with the type of dialogue about the war back in the US, and with, as he put it, “the fact that people could still engage in the rhetoric, left or right, without engaging in the ground narratives.” However, getting to know marines personally made it difficult at times to keep his critical judgment and know how to balance the military story with other parts of the war. “Fundamentally I think it rests on integrity. You [the American public] have to decide whether we have that as journalists.”
“Front Line, First Person: Iraq War Stories” continued all day on Saturday with panels of journalists, writers, filmmakers, and veterans discussing how to tell soldiers’ stories and make them accessible and relevant to a wider American audience.
By Watson Institute Student Rapporteur Phoebe Sloane ’08
More information from the conference is available here.