From the Land of Genesis

The narrative of the Combat veteran from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over the past decade has been largely obscured. This is in part due to lack of media attention and partly to a nation-wide numbness to the prolonged conflict, but also due to a lack of creative publication. Plenty of reporters have published journalistic accounts of events or experiences, and several veterans themselves have published first-hand memoirs of their tours—but there is still no literary publication to represent the conflict for the general public. Through the hundreds of sources we have gathered (from scholarly studies and news articles to journals and blog posts), as well as our interviews with combat veterans, I have developed a series of short stories that represent the experiences and themes of the soldiers who have fought for our nation in its most recent wars. These stories, while independent, depict a large scope of the combat and experiences through an interconnected web of scenes and characters in the structure of a short story cycle (similar to Dubliners by James Joyce, or In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway). They also aim to contribute to the evolving style of war narratives following Tim O’Brien and Anthony Swafford. Through this project, I hope to reach the general public in an attempt to spread awareness of the experiences of our soldiers over seas—to tell their stories in a style and medium that will encourage people to listen