Iraq War: Thinking about soldiers' letters

I'm glad to see all the publicity about soldiers' letters for a couple of reasons. One is that it helps focus attention on the experience of actual soldiers. Just as our worship of national symbols like the flag sometimes winds up trivializing them, so the current sincere-but-often-abstract sentimentality about the Brave Soldiers Serving Their Country too often goes together with a callousness about what's really happening to the soldiers we're sending into wars on our behalf. And to their families.

It's also a reminder of what soldiers' letters are (statements of personal experience) and what they are not (independent journalistic accounts of war).
To use a non-combat example, if I wrote a narrative about a normal workday, I might talk about the guy at the subway exit who plays guitar and sings badly but who usually has a good selection of songs. I might mention running into people I know on the street. Someone else might talk about the kind of cars they saw, or the new fall fashions people were wearing. And depending on our narrative skills, these accounts might be more-or-less entertaining.

But they wouldn't make the newspaper because they aren't news. Millions of people go to work and see people on the street every day. And a little personal story like that won't tell you anything about what decisions the city council is working on, or what kind of deals the mayor is negotiating with developers.

Similarly, soldiers' letters may give an accurate account of the writer's own experience without telling us much about the larger situation in which he finds himself. Privates and sargeants don't make policy. And they may be actually hearing less news of dramatic - and important - events in Iraq than people following the news in command headquarters or in the media back home (Fox News viewers excepted).

It's perfectly valid for people to use soldiers' accounts to illustrate what's going on. But it's also important that both journalists and readers keep in mind what soldiers' letters normally are: soldiers' accounts of their own experiences. I read a description somewhere that said being in combat is many hours of boredom punctuated occasionally by moments of pure horror. Which moment he's recently experienced would have a lot to do with how a soldier's letter sounds.

Tags: iraq war