Take in the bright pink light. Feel the energy in your body.

 Isn’t it strange we say take a breath, when, in truth, we receive a breath?

Receive a breath.

October 2009. The economy was in a coma and we were in the middle of two wars. Iraq was winding down, Afghanistan winding up. I took my first-ever yoga class nine months to the day after giving birth to my daughter.

In the class, aimed at pre- and postnatal women as well as general beginners, I watched a woman who’d had a baby only seven weeks prior twist her body into positions I still couldn’t. Seven weeks after giving birth, I wasn’t able to sit up in bed. Just getting into bed required a step stool. I’d step on the bottom level, one foot then the other, then the top level and fall into bed like a bungee jumper, careful to keep my legs together in the false hope that it would help the jagged skin grow back straight and fast.

Send the purple light of peace out to the world.

Feel the purple light leaving you as you send peace into the world.

Om

The morning after class was a Sunday. My husband Jose attached my daughter to the front of him and we all walked toward the Self Realization Fellowship, Swamis as we locals call it. To get to the beach below, you must descend an ominous set of steps – ominous because you know you will have to huff up them to return home. If you look left, you see a cliff of fan palm trees, trunks thick with dead fronds no one will ever trim, grey-green bushes like long pom poms, bunched vines of aloe-like ice plant, tall-swaying stalks that look like soft, oversized wheat, the cliff face striated into different shades of sand and streaked vertically with water stains, rusted and broken drainage pipes. When you look right, you see the ocean dotted with black-suited surfers on ivory boards, pelicans landing quietly on the water, seagulls hovering for their piece of food, tequila-colored seaweed strings with pods that snap under foot, smooth, black beach rocks, teeming bunches of twig-legged clay-colored birds poking their thin-hooked beaks into the sand, and teeming bunches of smaller, fatter white birds poking their beaks into the sand. If you walk toward either of these flocks of birds, they will scurry, not fly, away from you.

As we headed back toward the tower of steps, the baby noticed seagulls and kicked the air. A group of men jogged toward us. As they got closer, we saw they were soldiers in training. In the front, the men wore T shirts announcing they were Navy Seals. In the rear, a clutch of about twelve guys – teenagers – struggled in camouflage pants and white undershirts. The men in the front breathed easy, looked glib. The guys in back scuffed the soft sand with their boots and carried black packs. They were flush-cheeked, wide eyed, stared straight. As they approached I noticed words written on their undershirts in black marker. I was only able to read three. Dying, Sarah, then Shit Turd.

Why were they running on this beach when Camp Pendleton has miles and miles of coastline? Had they run all the way from Pendleton? Maybe the guys in front just wanted to show us beach bums and yoga fruits exactly who the fuck was dying over there.

***

To train for childbirth, I took a class centered around the idea of mind over matter – hypnobirthing. We were coached to escape with our minds, meditating to each color of the rainbow. Every night before bed, we were to listen to a recording by the method’s founder and train ourselves to relax. This was impossible for me, since all I could focus on was the clicking of her dentures. Our instructor told us that contractions wouldn’t hurt. They were merely the result of a muscle contracting. Nothing more than flexing a bicep.

She lied.

 ***

Six months after I gave birth, I had to drive my niece to the airport. We were late because I’d been sick with an upset stomach all morning.

“I don’t know if I’m going to make it to the airport,” I said. “I might shit my pants.”

My niece laughed, her face red with embarrassment for me. I laughed, too. Before giving birth, I would have been able to hold it. Now I was nervous.

I dropped my niece at the terminal then parked in the short term lot planning to meet her inside and see her off. I pulled the stroller from the trunk, then lifted my daughter out of the car and strapped her into her stroller. I draped a blanket over the canopy to keep the chill from her. I reached to close the trunk when I felt a sharp pain in my gut.

“Come on,” I told myself. “Focus.” I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing. “Focus.” My daughter was next to me in the stroller, kicking the blanket that covered her. From the edge of my vision, I saw a clean, unused diaper in the side pocket of the trunk. I grabbed it and stuffed it down the back of my pants.

I climbed into the car and ripped off my pants, thankful for the tinted windows. Naked from the waist down, I looked into the rearview mirror and saw a man staring at my baby’s stroller.

“Keep walking,” I said through clenched teeth. “Go.”

He stopped in front of her and looked around for signs of an adult.

I wiped myself with my underwear. Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes as I stuffed the diaper and my underwear into an empty grocery bag I kept for trash. The man took a step away, then another. He looked over his shoulder, searched again for an adult, checked his watch and walked toward the terminal.

***

One Sunday morning, Jose and I headed out on a nearly empty freeway toward downtown San Diego, toward the air and seaports, the aircraft carriers and the destroyers. As we drove we passed a white school bus with United States Marine Corps written on the side in plain black lettering. After we passed one white bus, we passed another and another and another. Through the windows I saw soldiers asleep, soldiers listening to music, soldiers staring. Yellow school busses are like popcorn machines, barely able to contain the energy of the children inside. They are giggles and squeals and elbows to the ribs and hip shoves. But, the white school busses were still. The quiet seeped into us until the only discernible sound was the relentless click of wheels on cement.

 ***

Back for more of the same – that’s how the Afghans view us, according to General Stanley McChrystal, the man once in charge of Operation Enduring Freedom. How do I know General McChrystal’s take on the Afghans? Jose spoke to him at the AdvaMed CEO Summit where McChrystal was the keynote speaker. In the Afghans’ opinion, their country was a major battleground in the Cold War between America and the Soviets. We supported the Afghans who fought a long, decimating war and ultimately defeated the Soviets. Then we abandoned them and the Taliban filled the vacuum. And now, because Al Qaeda attacked us, we’re there again. Not to provide help, but to seek revenge.

“What’s most important to understand,” General McChrystal told Jose, “Is that soon after the Afghans defeated the Red Army, the Soviet Empire collapsed. From the Afghans’ point of view, Afghanistan won the Cold War for America.”

 ***

In the yoga class, as I lunged and struggled for balance, the instructor explained that the generations of people on earth correlate to the rainbow. Her generation was the blue generation – the generation of change. She and my parents and all the other Baby Boomers changed the world. My generation was the indigo generation, a period of transition. We stepped on the backs of her generation.

The yoga instructor walked the room correcting our poses. She shifted my hips to center then received a breath.

“These babies you’re bringing into the world,” said the yoga instructor. “Are the violet generation.” She weaved a path through the maze of mats then paused to align another set of hips. “They are the generation of peace.”

 ***

Nine months earlier, on the day I brought my baby into the world, Marine Lance Corporal Julian Brennan of Brooklyn, New York, was killed by a roadside bomb in Farah, Afghanistan. To his mother, he expressed a “deep empathy” for the Afghan people. His father called him a “happy and ethical warrior.”

***

Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.

Listen to Gwen read her essay:

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Afghan writer Kakail Nuristani compiled photos, letters and documents from his father’s life, working with Adam Klein to tell a fascinating story that spans three-generations.

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Stack’s first book is the extraordinary account of her time spent there, as well as in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya—all countries in thrall to war machines or repressive regimes. After a three-year stint as the Moscow Bureau Chief, she began a post in China this July. I reached her at her home in Beijing to talk about the book. A few hours after our Skype-enabled conversation, Every Man In This Village Is A Liar was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award.

The Rumpus: I’m curious—the book has been out now for several months—and I’m curious about the response you’ve gotten in general but in particular from your colleagues at the LA Times, and elsewhere. I was struck by how honestly and openly you described grappling with the limits of war journalism.

Megan Stack: I tried to be very honest in the book, and not just in terms of telling the truth by the letter—I tried to be intellectually honest about war reporting, and foreign reporting in general, and to a certain extent the very nature of reporting. Because I think there’s a tendency to be a little less intellectually honest in the way we portray ourselves and the work that we do. Everybody wants to look good and look like they know everything and they’re the smartest kid on the block, and I was really trying to get beyond that—the posturing that I feel like sometimes gets in the way of journalistic accounts. But I don’t think anybody would come to me and say, “You misrepresented this.” If anything, I think some people appreciated it.

Rumpus: You’re very frank about the business—or the process—of reporting, and its challenges. For instance in the Yemen chapter, you get at the pressure of situations where, like, “they sent me here, so I have to send them something back” [even if the facts on the ground are unverifiable].

Stack: It’s funny—the Yemen chapter was the one I was thinking about too. That was the chapter where I tried to say to the reader, “Look, let me level with you. Not everything that you are reading in the newspaper is necessarily completely clear.” It’s not that it’s untrue—of course these things are true; it’s true that someone said this to a reporter, and it’s not like reporters are going around misquoting people—of course they’re not. The problem is that there are so many layers of misrepresentation, there are so many layers of the difficulty of penetrating another country that’s not your country, finding someone to talk to you who isn’t just trying to use you for their purposes, who isn’t lying to you because of the agenda of the foreign government.

If you’re talking about truth, it’s not really enough to say, “This happened, according to this official.” Because that may not be true, and that’s what I was trying to elucidate with the example of that one trip where I felt so completely unable to come back with anything that was truly meaningful to the story I was trying to get, about how the so-called war on terror was being fought in Yemen and what kind of compromises were being made, what kind of deals had been struck between the U.S. government and Yemen, and just what it feels like to get swaddled in spin, and more and more desperate to come up with something. You start out with very ambitious plans for the trip and then—some of these trips disintegrate into, “Okay, what kind of feature can I get, because I’m leaving on Saturday and I have to pull something together.” That’s just part of the work, but I wanted people to have a sense of that—because it is how a lot of places that are important to the U.S. are covered.

Rumpus: I got the sense that a big part of your experience was figuring out how the job worked. You were so young when you first went to the Afghanistan, and one of the first things that happens is you report a story that Donald Rumsfeld contradicts in the press the next day.

Stack: It wasn’t just me—everybody who was working in that part of Afghanistan that day got the same story. But yeah, there was a denial of a bombing that had pretty clearly taken place. That’s something that you deal with all the time; getting people to tell the truth is in general very difficult, and in no place is it more difficult than a war zone. The nature of that experience is that people are doing things that are not noble and that they don’t want to remember themselves, let alone talk about. It’s a very sticky thing to try and sort through.

Rumpus: When did you know that you would write this book, and filter your experiences into a work of narrative non-fiction?

Stack: It’s interesting, I had experienced all of these things in the Middle East, and it was all sort of still boiling inside of me. I used to look at the pile of newspaper stories that I had written over the years, and just feel kind of sad, and like they weren’t enough. All of the people I had known, all of the human tragedies and triumphs and places and emotions that I had seen felt more or less wasted. And I was really bothered by that; I felt like if I move on with my life and don’t find a way to record these things in a way that was more artful then I had wasted my time.

I wanted to write a book, but I didn’t think that I could write a book, and I didn’t think I had a book. I didn’t have an idea of what the book would be. I was in Egypt when I was thinking this through and I remember having coffee with a friend and telling her, “I don’t have a book.” And she said, “You do, you have a book.” I said, “I don’t remember anything that’s happened the past six years, it’s just a blur of experiences and places and I could never sit down and take it all apart.”

But it’s interesting, once I got to Moscow, and out of that part of the world—Moscow was so completely different—the daily experience and the feeling of being there—from an Arab country, that it gave me the distance that I needed. I started going back and reading through all of my reporting notebooks, and re-reading my journals, which is something that I don’t usually do. I had the time and the space, for the first time, to process all of the things that had taken place, and what they meant. And that’s where the book started to come; I saw that there was a narrative, there was an overarching thread that ran through all of these disparate experiences and countries, and that in some ways it was the story of this thing called the war on terror. It’s also a very American story about going out into the world and getting lost, and to a certain extent that had happened to me:  I had had to find my footing again after ending up in war zones almost serendipitously—I don’t know if you can call it serendipity to end up in a war zone! By happenstance. And it had also happened to the country—the country had gotten into something that got so much bigger and more complicated and difficult to get out of than any of us could have imagined after September 11^th.

Rumpus: In terms of arriving at your style—which I found really distinctive—was that a parallel challenge, or something that evolved as you wrote?

Stack: I write a lot independently—this is the first thing I’ve published outside of the LA Times, ever—but I do write a lot, and read a lot. I think I had my own way that I wanted to do a book; I knew exactly how I wanted to write it. If anything I felt really free when I was writing the book; I felt like I could finally write the way I wanted to write, and I didn’t have to make it match a newspaper style. Which I like to do—I like working for a newspaper—but it was great not to have those restrictions in prose style, to be able to lose myself a little bit and have more of a free-roaming artistic experience. I really enjoyed writing the book; there were times I would spend working—in the morning in Moscow with the streets still dark, and I was just so happy writing.

Rumpus: You wrote that you “had expected everything from war, danger and blood and hurt, and the war produced all of it.” Was there anything that surprised you about the experience of war, or your own response to it?

Stack: I covered different conflicts at different stages of my late twenties and I guess early thirties; from the first time that I went to war, I think the thing that was most striking to me—and I bet that a lot of people have this experience, just on first impression—is how much ordinary life there still is in a war zone. You watch movies and read books about war and it’s very easy to get this melodramatic impression that everything’s going to be blowing up around you all the time, and it’ll be non-stop carnage. I think you expect that to some extent unconsciously without realizing that’s your expectation. Then you go to a war zone and you realize that kids still go to school, and you can go to one village and it will be this apocalyptic nightmare, and a few miles down the road you’ll maybe find something completely different. Obviously every war is different, but when I went to Afghanistan that was what surprised me the most. I had girded myself, I was ready for it to be awful and traumatic and difficult every moment of the day. Then you get there and find yourself having a wonderful day with villagers—or whatever; you have all kinds of different experiences in the context of covering the war.

As far as myself—and I wrote about this in the book—I think went from in the beginning feeling very aloof and unafraid and sort of cavalier about being there to two years later being in Lebanon and being terrified for the first time, and how awful it was to be that scared in a war zone. All of a sudden I found myself not having those reserves of fearlessness. It made it much harder to be there, unsurprisingly.

Rumpus: The chapter in which you chronicle the aftermath of the assassination of Rafik Hariri in Lebanon is amazing—one thing I kept wondering as I read it is how you got such incredible access. It almost sounds like you became a part of his funeral procession.

Stack: It’s one of the things about Lebanon that had started to change when I left Lebanon—I’m not sure if it’s still like that. I did have very good access in Lebanon, but that wasn’t specific to me, all the reporters were able to come and go. But with Hariri for example—and a lot of Lebanese leaders—you’re talking really about communal bosses, so you’re kind of talking about somebody who’s sitting at the top of a pyramid which consists of a sect. In the case of Hariri of course you’re talking about Sunni Muslims. And one of the ways that people who derive power from their people show their strength is to let you know that they would go out among the people and be with them. There was that sense of inherent protection, that you didn’t need a bodyguard and people could come up and kiss your hand and ask you for a favor. That was a real display of strength.

As a result, if you were a reporter you could kind of just walk into the house—not every day, but during the funeral definitely, because they opened the doors and let in, not everybody in Beirut, but the Beirut upper crust was definitely all there. That started to change after the war, but Lebanon in general—once you spend some time there you realize it’s kind of like a small town. It’s not like Cairo where you have huge numbers of people and a huge security apparatus, it’s much more of a small town feel.

Rumpus: I noticed in the news this morning there are reports of [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon, where I guess he received a distinctly warm welcome. You made some criticisms of the U.S.’s position on Hezbollah in the book, I’m curious about your thoughts on what the U.S. should be doing?

Stack: I don’t think the book is critical of how the United States deals with Hezbollah, I think the book talks about, during the war in Lebanon, the efficacy of bombing Hezbollah. I think there is a parallel to Iraq and the old school thought of counter-insurgency strategy and does it work to deal with an insurgency this way.

Mourners of Rafik al-Hariri

The book does talk about how, after the assassination of Hariri, there was this rush, in U.S. policy circles, to look at Lebanon as a country that was defined by the Hariri people, which is to say the pro-Western, either Sunni Muslim or Christian or Druze communities, and not recognize the fact that there is a huge Shi’ite population in Lebanon and in general that population is with Hezbollah. You can crunch the numbers and try to make them not say that, but it’s the truth, that’s what the situation is. So there’s the question—and this is a complicated issue that’s in the book—about the problems that were going to be caused after the assassination of Hariri by to some extent negating the existence of part of the country, and how that would destabilize Lebanon in the long run.

I think that is what you see today: You see Ahmadinejad coming and you see how excited the country is. Obviously not the entire country, I’m sure there are people in Lebanon today who are disgusted with the fact that he’s there, but you have a very, very divided country in Lebanon—it sometimes seems like a hopelessly divided country. So it becomes very dangerous and very difficult to pick one side or the other and say, “We’re going to let this side define what Lebanon is.”

Rumpus: I got the sense in the book that you were raised Catholic?

Stack: I was, I was raised Catholic and my family is very observant Catholic. They went to church every Sunday.

Rumpus: I’m wondering what your feelings are about religion…[general laughter] I guess that’s kind of an absurd question.

Stack: I don’t think I can possibly answer that question effectively or honestly in the context of this interview just because there are so many things that I can say about that.

Rumpus: Let me ask a more specific question: In your chapter on Egypt you observe that “profound” religious faith is often a product of poverty and a source of comfort for its practitioners—“to feel the fire of faith when you have nothing else to hold.” You compare it to the Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States. I’m wondering if you could talk about the notion of class—if you think it’s a determining factor in whether someone is raised in an extremist faith, rather than a moderate one, or no faith at all.

Stack: No, no, I don’t think that at all. I wrote about that in the chapter about Saudi Arabia, which is one of the most radicalized places in the Arab world, and also the richest. No, I would definitely not make that argument at all. In the chapter about the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s talking about Egypt, and a part of Egypt where people are poor and don’t have much, and what they do have is this profound religious faith that they’ve been raised with and that binds them to their ancestors and to their relatives in a very powerful way. It’s also a place where the mosque is one of the only social structures you have; it’s naturally going to have a great deal of appeal to people growing up there.

When I think of those people in that chapter in that village, I don’t think of them as necessarily radicalized people. They were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but individually I think that’s what they were living inside of, that’s culturally what they had—I don’t think they were people who were individually looking to blow something up, or whatever. They were people who were very, very devout. In a country like Egypt, where you have so much corruption, here were people [the Muslim Brotherhood] who came to them as political leaders draped in this perception of incorruptibility—“We’re not coming from the wealthy, powerful secular leaders, we’re coming to you from religion, we’re coming from the mosque.” And the people have seen their entire lives that these are people who take care of orphans, and the elderly—it’s a very powerful PR move. It’s a large issue and I go into it more fully in the book, but I think poverty is just one part of it.

Rumpus: You have a quote from one of the Muslim Brotherhood candidates whom you shadow that I thought, although it has a specific context, really got to the heart of the matter. He said: “Globalization shouldn’t be a globalization of morals, of interfering in affairs of every stripe.” All of the issues and events you write about in the book are so complex and so layered, and yet it seems to me you either believe this or you don’t.

Stack: He was saying that to me at that moment because I was a woman who was asking him about how women would be treated in this theoretical universe where the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, and he did not like that. He was trying to tell me, in a roundabout way, “Hey, back off, you don’t live here, this isn’t your country, you can talk about women’s rights in your own country, not here.”

But the question you’re raising is the serious question of our time, and it’s something that’s not necessarily answerable with a throwaway line. I think to a certain extent, I think it matters—it matters to me. It matters, for example, what my tax dollars go toward. Do I like the idea, for example of propping up dictatorships that oppress their own people and don’t hold elections? No, I don’t like that at all. On the other hand, I live in the world, and I have spent the better part of the last decade traveling the world, and I do understand that there are strategic concerns, and those concerns are real, they’re not fake concerns.

I’m a writer, I’m a journalist, and I’m forming, as I go along, my stance on these big questions. I don’t have a hard answer. But what is very important to me is that people in the United States become more educated about the world, because those are exactly the kinds of questions we need to decide as a country. What would Americans say? What is more important to them? Is it preserving markets? Is it preserving strategic interests? We like to think of ourselves as a country of ideals, and we don’t like to think of ourselves as a country that has done things to contravene those ideals overseas, but I think that we should have a very conscious sense of the choices we’re making as a country and I don’t think we necessarily do. For me, the bigger thing is moving information and getting people educated and trying to share some of the stories so that at least they can make educated choices and informed choices.

As I said, I think the question you just asked is truly one of the driving ones in foreign affairs right now. This is a big deal. If you look at China, for example—I remember a lot of Arab governments telling me, and people in the Arab oil industry telling me that they really liked dealing with China because China paid, and China just wants to do business. “China doesn’t hassle us about human rights: They come, they make a deal, they go home. We don’t have to have the conversation about political prisoners or torture, or whatever it’s going to be with the Americans.” At the end of the day, we still have a lot of the same deals with these countries but we do go through the process of putting some pressure on them; sometimes they do some good. All these questions—how we want to guide ourselves as a country—I think is really important, and I’m not sure that that conversation is taking place in the country right now.

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What is the state of reading among the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The worst dinner party ever: “The guests were ushered into a room that was decorated entirely in black…, lit only by flickering funeral lamps. Each guest’s place was marked with a gravestone engraved with his or her name, and instead of the customary soft couches, they reclined on rock-hard benches.”

The future is coming, and it looks like Google. “It is hard to overstate how big this change could be.”

Before this moment, I had never even considered the possibility of anything like bookrunners. I think I was born fifty years too late.

Rebecca Solnit at BOMB Magazine: “Like in New Orleans, the public was demonized. That’s the social disaster, which is not at all the same thing as a natural disaster.” (see also The Rumpus interview with Solnit)

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Miniature architecture fashioned from re-purposed kitchen and hardware items.

Illustrating New York Missed Connections.

Photographing the war in Afghanistan.

TED talk on what global warming actually looks like. (via Metafilter.)

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Pop Idol

The program was the eponymous subject of a documentary film currently showing throughout the US, which follows four contestants — two men and two women — as they vie for the top prize, and the contest becomes a way to explore politics, ethnic rivalries, and the status of women in the country.

It reveals much about Afghanistan; or so I thought, until I mentioned the movie to Tamim Ansary. He seemed ambivalent, so I went to watch it; it impressed me, but then again, I knew very little about Afghanistan apart from what I’d learned from the film. So I thought it’d be interesting to sit down with Tamim and subject my naive reactions to his expertise. The result was a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation nominally about the film, but really about Afghanistan in general, touching upon music, the country’s ethnic diversity, the status of women, democracy, the pariah status of artistic truth-tellers like Khaled Hosseini, the successive waves of modernization and backlash that have convulsed the country since 1918, “old men with beards saying horrible things,” and — as a weird bonus — a popular but creepy overweight singer who, in his heyday, walked upon women’s hair on his way to the stage.

The Rumpus: So I just wanted to ask first: Was there anything in the film that actually surprised you?

Ansary: No, nothing that actually surprised me. I had kind of a funny reaction to the film, actually, after it steeped for a little bit. I’d been following Afghan Star before this movie came out, and in retrospect it struck me that the movie never really showed any complete performances by these people, that they didn’t respect the fact that these people are doing something they consider to be art. They did spend a whole lot of time on that suspenseful moment when the singers stood there and one of them was eliminated. Now I can perhaps say that, maybe to an American audience, it all sounds kind of the same.

The Rumpus: Well, you said that when we were talking about this last week, and I still don’t agree! To me, anyway, there was clear diversity to the songs, at least as much as we heard of them.

Ansary: Okay. But then I also realized that she mostly just hit all the themes you already hear about Afghanistan: there’s a lot of ethnic conflict and they can’t get together, they hate women, they’ve got old men with beards saying awful things, you know? There’s something about it that made me feel like the director kind of found what she was looking for. She found what she already thought was there.

The Rumpus: Wow. That reaction is really interesting. What I’m hearing from you is that the film reinforced preconceptions, but because I came to this without really knowing the first thing about Afghanistan, almost everything in it was a surprise to me. I actually found it educational.

Ansary: So in what sense did it educate you?

The Rumpus: Well, I’ll put it this way. Previously, when I thought of Afghanistan, I thought of a desolate place with no infrastructure, with children toting Kalashnikovs, with caves and terrorists mixed somewhere in there. But within ten minutes I got to know an Afghanistan, and a Kabul in particular, that seemed to be a very modern place despite all the war and earthquake damage — I loved that saying they quoted, “in Afghanistan, if there’s not war, there’s earthquake.”

Ansary: It’s true!

The Rumpus: Anyway, the film gave me a much more complex idea, compared to what I started with. Maybe it’s kind of pathetic, but I knew so little that what seem preconceptions to you, were revelations to me. Now I’d feel naive, but everybody that I talked to about this, and I like to think I have smart, well-informed friends, were just as surprised to hear this as I was to see it.

Ansary: Well, I have encountered this before. And you know, when I went back in 2002, I myself was surprised at how much there was of the old Afghanistan. The Afghanistan I remembered was pretty much all there. Like a third of the city was completely destroyed, true, but there were shops and stores, restaurants, kabob, cheese, good food, so many cars, and so many people could put together computers out of anything.

And when I went outside the city, into the countryside, into places like the Panchir Valley, which I thought would have been completely isolated, it turned out that the war itself had exposed these small villagers to sophisticated technology. I’d go to places where you’d see scenes from another time, people threshing wheat with pitchforks, and little boys would come running up and say “how are you sir? hello, hello!” And I would say, “how do you know any English?” Not only had the war not prevented the spread of technology, it had promoted it. It was so weird. So we don’t know much about them, but they know all about us.

The thing is, they’re alarmed by the young woman who dances in the sinuous manner onstage, but they have internet access there, and whatever you see on the internet, they can see it too.

The Rumpus: One of the producers alluded to that when he said “Afghanis see J.Lo on TV.”

Ansary: They see more than J.Lo, they see everything, including total porno. So I think that contributes to an even more dehumanized, weird idea about women. When you can see women on the screen like this, but in real life they’re like that, you have no idea what a woman is really like.

The Rumpus: Let me pick up on that. Two of the contestants they follow to the end were women. Inevitably, a lot of the film was about the status of women in Afghan society, and the restrictions they have to live under, and the risks they run by pursuing music. What did you think of the portrayal of that? Did you find it accurate or was it too heavy?

Ansary: I don’t think it was too heavy. But I’ll tell you something: I think Afghan women are really tough. It’s easy to assume that they’re pitifully crouched down and hiding, but that’s not the case. They’re tough, they have their world, and they’re in charge of that world, which outsiders never see. And in that environment, there’s a lot of activity of women pushing back against these structures. I would say 200 years ago, it was like that here. Women couldn’t go to school, they were disenfranchised, they couldn’t own property, in fact they were considered property for a time. And they fought for their rights, each little inch being the next they could conceive of getting.

That’s how it happened here, but it can’t happen that way there, because the most extreme advancement of women’s rights already exists in the world. So for those women, every time they want an inch further than what the culture gives them, the battle is not for that inch but potentially for the whole distance.

What I see is that conservative old men believe that the world will end if women are allowed to come out and do the same things as men. Aside from anything else, the one thing that would help, is if they could have an experience of how it really is when women are liberated, and know that the world doesn’t end. But they can’t get to that because they’re busy making certain that it never happens, and making certain that every step towards its happening ends up creating violence and catastrophe, so they can point to that and say, “see what happens to society when women are liberated?”

It’s not because women are liberated, it’s because men don’t know how to handle it. And this is the other thing about the question of women in Afghan culture, which can be traced back to the legacy of colonialism. Many men have this attitude that “if my woman is independent, I’m less of a man, if my woman is strong, I’m a weaker man.”

The Rumpus: Well, that mentality was widespread here just a few decades ago.

Ansary: Yes, and it still exists in a lot of the country. So when that idea is present in someone’s mind, he will have this psychic reaction to women having strength and making decisions. He’ll feel emasculated by that.

So now, look at a context where an entire society has been imperially overtaken by another society, and their cultures are distinctly different, so it’s not just a power relationship, it’s a form of cultural imperialism too. The powerful other culture is there and it has social mores that are in argument with your social mores, and the most obvious, distinctive, and frightening one is that in the other culture, women are independent.

You see? There’s already a situation of cultural humiliation and impotence, and then the imperial culture comes in and says “you know, there’s just one little thing we want to change in your world: we want to emasculate you men, you have to let your women be free.”

This is catastrophic for the women, because it just exacerbates the idea that in the oppression of women, we can find our strength. And ordinary women then bear the brunt of men’s frustration.

The Rumpus: I want to talk a little about one of the key moments in this regard, which you alluded to earlier: when one of the women, Setara, is voted out, she impulsively dances and uncovers her hair during her performance. This causes an enormous scandal and there’s a lot of fallout: the TV show comes under pressure from the authorities, Setara has to go into hiding, there are threats on her life, she lies low for months in Kabul before attempting to return home, and there’s a clip of men in the street saying that she should be killed. All this in reaction to a dance that, to Western eyes, looks pretty innocuous.

Ansary: You know, I read several reviews of this, and I don’t think a single reviewer talked about that woman dancing without saying something like, “she barely even moved her hands! They call that dancing?”

The Rumpus: Well, I wouldn’t say that, exactly, but it was pretty tame.

Ansary: Sure, but here’s the thing: she didn’t just move her body, she did pelvic thrusts! When I saw it I thought, “gosh, she really didn’t have to do that.” It was so un-Afghan. There’s a kind of traditional dance, and it’s also provocative; they move their hands in this sinuous way and there’s a kind of flirtation with the eyes. But this was genital-centered dancing.

The Rumpus: No, you’re right, that’s an accurate description.

Ansary: And I thought, why did she do that? That was a deliberate move. She could not have really been surprised by the reaction. Now, did you see those six clips I sent you of Maryam Elaha in the fourth season?

The Rumpus: Yes.

Ansary: Well, in those you see that originally, that at the auditions, that girl is wearing a hijab and she’s standing stiffly, but by the end she’s got her fancy little Italian hat, and she is dancing and moving around. It’s not the kind of dancing that Setara did, but she’s loosened up a lot. If you only saw this movie, I think you’d come away with the impression that man, these guys are in danger, this show is going to fail, and people are going to get killed. It’d be interesting for people to know that now we’ve had another whole season, and I don’t know how many women were among the contestants, but to me Maryam Elaha is a superstar. She’s really good, even though she got voted out. These women in the movie, not so good! It’s like they made it to the finals only on some kind of rule.

The Rumpus: Unfortunately, I have to agree with that. Neither of them were that great. What’d you think of the two men?

Ansary: They were both good. I didn’t believe the one guy who said he was “classically trained.” I’m not sure what he means by that, and somehow I felt he was talking it up. Because in Afghanistan, “classical music” means Indian classical, like ragas. And he might mean “classical music”: what they used to do on Kabul radio ten years ago. Who knows what he meant.

The Rumpus: There was another aspect of Setara doing a Western-style dance that I wanted to talk about. It seemed like there was a double standard, in that Westerners can do whatever, but an Afghan woman on stage –

Ansary: That’s always been the case. If she’s ours, she has to represent our culture. They can do what they want.

The Rumpus: Are performers held to a harsher standard than ordinary women, or is it just that more attention is on them?

Ansary: More attention is on them, and I think that Afghans tend to have a very sensitive antenna out for what you’re telling the world, much more so than we are. There’s this hyper-consciousness of, whatever is done publicly represents us, and so we have to be careful about what we show the world. But then, pathetically enough, they kind of don’t understand what they’re actually showing the world.

You know, Kahled Hosseini was telling me he’s had a lot of trouble because of The Kite Runner. He’s persona non grata there, and that’s because he portrayed something that’s not at all uncommon: some bully kids raped a boy, and that happens. I lived in fear of that growing up myself, as a delicate little boy. And so, in some gathering or other, a bunch of Afghans told Kahled, You’ve dishonored our country. You’ve brought shame on us. And he said, What about ourselves killing each other by the truckload? I think that’s what has brought dishonor on our country, not this novel revealing some bit of truth about Afghan culture.

The Rumpus: Absolutely. I guess that any artist who writes about something kept tacit inside their culture exposes themselves to that kind of reaction.

Ansary: Yeah. His book is much more courageous in the Afghan context than anybody can see in the American context.

The Rumpus: Here it’s a summer read.

Ansary: Yeah, here people say, “Ah, I finally see Afghanistan. This is good.” But there, they say “Gah! Now they’re seeing Afghanistan! How could you do this to us?”

The Rumpus: One of the few things most people seem to have heard about Afghanistan is that music was banned there for a certain period of time. To me that’s almost like the idea of banning love: it just doesn’t make sense, and I can’t figure out how to get to where it makes sense. But I’ve read that there has been controversy in Islam over music from the beginning. Could you enlighten me a little bit about that debate? What’s the reasoning that gets one to banning music, if you know?

Ansary: I do know. First of all, I just want to emphasize that nothing like this had ever happened in Afghanistan before. The idea that you would ban music, it just would never happen. The fact that it did happen for five years only reflected the fact that something had arisen in the world of Islamic fundamentalism that had reached this point, and the Taliban were an expression of that. And this radical Islamic fundamentalism has emerged in a colonial context, in reaction to Western culture, and the place where fundamentalism finally gravitates to most intensely has to do with sexuality and women. And that’s everywhere. I think the Taliban were the most extreme version of it, but it is throughout this whole world. And you see it in fundamentalism generally, but in Islamic fundamentalism in particular. From there, I think there’s a tendency for Muslim extremism to take the position that anything that is pleasurable must be wrong, including music.

The Rumpus: So it starts from a puritanical sensibility, and justifications are found afterward?

Ansary: Right. But there are two more things I want to say about this. One is that, it’s possible to look at this ban superficially and think “this is what Afghans are like, look what they did.” And in fact, we’re talking about a five-year period. On the other hand, I saw something in that movie that I’ve seen many other places, where they say: “here’s how Afghanistan used to be,” and then they show video of a rock and roll concert.

But that wasn’t what Afghanistan was either. That was a tiny part of the country. It is fundamentally a very conservative, socially conservative place. And these old men with beards saying these horrible things, that’s more like what most of Afghanistan has been all along.

But I would also say that, up until everything broke thirty years ago, the conservatism that you saw in rural Afghanistan, was nested in a stable social structure that had not broken. It was tribal, and it was a world divided between private and public. There was this fairly rich kind of private world where there were men and women, whereas the public world was family to family, and the men were the public face of that. So that was a complicated social structure that had a stability, and it worked then, and this war completely shattered all of it.

Just think for a minute about the fact that 8 million people ended up as refugees, and virtually all of them were women and children. This was like a third of the population, and the men were in the country fighting, so that these eight million refugees represented an even larger number of internally displaced persons.

Facing a catastrophe on this scale, when people want to restore something from the past, the first thing they look to is sexuality and women. And watching that movie really brought up for me again how difficult this question of women is. That’s where the rubber meets the road, and the music question emerges from that.

The Rumpus: A moment ago you referred to the archival photos and footage they showed of a more liberal Kabul — I’m assuming all that was from Kabul.

Ansary: Yeah.

The Rumpus: If you had shown me that without any context, I would have guessed they were taken in India, or Beirut, Turkey, some place like that. But you’re saying that was just a tiny slice of the country. They paint a picture of a very liberal place. Do you remember any of that?

Ansary: It was 1964 when I left, and it was around ’62 or so when that started. Afghanistan has always been a place that has both things going on. It has a deeply conservative countryside, but there’s always been a sophisticated urban elite, because in the course of history, it’s been the crossroads: people come from everywhere and go to everywhere.

So let me go back a little earlier. In the 1920s, some Afghans who had been involved in all the modernization that happened in Turkey moved back to Afghanistan during the 1910s, and brought the whole Young Turk movement with them. And one of the people that heartily joined into it was the prince, the heir apparent. His father died in 1918, he became the king, and he immediately launched this huge modernization campaign. They have ten years of it, and it was extreme for the context. Schools opened up to girls, the veil was abolished –

The Rumpus: Aren’t you talking about overturning more than a thousand years of tradition?

Ansary: Yes, you are. They did it once in the 1920s, tried to overturn a thousand years of tradition, and there was a backlash in the 30s. That guy was chased out, and the restoration was this heavy-duty authoritarian monarchy. They were also interested in progress, but they thought they had better go slow.

So they moved in that direction, and by the time I was young, in the 50s, it was very much the case that within the compound walls, it was very modern and lots of stuff went on. People had record players and we’d listen to Elvis Presley. But it was understood that you don’t show anything like that out in the streets.

So as I said, there were really two worlds, and you knew about that other whole world, because you’d go to people’s houses and once you were inside the walls, it was like that. And then, during the period when the communists took over, the push was to have it not within the walls. They wanted this world to go public. And so that’s the period in which women were dancing on TV, they had TV for the first time, so there was a lot of progress in that way.

But honestly, it was too much progress for the context. They had bars, they had nightclubs, all that stuff. And it was so extremely disjunctive, between what was in Kabul and what was ten miles out of Kabul — how could that work?

And then when I went back in ’02, it was within three months after the Taliban had been driven out, and I went to somebody’s party. There were a lot of cars coming from all these different places, and when you got inside the walls of that place, there was whiskey on the tables, there was dancing, there was rock and roll music, women and men were mingling freely — this is two months after the Taliban and it’s happening right there.

You see, there’s a fast, modern, young urban culture that has had continuity right on through that period. And now they’re struggling. Those guys, like the promoter of Afghan Star, they’re entering the struggle against those old guys, and they’re saying “we’re going to do this.” And there are also a lot of people who have come back from abroad, and they’re trying to reclaim the country for that more modern idea.

The Rumpus: Do you think they have a chance at avoiding another backlash?

Ansary: Well, the backlash is here, now. It is happening. The awful thing is, I don’t know if another terrible period can be avoided now. I wonder if there’s anything the US could do now; we’ve made bad mistakes and it might be too late.

The Rumpus: What about this idea the producer was pushing, that perhaps music could be a tool to help unify this incredibly diverse country, that they could trade guns for music?

Ansary: Wouldn’t that be nice? They’re always saying “maybe this thing” — fill in the blank — “will be a tool to unify the country.” The last one was a national army.

But I doubt that music per se could be a tool for that, because politically it signifies too much. Let me step over and discuss education for a moment. People say “well, you can just put a school in every place, and that will unify the country, people will stop being so ignorant. But a school is a statement about what culture is better and what culture is worse. So putting a school in there is already an assaultive act, saying “you guys are ignorant, and we’re going to teach you.” So that’s not a tool for unifying the country, it’s a tool for creating a line of scrimmage. And then that’s where the battle is joined. Not that schools are bad, but that’s what happens.

So with music, there’s always been music in Afghan culture, and it has a certain place in traditional society, music is a certain thing, but now this Afghan Star kind of music is something completely different from that. So it’s an extreme version of, when rock and roll first hit here, all the old folks said it was just noise, and the kids thought it was the greatest thing. Music was not a tool for unifying the generations. It was a tool for marking the line between the generations. That’s what music is doing in this context now. Everybody’s got music, but whose music you’ve got is a way to mark out the lines.

In the long run, perhaps yes, but other kinds of relaxations have to take place before people can start to say “well, let me try this, what kind of music have you got?” The culture as a whole has to become more integrated, more easy with itself.

The Rumpus: I was thinking about your article the other day, Real Choice in Afghan Election, and I wanted to get your perspective on the claim that when participants voted using their cell phones, for many of them it was their first experience of democracy. What’s your reaction to that?

Ansary: Mixed. On the one hand, it’s an interesting thought, that because of cell phones, everyone can vote in something. So I think as far as that goes, that’s true. On the other hand, people really did vote in 2004. They didn’t really vote for anything in particular, they just kind of voted. But they did vote, and they were delighted –

The Rumpus: Yeah, it’s not like they were unfamiliar with the concept.

Ansary: Yeah, and I think that something like three-quarters of the coutry voted. I don’t think that’s fake, I think that’s a real number. But let me tell you a story. My cousin who was on the election commission, she helped organize those elections, and being a woman, she was the one who went into the compounds and registered the women to vote in these distant places. One woman said to her “I’m so excited about voting, when that day comes I’m going to have my husband bring me a hundred ballots, I’m just going to spend the whole day voting!”

The Rumpus: You know, voting used to be very like that here, especially in the late 18th to early 19th centuries. At that time the political parties were in charge of printing ballots, and already you can imagine what comes of that. The more ballots you could get printed up and marked, the more votes you could bring to the polling place. People would gather up huge bundles of ballots and send some unfortunate person to deliver them, and they’d be attacked and sometimes even killed along the way. So it’s not like elections have always been an easy thing even here.

Ansary: Some places that are coming to voting new — India is an example — they have very sophisticated electronic voting technology that works there. Much more so than ours. For some reason, ours never seem to work. The ATMs work, but the voting machines…

The Rumpus: To finish up, I want to return to one of the first points you made, which was that the film didn’t seem to respect the singers as artists. That made me wonder if you’d like to recommend some Afghan artists to us.

Ansary: Well, the artists that I like are mostly dead, unfortunately. There is one Afghan singer that every Afghan knows about and all Afghans love, and he was a popular singer from my day in Afghanistan and continued until ’79 when the communists knocked the country over. His name was Ahmad Zahir (AHK-med Zoy-eh). Everybody you hear singing popular music is basically singing in his style. We knew this guy when I was a teenager, he was also a teenager, and he came to our town, his uncle was my father’s friend, and even as a teenager, man, that guy walked into a room and nothing else was happening but him. He was just volcanically charismatic.

There was another guy who came to our town, Ustad Shaida (oos-TAHD shay-ah-DAH) to play music, and I couldn’t believe how good the guy was. I was twelve years old and standing by the stage, just lost in that music. And I recently discovered that there are two clips of this guy on YouTube. They’re audio clips with still shots. But the minute I saw the still shots, I said “there he is!” Then the music started and I was like, “man, I’m there, baby!”

The Rumpus: Can you recommend anybody from a younger generation?

Ansary: Today, there’s a young Afghan-American woman named Meghan Kabir (kah-BEE) and she plays this really kickass pop rock. But it turns out, she also plays Afghan traditional music. And when I see her playing rock and roll, I just wouldn’t even believe she’s an Afghan. Talk about moving!

One more old guy. There was a guy named Sarahang (sar-ah-RANG) who eventually became very famous after he left Afghanistan, but in my day he was a guy that, at the big weeklong independence festival in Kabul, he was usually hired to sing at one of these tea gardens they set up. Everybody loved him, but I remember that my mother really hated him and never really knew why. Then I saw clips of him on YouTube recently, and I realized why my mother disliked him. It’s because he was a big fat guy, and he was very flirtatious. He would sing and kind of eye the women.

The Rumpus: Well, that’s gross!

Ansary: It was pretty creepy! In fact, I was just talking about this guy the other day with an Afghan friend of mine, and he said “yes, he became so famous that when he went to India, they lined the street with women who came out to greet him, and the women bowed down and put their hair on the path so that he could walk to the stage without stepping on the ground.

The Rumpus: I don’t even know what to make of that. I can only hope he had a light step.

Ansary: Now I’m even revealing new things to you about Afghanistan!

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This is just awesome. There’s not much more to say than that.

Here’s an excerpt from a participant named Freshta, who at the time was attending a secret school for women:

“One day while I was walking toward the secret school alone, groups of Taliban were inside a Dixon car, which is like an open Toyota. They followed me because they suspected I was going to study school subjects. …

I didn’t look at them and went to another street, hid myself among the trees growing in front of the houses, planning to show them that I was entering the house, but by chance they lost me. They searched for a while but couldn’t find me. I was also waiting; my eyes followed their car until it disappeared. When I was convinced they were gone, I decided to go to school, but I was very afraid. Even now, when I hear such a car voice, it reminds me of that day and scares me.”

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Spoiler: Nothing new has been said in over 140 years.

If anything, according to Stewart, our rhetoric has gotten worse. Obama’s Cairo speech and others “mislead us in several respects simultaneously: minimizing differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandizing our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals.”

That’s not all.

“It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists. It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions.”

For almost two centuries, our country and our allies have proclaimed to know what’s right for Afghanistan, and professed the power to make it happen. Obama and other Western leaders’ policy to “defeat the Taliban, to bring development and an effective legitimate state to Afghanistan, and to stabilize Pakistan” sounds like it confronts the issues at hand, but Stewart’s not buying it. Instead, he says, such assertions “rest on misleading ideas about moral obligation, our capacity, the strength of our adversaries, the threat posed by Afghanistan, the relations between our different objectives, and the value of a state.”

“None of the experts in 1988 predicted that the Russian-backed President Najibullah would survive for two and a half years after the Soviet withdrawal. And no one predicted at the beginning of 1994 that the famous commanders of the jihad, Hekmatyar and Masud, then fighting a civil war in the centre of Kabul, could be swept aside by an unknown group of madrassah students called the Taliban. Or that the Taliban would, in a few months, conquer 90 per cent of the country, eliminate much corruption, restore security on the roads and host al-Qaida.”

Read the full article.

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Coney Island 1952. (via Metafilter) also the 1939 New York World’s Fair!

Hey, remember those wars we’ve got going on? The Big Picture has a photo-essay on what’s been happening in Afghanistan these last few months.

SF Gate gives us something else to be indignant about:  the California ABC is going after your favorite San Francisco all-ages venues.

Round-trip  tickets to Costa Rica right now are $372, which leaves you plenty of money to stay in the coolest hotel in the world.

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Writing a memoir raises a few important questions: Why write it? Why publish it? And who it its intended audience? In an author’s note that serves as a sort of epilogue to The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education, Craig Mullaney answers these questions more candidly than most memoirists:

“If I could tell the story well, it might help America better understand its military, might inspire some to serve, and most to appreciate, and might shed some light on operations in Afghanistan that seem to have been largely forgotten by the American public. I could either continue complaining that people lacked understanding about military service or I could do something to bridge that gap.”

Here he makes his goals for the book explicit, and Mullaney is uniquely qualified to accomplish them. The bullet points of his resume read as follows: West Point, Airborne Ranger, Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran of the war in Afghanistan, three years on the faculty of the U.S. Naval Academy, national security adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and Chief of Staff for the President-elect’s transition team. (All of this, incidentally, by the age of thirty; it’s enough to make an unpaid twentysomething book reviewer second-guess his own career decisions).

And if The Unforgiving Minute occasionally reads like a resume, it’s hard to hold it against Mullaney. Its flaws seem typical of a debut memoir: the opening section, “Student,” drags on too long, and its narration of a series of escalating challenges presented and overcome soon grows repetitive. The chapters about his time at Oxford, in particular—tales of drinking and carousing, falling in love and traveling the world with cohorts—sometimes suffer from the tedious earnestness of young men telling stories of their studies abroad. A scene depicting his rowing team’s victory makes one wonder if any triumph would be too small for Mullaney to narrate.

Craig Mullaney

But the book succeeds, despite those flaws, because Mullaney avoids another pitfall of so many memoirs: It doesn’t serve primarily to glorify its author. The same self-effacing honesty and wry humor that make the latter sections of the book so poignant go a long way toward redeeming even its less compelling moments. There’s something oddly endearing about a guy who, two months removed from completing hellish Ranger training, admits to quaffing Brandy Alexanders and Lemon Drops at Oxford parties, slurring pickup lines at passing girls, then going home alone and listening to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” It’s easy to bear with him through the occasional callowness, because, like Mullaney himself, the reader knows what looms at the end of his schooling: war.

Once he joins his platoon and prepares for deployment, the book takes off; as Mullaney matures, so does the writing. He turns 25 just after landing in Afghanistan, and he narrates the experience of being dropped into a strange country during an improvised war with a shrewd eye for detail and a sharp ear for voice. Just after arriving, during his intelligence briefing, he has the following exchange:

“How do we know who’s a bad guy?” I asked.
“They speak Arabic.”
“How do we know whether they’re speaking Arabic or Pashto?”
The briefer didn’t have a response, and my confidence level shrank.

Mullaney is soon sent to a remote base far from the action happening along the Pakistan border. His first experiences as a military officer involve mostly diplomatic and humanitarian work. The chapter on “Operation Doolittle,” a mission to provide immunizations to locals and their livestock, is a beautiful set piece, full of vivid detail, that captures the contradictions inherent to a “nation-building” war and the precarious position into which it forces an American officer: trying to strike a balance between diplomacy and security, while trying to keep his soldiers safe and sane.

Nor does Mullaney spare the telling detail in another of the book’s most memorable scenes, when Donald Rumsfeld comes to visit. The then-Secretary of Defense arrives to Mullaney’s base an hour late, watches a Power Point presentation, nods at pleas for supplies he will later ignore, then presides over a lavish steak-and-lobster dinner. “We never ate better than when politicians visited,” Mullaney writes. This wryness and reserve are typical of the book: Though the author risked his life in a mismanaged war, and later joined Barack Obama’s campaign and transition team, he avoids polemics, choosing instead to relate his individual experiences as a soldier with candor and insight.

When his platoon is transferred to firebase Shkin, a hotbed of conflict near the border, the book builds to its titular climax: the moment when circumstances test a man’s education, preparation, and will. So says the excerpt of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” that serves as the epigraph:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Mullaney’s minute comes on a mountain in Afghanistan. The scene is rendered in spare and forceful prose, some of the best writing in the book. While his patrol is moving across an exposed position along a ridgeline, a sudden ambush forces him to make what is quite literally a life-or-death decision as bullets “whipsaw” past his head and a dud mortar shell lands ten feet from where he stands. Mullaney is forced to take responsibility, and does, and spends the rest of his time in Afghanistan and his awkward transition back into civilian life questioning that decision. The sheer and wrenching honesty of that self-analysis set The Unforgiving Minute apart from most memoirs, military or otherwise.

This is a brave and important memoir that belies the stereotype of soldiers as unthinking men. Mullaney’s insights into war, manhood, and duty resonate not only because of the experiences that authenticate them, but also because he offers them without bravado. No book can tell us what it means to be American in a post-9/11 world, but Mullaney deserves enormous credit for asking the question of himself, and sharing his attempts to find an answer.

**

Excerpt from Vanity Fair

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• Into the Tiger’s Lair
• The Pleasure (and Privilege) of Indignation
• Sleep Song, The Poetic Epilogue to War, Cancelled