Snapshots Sent Home: From Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine―A Memoir

by J.T. Blatty

US combat veteran and photographer JT Blatty journeyed to Ukraine in 2018 to capture oral history and portraits of Donbas volunteer soldiers. In frontline bunkers and Kyiv flats, her story began to blend with theirs in a universal bond of combat veterans, compelling her to stay as a new war began.

176 pages, Paperback

Published February 20, 2024

Reviews

[Iryna · Rating 5 out of 5]

So thankful for my dear friend who recommended this book. I have lived in the US for almost two decades, but have family and relatives still living all over Ukraine. I cook Ukrainian food and speak on the phone with my Ukrainian relatives, whose addresses keep changing, sometimes monthly depending on where it’s hot in Ukraine at the time. We were able to get my mom out after a year of war when her home was destroyed. So each Ukrainian town the author writes about is a place I have a personal connection to. Every name is familiar sounding, even my own too, every scene makes me feel like I can hear and smell it. The town I was born in on the outskirts of Donetsk is gone now, all the homes of my parents and grandparents are leveled with the ground. But reading the book for some reason gave me comfort and hope, because I trust that the author saw people there and will help so many readers really see them too. People who, if not for the war flipping their individual and collective lives upside down, would be living ordinary lives. Being teachers and accountants and artists, dropping kids at school and going on dates and celebrating holidays with their friends. Having fights and falling in love and going to the market and watching action movies. And the fact that they all stepped up to protect the right of people to live those ordinary lives in their country, the right to freedom and peace, did not turn them instantly into ethereal beings in golden armor without sin or fault. They are still the same, humans with feelings and pain and hopes like all of us. Fighting and living, existing as themselves in circumstances that many of us are lucky not to encounter. I will tell all of my friends asking questions about Ukraine, to read this book. And as always I’m so grateful for veterans here and those who went to help in Ukraine. For all who served so others could live free.

[Jonathan Gensler · Rating 5 out of 5]

JT Blatty paints as real a portrait of war in the modern era as I have encountered. A combat veteran myself (US Army 2000-2005), I know that nothing about combat is simple, especially not the labels we stick on anyone even remotely close to a battlefield. In Snapshots Sent Home, Blatty weaves the story of her own time in combat as a young US Army officer with the years she has spent interviewing and memorializing the volunteers fighting against Russian aggression in Ukraine, often sharing bunkers with them as artillery fell around them.

She weaves this thread beautifully between her own experiences and the experiences of what on the surface might seem to be a fundamentally different enterprise and story of combat. In juxtaposing these two periods of warfare with up-close, in-your-face written images, she demonstrates how war and violence connect all veterans, across all time. She pushes through the hollowness she felt after her own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq to find meaning and purpose in sharing the stories of men and women from the far side of the globe, fighting for the ideals that we too often merely pay service to in the West.

I think this book is a gift: of honesty; of unvarnished reality; of sadness; and even of the sparks of joy that are to be found in the killing fields of the world. It should be required reading for any future military officers, standing alongside such powerful war memoirs as Sledge's With the Old Breed and Sebastian Junger's more recent War.

[Dixie L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Snapshots Sent Home, JT Blatty juxtaposes her time as a military officer in Afghanistan and Iraq with her years of photojournalism in Ukraine, documenting a war that began long before it was recognized in the West in 2022. Blatty seamlessly travels back and forth between her own struggle to integrate into the “peace life” in the aftermath of a U.S. war half a world away and the surrealistic experience of drinking coffee in bistros a stone’s throw from soldiers dying in Ukrainian trenches. In examining the decision of a young Russian woman to defect to Ukraine to fight alongside other volunteers in 2014—volunteers not formally recognized by the government but essential to its continued existence—Blatty contemplates the difference between her own experience as part of a political military machine and the experience of young soldiers fighting by choice for the survival of their country’s independence. This experience will ultimately subsume them and change them in ways no outsider and even few insiders will ever understand. Blatty finds her own place of belonging in Ukraine, where she can create meaning through her photos and interviews—often of young people dead days or weeks after she captures them in a single, timeless moment. “I never believed in the intentional photograph,” Blatty tells us, preferring to document the spontaneous, believing it to be closer to the truth. But in creating moments of intention with her Ukrainian photos, she learns that in the context of war, the soul speaks through the eyes, or through hands caressing a guitar, or in the embrace of two dogs. Blatty doesn’t find peace in Ukraine, but she finds place. Her genius is that she is able to take us with her—even those of us who will never have an insider’s knowledge of the camaraderie and displacement of war and the price it extracts from our humanity.

[Cat Dickey · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an American watching what’s been going on in Ukraine and the regions of former USRR Soviet states, this book is eye opening.
J.T. Has as special way of writing which draws you into the reality of her experiences. The reflections on her time and a US Army Officer in Afghanistan and Iraq with the juxtaposition of choosing to go to the front lines of a war that is not hers but for her determination to bear witness to it is jaw dropping. This is a book which captures the reality in real time.
This is a must read for anyone wanting to understand the conflict and to learn about a group of people who chose to fight for their country, culture and their people. They came from everywhere to stand against the Oppressor. No orders. No packing list. No requirement to do it. No reason but their drive to fight for what is right.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very small percentage of people know what it's like to serve in the military. JT gives us a glimpse into a service member's life through her lens. Her book explores poignant relationships and harrowing experiences in multiple war zones. JT reminds us that humans crave the
same things, regardless of our upraising, nationality, or life experiences. She captures so many untold stories of those who live and die a life we can't even fathom. We need more work like yours to shed light on what's happening outside our comfort zones. Thank you for your service and for sharing your snapshots JT!

[Lisa Jaster · Rating 5 out of 5]

JT Blatty and I have a lot of shared experiences in our early years. I know very little about Ukraine and their history except the little bit I've read over the years. Jen was able to connect the world I understood as a young Soldier in the early 2000s to the struggles that currently plague the Ukrainian people. This manuscript creates empathy and understanding for a culture and war that seems too distant to matter sometimes.

[Kevin Cummiskey · Rating 5 out of 5]

JT Blatty brings to life the courage, tragedy, and humanity of those on the front lines in Ukraine. Along the way, she confronts her own relationship with war through a deeply moving and introspective examination of her experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. A must-read for understanding the complexity of how soldiers feel about war.

[Bob Koshin Hanson · Rating 5 out of 5]

like pictures in words

I thought when I purchased this wonderful book there would be some cool pictures! Well there are! Pictures as clear as Kodak written in words like a painting. The author takes one from one place to another so well you are not confused. Masterful! Read it and you will learn the complexity of war.

[Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some really really good passages, and massive respect for everyone in the book. I'm sorry for not liking it more.