Maddy Smith
asked
Wesley Morgan:
Hi Wesley! I haven't read your book yet but I look forward to getting it. My question is, when writing this book, were there certain tropes or cliches you tried to avoid when writing about the military, war, and conflict in general? I don't know if that question makes sense at all. War, it seems, is something many people romanticize, especially those who have never seen it or lived through a war....
Wesley Morgan
I don't think there was anything I made a conscious effort to avoid besides repetitive language. People who haven't seen a war aren't the only ones who romanticize it—one of the most striking things as I reported the book was the degree to which many (by no means all!) soldiers who fought there viewed their deployments to the Pech or other parts of Kunar and Nuristan provinces with nostalgia, to a much greater degree than I ever found among soldiers who fought in other parts of the country (like the flatter south) where the type of fighting was very different.
I touch on this in the scene-setting prologue of the book—where one veteran says: "I call it 'Kunar syndrome.' For those of us who joined the infantry, that place is exactly what we envisioned"—and return to it in the book's final pages, where a sergeant first class on his fifth Afghanistan deployment reminisces nostalgically about his first, to the Korengal tributary of the Pech, even though it was in many ways his hardest, both physically and emotionally. "If I could go back and do one deployment again, the Korengal would be it, no doubt," he says, before he initiates a conversation on Facebook with fellow Korengal veterans who feel similarly.
These are not sentiments I hear veterans of, say, Helmand or Kandahar express anywhere near as often, for reasons the book describes, but hardly a week goes by now when I'm not contacted by a Pech veteran on Twitter or Instagram expressing something similar.
I touch on this in the scene-setting prologue of the book—where one veteran says: "I call it 'Kunar syndrome.' For those of us who joined the infantry, that place is exactly what we envisioned"—and return to it in the book's final pages, where a sergeant first class on his fifth Afghanistan deployment reminisces nostalgically about his first, to the Korengal tributary of the Pech, even though it was in many ways his hardest, both physically and emotionally. "If I could go back and do one deployment again, the Korengal would be it, no doubt," he says, before he initiates a conversation on Facebook with fellow Korengal veterans who feel similarly.
These are not sentiments I hear veterans of, say, Helmand or Kandahar express anywhere near as often, for reasons the book describes, but hardly a week goes by now when I'm not contacted by a Pech veteran on Twitter or Instagram expressing something similar.
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