Story Behind The Book
There were many reasons to write this book, but one of the most vivid occurred amidst the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. I was reading the news and came across a picture of a female soldier seeming to gloat above torture victims. The starving, bloodied men piled at her feet were totally dehumanized: naked, hooded, likely sodomized or just back from the water board. The female soldier--a young woman, a girl really--was smiling. I looked at that photograph as long as I could. I thought, "How could a woman do that?" Men, maybe. But a woman? No. And then I thought back to my state of mind when I joined the Army in 1995. Rage. Aggression. Violence. Lack of respect for others. Self-loathing. You name it. Whatever bullet-point is on the back of a brochure in a psychologist's office, I qualified. But I never went to war. Thank God. And I do not think I would ever have done what the woman in the picture was so happy to do. What I did think was, "How could I reach that woman? What might I be able to say to stop her?"
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Reviews
<span class="commentBody">"I was really blown away by this series of shorts." -- Ashton Amo<br /><br /><a href="http://ashtonthebookblogger.blogspot.com/2011/03/review-war-is-language-101-short-works.html"><span>http://</span><span class="word_break"></span><span>ashtonthebookblogger.blogsp</span><span class="word_break"></span><span>ot.com/2011/03/</span><span class="word_break"></span><span>review-war-is-language-101-</span><span class="word_break"></span>short-works.html</a><br /><br /> "Her arsenal of words is substantial, and she has the same command of phonics that makes EE Cummings poems so effective." -- Alice Yeh<br /><br /><a href="http://www.hideandread.com/2011/09/war-is-language-101-short-works-nath.html"><span>http://</span><span class="word_break"></span><span>www.hideandread.com/2011/</span><span class="word_break"></span><span>09/</span><span class="word_break"></span><span>war-is-language-101-short-w</span><span class="word_break"></span>orks-nath.html</a><br /><br /> "The third and final section about letters to a fake advice columnist was titled Letters When Gods Won't Do and this was my favourite section. Some of them were hilarious and I felt that I had to pass my Kindle across to my wife to let her read them, I think she started getting annoyed when I ended up doing it for nearly every letter at one point." -- David King <br /><br /><a href="http://killie-booktalk.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html"><span>http://</span><span class="word_break"></span><span>killie-booktalk.blogspot.co</span><span class="word_break"></span>m/2011_04_01_archive.html</a></span>