My February column for The Wrath-Bearing Tree is titled “The Clock Strikes Twelve.” As the title suggests, it is the last of twelve columns I signed on to write beginning in March 2023. It’s been a pleasure and honor, but it’s now time to move on to other writing and life ventures. Thank you for reading Strike Through the Mask!, and thank you Wrath-Bearing Tree.
Strike Through the Mask! #11
This month for The Wrath-Bearing Tree, I’ve created a 30-question quiz covering the war-writing scene I’ve followed closely here on Time Now. The quiz is meant to be light-hearted, so have some fun with it, but my hope is that it also serves as a historical record of many of the major authors and fiction, poetry, and memoirs that have marked post-9/11 / GWOT writing.
2023 H-Net and Strategy Bridge Book Reviews
This year, in addition to my monthly Wrath-Bearing Tree column Strike Through the Mask!, I’ve published two book reviews in reputable online sources.
For the H-Net “H-War” historians’ book-review compendium I reviewed Christopher Hull’s Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel.
For Strategy Bridge, a security-and-defense journal, I reviewed John W. Lemza’s The Big Picture: The Cold War on the Small Screen.
The two reviews were of books outside the normal scope of Time Now, but I’m flattered the editors sought me out and I enjoyed reading and thinking about the two books’ subjects. Both books described the intersection of art-and-entertainment creations with real-world Cold War security concerns. That’s my interest in 21st-century art, film, and literature about the Global War on Terror, as well, so the overlaps and underlaps between the two eras was interesting to contemplate.
Gve the two reviews a read, please, and stay tuned for more Wrath-Bearing Tree columns. I’ve got some fun planned for the January and February posts.
Strike Through the Mask! #10
This month for The Wrath-Bearing Tree I offer three vignettes drawn from soldier and Marine memoirs about fighting in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan and Fallujah in Iraq. The three vignettes are titled “The Powerless Lieutenant,” “Former Friend, Now a Foe,” and “Death in a Minaret.”
Strike Through the Mask! #9
This month for The Wrath-Bearing Tree my column is called Fallujah-Korengal/Korengal-Fallujah. In it, I explore how books and movies about the two GWOT battlegrounds mentioned in the title don’t just describe events but help create a near-mythic aura. Check it out!
Strike Through the Mask! #8
This month for The Wrath-Bearing Tree I write on two memoirs by service members who served in the same region of Afghanistan I did and at the same time. Between them, they describe my tour in very familiar ways.
Strike Through the Mask! #7
This month my column for The Wrath-Bearing Tree is subtitled “Arlington Interment.” It is about the burial of Army major Ian Fishback in Arlington Memorial Cemetery. You can read it here.
Strike Through the Mask! #6
This month for The Wrath-Bearing Tree I’ve written on a subject in which I’ve long been interested: the lifespan of public popularity and critical acclaim of newly-published books and movies in the days, weeks, months, and years after their release. Everyone has an informal sense of how these things go. Some books are acclaimed immediately, but their reputations fade over time. Others are unnoticed upon release, but gain popularity and acclaim in later years. Some are pronounced great early on and attain and maintain “classic” status afterwards. Sometimes an idea, or passage, or character contained in a prose-work or film retains resonance, even as the original work is more-or-less forgotten.
I think there should be a more formal way of analyzing these processes and phenomena. Maybe it’s been done, but I’ve got a PhD in English Literature and haven’t discovered THE study that systematically and structurally explains the cultural reception and historical reckoning of artworks.
In this month’s Strike Through the Mask! I explore the subject by considering GWOT literature and film using the concept of “cultural biodegradability” as proposed by the French proponent of “deconstruction” Jacques Derrida.
The column is subtitled “The Afterlife of Words and Deeds.” It’s a serious subject, but nonetheless one I hope you enjoy exploring along with me.
Strike Through the Mask! #5
This month for Wrath-Bearing Tree I’ve conducted interviews with two heroes of the contemporary vet-writing publishing scene: Tracy Crow of MilSpeak Books and Randy Brown of Middle West Press. Their stories and insights about military-themed writing and publishing are lively and shrewd, so please give the article a read and give Crow and Brown and their authors your support. The entire July issue of Wrath-Bearing Tree is full of good things by good people, so be sure to check out the other articles and reviews as well.
Strike Through the Mask! #4
This month for Wrath-Bearing Tree I write about American veterans fighting in Ukraine. The piece was prompted by attendance at a public memorial ceremony honoring former-Marine Peter Reed in Bordentown, New Jersey. In February of this year Reed was killed fighting in Ukraine. Bordentown, as it happens, was the American home of Englishman Thomas Paine, the famous Revolutionary War author of the lines that begin with “These are the times that try men’s souls,” which got me thinking about what it meant to pledge one’s life for another nation’s cause. Read my article here.
Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature 