Category: Art and War

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. 

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.

Memory and Memoir in Afghanistan

For the next 12 months I’ll be writing a monthly column for The Wrath-Bearing Tree online journal. My first post, on Elliot Ackerman’s The Fifth Act and Jamal Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Haji Hotak is already up and can be read here:

Peter Molin’s “Strike Through the Mask!”

The name of my column is “Strike Through the Mask!” It’s a quote from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The full passage, spoken by Ahab, goes:

Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.

Strike Through the Mask! will mostly be book reviews, like Time Now, but not entirely so, so stay tuned. For Time Now, I’ve limited myself to fiction, poetry, art, music, and theater, but for The Wrath-Bearing Tree I am expanding my range to include non-fiction, memoir, and journalism.

While I’m writing Strike Through the Mask! Time Now will be more-or-less in abeyance. In a year’s time, I’ll regroup and decide if more Time Now posts are in order.

Thank you for reading Time Now over the years. It’s been a rich, rewarding ride.

I’m leading a Zoom writing workshop for veterans and people with veterans in their lives on March 22. The workshop is co-sponsored by the San Diego-based So Say We All spoken-word/performance collective and the online journal Wrath-Bearing Tree (thank you!).

Please pass the word and consider joining yourself! Whether you are an old friend or we’ve never met, an experienced writer or one just starting out, I’d love to see you there and I promise to make it good for you. I’m already thinking of writing prompts and short pieces from contemporary vet-writing for us to talk about.

Don’t tarry–the deadline for signing up is February 26. Below’s the link for more information and for signing-up through Submittable:

Veteran Writers Masterclass Series sign-up

Between 2001 and 2009, I reviewed five military-themed books for the Military Review, a professional journal associated with the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. As I remember, I chose the books from a list of titles offered by the book review editors. I enjoyed all the books and appreciated the chance to write about them. Looking back at them now, I like to think my writing holds up, as well as my judgments. The books I reviewed are all non-fiction, not the fiction and poetry that Time Now specializes in, but reviewing them sowed some of the seeds that would eventuate in Time Now when I began it a few years later.

Below are short synopses of each review, along with a pull-quote from my review (not the book being reviewed). Most of the reviews are available in the Military Review archive here, but in most cases you’ll have to scroll through the back issues to find them. That’s not a bad thing, actually; my own scroll reminded me how interesting and trenchant were so many of the articles and book reviews written during the peak years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Good job Military Review–noted and appreciated. In a couple of cases, I’ve provided a direct link or a picture.

1. Jan-Feb 2001 FIRE IN THE NIGHT: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia, and Zion, by John Bierman and Colin Smith (1999)

My first Military Review article was on a biography of the charismatic World War II British commando Orde Wingate. The focus on this proto- special-operator proved prescient, as the role of Special Forces in the GWOT wars-to-come expanded in controversial ways. A pull-quote speaks to the tension:

To his critics, Wingate’s forces produced few tactical victories and contributed little to operational or strategic success. To his fans, Wingate was a gadfly who restored initiative and energy to his units and a visionary who accurately foresaw the shape of future wars. His critics counter that Wingate was a shameless self-promoter whose antics created antagonism that detracted from overall mission accomplishment. His premature death in Burma in 1944 gave his life a tragic aura of greatness cut down in its prime–or just short of it.

2. May-June 2001 THE BOER WAR GENERALS, by Peter Trew (1999)

My second Military Review review also pointed forward to the upcoming wars, as I pinpointed the difficulty faced by conventional armies fighting against a fully-mobilized insurgent force.

The Boer War Generals suggests just how determined an army has to be to defeat an opponent totally mobilized for self-defense, fighting on its own turf and reliant on unconventional tactics.

3. Nov-Dec 2007 BUDA’S WAGON: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, by Mike Davis (2007)

My third review came a few years later, just before my own deployment to Afghanistan. Buda’s Wagon was written by the noted radical historian Mike Davis (who recently died, RIP). It brings back the horrible memory of how defenseless were US forces against the IED and Vehicle-Borne IED threat in Iraq:

For the serving military professional, Buda’s Wagon places into historical and contemporary focus a weapon that, along with the roadside bomb and the sectarian execution, has shaped the face of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Implicit in his commentary is that American political and military leaders might have better anticipated that our enemies would employ these readily available and profoundly modern weapons to disrupt our plans and operations.

4. Sep-Oct 2008 SECURING THE STATE: Reforming the National Security Decisionmaking Process at the Civil-Military Nexus, by Christopher P. Gibson (2008)

Securing the State was written by US Army Colonel Chris Gibson, who was then a brigade commander in the 82^nd Airborne Division, later was a two-term US Congressman, and is now president of Sienna College in New York. In 2002, I replaced then-Major Gibson as the Executive Officer of 2-14 Infantry Battalion, 10^th Mountain Division.

Colonel Gibson argues that the U.S. government lacks sufficient institutional structures and protocols to ensure that its “civil-military nexus” functions efficiently and effectively.

As war with Iraq loomed, for example, Gibson claims that the Joint Chiefs of Staff found themselves in such a subordinate and deferential position vis-à-vis Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that they were unable to communicate wise military advice, unfiltered by the Secretary’s political and personal biases, to the president and the Congress, the nation’s elected leaders. Nor were military leaders allowed to develop plans as prudent, detailed, or as fully resourced as required for success in Iraq.

Here is a direct link to my review of Securing the State.

5. Jan-Feb 2009 TERRORISM  FINANCING AND STATE RESPONSES: A Comparative Perspective, edited by Jeanne K. Giraldo and Harold A. Trinkunas (2007)

This review explored a wonky and still murky and still important subject.

…the book plumbs the murky financial infrastructures and processes of terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Therein lies the book’s value, as well as tactical and strategic possibilities.

I was invited to speak as part of a 2023 American Historical Association panel titled “Toward an Illustrated History of a Global War on Terror” because the panel organizer, vet scholar-and-playwright John Myer, liked my short story, “The Brigade Storyboard Artist,” as it was published by The Wrath-Bearing Tree.

John thought that should I approach the subject of military storyboards from an academic perspective my ideas would interest an audience of historians.

So I did. Here’s how my presentation “PowerPoint Rangers: The Aesthetics and Historical Significance of Military Storyboards” began:

By now, the use of PowerPoint presentations as an institutional communication medium in education, business, and the military has been widely studied. Here, though, I’m interested in one facet of PowerPoint that has not been widely-considered: the use of one-slide PowerPoints known as “storyboards” in the United States military, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, to plan and document activities and operations at battalion and brigade level. Storyboards, whether viewed on individual computers, projected on screens in meeting rooms, or printed out in paper copies, were a fact of life for officers at these levels of command; their use was ubiquitous and ability to create coherent storyboards in-line with command expectations and conventions a necessary skill for staff-officers and unit leaders. Typically storyboards were created by operations and intelligence officers—30-year-old captains, 35-year-old-majors and 40-year-old lieutenant colonels—and then circulated up-and-down the chain-of-command. In my own one-year tour as an advisor to the Afghan National Army I was asked to prepare dozens of storyboards (in addition to longer PowerPoint presentations) and read hundreds of them. Neither I nor my peers received training in their preparation, nor were there handbooks or guides; in my experience I was expected to get the hang of their creation quickly as I realized they were the informational coin-of-the-realm, supplanting other established military genres such as operations orders and after-action reports, as well as longer multi-slide PowerPoint presentations. My purpose here today is to explain various aspects of their use and suggest some implications for historians. My argument is that they represent an archive of information about how the military, particularly the Army, communicated internally about events as they happened and were meant to be understood and remembered, and yet they remain difficult, if not impossible to access, and, once obtained, must be handled with care.

Here are two examples of storyboards, both taken from a 2015 Intercept article written by Ryan Devereaux titled, “The Drone Papers: Manhunting in the Hindu Kush” and then republished on the Transcend Media Service website here.

The first storyboard documents a request to kill a Taliban insurgent named Qari Munib (code-named “Lethal Burwyn”) in Pech District, Konar (Kunar) Province in 2013.  

The second storyboard documents the successful completion of the mission:

Here is how I concluded my presentation:

My argument has been that the challenges of recovering and interpreting storyboards is a goal well worth pursuing for historians writing on war in Afghanistan or Iraq. More so than command post logs, operation orders, official assessments, and command statements, they constitute the official-unofficial, or unofficial-official diary of the war. When studied carefully, in conjunction with other means of collecting evidence and doing primary research, they will add granular real-time detail to personal testimony, authorized accounts, and broader-brush journalistic and historical narrations. One thing I am sure of is that if anything occurred in Afghanistan or Iraq that the military was significantly involved in, PowerPoint storyboards were built in regard to it, and those storyboards might still exist somewhere.   

*****

We also included in our panel a “flash” round in which each panelist presented an image and offered a short comment. I chose this famous image:

Here’s what I said about it:

My image first came to public light in a 2010 New York Times article about the use, overuse, and abuse of PowerPoint in the military in the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is an intelligence assessment that purports to illustrate the complicated tangle of factors that underwrote the military operating environment in Afghanistan. The image in fact is not a stand-alone PowerPoint, nor taken from a longer PowerPoint presentation. Rather, it was an illustration extracted from a 31-page report prepared by the PA Consulting Group for the highest-level of military command in Afghanistan. In terms of genre it is a “causal loop diagram,” as prepared by specialists in the field of System Dynamics. Be that as it may, in the NY Times article and afterwards, the image was widely derided as an exemplary example of form over substance and product over action—evidence that the military was so caught up in over-analyzation of the political-military situation at the headquarters level that it had lost sight of the clear focus and directives necessary for effectively doing something about winning the war in Afghanistan. I won’t deny any of that, and speaking from experience, have a special level of commiseration with the officers and troops on the ground who were supposed to translate any of it to an actual military operation. But I will note, that within the rarified air of headquarters staffs there is a way that this slide makes sense to the highly-literate senior officers and officials who were the intended audience. In fact, it perhaps can be said that it provides the necessary level of connected detail that might be a necessary first step to developing strategies and tactics that could actually help the US help Afghanistan government defeat the Taliban while attending to the real needs of the Afghan people. Perhaps.