Brian Sparks on his Oral History of the Iraq War

Soldiers evaluate a roadside bomb detonation, May, 2005.

We recently asked Brian Sparks to explain why he’s embarked on a journey to interview the veterans from his own platoon in Iraq eight years after they returned, and about the impact of war on soldiers, families and communities. We wanted to get a sense of what he learned so far and hopes to share:

I wonder how so many books have been published about the Iraq War that completely ignore the human experience and real-world social problems that this war created.

I’m working on an oral history project of the Iraq War because the human experience of the war has so far been ignored. I’m working on this project because I’m afraid history will forget this war, like it forgot Korea and the Banana Republics and so many others. And I’m working on this project because, eight years after returning from Iraq, I still do not understand my own experience there.

If this project accomplishes only one thing, I hope that it will bring to light the human cost of war to the individuals who participate, and the cost to their relationships and their communities.

What I’ve learned so far is how little I knew about the war before starting this project. And I was there! Beyond my own experiences I knew the war from the lens of CNN and political and military experts who have written books. These sources aggregate the experience of war, turning it into a list of numbers, an abstraction. I want to tell concrete stories from people on all sides of this conflict, beginning with the stories from the soldiers of my own platoon. I want to make a special point of gathering and including stories from Iraqis who lived and worked in the same part of Baghdad where my platoon conducted operations.

I did not know the meaning of vicarious trauma before visiting a friend in New York. His wife of seven years had a nervous breakdown the week before my visit. The doctor diagnosed anxiety among a host of other symptoms. She blamed her husband’s PTSD for causing trauma in her life.

What amazed me was that my friend denied having PTSD. I had met with nearly a dozen men from my platoon before this meeting, and every single person had stories of Post Traumatic Stress. Yet this one person claimed to be unaffected.

Maybe that really is how he feels, maybe he transferred all his stuff to her.

Sometime later I was visiting a friend in California. After a few hours and a few beers he got up to use the restroom. As soon as he’d shut the door his wife urged me to look into vicarious PTSD. She said a number of her friends were being affected.

And I’ve looked into it. The research and statistics that exist point to a large, yet very unseen, social problem. When the soldiers remain in the military their spouses and their children can seek treatment for vicarious PTSD, and, by the way, treating secondary PTSD is becoming a huge part of the Department of Defense healthcare budget. But as soon as the soldier leaves the service, there is no recourse for the family. The Veterans Affairs people don’t provide counseling for this. It’s a hidden cost of the war, and it shouldn’t be.

Nearly every book I’ve read or movie I’ve seen on the subject of America’s recent wars has been decidedly pro-war and pro-America. Subjects are discussed in the abstract, perspectives offered are those of Americans. Experiences of Iraqis and Afghans are discounted, and they shouldn’t be. I hope this project will help to change that.

My name is Brian Sparks and I deployed to the al-Dora district of Baghdad in 2005. If you would like to read excerpts of interviews I’ve conducted, feel free to check out my website. secondplatoon.wordpress.com

Frankentweet: A Work in Progress

Frankentweet is a project that grows out of three basic
elements:
1. An intrigue with digital technology.
2. The surname “Frankenstein.”
3. The shaping of narratives that take viewers into a realm of “disorienting dilemmas.”

What will this be or become?

One mode of delivery will be a long form documentary useful for broadcast,
the classroom and public screenings. Also fitting to the topic, our era of media consumption and social media, the
project will be revealed in short bursts with participation along the way.

We welcome ideas, stories, and collaborations.
Send them our way.

Thinking About Glaciers

As we work on the film, Tracing Roots, (working title) I’ve been thinking about glaciers.

They’re always on the move.  What they do impacts us. What we’ve done impacts them.

People around here, pre borders and highways, used to walk over glaciers to trade. As Lani Hotch says in an interview for the film, she remembers her grandmother’s stories of using an ice axe to travel to the interior from the coastal Alaskan community of Klukwan.

I  had a hunch, as I thought about glaciers that saying they’re melting was a simplification. Last week talking with Dr. Gwenn Flowers, a glaciologist,  I confirmed my hunch and learned about accumulation and ablation. When the loss is greater than the gain the terrain uncovered has usually not been exposed for a long time.

As I found in an article on archeological discoveries made possible by global warming, “An entirely new discipline of archaeology called ice patch archaeology is evolving. Ice patches are long frozen areas of water and snow that lie on the always shaded sides of mountain ranges”and they don’t move like glaciers.  More here.

In this landscape, archaeological artifacts that have been trapped in the ice for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years come to light once again.  These aren’t just stone objects, they’re organic material, like the Long Ago Man Found’s Spruce root hat–the hat Delores is replicating in the documentary.

When I chatted with a couple archeologists and read some more, I learned about finding Caribou dung in places where no one thought the caribou had been.  What was exciting about that was a 4,000 year old spear shaft found in the dung, So thinking about glaciers led me to talk about dung with scholars. That doesn’t happen everyday.

Plus Gwenn pointed me to a couple of useful resources.

Take a look at this interactive tool designed to help students better understand glaciers

Here’s a  link to Kate Hartman’s fun piece on glacier-human communication. It is a great example of art and science intersecting.

Eating Alaska Master Gardeners Conference Screening

Pulling out the Eating Alaska pins and postcards for a screening today to the International Master Gardener Conference: 9 and 11 AM in Sitka at Harrigan Centennial Hall. The conference includes over a thousand Master Gardeners* on a cruise ship making a stop   to find out what eating local means here.

The documentary Eating Alaska is a wry search for the “right thing to eat.” We’ve also described the 57 minute film as a story of “what happens to a vegetarian who moves to Alaska and marries a fisher-hunter” In screenings from Kotzebue to Warsaw, we’ve used the film to provoke conversations around questions such as:

• What is the most healthy, safe and sustainable ways for us to be part of the food chain?
•  What is our ethical obligation to the land and sea?
•  How is food a bridge between the natural and the social world?

Eating Alaska’s themes include sustainability, health, food justice and local vs. global issues. Public libraries, universities, art houses, Slow Food chapters, environmental centers and churches have not only screened the film, but used it to draw people together with local food potlucks, sustainability fairs, and fundraisers for greenhouses, food banks and farmers’ markets. The potlucks invite viewers to either bring something they “Grew, brew, caught,” or local, organic, fair trade foods. Discussion panels have included vegans, butchers, farmers, wild food harvesters, chefs, artists, and journalists.

E. Paul Durrrenberger. from the Department of Anthropology at Penn State recently reviewed Eating Alaska in CAFE. The Journal of Culture, Agriculture. Food and the Environment:

“Americans’ elevation of the denial of human and animal death to industrial status suggests the importance of keeping dying and killing hidden from view. To look your meat in the eye as you squeeze the trigger to dispatch the bullet to end its life, to walk to the fallen carcass and kneel beside it as you dismember it with a knife, and to feel the burden of the former animal become food as you hike out with it on your shoulders requires intimate familiarity with your food and puts it on a different existential, moral, and cultural footing than the anonymous chicken nugget you buy at a fast food depot. To all but the wealthiest of urbanites who can indulge in hunting vacations, this is a remote possibility, but residing in Alaska made the contrast inevitable for filmmaker Ellen Frankenstein, an erstwhile urban vegetarian struggling with questions of what we eat and how we think and feel about it….

Dilemmas need to go beyond guilt, as Durrenberger writes:

“Can we help our students envision these dilemmas with anything more hopeful or more productive than generous servings of guilt?Can we help them reformulate the question from the individual ones of whether it’s, in some sense, wrong to kill animals, to eat meat, or to eat industrial food to the larger community question of what kind of political economy can provide healthful and sustainably produced food for all?”

*The Master Gardener (MG) program started in Seattle in the 1970s as a way to extend the horticulture resources of Washington State’s land grant university  to the urban horticulture public in Seattle. The Master Gardeners receive 40 hours of training, similar to a basic three-credit-semester-hour, college-level horticulture class. Read more on the Sitka Local Foods Network site.

Thanks to University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service Sitka District office and other planners for including Eating Alaska in the conference.