Who Says You Can't Return

Well, I took a seven month sabbatical from the blog, mostly due to my teaching load. And I even thought about tanking the blog altogether, but some little voice said, "eh, give it another try."

Since I last wrote, one of the authors I recommended has been redeployed to Iraq. That would be Colby Buzzell, author of My War: Killing Time in Iraq. I had decided to teach this book, along with Imperial Life in the Emerald City, the Washington Post's head editor of the foreign bureau's scathing account of the excesses of the Green Zone. Not the salacious excesses that one used to occasionally read about in the press, but more the fiscal irresponsibility that makes the Grant administration, one of the most corrupt in American history, read like amateur hour. For instance, 1.7 billion dollars in cash, that went missing between the delivery in an army cargo plane and the Green Zone, and the replacement of a seasoned veteran of Wall Street by a 24-year-old whose sole mission in Iraq, and one that was completely unreasonable (and the reason why the veteran was replaced: he wisely objected against the administration's protestations that this was a "great idea"), was to get the Iraq stock market up and running with computers and high tech stuff that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars without taking into account that the grid that powered Baghdad was basically cobbled together with baling wire, and was only supporting three hours of electricity a day. The Iraqi stock analysts and traders were using grease boards, with success, and continued to use them after the equipment was in place because there was no electricity on a regular basis. That's called a billion dollar answer to a one hundred dollar solution.

Colby's book is from an American soldier's POV, and is compelling and interesting reading. My students love it. I have to remind myself that they (the freshmen) were, on average, twelve years old when the war in Iraq started, and therefore they are inured to it in the way an older student usually is not. So, I wanted to teach them how to write effectively, both in an informal way like Colby Buzzell, and a formal way like Chandrasekaran, the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, while waking them up to the fact that there is a war taking place. Actually, kids, there are two wars taking place (a lot of my freshmen said they thought the Afghanistan war "was over").

So a shout out to Colby. Hope he resumes his irreverent blog on his second deployment, and stays out of harm's way.

Nice to be back!