The Indian soldiers’ experience in World War I Mesopotamia forms half of the base of this site; American soldiers now in Iraq are the other half. Capturing narratives of those soldiers is the goal of this research. So far, against the sparsity of Indian letters, the personal record of American soldiers is that much more extensive and, in degrees, accessible. Indian mail was subject to censorship by British officials, or worse, to harsh combat and captivity in Kut, Baghdad, Mosul. Even if he survived the campaign, it wasn’t as though a soldier returned to the Punjab where a book deal was waiting.

In contrast, then, American letters, emails, blogs, and books standout for their instant permanence. The New Yorker devotes a recent issue to soldier letters (having already profiled a soldier-poet), while the National Endowment for the Arts’ Operation Homecoming trains soldiers to be writers, blog posts from Iraq supplement intermittent letters, and bookstores stack and sell amped-up soldier memoirs.

Not that all of this forces a public imagination. Even with all the modern information and narrative, this war is often ignored or briefly forgotten day-to-day with front page dispatches from Baghdad a regular, consistent sight. What allows for this separation between war information and an articulated public attention to it? Is it the commonly thought of numbness to a glut of war coverage? Or, something more? Journalists file daily print and video reports, but the new fact is that soldiers are writing. Part of my question is who is reading them; the other part is the effect of reading narratives of war.