Introduction

The goal for my culminating project is to research the contemporary war experience
depicted by poets, journalists, and other forms of correspondence and question how we write
about war and conflict and compare it to the writing form the past hundred or so years. With
what seems like unlimited access to all sorts of media through the internet, I plan on conducting
my interview process from online previous conducted ones either from well-known news sources
or an author's personal blog.
Looking at questions such as: What is the author's role in conflict response? What does it
feel like a suitable amount of time before an artistic response to war? Who should we rely upon
to write about war? What we accept today as war literature and how its context and changing
global situations influence it. How can we capture the war's human experience?
Backround
I had always wanted to explore something related to military history and what peaked my
interest in this idea was I stumbled around this media group called Terminal Lance. This page on
Instagram has a curated collection of active duty Marines goffing around either while they are
bored to death stateside or while they are stuck with nothing to do during deployment. The
administrator of this page also has a comic series and is not afraid to hold back about his
critisism of the corps. I felt like throughout the course of history, people where never able to
receive a somewhat more realistic depiction of what war is like. This finally allowed me to arrive
to the question of how the depiction of war has changed.
Context
Even though there isn't a conversation surrounding my specific topic, which is a good
thing, there are many primary resources that found online, this can range from war testimonies
and also notes from war correspondents and journalists. There seems to be a very promising
scholarly conversation covering specific elements of war depiction. There are many books that
have been written about real accounts of armed conflicts that have happened in recent years.

Timeline (Rough Idea)

- Have my idea fully set in stone before spring break
 - I will also be doing some research during this time
- Have my research done by April
- Figured out how to fully organize my work by mid-april
- Present by end of year
Subject Matter Experts
1. War Veterans
a. Medal of Honor Society
i. They have a collection of memoirs from each medal of honor recipient
dating back to WWII
2. “On Killing”
a. A documentary series that samples a lot of peoples opinions on the burdens of war
and death

Scholarly Voices
1. Patrick Hennesy
a. Born in 1982, he studied at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College in Oxford,
where he read English. He joined the Army when he left university and served as
an officer in the Grenadier Guards from 2004 to 2009. In between guarding
towers, castles and palaces, he worked in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia,
the Falkland Islands and deployed on operational tours of Iraq and Afghanistan.
After leaving the army, he wrote his first book, The Reading Club of Junior
Officers, a memoir of a short but eventful uniform stint, followed by Kandak's
account of how unlikely alliances can be forged in the intensity of the battle. Now
Patrick is a barrister.
2. Owen Sheers
a. He has written two poetry collections, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill, which
received a Somerset Maugham award. His verse drama Pink Mist won the Year's
Wales Book and the poetry medal of the Hay Festival. Non-fiction includes The
Dust Diaries and Calon: A Journey to the Heart of Welsh Rugby. His first novel
 Resistance has been translated into ten languages and was made into a film in
2011.
3.
a. In August 2014, after being a BBC Defense Correspondent from 2007, he became
the BBC's Religious Affairs Correspondent. Previously, she covered operations in
Iraq in 2003 and 2001 in Afghanistan. Caroline was a correspondent for the BBC
Paris from 2003 to 2007 and spent three years as a correspondent for Moscow,
charting the first term of Vladimir Putin as Russian President.

Works Cited

"How Vietnam dramatically changed our views on honor and war." The Conversation, 13 Sept.

2017, theconversation.com/how-vietnam-dramatically-changed-our-views-on-honor-and-war-

83021. Accessed 14 Mar. 2019. One way of changing the military was how it honored its

members with medals. Officers have always used medals to reward and identify behaviors that

they want to emulate their troops. The Medal of Honor, the highest award given by the U.S.

before Vietnam, usually went to those who lost their lives or risked their lives by going on the

offensive to kill enemy fighters. This shift echoed changes in the 1960s and 1970s ' wider

American culture – a shift toward celebrating individual autonomy and self - expression. In news

photos of service members in Vietnam, civilians saw this new attitude by wearing buttons saying

"Love" or "Ambushed at Credibility Gap."

Secondly, the families of the troops became a focus of attention. First, the military replaced the

practice of sending telegrams to survivors of dead service members with visits from casualty

assistance calls from officers who personally delivered the news.

Interview. By Brian Williams. 3 Aug. 2011. The medal of honor book is a collection of

interviews from living Medal of Honor recipients. It recounts each individuals' account of the

armed conflict they were in. All of these can be found on youtube and what makes this an

interesting medium of media is that it is sent directly to the reader.

Josh. "Josh on Killing: Do You Miss War? | On Killing: Season 1 | Cut." Youtube, 10 Nov. 2015,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXCQZhtzEs. Accessed 13 Mar. 2019. Interview. Josh's account

of his time serving in Afghanistan is one that is open and raw. While his first kill stood out the

most to him he said that at a certain point killing "turned into a job". He doesn't hesitate to say

how much he misses war. What was interesting was that he talked about the primal feeling he got

from it. He recalls that "it felt like ancestors where living inside of me". The feeling of

participating in something that people have been doing since the history of mankind felt like a

coming of age experience for him.

When he was asked if whether or not veterans should be more open about war, he said that of

course, they should be more open, but he adds on by saying "We want you guys to know what

we've been through, [but at the same time] we don't want you to know what we've been through".

Which explains a lot as to why war has been misinterpreted throughout history. As of recently,

these correspondents of war have been able to communicate straight to the audience, unfiltered,

telling the true story of what war is really like.

Vernon, Alex. The Eyes of Orion. The Kent State University Press, 2001.
https://writingcooperative.com/writing-about-war-a5c1a932b6c5
https://dcc.newberry.org/collections/literature-of-the-american-civil-war