Throughout the duration of this blog my intention is to focus on how the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq affect not only the soldiers themselves, but also their family and the people native to the area. I think it will be interesting to see the different ways people who are involved with the conflicts on varying levels deal with the presence of war in their lives.
When searching for sources for my feeds for this blog I tried to cover a great range of feeds. I Started at the top with feeds from major news sources, the two main ones I plan to follow are the New York Times World News and the BBC News: America. The podcast that I chose to follow deals with the lives of Army Wives. I found it interesting how these women internalize the struggles that their spouse go through as well as their own difficulties of going through life with a loved one living abroad in a dangerous environment. I subscribed to a handful of different blogs to be able to catch glimpses of opinions by different people involved in these conflicts. One is “An Arab Woman Blues. Reflections in a Sealed Bottle”, it is the thoughts and opinions of a woman who has lost her homeland and dealing with the violence around her. I also subscribed to two different blogs by people in the armed forces. “Afghan Quest” and “Training for Eternity”. I chose these two because they have contrasting themes, one focuses on the rebuilding of a nation while the other is preoccupied with the pointlessness of it all. To add to the blogs, I included in my google reader feeds from “Iraq Today” and “Death of a Nation” – a Pulitzer Crisis website on intelligence from Iraq. From these feeds I hope to be able to connect the technical aspects of what is going on in the conflicts to how the people are reacting and internalizing it.
Throughout my examination of these current conflicts I will be relating them back to literature that has been written about previous wars. My intentions are to highlight universal themes of heroism, patriotism, and mortality between various time periods and the different levels of all people involved.
