<p>John, it is October,
2001. The U.S. has just occupied Afghanistan, and you’re happy about that, but
you’re only twelve years old, too young to act on any nationalistic impulses.
In your eighth grade yearbook at age fourteen, you’ll write in your third
person biography that someday you hope to be an author and a U.S. Marine. When
you’re nineteen, you’ll enlist in the Marines, and then join the occupation of
Afghanistan at age twenty-one, from which you’ll return home safely. Now you’re
twenty-three and you’re going back to school, mature enough to understand the
complicit nature of your involvement in Operation Enduring Freedom. By the time
you reach grad school at age twenty-seven, you’ll begin to feel a nagging
guilt, and you’ll bear the full impact of this guilt by the time you turn
thirty and begin writing your thesis. You’ll want to write a book reflecting your
experience in a real-life war, describing what it was like to be there, and
what it was like to be a part of something that people had forgotten about before
you were even old enough to participate. Instead of reporting the facts, which
you will do on many occasions throughout your book-length project entitled <i>The Militia House</i>, you’ll write about
the experience as a haunting. John, if this manuscript reaches your hands in
2001 via some means of time travel, I want you to know that you’ll have
accomplished your goals, but at a significant cost. Even though you will
survive the war, you’ll leave a part of yourself in Afghanistan forever. But perhaps
even worse, a piece of Afghanistan will come back with you to live inside of
your body and your mind, and it will haunt you for the rest of your life.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/8049830 |
| Date | 10 June 2019 |
| Creators | John S Milas (6640904) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/The_Militia_House/8049830 |
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