They should have...sent a poet...

Hate to bring down the fun-loving atmosphere here at The Inertia, but I wanted to link to this captivating, extremely well-written account of a few months spent driving a truck in a convoy in Iraq. It's by Matthew Doherty, taken from the December issue of what is quite possibly the least-read publication in the White House, "Poetry Magazine." (The most-read publication in the White House? Do you even have to ask?)

Here's a brief excerpt:

I watch the moon. It’s reassuring to track its familiar, patient cycle. And the full moon has been pretty much in synch with our paychecks. May 4th the moon was full over Anaconda. I wondered if the camp would get mortared that night. Anaconda gets a lot of mortar and rocket attacks, but I thought that the brightness of our satellite might make for a quiet evening. In these days of night-vision and drones and infrared, maybe moonlight doesn’t matter as a detection tool. Besides, even broad daylight doesn’t forbid the mortars and rockets. And sometimes a mortar round is frozen, caked in ice, and placed in a launcher on the sly. The ice makes it too big to fit down the tube, but the ice melts. The mortar slides down and launches with no one around.

Good stuff.

I liked the article, and other writerly first-person accounts from Iraq, because it gives you some real sense of the task at hand, at what these soldiers and third-party operatives face when they arrive in that particularly miserable corner of the world. You can listen to pseudo-intellectual Christopher Hitchens rail on about the importance of the Iraqi mission for weeks (what it feels like every time he opens his mouth) and not get the perspective Doherty lays out in just a paragraph or two like the above.