By Jerad W. Alexander “I said, ‘SHOOT HIM!’” A machinegun rattles. A man dies. He does not pass away like the elderly or terminally invalid—lying in a hospital bed in the soft receiving haze of curtained sunlight, each breath labored and forced until they’re not anymore. No spectacled doctor in a trim white lab coat…
By Sean Tyler There are plenty of firsthand articles about the life of a door kicker. This isn’t one of them. I don’t want to paint the picture that I’ve ever experienced combat first hand. I was an enlisted infantryman prior to OIF/OEF, and then a medical platoon leader/headquarters company executive officer in an infantry…
by Daniel Buckman It was a veteran’s daughter who read my first attempts at fiction, written in spiral binders at Fort Bragg, and mailed in letters to her Dekalb, Illinois’ dorm room. She talked to me about my writing through one of fifty payphones outside the First Brigade snack bar from her university in the…
by Jerad W. Alexander In a bar in the Poncey-Highland neighborhood of Atlanta, I sat across from a woman with eyes like wet iron and watched through cigarette smoke as she explained how her boyfriend had been murdered. He had been killed the previous May at a popular drive-in theater. After the movie had ended…