Dissenting Veterans on Post 9/11 Wars
Memorial Day can feel different every year, bittersweet at its best. It’s been the last Monday in May since 1868, first as Decoration Day, for marking the graves of our Civil War dead—lest Americans forget, it was said, those who had paid the price of a free and undivided republic.
In this Memorial Day installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with Radio Open Source, host Christopher Lydon asks American war survivors to reflect on the memories of our war dead, and to talk back to some of those memories, in dissent—as they choose.
We’re drawing on Metropolitan Books’ Paths of Dissent, a sparkling collection of short war memoirs—co-edited by QI President Andrew Bacevich—from 15 soldiers who served in what they remember now as misguided or misbegotten American wars in two decades since 9/11.