Over the past few months, America found itself on the brink of serious US military deployment (again). We recognized the fervor of an “antiwar” candidate turned into a bomb-dropping president. The costs of war are both economic and personal, global and local. As we move further and further away from old active conflicts, and potentially closer to new ones; a new group of young people enter into military life. While the civilian-military divide remains as large as ever, this issue will look at war through the people who are actually in it.
A lot of people ask what our "angle" is when we talk about the military, but we don’t have one, our point is simple: “The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”
To begin our issue, we had a conversation with J.G.P. MacAdam, author and veteran. He wrote a book called, A Square of Dirt, that tells a story from the point of view of the base, because, “the base observes everything—collecting stories, counting losses, and understanding the futility of conflict in ways its human inhabitants cannot.” We spoke about his process, his political evolution, and his quest for purpose. The interview was conducted by franknews and condensed for clarity.
franknews is committed to bringing quality information to the public — and remaining independent, ad-free, and accessible to everyone. To support us, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
To start, would you introduce yourself and, if you don't mind, tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got to your book, A Square of Dirt?
Sure, I’m an Army veteran. I did seven years active duty. I was an 11 Bravo, so I was an infantryman, and I served in Washington, DC with the Old Guard doing funerals in Arlington Cemetery and other ceremonies and things like that. Then I served a year in Korea, and after that I was in the 10th Mountain Division. I deployed twice to Afghanistan: in 2006–2007 in Paktika Province, and then in 2009 to Wardak Province. After that, I used the GI Bill, got myself a degree, then went to work for the government. So I've been working as a civilian employee for the federal government for about 15 years now. My military-related experience has been going on for over 20 years at this point.
I don't really come from a military family. My dad hated people in uniform—cops made him nervous. I was really just kind of a chronic runaway as a teenager and I used the Army to run away again. I didn't have a plan for anything else to do, so it was really about using the Army to my advantage, using those benefits, and eventually coming up with some kind of idea of what to do with myself.
That's probably what I got most out of the military, but I also got this experience that I keep coming back to even decades later. I was talking to my old company commander a couple of years ago, and he said that he's definitely conflicted about Afghanistan and everything that happened over there and what's happened since. I feel like I really tend to lean into that with my writing, which has been not just a passion, but a purpose in life, I guess you could say, beyond family, friends, or career. It's the kind of creative outlet that allows me to make sense of the memories. I started out wanting to write things that were not about the military—I wanted to write science fiction and fantasy, but I found that as I wrote, I kept coming back to military topics.
Can you tell me about the book, A Square of Dirt, a little bit?
I originally wrote this book the month before the fall of Kabul, so in July 2021.The base we were serving at in the Nerkh Valley in Wardak Province in 2009—we built that base and were the first American unit to be stationed out in that valley. And in May 2021, I read from a French news outlet that the base had been taken over by the Taliban.
I wanted to write about that and have it be not just the typical deployment story you get with a lot of veteran memoirs—where it's "we deployed, this was our deployment, we came home, and this is what we went through when we came home." To me, that's an incomplete story of the whole war. I wanted to try to capture the multi-year effects of the occupation. I imagined this story, A Square of Dirt, taking place somewhere around 2008–2009 to about 2013-2014, which roughly follows the time there was a base where I was stationed in Afghanistan, and all the things that happened with the handing over of that base to the Afghan military and the eventual fall to the Taliban.
I figured I couldn't really do that with a solely American perspective, even though I'm American. So I needed something else, and slowly but surely, I came up with the idea of telling a story from a base's point of view, because that way it could cover all those years, look at all the units that rotated in and out, look at the Afghans who took it over, and so on.
I think it's such an interesting and unique perspective for a lot of reasons—much of what you just said, but also because so much conflict is about borders, land, and geography, and the way those things change and stay the same. I think a Western perspective of what that looks like versus a local perspective is just really interesting. The idea of a base itself is so layered in the Middle East.
I agree, and I might add that one of the things that bin Laden pointed out about why he attacked the United States on 9/11 was that there was, or used to be, a US military base in the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia, which is where he was from, so, yeah, a lot of politics and drama when it comes to military bases. To include right here in the States as well.
I wanted to hear about how the process of writing felt as you got into it. You mentioned earlier that writing felt like a purpose, a way to sort out memories and what goes along with that. I wonder how it felt once you were in the thick of writing it.
I think I put it out on paper, or on a Word doc, pretty quickly. I was writing in the wee hours of the morning or late at night because my kid was three and a terror, and I was a stay-at-home dad at that point. So I would have these few hours here and there, not getting any sleep. I got a rough draft out within maybe a few weeks. A lot of writers talk about rejection. Rejection is actually part of my writing routine: I'll put something together, try to finesse it as much as I can, think it's done, and then almost inevitably I send it out way too early, it gets rejected, and I realize it isn't ready yet. I'll take that feedback, think about why it's getting rejected, try to have as objective a look as possible at my own work, then go back and tweak it.
When I was writing the first draft, what was feeding into me were all these stories about the difficulties the Afghans were having holding onto territory, not having air support, not having medevac support, and just the steady fall of those small outposts they couldn't maintain. The idea of America making an army in its own image that, after the fall of Kabul, turned out to be a paper tiger army—it just didn't work for a country like Afghanistan, because you're talking about making them into a hierarchical, modern army, and they don't have the industrial base, the population, or the society to support that kind of military. It was always kind of unsustainable from the start.
When you look at Afghanistan now, how does that make you feel? How close to the story do you still feel, and how much do you think about this place as it moves past the point where you were writing about it?
Something I touch on in the book is what's left of the American presence there. I spoke to Matthieu Aikins, a reporter who wrote a book about Afghan refugees but has reported from Afghanistan quite a bit. He got in touch with me about my experiences in Nerkh because he was looking to write about that valley in particular. He told me what he saw in Nerkh in, I think, in 2020. He said there's not a whole lot left—just ruins up on the side of a hill, slowly eroding away. I keep that image with me whenever I think about that time and what effect it ended up having overall.
I was just reading a book about pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. The qasida is a popular poetry form from that time, and it always tends to start by looking at ruins of an encampment. That's always struck me as a poignant place to begin, because you're looking at something that's ended, something that's passed away. I was just listening to a podcast about Antarah ibn Shaddad, the most famous warrior poet of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry—he asks in his qasida, "Has all the poetry that's going to be written already been written? What else is there to write about?" Even at that point in time, the poetic tradition had advanced to the point where someone could say, "I don't have anything else to write about” and it makes me think, here I am writing about war, writing about Afghanistan, against which so much has already been written. Nowadays, anyone can write and publish anything they want, and I think they should, but what can I say that’s different, that’s unique? What else can I possibly add to this broader story that's told by both Afghans and Americans, as well as all the other international people who were there? I just try to find that angle or niche that's somewhat unique, that hasn't been done or tried.
You're so thoughtful and deliberate in what you're reading and writing and how you're thinking about it. Like you said, there's so much written—veteran memoirs, people writing from their own perspective, journalists covering combat, all the angles—and there is still so much to say.
I had another question: do you feel like part of the processing is two-pronged? Obviously there's the emotional component, but has your politics changed or evolved? Have you become more or less political?
I know veterans who attend protests at G7 summits because they've gone that way politically, and others who have bought into every right-wing conspiracy. Politically, maybe because I'm from Pennsylvania, I tend to sit back and look at more of a long view. I'm also interested in the ideas some of the Amish, Quakers, and Mennonites have had about nonviolence and pacifism. I was just reading Tolstoy's ideas on nonviolence—he wrote War and Peace and served in the military himself. I learned that Gandhi and MLK actually got ideas from Tolstoy about nonviolence.
I'm not a pacifist, but I do wonder whether war as political violence—or even just violence—really does always have a political end. Some violence doesn’t seem to have any political purpose at all. The violence I took part in, in Afghanistan, didn’t have any real diplomatic or political end game, aside from the paper veneer of democracy in Afghanistan, or whatever we were trying to do there, I’m still trying to figure that one out. So, personally, politically, I am trying to decide whether war and violence are inherent to human nature or not. Part of me wants to believe they don’t have to be.
It may be, but you wonder if we can control our instincts. You teach a toddler that hitting is bad, so you wonder… It's a hard thing to assess.
I don't know that there is an answer to it, so I wonder if I'm even asking the right question.
This search for meaning in a time and place feels never-ending, especially for those involved—veterans, people close to the issue, or those who cover it—as it keeps evolving. For most civilians, though, it seems they’ve moved on. I wonder about the young people enlisting now and what that looks like. I’m also curious about your thoughts on the civilian-military divide, and whether you feel your work is for everyone, for veterans, or maybe even more for civilians.
I try to write for everyone, but of course my subject matter draws in a lot of veteran readers. But I've also gotten feedback and reviews from people who don't have anything to do with the military, and they tell me that they find my stories engaging, so that’s immensely encouraging. Ultimately what I'm out to do is number one, write an engaging story. And then number two, three, four, five could be something like trying to bridge the civilian-military divide.
There is almost like a responsibility as a citizen in our country to be like, this is what we're paying for, this is what our country is doing overseas, and so on. And it always surprises me when I talk about, say, the Department of Defense and people have question marks in their faces. People can picture the Army or the Navy, but many don’t understand how the Department of Defense works, or even quite what it is. Maybe they don’t need to. When telling a good story, you symbolize this big bureaucratic machine—it has a name, but who cares? You tell a story about how being a soldier means dealing with bureaucracy and rules and, yes, politics.
You mentioned you worked in a government job as a civilian. Do you have a preference for working for the government as a civilian or as a member of the military? Is it even comparable?
It is not even comparable. I remember the day I walked off a base in civilian clothes on my last day in the military—it's one of my happiest days, up there with the birth of my kid.
