Revised foreward to the taxi book

Taking some editorial advice from DUer Dora, we've shuffled and cut and added. Love to hear your thoughts, you can compare the two drafts by checking my journal


The Front Lines from the Back Seat
Candid conversations about the War on Terror with those who are fighting it.
By Sxxxx Mxxxxxxxx


Foreward




Driving a taxi in a small metro area near a major U.S. military base you meet literally hundreds of our brave fighting men and women. Fort Drum, the base I work near and that provides me with probably a full seventy percent of my weekend business, houses the 10th Mountain Division and as of this writing is currently moving in other units from around the country <possible fact confirmation>. Since the beginning of the war on terror they have been the most deployed division <fact check> in the military and a high percentage of the casualties <check % reference> are from units here. It is the raw tales of combat, military life I hear and the inside view to the mindset of our soldiers that I’m privy to that inspired the genesis of this book.



Not all of my customers feel the need to engage me past the necessary information of their destination. Many opt for the company of who they are with or who they are wired to via their cell phone, and those conversations are interesting enough, but some of my patrons, particularly when it is just one person and me, just really want to talk, about anything, and they do.

The uncomfortable silence that exists when two strangers must share an enclosed space together that seemingly makes people retreat into their own bubble of solitude in say, an elevator, can have a dramatically different effect, in the back of my taxi.

I found that like my many other customers, occasionally aided by the inhibition shedding powers of alcohol and other substances that some soldiers would open right up to me or indeed even confess to me graphically detailed accounts of their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I started pushing and fishing and tried to get them talking as much as I could.

The stories I started hearing ripped me to my very soul because many of these soldiers held absolutely nothing back in their recounting of the horrors and indeed some triumphs they had experienced.

It is the fleeting yet intimate nature of the priest/confessor, cabbie/customer, doctor/patient relationship that allows people to dump anything in their soul no matter how vile on to a perfect stranger. Am I breaking some ethical journalistic code by now recounting the tales of these men and women who mostly thought they were speaking to the night air alone? I will struggle with that and I’m sure some will chastise me for it but in my defense, I never learned the identity of any of my sources and after a time I did start telling many of the troops of my intention to possibly publish these tales. I haven’t encountered one yet that has discouraged me from doing this.

That I am even writing this now may prove that I was better at my explorations than I even expected to be. I started writing the stories as a regular column on an internet forum and they took on a life of their own. It was more simple therapy for me than anything. I was finding that the brutality of some of the stories I was hearing and the simple and obvious facts of what the war was doing to the emotional state of many of my customers was giving me a vicarious experience that I did not want.

This book is a compilation of many of those original columns and many more I hadn’t yet put to text. It approximately encompasses the time from March of 2006 until the present and a hodge podge of experiences from my entire, fifteen plus years of driving. More than that, it is an exploration into the individual experience of war as told by dozens of the individuals involved in it. It is my hope that these stories will help connect citizen and warrior in a way that is not often pursued by the mass media.

Obviously none of these stories can be proven beyond what they are. A small and specific oral history of our times and of the overall “War on Terror” told to me by the men and women who are living and fighting it. It has been both my privilege and my burden to hear how these men and women of our military live be it heroic or horrible.

The ride begins.

I didn't know how to write it any other way at first but I think I got my head around what she meant and I think I agree with her lol.

:) But I am easy...

and exactly how you felt and how you feel, as well as what to expect in the stories. I like "The ride begins."