"Sh*t, Meet Fan"

Independent "journalist" Jay Shaft has been passionately pursuing a cause of his own recently, sharing the trials and tribulations of troops who apparently got quite a bit more than they bargained for, when they signed up to go to Iraq or Afghanistan.  Shaft, who paints himself as a counter-culture revolutionary with little obvious background in conventional journalism, nevertheless claims to have interviewed military members with bad attitudes about the war, extensively, and shares their letters in some of his writings. (The article in question is "Letters from Iraq, Part I.")  It's tempting to apply the expression, "like watching a train wreck," to the letters he produces.  They are written by people on the verge -- and sometimes seemingly past -- full emotional collapse.  They don't want to be in war, they're fully traumatized by what they've seen and done, and they feel like no one is listening to their pain.  Shaft is.  (Can that be his real name, or is this a bad sixties reference?  Can you dig it?!)  And Shaft is equally hell-bent, and more power to him, on making sure those voices get heard.  Now, for whatever its worth, the only we became aware of Shaft's work was through a website based in New Zealand.  Maybe what he's saying is just too radical for the American media to pick up.  Not really sure.  But his compilation of outraged cries for help is highly worth reading, if only to sensitize us to what it feels like to be somebody who really doesn't want to be there, well after the fact they've figured that out, and for whom war has become true personal and psychological torture of the self.  The scary sensation in Shaft's writing is that we're encountering people with fullblown PTSD symptoms, and they're frequently still very much in the military, contemplating anything, including sadly suicide, as a way to get out.  These people are desperate, and Shaft is giving them a voice -- their own.  Not to be missed, for the sheer power of the content.  It's like listening to real-time interviews with passengers on the Titanic as they drown.  Very intense stuff.  So far Shaft's work is the most radical we've read, about how participants feel about the war when it's lost its appeal for them, to put it mildly.  It'll be interesting to see whether Shaft's work will be discredited or sought out.  In either case, he's a radical man on a radical mission -- and it'll be worth watching to see what comes of it.