Comments for Reflections on Return: Three Military Perspectives

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Produced by Youth Radio

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Summary: Youth Radio's Irie Reyes brings listeners the stories of three African American soldiers.
 

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Review of Reflections on Return: Three Military Perspectives

Three different perspectives of the Iraq war that help us understand the variety of experience and point of view of our military. The interview tape is good. The narrator (whose name was garbled in my stream) has a great deal of presence which really helps hold the story together. Without his narration, it would be hard to see what unites these three disparate perspectives. What holds it together is the connection of the narrator (presumably) and the three soldiers to the community of Oakland, which is specifically mentioned throughout the story. As such, the story becomes a part of an anthropology of a community in the midst of war. Each soldier makes sense of his individual experience in the war a different way, which in turn helps us address an important question: How is the war changing America? What are we learning? What are we losing?