Doc's Afghan diary takes us up close
and bloody in Afghanistan
[This item has been updated; see below*]It's worth wondering why the article in the current (July/August) issue of Mother Jones [thanks to This Magazine for tipping us on this] wasn't published in a Canadian publication*. It's written by a Canadian doctor, Kevin Patterson, a diary of time working among Canadian, other NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan and it is rivettingly well-done. Of course, it will get significant Canadian readership with Mother Jones, which is readily available here.
This Magazine has blogged about the controversy among some in Nova Scotia who felt that the article exploits the accidental death of a Canadian soldier, but I found the article not only compassionate in the specifics but important in its clear-eyed detail. Well worth your time. And, one hopes, this article finds second rights being picked up by Canadian magazines and made widely available to Canadian readers.
If you ever wondered how life is for the Canadian forces in Afghanistan, this first-person account has a ring of truth that we may not often hear from General Hillier and Defence Minister O'Connor.
[*UPDATE: a blog posting by the co-editor of Mother Jones gives some further context to this story.]
Labels: first person, writers
posted by D. B. Scott at
12:40 pm
1 Comments:
What Canadian publication would have published Kevin's piece for a comparable fee? Even the issue of fee aside, there are no mainstream, national publications for this type of work any more. Kevin has contributed to both Saturday Night (back in the Paul Tough era) and Toro in the past, both of which would have been viable Canadian alternatives, but those are obviously no longer. Someone may offer the Walrus, but I wonder if this diary would have qualified under Walrus's mandate that each piece must be sufficiently "issue oriented" to justify a tedious panel discussion. (Good old fashioned magazine stories don't cut it on those merits alone over at the Walrus.) Plus, Kevin undoubtedly didn't want to wait 9-plus months to get paid.
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