Two women in a small town find themselves on opposite sides of a protest. One is for the war in Iraq, one is against it, but despite this, they cross enemy lines and become friends.
Host Ira Glass talks to Anthony Swofford, a former marine sniper and author of the Gulf War memoir Jarhead. He explains what he's seeing when he watches this new war with Iraq on television.
Sarah Vowell tells the story about the first time the United States attacked a country that hadn't attacked us first. It was also the first time the U.S. went to a foreign country to force a regime change.
A few years back, a writer named Lee Sandlin wrote a story for the weekly paper The Chicago Reader about what makes wartime different—how a country's perceptions and logic during war are fundamentally different than during peace. It was a massive historical article, exhaustively researched.
The story of a preventive act of war committed 3200 years ago, in the land that's now Turkey, not too far from Iraq. Seneca's The Trojan Woman takes place at the end of the Trojan war.