In The Hot Zone

I read Kevin Sites' non-fiction book In The Hot Zone (#1,197) in preparation for BookMania!, where he will be one of the panelists.  Although we will be discussing his first novel The Ocean Above Us, I wanted to get a feel for his writing.  This was harrowing.  

After being embedded with a combat unit in Afghanistan, he witnessed and videotaped the shooting of a wounded insurgent in a mosque, Mr. Sites ran afoul of both the military and his own NBC network by taping what he felt was important to document.  He parted ways with the network and subsequently proposed a project to Yahoo!; to spend an entire year covering war-torn areas all around the globe.  He interviewed combatants and innocents in these Hot Zones, documenting the effects of war not just on the soldiers, but on the civilians and their environment.

He came away from the experience shaken and angry.  Not just by the fact that so much violence and destruction was taking place in so many different places around the world, but that Americans have mainly chosen not to see or acknowledge it.

Even though he undertook the project almost twenty years ago, in 2005, so much of what he wrote then could be ripped from today's headlines.  So little has changed.