J. Malcolm Garcia – författare

They bear labels instead of names—noncombatant, unintended victim, collateral damage. Theirs are the blurred faces and forms seen in news footage shot from a moving vehicle. And when soldiers, media, and profiteers move on to the next conflict, they stay behind to cope amid the wreckage. They have stories to tell to anyone who will pause long enough to hear them.In What Wars Leave Behind, J. Malcolm Garcia reveals the people and pain behind the statistics. He writes about impoverished families scraping by in Cairo’s city of the dead, ordinary Syrians pretending all is well as shells explode around them, and others caught in conflicts that rage long after the cameramen have packed up and gone away.Garcia describes his travels in some of the world’s hotspots in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In a series of personal travel essays that read like short stories, he exposes the endless messiness of war and the failings of good intentions, and he traces their impact on the lives of natives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Kosovo, Chad, and Syria. He discovers amazing resilience among people who must struggle just to survive each day.Garcia gives readers the sort of gritty detail learned from immersing himself in other cultures. He eats the food, drinks the tea, and endures the oppressive heat. These are the stories of how a middle-class guy from the Midwest with a social work degree learned to experience and embrace the cultures of Third World countries in conflict—and lived to tell the tale.

Many Americans believe service in the military to be a quintessential way to demonstrate patriotism. We expect those who serve to be treated with respect and dignity. However, as in so many aspects of our politics, the reality and our ideals diverge widely in our treatment of veterans. There is perhaps no starker example of this than the continued practice of deporting men and women who have served.J. Malcolm Garcia has travelled across the country and abroad to interview veterans who have been deported, as well as the families and friends they have left behind, giving the full scope of the tragedy to be found in this all too common practice. Without a Country analyzes the political climate that has led us here and takes a hard look at the toll deportation has taken on American vets and their communities.Deported veterans share in and reflect the diversity of America itself. The numerous compounding injustices meted out to them reflect many of the still unresolved contradictions of our nation and its ideals. But this story, in all its grit and complexity, really boils down to an old, simple question: Who is a real American?