Review in The Nation

"What should we make of wartime that has the appearance of peacetime?" asks Peter Maas, author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, in a review of War Time in The Nation.  Maas reported on the war in Iraq.  He found the carnage there to be "almost the least shocking experience of my journeys between war in the Mideast and my home in New York City."  In the United States, 

while Americans killed and got killed in Iraq, Americans back home shopped at Walmart and watched reality television....Outside the tight-knit community of military families who cared so deeply about the wars, nearly everyone in America went about his or her life as though Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t matter much. Nor had Americans been asked to change their way of life. It had become possible, I realized, for a nation to be at war without suffering the inconveniences associated with war—including the inconvenience of thinking about it.

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