Ryan Spencer Reed

"Despite Similarities to Reality, This is a Work of Fiction" Offering a glimpse into the idea of enduring freedom, this body of work underscores a gap between the fiction through which most Americans consume war and the realities from within the ranks of those charged with implementing the foreign policy of the United States in Afghanistan. These pictures chronicle one Army battalion – the final deployment cycle of the storied 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, otherwise known as the Band of Brothers, during the final throes of the United States’ longest war. Tales of the unit’s heroic contributions to conflicts since World War Two have inspired many to join the ranks to serve their nation. These stories of men at war are heavily edited and designed to perpetuate a tolerance - a penchant even - for war in the individual and the national conscience. They are also myths that perpetuate a perversion in society about the nature of (and rites of passage to) manhood, unattainable glory, heroism, and even war itself. These myths leave most Americans no more understanding of what is asked of their soldiers during the prosecution of their wars than the cultures left in ruin as a result. This work, in contrast, is impersonal and carries something of the anonymity of soldiering with it; the routine, irony, monotony and banality of military operations - things other than combat and obvious visual cues from war. It suggests that compromising the sovereignty of Afghanistan and Iraq was predicated on fiction; fiction generated by those pushing for perpetuation of hostilities to secure their profits. The wars’ achievements there were fiction and in some cases, to those of us less familiar with shock and awe, science fiction. Fictions were further fanned by the news sent home during the war “packaged” by those holding shares in both the organizations reporting and those multinational corporations profiting; fictions about the reasons, costs, and benefits and so it remains.