 |
| AAFH image thumbnail |
It was humorous that Ryan was late, remembering the issue he made of the girls being late for the cast trip to Gettysburg in The Real World Brooklyn. He wasn’t too far from the studio when he had to call in. He told the host that perhaps he favored making dramatic entrances and he was setting himself up for one.
The host first talked about how the book came to be. Steiner remarked that it seemed that a lot more veterans were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan and talking and writing about their experiences much earlier than did veterans from previous wars. Ryan indicated that with the news coverage of the conflicts, people at home were already well acquainted with a lot of the circumstances of the wars and so it made it easier for veterans to come back and start talking within that context. As far as books on the subject, Ryan said that there is a market and an interest in stories of what has occurred in the combat zones.
Ryan remarked that he didn’t intend to write a book for publication. He wrote out the manuscript as a way to get the experiences out of his head and onto paper. He did it while the memories were still fresh in his mind, using saved, detailed emails that he had sent to his parents as the foundation for the material in the book. For him, those saved emails were his journal of what had transpired during the year he had spent in Iraq with his first deployment there.
Another thing that helped Ryan tell the stories in the book was assistance from his Army buddies who could help fill in any of the details that Ryan might be sketchy on. Ryan served closely with around forty guys during his first deployment, and afterward, Ryan and his buddies have been able to use social networking to keep a close connection with one another. He noted that this is something that previous generations of veterans didn’t have available to them to stay in touch.
For the rest of the Ryan Conklin interview <- click on the link.
