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    A Marine's Reaction to a Children's Book Prompts an Apology From the Publisher

    A Marine's Reaction to a Children's Book Prompts an Apology From the Publisher

    This is a neat story about a Marine blasting a children's book on the Afghan war. The publisher apologized.

    Earlier this month, Zachary Bell, a former Marine rifleman and infantry squad leader, received an unsolicited email from the head of Capstone, a publisher of children’s books in Minnesota.

    The New York Times Magazine had just published Bell’s first article for the At War channel, in which he had detailed his reaction this summer to observing his two daughters, ages 8 and 10, reading “War in Afghanistan: An Interactive Modern History Adventure,” a book in Capstone’s You Choose series. The book included a chapter on an operation in 2010 in Marjah, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province, in which Bell participated. He watched and listened as they confronted the text’s notional choices, including how to navigate the perilous landscape and whether to fire upon Afghan men who might be snipers — at risk of committing a war crime.

    Bell’s reaction was unsparing, reflecting his uneasy relationship with his own service in the Afghan war and his surprise upon seeing his children, after a visit to the local library’s children’s section, puzzle over the same bloody deployment that had defined a period of his life. It was not that he was opposed to discussions with his children about the war; he is preparing for the day when he will have these discussions firsthand. It was that the book seemed too light, and presented fictional scenarios where real facts would do.

    “The choose-your-adventure format,” he wrote, “felt breezy and cavalier, recklessly presenting a bloody contest between the Taliban and the Marines in a manner largely devoid of consequences. I know what the book did not say. My friends and I killed in Marjah, and Marines in my rifle company lost limbs and lives. No notional exercise in choice will erase the fact that both my battalion and the battalion to our north killed many civilians in the opening days of Operation Moshtarak, when American high-explosive rockets struck occupied Afghan homes. Then, in the end, American plans for the area failed. Today Marjah is again under of the control of the Taliban and warlords.”
    This initial surprise — of having as his daughters encounter his war in their own home — was only the start. A week after the essay ran, an email from Patricia Stockland, Capstone’s publisher, landed in Bell’s inbox.



    Stockland was direct. “I want to personally apologize for the line we crossed with our War in Afghanistan You Choose book,” she wrote, “and for the disrespect and, as you rightly described it, breeziness of its approach and tone. Your recent piece in The New York Times was humbling, articulate and very much a wake-up call for us.”
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