Jason Bitner is the co-creator of Found, the on and offline show-and-tell project of lost and tossed items. He also edits Dirty Found, the X-rated version of the project.

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“The collection reads like an incredibly beautiful census, with expertly lit faces replacing biographical data.”

The highway from my home in Chicago to LaPorte, Indiana, hugs the southeastern edge of Lake Michigan. Heading away from Chicago’s landmark skyscrapers, you soon pass the rundown high-rises of the South Side, bypass the smokestacks and casinos of Hammond and Gary, Indiana, and exit near the scenic Michigan City, Indiana.

The roads become smaller and more affected by the quiet rolls of pastureland and the out-of-place vineyard. You’ll pass a small airport, some garage sales and cigarette stores, and a few horses. You’ll cross the train tracks, which supplied this former vacation destination with visitors from Chicago. And before long, Lake Michigan and her surrounding sandy dunes will be left in the rearview mirror, and a smallish Midwestern town will appear near the edge of South Pine Lake.

A few years back, I got wind of the LaPorte County Fair and its legendary demolition derby. Legendary like your ears will ring until Monday and you might get lucky and see a super-sized man booty-dancing on the roof of his broke-down station wagon. Not to mention this very fair has brought people together each year since 1836-before radio, before my grandparents were born, and even before the California Gold Rush. With this in mind, a friend and I drove out toward the fairgrounds early on a beautiful Saturday morning to guarantee some tickets for the evening’s show.

When heading to LaPorte, you use the monstrous overpass (built to ensure that 18 wheelers would have an efficient in-and-out of the city), and drive by the monumental courthouse designed by Chicago’s acclaimed city planner, Daniel Burnham, in 1894. If you stop by the local historical society situated behind the courthouse, you might learn about the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant, the local munitions factory, which produced a huge number of shells for World War II. You might come across early farming equipment and the re-creation of a settler’s parlor room, and you might learn that LaPorte, “the door,” was so named because its prairie land allowed an easy passage to the new frontier, the West.

Traveling into town on the sleepy thoroughfare, we decided to stop for a quick bite at B & J’s American Café, a classic old diner complete with an enormous counter, local gossip and friendly teens taking orders. Checking the menu, I noticed the cinnamon roll requires an extra fifteen minutes, and if a menu item asks for additional time, it must be a specialty. We ordered three and spent a few minutes watching people come and go.

As we sipped coffee at the counter and reviewed the LaPorte Herald-Argus, I noticed a couple of beautiful 5″ x 7″ black and white photos taped to the pie case. The paper was slightly yellowed and showing a few signs of wear, but these amazing portraits were from an entirely different era.

A couple years back, I helped create a show-and-tell project of discovered notes and photographs called Found Magazine. People from around the world sent us their discoveries, from lost and forgotten love letters to extensive and exhausting lists, from Polaroids to classroom notes-anything that gives a peek into another person’s life.

Sometimes a find comes as a loaded 20-word missive and other times we’ll receive an entire journal detailing an extended family’s history. Our intention is to see how people’s worlds are often very different in specifics-race and class and ability to spell-but also how we share similar emotions and difficulties and joys. Oftentimes all we know is our own world, and we can easily forget about lives that don’t directly impact our own.

After tens of thousands of submissions, I’ve grown accustomed to receiving these wonderful and unexpected finds in my mailbox, and every once in a while there’s a treasure in the alley behind my apartment. As the project brings dozens of to-do lists, missives from angry neighbors, and break-up notes to us each week, I’ve learned where to look for the prized keepers.

Nothing I’ve seen since the project began, however, could match the scale of what I was about to happen upon in the diner.

I asked the waitress about the photos and she pointed toward a door leading to an unused dining area. The near side of the room was reserved for rolling silverware into paper napkins, while the back of the room housed two large metal shelving units holding 22 cardboard boxes. These boxes were stuffed with stacks and stacks of photos, all with remarkably similar characteristics. Initially, I guessed we were looking at 2000-3,000 photos, though I’d later hand count nearly 18,000 of these beauties.

“Find a family member! Photos $.50 each-or-$5.00 for a packet,” stated a small sign to the right of the shelves. Before us stood a nearly complete archive documenting the townspeople of mid-century LaPorte for sale-cheap!-in a quiet room of a local eatery. We rifled through an entire town’s population, as if it were a card catalog, a huge visual archive of Midwestern faces that were being unloaded two-for-a-dollar.

Diner owner John Pappas grew up in the building; he and his wife Billie passed along the details.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, the building’s second floor was home to Muralcraft Studios. Frank and Gladys Pease made their living by crafting kid’s photos, anniversary shots, senior portraits, engagement announcement pictures, and portraits for any event that called for a formal sitting. Frank photographed, while Gladys took care of the administrative end of the business and helped clients look their best for this special occasion.

A typical client would climb a long set of stairs, enter a small waiting area and be greeted by Gladys. After taking their coats, she would lead the subjects to either the men’s or women’s dressing room, and sit them before a mirror. Makeup might be applied, hair combed, ties adjusted, teeth checked for spinach. When everything looked satisfactory, they would head down a short hallway to greet Frank.

The back half of the space housed the studio, darkroom, and a storage area for props and the especially large lighting equipment. Pease shot with a medium-format camera (a few of the negatives still exist) and once he established his technique, he never wavered from the look; sitters’ hair and clothing styles changed over time, though the art direction never budged. This was not ego-driven work-Pease simply offered himself as a skilled photographer for hire and put clients’ needs before his own. Clearly he viewed his photography as a trade or a craft instead of an art form.

The photos that follow were never intended as final prints; rather these are proofs that were shipped to clients so they could determine which shot was most becoming, would look best on the mantle, or would be the most flattering to send to loved ones across the country. As clients were offered black and white or hand-colored final images, handwritten notes detailing the color of eyes, hair, and clothing mark the backs of these proofs to ensure eyes weren’t mistakenly tinted blue rather than hazel.

After running Muralcraft for decades, Frank Pease passed away in the early 1970s. Prior to his death, Pease kindly donated his photo equipment to the local high school (and it’s likely that some of the younger subjects honed their darkroom skills on the very enlarger of their first portrait) and the proofs were all left in the studio. These photos sat in storage for over 20 years, until Billie and John opened their restaurant in the early nineties. For the past decade, these photos have been quietly sitting for sale in their back room, along with a few remainders of the lighting setup, while the Muralcraft studio has been renovated into a spacious apartment.

So we hunkered down on the floor, picked up a few stacks of photos and were instantly transfixed. Flipping through the pictures, we discovered an enormous visual survey of the Midwest a generation back. These faces staring back conjured family members, close friends, distant acquaintances-even Hollywood glamour shots. The collection reads like an incredibly beautiful census, with expertly lit faces replacing biographical data. By carrying on with his commercial photo business practice, Pease unwittingly created an enormous and compelling historical document. He became an accidental historian.

We ordered our second meal and kept digging. Halfway through the first box, I’d already committed to somehow taking in each of the 18,000 photos. It’s addicting, and overwhelming, and you don’t just come across something this incredible and soon forget about it. Three boxes into the process, I decided to spend a week straight in the back room of B & J’s, sipping coffee, reading the local paper, and selecting a couple hundred of my favorites to share.

I discovered it’s real easy to become image-fatigued when handling hundreds of photos each day; this kind of repetition leads to excitement for oddballs and more peculiar photos. I tried to steer clear of this kind of sensationalism when choosing photos for this book. The pictures that follow are organized and ordered, though the themes may not always be obvious.

Pease became a stenographer of LaPorte. He surely didn’t intend on a life as a cultural secretary, but his career and his work have gained an importance beyond that of each individual image. For a single anniversary photo holds a little historical value, but a collection this vast, spanning over a generation will certainly hold greater cultural value.

And that the collection should come from LaPorte-the door, the entryway-well, the metaphor is almost embarrassingly obvious. Come take a peek at the Midwest in the 1950s and 60s.

Reprinted with permission from LaPorte, Indiana (Princeton Architectural Press).

Kathy and Hugh Tonagel posing for their engagement photo. Photographer Frank Pease reminded the young couple that the portrait would visually represent their engagement, which may account for their intense eye-lock. He tried to impress up them the gravity of the situation-and take the moment seriously. The Tonagels are still married and have four children, great basketball players, we hear. Hugh works at the 4-H, while Kathy works at the local hospital and is a great cook.

This one’s such sweet and intimate portrait, and one of the few truly candid moments found in the Pease archive. I love the distant gaze coupled with the bad toupee. We’ve heard rumors that the man on the left headed off to join the circus-no kidding-but we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of this one.

Patty Sallwasser still lives in LaPorte and works as a mortgage officer When she saw her photo, she exclaimed, “That’s my purple polka-dot dress, that’s me! My mom cut my hair; she made the dress. I remember that I chose the fabric.”

Garry Lenard lives and works in LaPorte as a dental supply salesman. His signature buzzcut earned him the nickname “Burrhead,” which he still answers to around town. “I’ve always had short hair. Maybe in college [it was longer]. I think all of us went through a phase with the Beatles. That was the big thing. And now if you look at the Beatles, they never even really had long hair.” He is now married with three kids.

David VanSchoyck’s brother Dewayne tells us David died at age 9. “We used to have our photos taken every year,” Dewayne said.

Matching outfits sometimes aren’t a great idea, but these twins pull off the look in a warm and charming fashion. There’s something so sweet about older twins who still match. This is Lily (Ahlgrim) Baker and Rose (Ahlgrim) Scherer-twin sisters who lived on Weller Avenue; Lily had one son, Billy, and Rose had one daughter, Jeanette.

Robert Charles Ewald graduated LaPorte High in 1952, where he was a member of the band; he later formed the Bobby Charles Band, and now lives in Minnesota.

Pease captures this LaPortean’s cosmopolitan style, somewhere between a flight attendant and a Bond Girl. This is Dale (Horne) Lehner who graduated LaPorte High in 1971; Her father managed the local JC Penny, and is remembered as a “a very good student and a very happy, kind, friendly classmate.” She now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

What’s this big guy’s story? No one knows. But each week I hear from more and more folks from LaPorte, Indiana who see themselves in the pages of this book, get in touch, and fill in the blanks of the past 50 years. And when that happens this story of LaPorte, Indiana-a story I so randomly stumbled upon a few years ago-becomes just a little be better told.

Michael Slenske writes SMITH's Back Home column. His last piece was Back Home With Paul Rieckhoff.

“I don’t harbor any ill feelings toward the Marine Corps. I learned valuable, intangible traits when I was in there-self-confidence, self-discipline. But in the back of my mind is that the reason they taught me these intangible traits was to turn me into a killer. And they succeeded.”

In the wake of the James Frey debacle-and its tractor-powered disinterment of similar thinly-veiled literary hoaxes surrounding the louche and love-starved — it’s rather conspicuous (or perhaps not) that Jimmy Massey’s name has failed to resurface in the broadsheets. If you haven’t heard of him, Massey, a former Marine staff sergeant who spent 12 years in the Corps before being medically discharged with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and becoming a key figure in the peace movement with Veterans For Peace, rose to infamy last November after St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Ron Harris (followed lockstep by hawkish blogger Michelle Malkin) discredited claims made by Massey in his book Kill, Kill, Kill that he’d been party to (and a participant in) war crimes during his tour in Iraq with a Combined Anti-Armor Team (CAT) platoon.

Although Harris and Co. vehemently disputed Massey’s claims of killing innocent civilians on the road to Baghdad, Harris has admitted that he doesn’t read French (the language in which Massey’s book was published) nor was he ever directly embedded with Massey’s unit. Malkin, for her part, failed to return various emails, which is telling, considering the fact that the claims made in Kill, Kill, Kill, which is also being published in Spain, were corroborated by three other Marines in Massey’s platoon in interviews with the same French-American investigative journalist who ghost wrote the book with Massey. To find out what really happened SMITH deconstructed the fog of the Iraq war with the Marines’ most outspoken anti-war, war criminal.

SMITH: What made you want to write Kill, Kill, Kill?

MASSEY: When I was first diagnosed with PTSD, the psychologist suggested I write a memoir as part of the therapy. I started writing, basically just jotting down notes, and then when I got discharged from the Marine Corps, Natasha Saulnier, my ghostwriter, contacted me through Veterans For Peace. She did a couple interviews with me and asked if I wanted to write a book with her about my experiences, and it all kind of fell into place.

SMITH: How do you feel when people in the press like Ron Harris want to attack you for what you’ve said or what you’ve written?

MASSEY: Ron Harris is just covering his own behind. He knows he is just as liable for war crimes as any military member serving in Iraq.

SMITH: How so?

MASSEY: Because of his failure to do any investigative journalism into the actual incidents of the killing of civilians.

SMITH: Was he with you when this was happening?

MASSEY: No, he was never with my company. He was with Lima Company. The only time that I saw Ron Harris was after a particular incident happened at a checkpoint when he came in to do his little interview and leave back to Lima Company. It took an international incident for him to report any of the civilian casualties. It took the killing of reporters for him to finally talk about that.

SMITH: But what’s the actual dispute?

MASSEY: Well, that’s the thing. Ron Harris even stated that he didn’t set out to dispute, he just didn’t see the harshness I portray in the book. And I don’t think Ron Harris has read the book either.

SMITH: So the contention is essentially whether the events you describe in the book should be labeled as normal combat procedures or war crimes.

MASSEY: I leave it up to the readers in the book. Are these war crimes or are these just fog of war? My definition of fog of war is that you’re on the battlefield and out of the corner of your eye you see somebody run and you fire off a shot and you go find out it’s a civilian. That’s fog of war. Where I have a heartburn with it is that we actually escalated the violence by heightening the intelligence reports. We demonized the Iraqi people and we were given carte blanche to shoot first and ask questions later. I think that the truth hurts. I think when a lot of Marines read this book it’s going to bring to their point of view the violations of the Geneva Conventions. Can you win a war with continued violations of the Geneva Conventions and International Law?

SMITH: So did you feel you were violating the law at the time?

MASSEY: Oh definitely, and I raised the BS flag very early on.

SMITH: And what did your fellow Marines say?

MASSEY: I was kind of treated like an outcast or rogue because they didn’t like my opinions about certain situations. I became very agitated because I went up to Captain Smith [of Lima Company]. This was shortly after the red Kia incident. I told him we need to get combat engineers in here to fortify when we have these kinds of checkpoints. And his response was, “No-there’s not going to be any combat engineers to come in.”

SMITH: So what would you say to people who’d claim your story is a fake war story?

MASSEY: The thing is I was there. There were other members of the platoon that were there. I haven’t seen one reporter that has interviewed guys who were in the book. Mainly these are just random Marines in other companies who have been interviewed. I think what is going to have to happen is that these Marines I talk about in the book are going to have to come forward or be interviewed and ask them about each particular event. Natasha Saulnier actually conducted the interviews with the Marines in the book, and they openly admit to killing civilians.

SMITH: Is this at the level of a Mai Lai incident?

MASSEY: I don’t think it’s to that level yet. I do think we have the propensity to head in that direction because of the military thought process and [because] we demonize the Iraqi people and treat every Iraqi as a potential terrorist. I’m very curious about Fallujah and the actual battle plans of what took place in Fallujah. I’d love to hear the civilian accounts of what happened, especially because I’ve been hearing that they used white phosphorous.

SMITH: Are you trying to get the book published in America?

MASSEY: If an American publishing company comes along and wants to publish it, sure. We’ve had a few look into it, and a few more are still looking into it, but it will published in Spain in March. We’ve also had a good response from the French-speaking provinces of Canada.

SMITH: What about those who’d say you were trying to make money off these events?

MASSEY: Come on, brother. You know how much I’ve made off this book? I made about $8,000. The reason I wrote the book was initially for therapy. I have started a PTSD foundation through Iraq Veterans Against The War called the Vets for Vets program. What I’ve been using are the proceeds that are going to that so that we can continue helping returning vets diagnosed with PTSD because the VA system is taking almost two years to get into the system, to get a diagnosis, to get a rating before they even start seeing a disability paycheck. These guys are living on the streets, homeless, and we still got people slapping yellow stickers on the back of their cars saying, “Support The Troops.” They don’t have a clue.

SMITH: What was the hardest thing for you to deal with over there? Not just the stuff you saw, but the day to day?

MASSEY: The desperation in the Iraqi people. I don’t think that the Marines in my platoon had realized the devastation this country had been under. Thirteen years of sanctions, lack of medical supplies, humanitarian rations, and I knew the Iraqi people’s plight because I read the history of Iraq, and I knew the US involvement with Iraq, and I was a firsthand witness. I saw American tanks in Iraqi compounds; I saw ammunition with American flags spray-painted on the ammo box. All evidence. But it was just the desperation in their eyes. They were looking at us to be liberators and provide that humanitarian support and just act humanely toward the Iraqi people and we didn’t do it. We established places like Abu Ghraib; we established free-fire check zones at Marine Corps checkpoints, just crazy, crazy military blunders.

SMITH: What made you want to join the Marine Corps?

MASSEY: I came from a long line of military going all the way back to the civil war. All my kin, my family is from South Carolina, so I can trace all my roots back to here. I’ve had relatives that fought for the Confederacy, for the Union. My grandfather [Zachariah Roberts] was with Patton’s division during World War II, and I was growing up hearing stories of what he did while he was over there. So I always had a deep sense of pride in my country.

SMITH: Did you enlist?

MASSEY: I was going to UTI [Universal Technical Institute] I was studying to become an automotive engineer, but my goal was to design new cars. But I ran out of money and so I worked in the oil fields for Cardinal Well Service in the Gulf Coast. I was a tool hand. I took a job in New Orleans doing the same thing. But being young I fell in love with Bourbon Street, and I was eventually fired, lost my apartment and became homeless. I had too much pride to go back to my mom and tell her, so I talked to a recruiter when I was in New Orleans. I called my mom [and told her] what I planned on doing. She begged me to come home, so I came home. I told her I wanted to go into the Marines, and this is what I need to do to be successful.

SMITH: Do you regret anything about your service?

MASSEY: Absolutely not. The only thing I regret … is that I did not go into the Naval Investigative Service and tell them what I saw.

SMITH: Why didn’t you do that?

MASSEY: The Marine Corps told me they were doing the investigation and they were looking into what I was saying, so I was like well, “If they said they were looking into it, they were looking into it.” And I didn’t think I was getting discharged anytime soon.

SMITH: How do you think the support system is set up for soldiers and Marines who get “shell-shocked” over there?

MASSEY: We’ve got to look at the whole medical system of the military and see what their overall goal is. Lieutenant Col. Dave Grossman wrote a book called On Killing, and he talks about the psychological effects going all the way back to World War I up to the recent Gulf Invasion. He says the overall goal of the system is to get a member of the armed forces back on the battlefield. That’s why they are setting up these little rehabilitation centers in Iraq. So they let them play video games, and I’ve seen pictures of these little camps they have, and they play video games and they have this down time. They give them psychotropic medications, antidepressants, things to help them sleep. Then they get them back to a certain level, they ship them back to their unit. But they’re not getting to the real cause because the real cause-the PTSD-is a trauma that they’ve received while they are in country. And if you continue to keep them there that trauma continues to build and build.

SMITH: How did you feel when you came back? I’ve talked to other vets who say when they hear a car door slam or hear a firecracker go off they are very, very on edge.

MASSEY: I tell you what; the worst thing for me is driving. If I see a bag of garbage on the side of the road, or even if I see somebody walking, I’ll just instantaneously flashback and think about IEDs. My wife doesn’t let me drive anymore.

SMITH: You’ve been working with Cindy Sheehan. What is that like?

MASSEY: Working with Cindy is wonderful.

SMITH: What’s it like on the ground in Crawford, Texas?

MASSEY: It was amazing. My life to me is certain periods where I heal and that’s what I remember. PTSD, battling with it is everyday, but when I was in Crawford I didn’t have to battle with it, it was like I felt a sense of camaraderie, communion, we were achieving the same goals.

SMITH: Have you met any opposition at these events?

MASSEY: Yeah, I’ve been on speaking engagements-one in particular was in upstate New York-where I had people actually out front protesting me being there.

SMITH: Did things get messy?

MASSEY: No, but that’s the great thing: this is what the soldiers over there are fighting for is freedom of speech. I welcome those people if they want to come in and listen to what I have to say, or ask questions. I don’t claim to be perfect or know everything so I welcome a healthy debate on topics. But the Marine Corps was good to me the 12 years I was in. It’s not the Marine Corps’ fault for being used in a negative direction; I don’t harbor any ill feelings toward the Marine Corps. I learned valuable, intangible traits when I was in there-self-confidence, self-discipline. But in the back of my mind is that the reason they taught me these intangible traits was to turn me into a killer. And they succeeded.

SMITH: What was the fondest memory you had in Iraq?

MASSEY: I had a big saying while I was over there, I would come across the radio and say, “My Spiderman senses are kicking in.” And that was kind of like a key to the rest of the boys to be on a heightened sense of alert. And this wonderful artist, Lance Corporal Martins, came up to me and drew this Spiderman with a Marine uniform on that had a caption that said, “My Spiderman senses are tingling.” Just little stuff like that.

SMITH: And what is the day-to-day routine for you now?

MASSEY: I do a lot of work for IVAW [Iraq Veterans Against the War] so I’m heavily engaged in that and lining up different speaking engagements with various organizations throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world. I recently went to Kuala Lumpur. The prime minister of Malaysia was hosting a peace conference, and wanted a representative from IVAW and I was the chosen one. I also went to Ireland to help with the plan of getting the U.S. warplanes out of Ireland’s Shannon Airport. I was on The Late Late Show [in Ireland] talking about the depleted uranium being flown through Ireland. I’m Scotch-Irish, so Ireland is my home country.

SMITH: What’s the one thing we don’t know about this war as the American public?

MASSEY: [Laughs] I feel … how can I put that … how do you tell a 25-year-old Iraqi that just witnessed his brother being killed at a Marine Corps checkpoint … how do you tell this young man not to become an insurgent?

SMITH: I don’t know.

MASSEY: That’s a question I’d like answered because I feel that’s something we did. We escalated the violence by our stupidity, our lack of Middle Eastern cultural customs.

SMITH: What’s a concrete example of that?

MASSEY: For one, [at checkpoints] we were sticking our fists up in the air, which is pretty much the military sign for stop. And then we would fire a warning shot as the car approached. I had this Iraqi-American woman, she came up to me, after I got done with a presentation [in America], and she said, “Wait a minute, explain to me what you were doing?” So I explained to her that we were sticking our hand in the air and firing a warning shot. She said, “Okay, don’t you think that by sticking your fist in the air in a Middle Eastern country that that could possibly mean solidarity?” And I said, “Okay, I’ll play devil’s advocate with you, but what about the gunshot?” She said, “What do you always see Saddam Hussein doing on the television.” And I was like, “Oh my god!” I travel to Iraq, go through that, to come back to the US to have this elderly Iraqi woman tell me that we were culturally fucked up.

SMITH: Were there any other things that bothered you after you returned home from Iraq?

MASSEY: I’ve got to bust on Harry Connick, Jr. This guy is from New Orleans. I’ve seen Harry Connick, Jr. play at the old Preservation Hall. This guy gets on CNN has the prime opportunity to say, “You know what? The government messed up. We were not getting the support we need to rebuild.” And he blew it. When they asked him the hardball questions about how he felt, he blew it. He just kind of tiptoed and danced around it. I guess he’s worried about his cell service. If that was me I would say, “Hey, come with me, walk with me down the street. I’ll show you what New Orleans is like.” And the celebrities are not doing it. Where are they at? What happened to the Johnny Rottens? What happened to the Dead Kennedys? That’s the stuff I grew up to, the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag and The Cult. I grew up with those kind of bands, and it’s just not there anymore.

SMITH: What did you think about the book and recent movie Jarhead?

MASSEY: I’ve got to give [author Anthony] Swofford props. I think he set out to tell a very heart-wrenching story of his indoctrination into war. I think that Swofford was censored. I could tell when I read the book that he wants to say something more here, and he wants to say something more here. You understand that Marine mentality. You can understand he was censored. Once I wrote my book and presented it to publishing companies, [and] they wanted to add things and take things out, I started to understand what he was up against. But I think Swofford did the very best of telling a gut-wrenching story, and ultimately I think his story has an anti-war statement.

SMITH: What’s the ultimate goal here?

MASSEY: The ultimate goal is to end the occupation of Iraq and bring the troops home and once they’re home provide support for them. That’s the ultimate goal. I don’t have any political ambitions-no crazy stuff like that.

Bernice Yeung is an editor at Hyphen magazine

When he was a kid growing up in South Korea, Dennis Hwang doodled in class instead of listening to his teachers. They’d holler at him to stop. He’d ignore them, and his spiral notebooks would overflow with cartoon frogs and planes and rainbows.

Some 20 years later, Hwang’s artistic defiance has paid off — he’s arguably the most viewed artist on the planet. In 2000, the young and steadfast doodler landed a job as the “Google doodle” guy, the enigmatic graphic designer who changes up the company logo every time there’s a holiday.

Working from a messy cubicle with three 24-inch computer monitors at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, Hwang has converted the logo into Braille for Louis Braille’s birthday, substituted an “o” with a soccer ball for the 2002 World Cup, and celebrated the 50th anniversary of the understanding of DNA by transforming the “o’s” into a rainbow-colored double helix. By now, he’s drawn about 300 Google logos, including a slew of international holidays from Korean Independence Day to Ramadan.

Hwang’s odd career trajectory started in the late ’90s at Stanford University, where he was double-majoring in fine art and computer science. “I was dead set on studying fine art,” he says, “but Stanford has a strong computer science department so I got sucked into that since I wanted to know about tools for creating animations and movies.” A guy in Hwang’s dorm told him about internships at a local dotcom with a funny name that means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros: Google.

By the time Hwang landed an unpaid programming gig, Google was already mixing up its logo, a tradition that had started the summer before when founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page inserted a flaming stick figure behind the company logo before packing up a car and heading out to desert arts festival Burning Man. They later asked a few guest artists to design variations of the logo, but when Dennis came aboard rumors of his talents quickly circulated among the staff.

First assignment: fix up the brand for the Fourth of July. Dennis drew fireworks coming out of the center “o” and placed three Founding Fathers to the right of the logo. “They were using clip art at the time so I thought, Fair enough, it’s within my league,” says Hwang.

He impressed his bosses so much that they not only gave him a programming job with salary and benefits, but custody of the Google doodles. “At first I didn’t quite have a clear understanding of the scope of these images. Even now, it really hasn’t hit me how many people see them.”

Five years later, Hwang is still pumping out new marks every week or two, generating ideas from Google doodle meetings (four a year), and from Google users suggestions (via email, of course). Though the doodles only make up 20 percent of his job — his official title is Webmaster and involves prodigious amounts of coding as well as managing a team of programmers, — the 27-year-old Hwang has learned that people take his doodles very personally.

Last June, for example, he created a logo for Bloomsday, the celebration of the work of James Joyce that’s based on events from his novel Ulysses (Hwang placed the author’s bespectacled face in the “G” and a tiny book to the right of the logo). That day he received dozens of emails from literary scholars telling him how much they appreciated his doodle. But one irate scholar wrote in to complain that Dennis had gotten it all wrong: the original version of Ulysses had a blue cover and the logo had erroneously featured a book with a yellow color. (He was not moved to change his Joycian vision.)

And then there are the librarians. On National Library Week in 2005, Hwang placed an open book where the two “o’s” should have been, and librarians from all over the country went nuts, sending him hundreds of flattering notes. A professional librarian organization has since sent him fan mail in the form of cards and a Librarian action figure with “amazing push-button shushing action.”

Although Hwang says he never expected his doodling to draw so much attention, he enjoys the reality of millions of eyeballs seeing his artwork. “I usually don’t tell people unless they ask me what I do,” he says. “And people don’t exactly recognize me on the street.”

He will admit it’s a real conversation starter at parties. “But,” he says, “I don’t use it to get dates.”

Penelope Whitney writes about people with unusual jobs, like a cow ob-gyn, for SMITH.

“How do you make an Aussie and a California boy sound so convincingly cowboy that their accents aren’t even noticed?”

Brokeback Mountain dialect coach Joy Ellison has a voice so velvet smooth you want to curl up into it. She also has pretty green eyes and long red hair, and when she switches flawlessly from a Texas to Russian accent it’s hard not to wonder if she really is some kind of James Bond spy.

Then you find out that when preparing for her work on Brokeback she actually hid a microphone up her sleeve. This was in a roughneck bar in Riverton, Wyoming, the kind of place where people are especially sensitive to being taped. “I held my beer up and leaned my elbow on the bar,” she says, “Then I just starting asking questions about the town and what had changed.” By the time she and actress Michelle Williams roadtripped through Wyoming and up to Calgary (where the movie was shot), she’d pinpointed the sounds that would make Brokeback believable.

THE IN SOUND FROM WAY OUT WEST:
Dialect coach Joy Ellison’s notes for Brokeback Mountain

The work of a dialect coach includes phonetics, but more than anything it’s about having an ear. “I’ve always been good at picking up languages,” Ellison says. “The major basis of this work is to hear something, recognize it, and analyze it.”

As a child actor in California on shows like Andy Griffith, Ellison grew up on sets — but the acting bug didn’t stick. She found her true calling when she began working as a dialect coach. After her first job, when Isabella Rossellini begged her to stay and help hone her German accent, there was no turning back. Since then, Ellison has helped Melanie Griffith with an Alabama accent, Eric Bana do Israeli, and Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger pull off Wyoming.

How does someone who’s not from a culture parachute in and capture a precise local dialect? How do you make an Aussie and a California boy sound so convincingly cowboy that their accents aren’t even noticed?

It starts with the writing, says Ellison. “They don’t all walk around saying ‘Can’t swing a cat without hitting a Dairy Queen.’” Once you have a beautiful script like Brokeback Mountain, it comes down to the essence of the sound. “Wyoming has some Canadian dialect influences. They’ll say ‘oh no,’ with that little rounded mouth. Another vowel that really identifies Wyoming is the ‘i’ in pineapple. It’s very slight, say, compared to Texas where they’d say “pineapple upsy-ide down cake’ with a longer stress on that ‘i.’” (See her process, via her hand-written notes, above.)

To work with Gyllenhaal, Ellison sat down with the script and went line by line to break down the major sounds. From there, she’d go back through the script and find those sounds in his dialogue and make lists. “Jake might have a line like, ‘I’m trying to buy the fried eggs.’ So I’d go back and go ‘I try fry,’ take all those words out so he starts to recognize that sound in all its forms.”

Not overdoing the accent is vital to making the voice authentic — Ellison calls it 75 percent of the challenge. “Jake was funny because at the end of the movie he said to me, ‘I know, I know, pull it back.’ “Because,” she shifts to a twangy Texas accent, “he always wanted to go real strong, y’know, TEXAS.”

The two Brokeback actors had wildly different approaches. “Jake is theater trained and analytical, and pulls acting apart intellectually,” says Ellison. “Heath is very seat of the pants, in the moment, his mind is going a million directions all at once. So as an actor it was even a greater stretch for him to play this character.”

Ledger’s speech caused a stir in the dialect coach world due to the way he held his lip, as if he were chewing tobacco. “A lot of the guys that we met and voice samples we had were guys that were chewing,” Ellison explains. “We even talked about him keeping a piece of paper or gum there all the time, and then we thought that would be impractical. It so suited his character to keep that lower lip in that position that cowboys do when they’ve got chew.”

“Other dialect coaches have said, ‘What is that thing that he’s doing, why is he holding his lip like that? That was a weird choice.’ Afterward they thought it worked.”

Joy raves about director Ang Lee’s dedication to detail (”Ang knew the eyeshadow color ladies in Wyoming wore in 1963″). The Taiwanese native was also a quick study of American accents. “A couple of times during the shoot when someone would go way off with their accent, Ang would look at me and say, ‘Joy, was that right?’ He could hear the difference.”

Ellison is deep into her next movie, working with Catherine Zeta Jones on location in New York City. If you find yourself in a downtown bar and a pretty redhead starts asking too many questions, ask what she has up her sleeve. Your accent could be next.

Editor’s note: Here are two excerpts from Eat, Pray, Love, courtesy of Ms. Gilbert. First, we find our heroine at a soccer game in Rome. In the second excerpt, the author arrives in Bali, without really understanding what “arriving in Bali” actually entails.

See the author on tour across America over the next few months.

Spaghetti and Soccer in Italy—from chapter 23 of Eat, Pray, Love:

Yesterday afternoon I went to the soccer game with Luca Spaghetti and his friends. We were there to watch Lazio play. There are two soccer teams in Rome—Lazio and Roma. The rivalry between the teams and their fans is immense, and can divide otherwise happy families and peaceful neighborhoods into civil war zones. It’s important that you choose early in life whether you are a Lazio fan or a Roma fan, because this will determine, to a large part, whom you hang out with every Sunday afternoon for the rest of time. Luca has a group of about ten close friends who all love each other like brothers. Except that half of them are Lazio fans and half of them are Roma fans. They can’t really help it; they were all born into families where the loyalty was already established. Luca’s grandfather (who I hope is known as Nonno Spaghetti) gave him his first sky-blue Lazio jersey when the boy was just a toddler. Luca, likewise, will be a Lazio fan until he dies.

“We can change our wives,” he said. “We can change our jobs, our rationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team.”

By the way, the word for “fan” in Italian is tifoso. Derived from the word for typhus. In other words, one who is mightily fevered.

My first soccer game with Luca Spaghetti was, for me, a delirious banquet of Italian language. I learned all sorts of new and interesting words in that stadium which they don’t teach you in school. There was an old man sitting behind me, stringing together such a gorgeous flower-chain of curses as he screamed down at the players on the field. I don’t know all that much about soccer, but I sure didn’t waste any time asking Luca inane questions about what was going on in the game. All I kept demanding was, “Luca, what did the guy behind me just say? What does cafone mean?” And Luca never taking his eyes from the field would reply, “Asshole. It means asshole.”

I would write it down. Then shut my eyes and listen to some more of the old man’s rant, which went something like:

Dai, dai, dai, Albertini, dai va bene, va bene, ragazzo mio, perfetto, bravo, bravo Dai! Dai! Via! Via! Nellaporta!Eccola, eccola, eccola, mio bravo ragazzo, caro mio, eccola, eccola, eccoAAAHHHHHHHHH!!! VAFFANCULO!!! FIGLIODI MIGNOTTA!! STRONZO! CAFONE! TRADITORE! Madonna Ah, Dio mio, perch,perch,perch, questo stupido, una vergona, la vergogna Che casino, che bordello NON HAI UN CUORE, ALBERTINI! FAI FINTA!Guarda, non successo niente Dai, dai, ah. Molto migliore, Albertini, molto migliore, s s s, eccola, bello, bravo,anima mia, ah, ottimo, eccola adesso nella porta, nella porta, nellVAFFANCULO!!!!!!!

Oh, it was such an exquisite and lucky moment in my life to be sitting right in front of this man. I loved every word out of his mouth. I wanted to lean my head back into his old lap and let him pour his eloquent curses into my ears forever. And it wasn’t just him! The whole stadium was full of such soliloquies. At such high fervor! Whenever there was some grave miscarriage of justice on the field, the entire stadium would rise to its feet, every man waving his arms in outrage and cursing, as if all 20,000 of them had just been in a traffic altercation. The Lazio players were no less dramatic than their fans, rolling on the ground in pain like death scenes from Julius Caesar, totally playing to the back row, then jumping to their feet two seconds later to lead another attack on the goal.

Lazio lost, though.

Needing to be cheered up after the game, Luca Spaghetti asked his friends, “Should we go out?”

I assumed this meant,”Should we go out to a bar?” That’s what sports fans in America would do if their team had just lost. They’d go to a bar and get good and drunk. And not just Americans would do thisso would the English, the Australians, the Germans everyone, right? But Luca and his friends didn’t go out to a bar to cheer themselves up. They went to a bakery. A small, innocuous bakery hidden in a basement in a nondescript district in Rome. The place was crowded that Sunday night. But it is always crowded after the games. The Lazio fans always stop here on their way home from the stadium to stand in the street for hours, leaning up against their motorcycles, talking about the game, looking macho as anything, and eating cream puffs.

I love Italy.

Hello …. Bali—from chapter 73 of Eat, Pray, Love:

I’ve never had less of a plan in my life than I do upon arrival in Bali. In all my history of careless travels, this is the most carelessly I’ve ever landed anyplace. I don’t know where I’m going to live, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I don’t know what the exchange rate is, I don’t know how to get a taxi at the airportor even where to ask that taxi to take me. Nobody is expecting my arrival. I have no friends in Indonesia, or even friends-of-friends. And here’s the problem about traveling with an out-of-date guidebook, and then not reading it anyway: I didn’t realize that I’m actually not allowed to stay in Indonesia for four months, even if I want to. I find this out only upon entry into the country. Turns out I’m allowed only a one-month tourist visa. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Indonesian government would be anything less than delighted to host me in their country for just as long as I pleased to stay.

As the nice immigration official is stamping my passport with permission to stay in Bali for only and exactly thirty days, I ask him in my most friendly manner if I can please remain longer.

“No,” he says, in his most friendly manner. The Balinese are most famously friendly.

“See, I’m supposed to stay here for three or four months,” I tell him.

I don’t mention that it is a prophecy that my staying here for three or four months was predicted by an elderly and quite possibly demented Balinese medicine man, during a ten-minute palm-reading. I’m not sure how to explain this.

But what did that medicine man tell me, now that I think of it? Did he actually say that I would come back to Bali and spend three or four months living with him? Did he really say “living with” him? Or did he just want me to drop by again sometime if I was in the neighborhood and give him another ten bucks for another palm-reading? Did he say I would come back, or that I should come back? Did he really say, “See you later, alligator”? Or was it, “In a while, crocodile”?

I haven’t had any communication with the medicine man since that one evening. I wouldn’t know how to contact him, anyway. What might his address be? “Medicine Man, On His Porch, Bali, Indonesia”? I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. I remember that he seemed exceedingly old two years ago when we met; anything could have happened to him since then. All I have for sure is his name Ketut Liyer and the memory that he lives in a village just outside the town of Ubud. But I don’t remember the name of the village.

Maybe I should have thought all this through better.

Kathy Ritchie, a New York­-based writer whose lips are pictured above and face below, works at a celebrity gossip magazine. She has never been harassed by Bill O’Reilly

I was lying on a paper-covered table, my legs propped in sock-covered stirrups, when my doctor asked: “Has anyone ever said your lips look like Angelina Jolie’s? And is your cervix normally this red?”

The author (pictured here and above) and her Angelina-like lips.

How does one respond to this line of questioning? I offered a very awkward, “Um, I guess so?”

Truth is, I wasn’t so put off by her question. People have been wisecracking about my lips — the ones on my face — since I was a little girl. Back then, comments like “fish lips” and “fat lips” usually sent me running home in tears to my mom. She tried her best to console me, but the third-grader didn’t believe her when she said my lips would be more appreciated when I got older.

I believe her now.

Nearly two decades later, everybody loves my lips. Men want to kiss them, women want to buy them. And, it’s all because of her. The woman with the famous bee-stung pout. My arch nemesis: Angelina Jolie.

Ever since Angelina turned heads as the Tomb Raider, I am constantly compared to the one-time blood-wearing, Oscar-winning Hollywood darling of darkness. From Mario the postal worker — “Um, so, like, has anyone ever said you look like Angelina Jolie? — to my dental hygienist — “Do you know who you look like?” Even the towel man from my gym had something to say: “Lips! You’re not … nah … Want a towel Lips?” Yes, please.

I have received cash offers to give strange men kisses. Those awkward, “no thanks” moments are endless. In fact, when I asked a girlfriend to help me evoke memories of Angelina, all she could say was, “God, Kathy, it happens so often I can’t remember just one in particular. Hey, remember when they used to say you looked like Posh Spice?”

I know, I know, I should be flattered. After all, we are talking about a woman who is constantly declared one of the sexiest women alive. And, I suppose it’s time that I face and embrace my inner-Angelina. Just because I’m not Hollywood royalty doesn’t mean I can’t jet off to some faraway land and adopt my own little
refugee or two.

Still, no matter what I do, it won’t change the fact that Angie-J gets all of the hype, like she started the look first or something. Granted, she is two years older than me, so one could argue that she had fat lips first, but I had to live with those fish lips in the real world, where looking different in any capacity is simply not cool. Yo! I’ve got fat-lip street cred! What does a girl have to do to get a little respect? Get five or six tattoos, smooch her brother, maintain an impressive knife collection, date another woman, shack up with Brad Pitt, and cause America’s favorite funny girl to weep in front of a Vanity Fair reporter?

That just seems like so much work.

Michael Slenske is a New York-based writer who recently wrote about war lit for the L.A. Times Magazine.

“When the new Madden Football came out we had the whole platoon in a tournament. But the problem was that everything ran out of generator power, so you get week 16 playoffs, two guys would be duking it out, and a mortar would come in, and the guys would be more pissed that the generator went out then they would about getting mortared.”

At war, 1st Lt. Paul Rieckhoff led 38 men with the Third Infantry Division in the Adhamiyah section of Baghdad running combat patrols along the East Bank of the Tigris River for 10 months. At home, the former poli-sci major put his political savvy to use, founding one of the nation’s largest veteran’s organization, IAVA (Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, formerly Operation Truth). Whether he’s responding to the President’s Veteran’s Day address or facing off with armchair quarterbacks on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Rieckhoff has helped to focus the dialogue about Iraq —through his Web site, college tours, and his new book, Chasing Ghosts (Penguin). Above all, his mission is to get the troops everything—from armor on the front lines to VA funding back home—needed to win the war on both fronts. Perhaps the most vocal veteran since John Kerry, the 30-year-old Rieckhoff is a patriotic provocateur who knows a thing or two about staging a Madden tournament in a war zone.

Read an excerpt from Paul Rieckhoff’s Chasing Ghosts.

SMITH: You were doing investments on Wall Street. What made you want to go to war?

RIECKHOFF: I went to work at JP Morgan on Wall Street and I made a deal. I told them I needed a year to go do some military stuff and then wanted to come back. And that was pre 9/11, so they looked at me like I had three heads. But my grandfather had been drafted during World War II, spent a few years in the South Pacific, then my father was drafted in Vietnam. So I always had a sense of service, and I felt I had a tremendous amount of opportunities given to me from this country and I wanted to give something back: just because I didn’t have to go, didn’t mean I shouldn’t go.

And then there was another part of it: I wanted the ultimate challenge. When I came out of Amherst College—the place where everyone tells you the sun shines out of your ass—I wanted to go to a place where no one would be looking for that sunlight. It came down to the Peace Corps and the Army. And in the Army you get to jump out of planes and blow shit up.

SMITH: What did you learn about yourself before, during, and after the war?

RIECKHOFF: During the war I think I learned that leadership is a complicated equation, it’s not just being a tough guy and running out in front under fire that determines who a good leader is. Who will guys follow? Sometimes it’s the guy who will kneel down and cry with a guy after his wife leaves him, or it’s the guy who sits with somebody who can’t balance their checkbook. There are just so many variables in the leadership equation that they don’t teach you about that emerge, especially in Iraq.

Nobody taught me at OCS [Officer Candidate School] what to do when a guy’s fiancée sends him his ring back in Baghdad, or what to do when a guy’s wife gets locked up on drugs and he’s losing his kids, what you do when a guy gets wounded badly. I was driven to try and change and fix what I saw in Iraq. And I found out I wasn’t alone, there were other guys who felt the same way. That was the genesis of IAVA.

SMITH: How did you find those guys?

RIECKHOFF: Mostly online. Some of them were people I knew from the military and we just stayed in touch online, and others were random. And then I did the Democratic response to the President’s weekly radio address on May 1, 2004. I had contacted both political campaigns, and said, “Hey, you know I’ve got a lot of issues. I want to talk policy. I want to talk about the military.” And nobody called me back. Finally, a guy who was a Vietnam Vet who was with the Kerry campaign called me back and said, “Hey, do you want to meet John Kerry?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m not a tremendous fan, but if he’s willing to listen, I’ll talk.” Basically at that point neither political candidate was appealing to me, but Bush had pissed me off enough that I felt that a change was needed.

I met Kerry and we talked at an airport for like 15 minutes and then a couple weeks later they called me up and asked me if I wanted to do the Democratic response. I was in Vegas actually, playing blackjack with my dad and brother, drinking beers, and I was totally unprepared. I said, “Doesn’t a Congressman or Senator usually do this?” And they said, “Yeah, but we want you to do it.” I had emailed them a speech I gave at Amherst when I first came back. And I said, “Here’s some of the policy things I’m talking about, here are some of the ideas that I have.” And they wrote back to me, and said, “We read your speech and we’d like you to do some radio.” I thought they meant like go on some local radio show. But I had to come up with a speech that met the timeline, and I wrote it in the Palms Hotel in Vegas while my brother was downstairs getting shit-faced and dancing—it was kind of surreal. My dad was down by the pool looking at the girls, and he’s like, “Get down here, you just got back from Iraq.” I had to tell him, “Hey I’ve got to write this thing.” He’s like, “Yeah, you can do that later.” And I said, “Well, it’s kind of important.”

My family is not political, they didn’t really get it. But long story short, that thing blew up that weekend in May and I was doing a ton of media—Stephanopoulos, Paula Zahn, and all this other stuff—and I had a very basic, flat Web page called PaulRieckhoff.com and these guys started emailing me saying, “Hey I’m frustrated too, how can I get involved?” And that’s really what started it. It was probably born out of frustration and a need to serve. Somebody told Sean Huze once, “Thanks for your service, now it’s time for you to really serve.” Once we get home we have a right, but also an obligation, especially during a controversial war, to explain to the American people what the hell is going on over there, and how we can push this country back in the right direction.

SMITH: So what are the misconceptions the public has about the war?

RIECKHOFF: Where do you want me to start? I think the complexity of it, the overwhelming, paralyzing complexity of it. You hear a lot about “They don’t know who their enemy is,” and “You don’t feel safe” but it’s so much more than that. The gravity of it all. When you’re walking down the street for a year, you never know if a little kid is going to blow up on you. You never know if somebody is going to throw a grenade at you, if a mortar round that drops from your guys lands in the right place or not, I mean there’s this tremendous gravity to everything you do. And people kind of believe it’s like Vietnam, and everybody goes back to Saigon, and there are hookers, and everyone gets drunk and shoots heroin. It’s not like that in Iraq—it’s a pressure cooker for a year and you don’t get any breaks. There’s no downtown bars for you to hangout at, and you can’t go chill with the boys at a dance club. During my time there were no freakin’ girls. And then there’s the demands on the families. I don’t think people realize what these guys are giving up.

SMITH: What does patriotism mean?

RIECKHOFF: Whooh. That’s a big one. Patriotism is doing what you think is best for the country, and it’s sacrificing of yourself, or the individual moment for the greater good of the country and your countrymen. It’s hard to pigeonhole. I hate to use this analogy, but it’s kind of like those guys who say, “ I don’t know what pornography is, but I know it when I see it.” That’s how I personally look at Patriotism. It comes in a lot of forms. I think what Murtha did is patriotism. There’s always the love and devotion to your country, that’s always the literal translation, and the willingness to sacrifice for it, but I think as far as what it looks like, I think what Murtha did was courageous and was patriotism. You know what the wives back home were doing, without their husbands, without a father in their family for a year, without sex for a year. There’s a whole lot of different ways that patriotism comes into play, I think the thing that is unusual now is that most folks aren’t experiencing patriotism in their lives, nobody is asking them to sacrifice.

SMITH: What’s the hardest thing that you had to deal without, or deal with, while you were on the ground?

RIECKHOFF: I think the fact that I had 38 guys’ lives in my hands, everyday. You’re their boss, you’re their father, you’re their psychiatrist, you’re their dietician, you’re everything to these guys, and at the end of the day, their life is on your conscience. It’s a tremendous responsibility and it’s a tremendous honor, but it’s also overwhelming. We always know that if you lose a guy you’re writing that letter home to his wife or his daughter. I was lucky, I think I was able to get through it pretty well, but sometimes it can really put people down and crush them.

SMITH: Did you write anything while you were over?

RIECKHOFF: Yeah, I wrote a lot of letters.

SMITH: How many of those letters were there?

RIECKHOFF: More than 100 pages. Then once we got email I was doing more stuff online. But that was kind of a key connection. The hardest thing for me was that you had no control of your life. That’s one thing I don’t think people in the civilian world get. You can’t go where you want, you can’t be alone because you always have to have somebody with you, you can’t just say, “Oh, fuck it, I’m going to go out back and listen to a CD, and go for a walk.” The little things, the privacy of it. You can’t do what you want for a whole year. You can’t just say, “Screw it, I’m not going to work today,” or “I don’t feel like dealing with my boss.” You have to do almost everything when you are there. And I think with this generation of people who are more individualistic, and more freethinking, it’s more difficult than in past generations. But that’s the fundamental sacrifice you make as a soldier that’s eternal.

SMITH: What was the most disturbing thing in civilian life and culture you saw when you came back?

RIECKHOFF: Well, in the first couple weeks I was home I was in a Starbucks, which is kind of surreal to begin with, and there was this woman who was screaming at the guy behind the counter, who was clearly on his third shift, and she’s screaming at him because the top of her latte wasn’t put on properly, and I’m thinking to this woman, “You know lady, you’re lucky you got a latte, your head could be blown off.” And that’s kind of the perspective and the frustration we get coming home. Like four weeks after I got home I was in L.A. with some buddies and we went to a party with Prince. That was surreal. I was in Baghdad four weeks before and now I’m at the Mondrian with Prince. At first they wouldn’t let us in, then one of my buddies was like, “Dude, this guy just got back from Baghdad.” And they were like, “And? Dennis Rodman’s here.” You don’t want the red carpet rolled out, but you just want people to appreciate the sacrifice that you make.

SMITH: Do you think that sacrifice is being appreciated?

RIECKHOFF: It is by some people. Some people go out of their way. We run a veteran’s organization so I’m always impressed by the people who will give money, time, or of themselves in a multitude of ways, but at the same time I know that they are a minority, and many people are just not involved. It’s not their priority. Nobody’s asked them, and it’s become acceptable to some extent to do nothing. And I think that’s to the detriment of this country. Past generations everybody was in it all the way, and I think it made us all better. But very few people have skin in the game, so its hard for them to be motivated, to be connected.

SMITH: I know you said you had little to no down time, but in your down time, what did you guys do?

RIECKHOFF: In Iraq I worked out a lot. We felt like we were in prison. We bought an old weight set off some Iraqi people. We traded them for like five crates of water for a bench and some dumbbells.

SMITH: Where was that?

RIECKHOFF: In Baghdad, in Adhamiyah. Did that a lot, and we played a ton of PlayStation. I remember when the new Madden Football came out we had the whole platoon in a tournament. But the problem was that everything ran out of generator power, so you get week 16 playoffs, two guys would be duking it out, and a mortar would come in, and the guys would be more pissed that the generator went out then they would about getting mortared. I also did a lot of reading.

SMITH: What were you reading over there?

RIECKHOFF: I read The Magus by John Fowles. I read Friedman’s book on the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem. I read a whole stack of books while I was over there. I read a Noam Chomsky book. Music and reading and DVD movies are the things that can take you away. That’s what it’s about, escapism. Trying to get away from wherever it is you are at that place and time.

SMITH: Why do you think so many guys are writing about this war?

RIECKHOFF: It’s therapeutic, and at the same time I think there’s a need to make sure history is told from their perspective. I think there is an individualistic part of our society more than in past generations, but I think it’s also maybe deep-rooted in a sense that we know Vietnam was controversial, and even today there’s a lot of discrepancies and arguments about what Vietnam was, and I think soldiers, maybe subconsciously have a need to tell the stories they saw to make sure its taken into account.

SMITH: Do you think that having the site up has helped you with IAVA?

RIECKHOFF: Definitely. Guys come to us all the time with emails and videos and pictures saying, “I want people to see this because they’re not seeing it on TV.” And about 50 percent of them are there for a second time. They come home and they realize that the country is detached and kind of in the dark. And they want to help illuminate that.

SMITH: What’s the best way for citizens to get a better grasp on the situation?

RIECKHOFF: Read the blogs coming out of Iraq. Rather than sitting down and spending some time with a vet who’s been there, which is, I think, tougher, and there are more barriers to entry, spend some time reading the blogs from soldiers as well as Iraqi citizens in Iraq.

SMITH: Since milblogs are being registered with chain of command now, do you think those are getting watered down?

RIECKHOFF: They are now. I think the Army was slow in understanding and appreciating the power of the blogs, and the range of them, but they still keep popping up. And I think its like water, they will find a way around it, even if people have to send emails to their friends and their friends post it.

SMITH: What’s the biggest problem with training? James Fallows just wrote a big piece in The Atlantic on the failure to train the Iraqi Army. When you went over there, was the Army saying you’re going to train the Iraqis?

RIECKHOFF: Not when we first got there. When we first got there that wasn’t even on the table.

SMITH: When you first got there did you have any idea on how to train an army?

RIECKHOFF: We were always trained on how to train new soldiers or subordinate soldiers, that’s how the Army operates. Its kind of like a self-educating monster, so it’s not that unusual. The problem is, we’ve never started from scratch, and we’ve never started from scratch in a language we don’t understand, and in a country we don’t understand, with a group of people who didn’t get along until we came there. When it comes down to it, what they’ve asked us to do is beyond our capacity. And its an unrealistic level of expectations. And when people ask me, “Why isn’t the Iraqi army ready?” Well, because we haven’t done enough to get them ready, and it’s ridiculous to assume that we can have them ready two and a half years later.

SMITH: What was one of the bigger problems you faced on the ground in Iraq?

RIECKHOFF: I couldn’t get Sunnis and Shias to wait on a gas line together they were so divided—and that was for decades—so you can’t just go in with a magic wand and say, “Okay, you’re all going to get along.” It would be like if you came in after slavery in the United States and said all slaves and slave owners are now going to get along. And slaves and slave owners you’re going to be partners on the police force, and slave owners you’re now going to take orders from the slaves. It just wouldn’t work.

SMITH: What would you say to someone who compared you to John Kerry?

RIECKHOFF: Shit, I hope I end up better than that. I don’t know. I’d rather be…I guess it’s flattering, but it’s just the evolution of the veteran’s movement. It’s not just John Kerry. Kerry and John McCain are the ones everyone knows, but there’s also guys like Bobby Muller and Max Cleland who maybe aren’t as well recognized because they haven’t run for president in the last couple years.

SMITH: What’s the distinguishing feature about this new veteran’s movement, especially compared to that of Vietnam?

RIECKHOFF: There’s a calculated pragmatism about it. They’re not going to be marching on Washington. They’re going to run for office. They’re a little bit older, they’re not 19-year-olds. They have families and kids and to some extent they have more to lose, so I think they are going to be a little more pragmatic and work within the system more so than past generations.

SMITH: Why is that?

RIECKHOFF: Well, I think the entire political climate has changed and I think they’re also a much greater minority than they were in Vietnam. In Vietnam you had huge numbers relative to the general population. Now you’ve got less than one percent. So they’ve got to find a way to become what we’d call in the military “force multipliers.” We’ve got to use the Internet, we’ve got to use the media to amplify our small number of voices. If we brought all the Iraq vets down to Washington tomorrow there wouldn’t be that many, because half of them are in Iraq, half haven’t gotten out yet, and half the percentage who has don’t know what their legal rights are, so the fact that it’s a professional military that’s the core element. It changes the political and social dialogue of this war in a way that’s totally unprecedented.

SMITH: Do you think there will be a lot more guys like Paul Hackett coming to the forefront?

RIECKHOFF: Absolutely, I think Paul Hackett is the tip of the iceberg and I think that is a good thing. The Republicans got us into this mess, and the Democrats don’t have a plan to get us out, and these guys are the only ones with credibility to talk about Iraq. I don’t care if it’s Trent Lott or Nancy Pelosi, neither one of them have been there and they don’t know what’s going on in Iraq and these guys do and they understand how it affects us overseas and how its affects us back home. I hope that a number of them win in ‘06, and start to introduce legislation that can make this thing or at least fix it as much as possible or minimize the damage. Those are the guys who can introduce legislation on an exit strategy or fully funding the VA and those guys have the credibility that nobody else has right now.

SMITH: What advice would you give someone going in tomorrow?

RIECKHOFF: Into or Iraq or into politics? They’re both kind of nasty. Take one day at a time. They always say, “Yesterday was the hardest day.” My girlfriend told me before I left, “Try to find joy wherever you can.” Whether it’s just spending a minute with a kid or a puppy on the side of a road, or listening to a song at night before you go to bed, or having a cigarette, you kind of got to find opportunities to savor the moment of something that gives you joy or keeps you sane. And take care of your guys and they’ll take care of you. And then try to do as much as you can while you’re over there. You’re stuck in a very tough situation, without debate, and you’re going to be put in very tough circumstances, but you’re going to have power on a level that you’ll probably never have again in your life. And with power comes responsibility, and you have an opportunity, at least in a small way, if you take the time and make the commitment to help some people in that area. You can’t save the world over there, and you can’t fix all their problems, but you can make a difference.

SMITH: Is it easy to lose sight of what you’re there for?

RIECKHOFF: What you’re there for is in and of itself a loaded question. They’re there for a number of reasons. Some of them are there for the college money. Some of them wanted to learn how to shoot. Some of them didn’t want to go to jail. There’s a million reasons why we’re there.

By Penelope Whitney

It’s a Wednesday winter afternoon at the Missoula, MT stockyards and the intense action around the cattle chute resembles a pit stop at the Indy 500. Two dogs rush a cow into a chute, the door clangs shut, and while two men at her head check her teeth for age and ear tags for vaccinations, Dr. Rollett Pruyn eases his right hand in through the cow’s anus until his arm disappears up to the shoulder. The cow bellows and rolls her eyes, then quiets. The veterinarian signals to his assistant whether it’s an early or late pregnancy, then pulls the lever that opens the chute’s door. That cow leaps free and the next thunders in. The team has processed 300 cows in less than four hours and it shows: their hats, ears, noses, and cheeks are marked with moss-colored explosions of cow shit. Even the cattle dogs wear green spots.

The operation is part of the stockyard’s special sale of stock cows, which are sold not for slaughter but for raising calves. Scenarios like this one are played out at cattle ranches and stockyards across the U.S. — wherever beef cattle are raised and sold. The cow’s value fluctuates depending on the extent of her pregnancy. Today Pruyn checks cows that are either six or seventh months pregnant. The further along she is the more valuable, because calf sales the following October will be based on weight. The older the calf is then, the heavier it will be.

“The first thing I check is the cervix and different attachment sites of the baby to the uterus,” says Dr. Pruyn. “And sometimes I just go in to get my arm warm – it’s cold outside.”

Pruyn often works seven days a week, testing 9,000 cows a year, averaging a hundred cows an hour, speeding across western Montana as he makes house calls. Most days he tends to cows, horses, and dogs, but he’ll also doctor llamas, sheep, cats, and goats.

“At first they panic and want to get out, and after ten seconds they stand. They’re thinking, ‘Get it over with, I have hay to chew.’

“Cows and dogs are my favorite animals to work with. They have the same inquisitive disposition — when you walk up they run up to see what’s going on. They’re not like cats and horses. You can take a cow that’s been running free for 10 years, rope and tie it to a tree and pick up its foot without it trying to kick you.

“I change the glove on my arm every hundred head. Without the glove you get a severe skin rash from the hair follicles on your arm going in and out so many times. Most work on cows is fairly physical. At the beginning of the season, in August, I do 1 to 200, and I’m fairly stiff by the end of the day. By now, December, I can test five to six hundred in a day, no problem.”

Kathy Ritchie, an associate producer at The O'Reilly Factor from February 03 to July 03, is now attempting to be her own boss; she’s a struggling freelance writer who is sometimes mistaken for Angelina Jolie.

This is a true story about an unfortunate, unpleasant, unappetizing event that should have happened to me. And I’m pissed.

I spent six long months at The O’Reilly Factor as an associate producer, and during that time Bill O’Reilly – my ex-boss and the only man who could single handedly turn the falafel into a sex toy – never once pinched my ass.

You can’t blame me for being pissed off. Let’s be serious, if you placed my image next to his ever-somber accuser, Andrea Mackris’, well, I’d win hands down. It’s not arrogance, it’s a fact: I’m way prettier than she is; yet Bill never once, in a loving way, of course, advised me to use a vibrator to relieve my work-related stress. I even shared an elevator with the Man and not once did he cop a feel or make a sexy comment, like, “I want to cover you in hummus.” What a dick.

I remember the morning the scandal broke on every cable and local news channel. The victim’s name still hadn’t been released. Cold shock. A colleague stopped by my desk to see if I had any idea as to who the alleged victim was. I ran down the names of possibilities. Still shell shocked. After all, Bill was (and by all appearances still is) a holier-than-thou super newscaster who loves pissing on anyone whose ideas or opinions run contrary to his.

Mackris was never on my radar. I even spent time pondering which male employee might have fallen prey to Bill’s seductive charms – don’t tell me Tahini slathered onto some dude’s testicles isn’t hot – that is until Reuters finally announced the alleged victim’s name: Andrea Mackris. My first thought? You’ve got to be kidding me.

Mackris did have a couple of things going for her: she was confident and she was actually kind of cool. This is likely what caught the Man’s attention in the first place, since I doubt it was her looks. Now I know, this was probably the most difficult time in her life, surely causing her deep anguish and plenty of embarrassment. Never mind the fact that this girl stayed on the job despite a hostile work environment, then left for a brief stint at CNN, only to return to The O’Reilly Factor, apparently, after no one at CNN attempted to woo her with Middle Eastern cuisine; that and the fact that FOX matched the whopping $93,200 CNN was clearly suckered into paying her – not too shabby for an associate producer. Believe me.

Still, day in and day out, I live with the fact that Bill never once hit on me. What does that say about me! Am I not good enough for you? Is my Arizona State University journalism degree not impressive enough for you? Do you only fantasize about the Women of the Ivy League?

To make matters worse for me – the hot one – the pain is always rehashed during just about every job interview. If the simple fact that I worked at what was once one of the hottest shows on cable didn’t get my foot in any sort of door, I’d remove it and replace it with my first job ever – a movie theatre concession stand operator.

Interviewer: “Thanks for coming in. The position entails blah, blah, blah and blah.”

Me: “It sounds fantastic. Very challenging. Blah, blah and blah?”

Interviewer: “Naturally. By the way, did you know Andrea Mackris?”

Me: “Yes I did.”

Interviewer: “That’s so crazy. Do you think O’Reilly did it?”

Me: “No idea. Anything is certainly possible.”

Interviewer: “Did he ever try anything with you?”

Me: “Um, no. So did you say the salary is negotiable?”

I should record these conversations and sue for creating such a hostile interviewing environment.

My beef, ultimately, is about equal rights for the pretty people. If you’re a man or woman with a certain amount of power, you should at least have the courtesy to treat all of your young nubile employees the same lousy way. I’m not looking for $60 million, but $60K to pay of my student loans would be a good start.