The Balloon Goes Up

Host Ira Glass talks to Anthony Swofford, a former marine sniper and author of the Gulf War memoir Jarhead. He explains what he's seeing when he watches this new war with Iraq on television. (6 minutes)

Tice Ridley is a first lieutenant in the Army. He's been sending regular emails from Kuwait City, where he's stationed, about what it's like to wait for the war to begin, and what it's like to actually fight it. Excerpts are read by actor Tom Wright. (7 minutes)

Sarah Vowell tells the story about the first time the United States attacked a country that hadn't attacked us first. It was also the first time the U.S. went to a foreign country to force a regime change. The country in question is still not doing too well a hundred years later. (8 minutes)

The story of a preventive act of war committed 3200 years ago, in the land that's now Turkey, not too far from Iraq. Seneca's The Trojan Woman takes place at the end of the Trojan war. MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Mary Zimmerman is directing the play at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. She talks with Ira about the play. In it, a child is murdered to prevent a war, though no one's really sure that if the child lived he'd have actually waged war on his neighbors. A superpower nation preaches about the child. "His life itself is a danger we cannot allow to continue to undermine the entire region's collective security." (5 minutes)