4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2016
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Lynn Hill was an active participant in both Iraq and Afghanistan. She spent much of her military career flying Predator drones, gathering intelligence and firing missiles remotely some 12,000 miles away - from a central station in Las Vegas. Her brilliant poetry talks of the difficult task of separating her real life from her war life. About hate and insanity, violence and nihilism. About dreams and being involved in war via a screen. About seeing yourself in the third person. About some of the very serious problems faced by her 21st Century war colleagues - divorce, alcohol, psychiatric illness, crises of identity.
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0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
0:04.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. I'm Andrew Wilkie and I've come to Las Vegas, Nevada for the BBC World Service to meet |
0:22.4 | Lynn Hill, a US Air Force veteran who played an active role in combat |
0:27.3 | missions during the Iraq and Afghan wars. |
0:31.0 | Except Lynn has never been to those countries. |
0:34.0 | Lynn was a drone operative, supporting troops on the ground from a remote control |
0:40.0 | center here in the United States. |
0:42.0 | Lynn now right poetry about her very modern |
0:46.8 | experience of the military. I meet Lynn under the blazing hot Nevada sun as she recalls the unforgettable moment in 2001 |
0:56.4 | when she went from being a trainee going through seemingly endless preparation, |
1:00.8 | research, report writing to being on a war footing. |
1:04.0 | It was exciting. |
1:05.2 | Finally, something's happening. |
1:07.2 | It was a beautiful day on 9-11. |
1:10.0 | It was a beautiful day and you're sitting there reading through these reports. |
1:14.2 | Nothing significant to report. |
1:15.8 | Nothing significant to report. |
1:17.3 | The next thing you know, you hear CNN, something significant to report. |
1:21.6 | And everybody was paying attention. |
1:25.0 | Dreams, black, white, bent metal, scraping the roof of my mouth, |
1:32.0 | cracked glass on the iris of gray eyes. |
1:35.0 | Burned rubber and oil. |
... |
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