Praise for Snapshots Sent Home by JT Blatty
“JT Blatty’s Snapshots Sent Home is a sweeping and illuminating account of what it means to not only fight as a soldier or a civilian combatant but also to document war—to make photographs and record first-person accounts of lives lived on, or in close proximity to, an ever-evolving series of frontlines. … Blatty’s memoir kicks into gear in the weeks following 9/11 with her service in Kandahar, and it never stops as she takes us from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Donbas and Kyiv in Ukraine and back again. Her powerful, engaging narrative travels in and out of time, forward and back, to create an interwoven and kaleidoscopic portrait of her experiences, and those of the people she meets and grows close with along the way. These are lives caught up in the crosshairs of tremendous political and historical shifts—and Blatty shares her and their stories with immediacy, honesty, and depth. She has a gift for conveying a sense of place and people that is usually only arrived at by being there: the men and women who people this book are richly and vividly drawn, like characters in a good novel. As Blatty discovers her purpose, we learn more about what it means for her and her comrades to fight for home and nation, sovereignty and freedom. Snapshots Sent Home is a challenging, revelatory, and important book—one that takes us far beyond, as Blatty writes, the ‘disconnected world [of] reports and skimmed-over news headlines.’ This book is a rare and moving testament to the ties that bind those who experience war and its ongoing, lasting effects.”
—Alexa Dilworth, independent writer and editor; former publishing director and senior editor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
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“Through a series of dispatches, across several frontlines, former US Army officer turned journalist, JT Blatty weaves a wholly unique and timely account of life during wartime on Ukraine’s eastern front. Sometimes humorous, often gut wrenching, lines like ‘I went to take a shower. I stood there … crying and picking pieces of my friends out of my hair’ stay with you. Under the blanket of slow terror that hung across Ukraine leading up to Russia’s invasion, Blatty finds love on the other end of her camera lens, and perhaps, part of herself. Like so many of her fellow veterans who fought in the post-9/11 Bush wars, a crisis of conscience formed when the dust settled. Questions nagged. And much like the American volunteers drawn to the Spanish Civil War, Blatty feels herself pulled into Ukraine. A war without moral ambiguity. A war where the line between good and evil is more clearly drawn.”
—James McGrath, former bureau chief, Gamma Presse
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“Blatty’s unparalleled memoir gives readers a glimpse of what it is like to be on the frontline. There’s only the universal truths of war and conflict. The lingering thoughts, memories and moments afterward that stay with you. Snapshots Sent Home captures these moments perfectly for those with an eye on history.”
—Robert P. Ottone, author of The Vile Thing We Created and the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Triangle
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“… Snapshots Sent Home is an intimate, finely-written memoir about the truths and realities shared by soldiers everywhere. Moving between the author’s experiences in Ukraine, where she lives and works as a photographer, and before that in Iraq and Afghanistan, where she served as a US military officer, Blatty ruminates about the nature of comradeship, patriotism, longing, loss, life and death; memory and love. ‘Butterflies on fire’ is a phrase that makes a debut too, but you will have to read this devastatingly moving book to understand its meaning. Snapshots Sent Home should be read by anyone who cares about what we do on history’s battlefields, and about how we process what we have done afterwards. This is a lot more than a book about snapshots. And JT Blatty is a lot more than a photographer and former soldier. She is a helluva writer too, and I am certain that what she says here will stay on in readers’ minds for a long time to come.”
—Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer, The New Yorker; author of Che Guevara and The Fall of Baghdad
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“Vivid, bewildering, and brutally honest, JT Blatty’s Snapshots Sent Home catapults the reader into scenes from her deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan to running emergency supplies on the frontline in Ukraine. Along the way we meet the Ukrainian volunteer soldiers whom she befriended in 2018, and whose lives become inextricably linked with hers. There’s a cinematic quality to her writing that sears these episodes into your memory, and leaves you with a renewed appreciation of our common humanity.”
—Marilyn Terrell, former chief researcher, National Geographic Traveler magazine
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“… Blatty paints as real a portrait of war in the modern era as I have encountered. A combat veteran myself (US Army 2000-2005), I know that nothing about combat is simple, especially not the labels we stick on anyone even remotely close to a battlefield. With Snapshots, Blatty weaves the story of her own time in combat as a young US Army officer with the years she spent interviewing and memorializing the volunteers fighting against Russian aggression in Ukraine, often sharing bunkers with them as artillery fell all around.
She weaves this thread beautifully between her own experiences and the experiences of what, on the surface, might seem to be a fundamentally different enterprise and story of combat. In juxtaposing these two periods of warfare with up-close, in-your-face written images, she demonstrates how war and violence connect all veterans, across all time. She pushes through the hollowness she felt after her own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq to find meaning and purpose in sharing the stories of men and women from the far side of the globe, fighting for the ideals that we too often merely pay lip service to in the West.
This book is a gift: of honesty; of unvarnished reality; of sadness; and even of the sparks of joy that are to be found in the killing fields of the world. It should be required reading for future military officers, historians, and anyone who wants to be in touch with the heartbeat of the world. It earns its standing alongside [other] powerful war memoirs … ”
—Jonathan Gensler, author, US Army veteran, West Point Russian Dept. Distinguished Grad 2000
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” … Blatty’s prose is well-crafted, precise, and has the ability to immerse the reader in the moment she is describing, putting them directly into her headspace. This is both an achievement and a necessity in a book that recounts wartime experiences. … Blatty’s own combat experience enables her to connect emotionally with soldiers in a manner that journalists with a purely civilian background might struggle to achieve. This is notable in the descriptions of her interactions with Ukraine’s soldiers and her acknowledgment of the unglamorous reality of war, regardless of when or where it is fought. …” [Read entire review.]
—The Kyiv Independent, March 18, 2024
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“This book speaks straight to the heart of all who remember and have lived through the moment of 9/11 and everything after. Blatty’s own story confronts history with an eyewitness experience of what it means to respond to being attacked … Iraq and Afghanistan—both wars the author portrays as filled with contradiction. By contrast, her first-person narrative conveys the bonds between soldiers and what this humanity sustains on a more universal level, amid the total destruction of war. Written in highly relatable and clear prose, but absent of the actual photographs, her observations in the book convey what lenses alone or propagandized versions of heroism cannot capture: the shared fight for justice felt by her ‘tribe,’ which she comes to recognize in Ukraine among volunteer fighters who were firstline responders to Russia’s invasion of Donbas in 2014. Her own story merges with Ukraine’s patriotism in a shared trust that transcends identities and ‘insignias on uniforms,’ a trust on which entire nations depend to survive. In this collection of diaristic entries interspersed with interviews and recollections penned over a period of twenty years, JT Blatty provokes us to think about all the ways in which ‘all wars are connected.’”
—Jessica Zychowicz, PhD, director of Fulbright Ukraine, author of Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First Century Ukraine and Freedom Taking Place: War, Women, and Culture at the Intersection of Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus
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Snapshots of truth. Reading JT Blatty’s Snapshots Sent Home is like walking through a gallery of life events. The gallery isn’t silent as galleries usually are; it’s filled with voices, echoes, and memories. Guided by Blatty, I travel in time and place; I feel the dust on my face; I pause and look around to see the portraits of combat veterans, the landscapes of Afghanistan the color of sand, the glimpses of Iraq, Kyiv, Maidan, the apricot trees of the Donbas (so dear to my heart!), and then veterans, more veterans, always veterans, Ukrainian and American, dead and alive. I see their faces, slightly blurred, as the war makes everything foggy and smokey. I feel gratitude mixed with guilt, as most Ukrainian civilians would do around those who defend you with their bodies. …
Blatty drew the portraits of veterans with love and honesty … fearless, furious, broken, hopeless, hopeful, undeterred as forces of nature. It’s so easy to start romanticizing them, especially the fallen ones, yet Blatty respects them too much to turn these courageous spirits into cardboard heroes. They are humans instead, with all their follies, anger, broken hearts, and broken lives. I hear their voices: surprisingly, the voices of those killed sound even louder and more distinctly.
The power of a great book is that it stays with you long after you finish reading. Like a pebble thrown in the water, it radiates circles. I walk around Blatty’s imaginary gallery and think about her words: “The external viewers of conflict easily become desensitized. Those who stand within it often become habituated.” I see the snapshots of the Ukrainian veterans on the wall of Blatty’s gallery, and suddenly, there’s a mirror with my reflection in it. It’s been ten years since Russians occupied my hometown. It’s two years since my whole country turned into a war zone. I am both desensitized and habituated; I don’t cry anymore when I read about babies killed in Odesa or Zaporizhzhia; there’s nothing but numbness inside me, and sometimes I question if there’s still a soul left in my body. …
The book has so much unapologetic, brutal honesty that it almost hurts. I still prefer it that way: in the fog of the war, these snapshots of truth are as rare as beams of light. … The book is not truly finished, just like our fight. … I hope many people will read it and walk down the gallery to see the snapshots of truth. Maybe they will see the mirror like I did and find the courage to look there, too.
—Tetyana Strelchenko, director of America House, Kyiv, Ukraine