Chemtrails Over Eden

Abstract

This collection of episodes is a fictional work inspired by my experience in the U.S. Army as a soldier in Iraq at the height of the MySpace boom, where the digital realm first took hold of the millennial consciousness and birthed an alternate reality between the "irl" and our imagination. Rather than another book of reportage, I'm interested in exploring, from an oscillating perspective, the effects of a kind of cyber-psychosis induced by this new virtual world in conjunction with the radical reality of the American soldier in a contentious and ever-complex war which we still feel the harsh reverberations of. I aim to tell a story that is as absurd as it is true and as frightening as it is beautiful, which challenges the bounds of the "war novel" genre. The story follows Jupiter Killing, an unwitting lowly-ranked infantry soldier of Bravo Company. Over the course of the story, he goes from being the most unlikely youth to join the military, to signing up to be in the US ARMY, and then being shipped off to combat. He is blown up in IED's many times, prompting this (prev. mentioned) cyber-psychosis, and begins speaking to a cartoonish talking grenade throughout. Jupiter comes to learn of a horrific war crime perpetrated by soldiers from another platoon and this revelation further causes him to morally and spiritually spiral. Together, with a motley crew of other outcast, Jupiter Killian patchworks a strange and comical conspiracy which further propels the story.