In this essay for The New Yorker, Elliot Ackerman travels to the Turkish-Syrian border after Kurdish Y.P.G. and Free Syrian Army fighters retake the town of Tal Abyad from ISIS, and reflects on how the story of a battle can take on a life independent of the events themselves.

A Media Swarm at the Border

Ackerman describes arriving at the border to find dozens of satellite news trucks rather than the refugees and wounded fighters he expected, as correspondents wait to see whether Y.P.G. forces will be allowed to raise their flag over the captured town.

The Imitation Loop of War Stories

Drawing on his own experience as a Marine infantryman in the Second Battle of Fallujah, and on stories of an actor volunteering with the Y.P.G., Ackerman argues that war and its retelling form a feedback loop, in which fighters unconsciously imitate the war movies that will later be made from wars like their own.

When the Story Moves On

Ackerman closes with two aid workers who arrive at Tal Abyad hoping to assess what the town will need to rebuild, only to find that the journalists' local fixers have already left because, as they put it, "the story's gone elsewhere."

Read the Original Article

This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Read “The Story of the Story at Tal Abyad” at The New Yorker →