“I realized how little I knew about my own country. I had grown up in the suburbs and, after college, I moved out of the country, so I didn't really know the place well. When I started following soldiers and their families back home, it provoked a lot of the questions about who we are as a nation, questions I realized couldn't be explored through the more limited framework of looking at the military at war and at home.”
![“I went out to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fundamentally [in Buzzing at the Sill] because I was interested in war as a notion and in experiencing it. I was interested in history and how societies form. I was interested in the recent history of what had provoked these wars. So when I…” quote by Peter van Agtmael](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/bdc/peter-van-agtmael-25908_afghanistan_i-went-out-to-cover-the-wars-in-iraq-and_2786158.jpg)
![“That kind of unease, that melancholy, is of course partly my interpretation, but partly, I think, it's something that's really there [in America] as well. It resonates with this moment and the sort of alienation from the power structure a lot of people feel, as well as a certain amount of…” quote by Peter van Agtmael](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/46e/peter-van-agtmael-25908_alienation_that-kind-of-unease-that-melancholy-is-o_172380.jpg)
![“You find [reverberations from 9/11 ] in them most unexpected places, like graffiti on a wall. Sometimes it's a faded picture; sometimes it's a newspaper tacked to a wall. Sometimes it's weird paraphernalia related to it, home constructed paraphernalia. It resonates through society and continues to…” quote by Peter van Agtmael](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/f33/peter-van-agtmael-25908_faded_you-find-reverberations-from-9-11-in-the_312019.jpg)
![“The travel ban that was imposed by the [Donald Trump] administration is a very direct reverberation of 9/11.” quote by Peter van Agtmael](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/6b8/peter-van-agtmael-25908_administration_the-travel-ban-that-was-imposed-by-the-d_1496625.jpg)
