Harvey Pekar surrounded by his portraits. The artists are, clockwise from top left, Sean Pryor, Dean Haspiel, Joseph Remnant and Josh Neufeld. More Photos

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He's still dead, Ms. Brabner said over the phone, in a characteristic display of resilience through black comedy. When he comes back, rolls away the rock, I'll let you know.

It was the sort of unromanticized scene, mundane with an edge of mordancy, that Mr. Pekar might have liked to preserve in his long-running series of autobiographical comics, American Splendor, or in one of his many graphic novels.

But when Mr. Pekar died at 70 on July 12 suddenly it seemed to some, but in painful stages as those closest to him knew it brought an end to his compulsive chronicling of Cleveland's commonplace lives, including, most frequently, his own.

Known for the irascible, self-doubting persona he cultivated in American Splendor and his day-to-day existence, the frizzy-haired, wild-eyed Mr. Pekar, a writer whose comics were illustrated by other artists, was an improbable candidate for lasting glory. A major influence in the underground world but never a big seller, he was always waiting for his cult fame to recede each time it unexpectedly crested.

His obsessive drive combined with the sheer number of his collaborations produced a two-dimensional record of his shaggy life, rendered in varying styles by numerous illustrators. Now only his widow and the artists he worked with are left to narrate his final chapter, a tale of bruised feelings and allegations of opportunism, with nothing more at stake than the writer's modest legacy. But no matter how it plays out, Mr. Pekar is bound to emerge as enigmatic as ever.

As Dean Haspiel, an artist who worked with Mr. Pekar in his final years, said in an interview, There was never one version of Harvey.

Put it this way, he added. Nobody owns Harvey Pekar. Not even Harvey Pekar.

Beginning in the 1970s, when Mr. Pekar, a longtime file clerk at a Veterans Affairs hospital, started writing American Splendor at the suggestion of the cartoonist R. Crumb, he enjoyed brief brushes with fame, and was a recurring guest on Late Night With David Letterman in the 1980s.

But when an American Splendor film was released in 2003, starring Paul Giamatti as Mr. Pekar and Hope Davis as Ms. Brabner, it introduced Mr. Pekar to a new generation of artists who regarded him as a bohemian celebrity.

There was always this dichotomy with Pekar, said Joseph Remnant, a Los Angeles illustrator who started working with him in 2008. He had his sophisticated, avant-garde writing gig, and the next day he had to go to work in this hospital.

Younger colleagues revered Mr. Pekar as much for giving them their earliest breaks as for his personality quirks. They now speak fondly of his raspy voice, his fixations on work and money, and his general disregard for modern technology.

He would still send faxes, long after no one else was sending faxes, said Josh Neufeld, who drew Mr. Pekar's stories for 13 years. Sometimes he would call me up and dictate a script over the phone. Most of the time he would send it in the mail snail mail.

Ms. Brabner, however, coped with Mr. Pekar's fragility along with his idiosyncrasies. His wife of 27 years and a guardian of their foster daughter, Danielle, Ms. Brabner, 58, a comics writer and political activist, helped nurse Mr. Pekar through his battle with lymphoma in the 1990s (as told in their graphic novel Our Cancer Year) and then through a recurrence of the disease.

When Mr. Pekar was recently given another diagnosis of lymphoma, Ms. Brabner said she knew he was really winding down.

I had kind of conned him into thinking this third time was going to be like having the flu, for a while, she said. But he knew.

In the final months of his life, Ms. Brabner said, her strategy was to let Harvey be Harvey. She allowed him to lapse on his diet of organic foods and go back to keeping Beefaroni in the house and, she said, Little Debbies and potato chips hidden in linen cupboards and underneath sofas.

Ms. Brabner was long accustomed to her husband's irrational fears, screaming nightmares and bouts of sleepwalking and depression, and to accommodating his neuroses. (If that meant, she said, packing his things in transparent bags so he could find stuff, because he'd panic if he were traveling, I would do that.)

But his last illness took a toll on her. He had real trouble getting up and doing things on a daily basis, Ms. Brabner said. That made him vulnerable to some people. Some people exploited that.

Facing Mr. Pekar's degeneration, Ms. Brabner said, it was my job to be the dragon, to be the guardian, to be the distraction.

Among the illustrators Mr. Pekar began working with in his final months was Tara Seibel, a Cleveland graphic artist. Ms. Seibel, 37, can still recall the exact date March 20, 2008 of the panel discussion at a local college at which they struck up their partnership.

I just sat down next to him, Ms. Seibel said, and we just started talking like we had known each other for a long time. He felt very comfortable with me.

Ms. Seibel made no secret of her admiration for the pioneering comic work of Mr. Pekar, whom she described as a 70-year-old hipster who loved listening to the Beastie Boys in the car. In turn he provided her with stories that she illustrated for publications like Chicago Newcity, The Austin Chronicle and The Jewish Review of Books.

Ms. Seibel was also one of four artists whom Mr. Pekar invited to work on the Pekar Project, which starting in 2009 was an effort to translate his work and persona to the Internet. Hosted by the Web site of Smith magazine, an online publication, the Pekar Project published more or less weekly installments written by Mr. Pekar and drawn by a rotating team that also included Mr. Remnant and the artists Sean Pryor and Rick Parker.

Hoping to duplicate the success of earlier graphic-book projects that began as Smith magazine Web comics (including Mr. Neufeld's nonfiction account of Hurricane Katrina survivors, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge), the Pekar Project contributors deferred compensation for their online work, with the possibility of a payday if a book was published.

I totally understand, from a 20th-century point of view, why a deal like that might sound nuts, said Jeff Newelt, the Smith comics editor and editor of the Pekar Project. But with hard work and luck, he said, it could produce a graphic novel that sells 60,000 or 70,000 copies instead of 5,000, instead of getting 50 bucks up front and you're done.

The arrangement was different from what Mr. Pekar and Ms. Brabner were used to. People think that they should get paid up front especially when they have a history of getting paid up front, said Mr. Haspiel, who runs his own Web comics site, act-i-vate.com. But Mr. Pekar agreed to it because he understood that you have to promote yourself, and you have to be out there constantly, Mr. Haspiel said. Not only working with Joyce.

As the Pekar Project continued, it became apparent that Ms. Brabner was displeased with one contributor in particular: Ms. Seibel, the only female artist involved, and the only one who worked face to face with Mr. Pekar.

Ms. Seibel, whose husband and three children also became acquainted with Mr. Pekar, said that Ms. Brabner would abruptly pull Mr. Pekar out of their telephone conversations, and that she tried to interfere with a Brooklyn book-signing event at which Ms. Seibel appeared with Mr. Pekar in November. Ms. Seibel said Mr. Pekar told her these conflicts were for him to worry about, not her. He put it under his business, she said. (Ms. Brabner declined to comment on these matters.)

No one in their artistic circle believes the relationship between Mr. Pekar and Ms. Seibel crossed professional boundaries, but some could see how it strained Mr. Pekar's marriage.

A part of him was enjoying the attention he was getting from this very good-looking young woman, said Mr. Parker, one of the Pekar Project artists. And, naturally, Joyce, how could she enjoy that? You don't have to be a psychologist to see that one's not going to be good.

Not even Mr. Pekar's death quelled the tensions between Ms. Seibel, who has said she spent part of his last day alive with him, and Ms. Brabner.

Among her husband's work with Ms. Seibel that Ms. Brabner has objected to is an illustration created for the catalog of Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, an exhibition opening Oct. 1 at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. (Ms. Brabner said she was embarrassed that the show, ostensibly about Jewish women, is being hyped by way of saying we've got an old dead Jewish guy.)

Mr. Parker said he was contacted by Ms. Brabner, who wanted to cut Tara out of the equation of the Pekar Project's work. Other people with direct knowledge of the project's operations, but who did not want to speak for attribution for fear of offending Ms. Brabner, said she would not allow a book to be published if it included Ms. Seibel's contributions.

Ms. Brabner said Mr. Pekar left no formal will but might have signed a draft still buried among his papers. In any case, she said, I'm the one who decides about what gets published and what doesn't in any venue. She declined to comment on a possible Pekar Project book.

Mr. Newelt wrote in an e-mail that he hoped we can still realize the vision of Harvey, myself and the team, and produce a wonderful Pekar Project book, adding that Ms. Brabner is a terrific writer herself, and I look forward to collaborating with her.

Ms. Seibel said it would be extremely wasteful if this book were to be prevented from happening.

In any event, there are many posthumous works to come. Mr. Remnant is illustrating a graphic novel called Harvey Pekar's Cleveland, about the city's history and Mr. Pekar's upbringing, for a new imprint called Zip Comics. Random House is publishing at least two more of his graphic books: one, called Huntington, West Virginia, On the Fly,' in which Mr. Pekar reflects on promoting his movie and other books, and a second, written with Ms. Brabner, called Harvey and Joyce's Big Book of Marriage. And Farrar, Straus & Giroux plans to publish Not the Israel My Parents Promised, about Mr. Pekar's thoughts on Israel and Zionism, illustrated by JT Waldman, which Ms. Brabner is helping complete.

Mr. Haspiel, who illustrated Mr. Pekar's 2005 autobiographical work The Quitter, said Mr. Pekar's prolific output might have stemmed from his fears that he would die of Alzheimer's disease, as both of his parents did.

The guy was unstoppable, Mr. Haspiel said. Of course, when you really read his stuff, he could only write about one thing, and that was himself, or his worldview. Which is what kept everything honest.

Mr. Neufeld, an American Splendor artist, said he was skeptical about whether the coming books would add to Mr. Pekar's reputation. Emphasizing his reverence for Mr. Pekar and his work, Mr. Neufeld said, I don't think they're going to be all that consequential in relation to all the other stuff he did. He was, Mr. Neufeld said, a legend already, not to overstate it.

For now Ms. Brabner said her priority was burying Mr. Pekar's ashes, near a spot in Cleveland where they walked on dates that he wrote about in American Splendor. There's nothing left, she said. He just looks like kitty litter.

She joked that she might solicit pennies from Mr. Pekar's fans to raise money for a statue in his likeness. Things being what they are, she said, we're probably going to be lucky to get one of his shoes. If it is his shoe, it'll be a shoe that's untied.

Then she plans to return to the home that Mr. Pekar piled high with the vintage books and jazz records that she said were his true legacy. Imagining herself as an insect from Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, she said, I can just sit here and nibble them from the inside out, like some caterpillar.

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Sgt. George Zubaty

Posted by Susannah Breslin in interview on July 27th, 2010 - 13 comments

I grew up in Warsaw, Kentucky. It's a town of 1,200 people. It's the biggest city in the county. The county's got maybe 6,000, 7,000 people now.

Warsaw is, I guess you would say, a typical river town along the Ohio River Valley. It's a beautiful place to live, but, of course, there was quite a bit of poverty.

Especially growing up, I wasn't unfamiliar with people who didn't have running water or indoor plumbing. It was within my frame of reference to see people living in almost third world poverty when I was younger, much younger. But it's beautiful. You put anything in the ground, it will grow.

I enlisted in April 2001. I went in as an infantryman. I was in Airborne School when 9/11 happened. So it was pretty clear what the next few years of my military experience was going to be like. There wasn't any chance that I wasn't going to be going to war.

Part of the reason why I enlisted as infantryman was if I was going to have the Army experience, I wanted the real Army experience. My father was in Vietnam, he was a medic, and he was a LRRP, which is long-range reconnaissance patrols, which is weeks, and weeks, and weeks out in the bush, just out there.

Not to take anything away from people who drive trucksthat's not what I want to do. If I'm in a situation like that, I want to be tip-of-the-spear-type thing.

We left to go to Afghanistan in February of 2002. We landed right in Kandahar. It was completely unimproved at that point. There was very little of the Kandahar base that's like it is now, where it's gigantic.

The dirt has a weird smell to it. The way I described it is Moon dirt. If you've ever seen the pictures of the Apollo astronaut's footprint, that's what it would do to you.

We had several patrols where we would be dropped in at the top of a valley, usually by a CH-47. It was the middle of nowhere. Couple times, we were dropped off right on the edge of Pakistan. It was really pretty. You got scrub pine and forest. A lot of times, we would be dropped off so high that even in the spring there would still be plenty of snow on the ground.

Mostly it was to see if someone was going to come out and play. If somebody's going to come out and shoot at you, that's great, then you can find, fix, and destroy the enemy, which is really the way it works a lot of times. You drive around until somebody shoots at you and then, OK, good, I know where that other guy is because he's shooting at me, and now I can kill him. It sounds bad. It's the way it's been done in the military for a long time.

Especially during my Afghanistan deployment, there wasn't a lot of combat action for us, and I don't know exactly why. Other companies in other battalions who were detached from us got it, or were engaged, but we never really got into a lot of shooting situations. I didn't care one way or the other whether I got shot at or didn't. You know, I'm not looking to kill anybody.

It was sort of a sweet spot for us. We were the first people through, and it's great to be the first guy through because nobody ever shoots the first guy. They shoot at, like, the second and third guy.

The second deployment, the writing was on the wall from within a month or two of us coming back, that we were going to go to war in Iraq. The talk of deadlines and all that stuff, that's just complete bullshit. It was obvious that we were going to go to Iraq.

I was told in 2003, on the tarmac, waiting in the hangar to get on the airplane to go to Iraq, to go to Kuwait. There was the number two guy of the 101st Airborne. Dave Petraeus was the division commander at the time, but he, I guess, was already gone. I mean, he had other things to do than to see off a battalion.

So this guy, he comes in and gives this rah-rah speech of, Oh, we're gonna be over here, and we're gonna go and do this, that, and the other, and we're gonna take down the government, and we're gonna bring democracy. It was like a talking point memo that you would see from the Cheney-Wolfowitz crowd. It was a ridiculous statement.

I was told, You'll be there for about six months, it's all reconstruction after that, that's all it's gonna take. They had written up a plan that said that. It was the most blatantly full of shit, starry-eyed crap that I've ever heard. It's this power of positive thinking crap you get, where it's like, Well, this is what we're gonna do.

As if nobody else has any say in this. And reality can't intervene. Because we're gonna express our will in Iraq however we please. And it's all going to happen according to plan because the plan is good. Because the people who made the plan are people I like. Or whatever. I don't understand.

I realize it's arguable whether or not you can project force in a place like Iraq and do what the ideal was: to take apart the government, to overthrow the regime, to rebuild the country. I don't even necessarily think it was a terrible idea. I think the manner in which it was done was so hideously incompetent. It was based on people's beliefs, rather than rational thought, and they're two different things.

I got to Kuwait. We're getting ready to go, we're getting ready to go, we're getting ready to go. It was the very end of March, middle of March, we were forward deployed into the southern Iraqi desert. I don't even know if the war was formally declared yet or not.

The Third Infantry Division, which is an armor-heavy unit, they had gone out in front of us. And then we went out the next day or the day after that. We flew out in helicopters.

We go to this FARP, which is a forward fueling station for vehicles and helicopters. Because if you're going to drive the 300 miles, whatever it was, to Baghdad, you had to refuel at some point there. We got set up to be security for it. Basically wait around.

I think it's about a week we were out there. Time sort of ran together. You get freezing cold night, frost out, to 100 degrees during the day. It was like that day in, day out, the whole time we were out there. We were just waiting.

We ended up taking trucks and driving the trucks to Baghdad. We were there as light infantry support for the 7th Cavalry Regiment, which was the armor regiment for the 3rd Infantry Division. We were the first infantry unit in Baghdad. When they did the Thunder Runs, we were in there that night.

We took down the Saddam International Airport, kicked open doors. We slept in the airport. When we woke up, Iraqis that were stationed there were waking up: Holy shit, there's a friggin' American division here! The Iraqis wake up, freak out, get shot down, or get captured, or whatever.

It's really weird, because we came in there so latewe had been on the road for 36 hours or something like thatand so it was a very awkward situation once we got into Baghdad.

The first time I came under sustained fire was driving into Baghdad. We get onto what they call the Hardball. It's like an interstate highway. We see a fuel tanker truck in flames. I'm sitting in there with my SAW, M249 SAW, facing out. People are facing out on either side of the truck. It's a dump truck looking like thing, only it's not armored at all.

We hear some gunfire, and then you see a rocket go between not our vehicle but two or three vehicles up, an RPG go between the vehicles. Somebody had popped out and shot an RPG and tried to hit one of the vehicles. They had obviously shot and blown up the tanker truck up in front of us.

I'm looking around. No one in my truck has seen anything. There's, like, 20 guys on our truck. It's packed solid. We had not stood up, we'd barely moved, you know, you're pissing in the bottles. I'm sitting up here, I'm looking, and nobody of the more senior NCOs that were in the truck, they're looking around, and they're frozen, they don't know what the hell's going on.

So I'm on the right side of the truck, we're going north, I'm facing east. There is a house, and it is a two-story house, mud brick, and then you've got a white, I think it was a Nissan pickup truck, could've been a Toyota. There was about six yards between the house and the Toyota. This is all about 100, 125 yards away.

I had seen a guy with an RPG tube, I was almost certain, on the other side of the house. Then I saw him sort of disappear, I guess behind the vehicle. So I assumed rightly or wrongly either those people in the truck know or they should have known that there's hostile action here. I assume they're hostile.

I was like, Shoot that truck! And I started shooting. Psychologically, I'd prepared myself for it. I understand combat psychology. And, you know, my father was in Vietnam, and he'd tell me about it, and how people would react. People don't do what you think they're gonna do. You can't train it into people. They either have the seed of it, or they just have to be that way. People will wait for permission to shoot, especially if someone doesn't know what they're doing. You get told, Hold fire, hold fire, hold fire. Don't just light stuff up. But in a situation like that, that is exactly the wrong advice to give. People will get into an inertia of watching.

So, you know, we kill them. Whoever's in that truck is dead. We didn't stop and look, but it's accurate fire. I said, Contact! Light up that truck! And then it became a general suppression thing.

After a few seconds, there was no more fire. We cut off out of there, but it was a situation where there was so much traffic on the road, a division going in line, one truck after another, even though you're in a kill zone, there's nothing you can do, because the truck driver can't speed up and go because there's no place to go. It really becomes a little bit more real in that we're sitting in here, and the normal thing they tell you to do in convoy operations is blow through the ambush, but you can't.

Not but a few seconds after that, it's quiet again. There's no more buildings on either side of us, we're back in the open country, and you get relaxed again. That's when we started making fun of the kid that was sitting next to me, like, Oh, man, that guy was just hanging up his laundry!

I realized I probably shouldn't have done that. He was relatively new. It was sort of a general sick hazing that happens in the Army. I think I was just playing with him. Playing with his head a little bit.

Once we got closer to the city, we were in between two armored battalions. We've got tanks behind us, and we've got tanks in front of us. Our vehicle convoy is long, so we don't see the tanks in front of us, we don't see the tanks behind us, but we certainly see what they've done, in front of us, because they're killing everybody on the road.

Every single vehicle we come by is shot up, burnt, tank tread down the center of it. I mean, you're looking in a car, and there'll be mom, dad, kids, everything's burnt, everything's torn up. Remember, it's 2003. At that point, Army units, they were training to do a general movement warfare type action. The whole point of our training was, just kill people. It wasn't soft and nice. It was, you've been shot at, you shoot back until the firing stops. You could see immediately it wasn't going to be productive.

They knew that there was an invasion coming, I guess, but their propaganda, their state-run television, their state-run radio, and everything, they're not reporting it as, we're being invaded, there are people right outside Baghdad. So people had gotten on the interstate that morning to go see family, to go shopping, to go wherever. They drive down the interstate, and the first time they notice that there's an American armor convoy coming is when they start to get shot at. Tanks don't miss.

Looking back on it, it was a lot like how you envision, if you've read Cormac McCarthy's book, The Road. You had a lot of burned up cars. It was a scene of devastation. People that were on the truck with me were like, Oh my god, you see that dead body? At that time, a lot of guys hadn't seen a lot of dead bodies on the side of the road. There were burnt up corpses, half-burnt corpses. It's Iraq, it's hot, and the sun's out. White turns black pretty quick, within hours. There's fresh ones, there's not so fresh ones. There's cars on fire.

One of the kids in my truck, a lot of people had brought cameras, which was a stupid idea, but they're gonna take a picture of that. I remember saying, quite clearly, Don't take a picture of that. One, you don't want to know. You don't want that memory. And two, it's just not a good idea to take pictures of dead bodies, because it's foolish, it's ridiculous. You're gonna see plenty of dead bodies in your life, whether you like it or not, you don't necessarily want to take a picture of it.

Within several hours of that, we were in Baghdad. And then that got a little bit crazier.

We were in Iraq for 11-1/2 months. Everywhere we were at in Iraq, we were the first people there. Pretty much every other day for the whole time I was in Baghdad, we came under fire, were shot at on patrol, or returned fire, stuff like that.

Within a few days, we took down a Republican Guard barracks. There was a large Defense Ministry building that we had to take down. We were in a situation where we were under fire intermittently for days. It sort of ran together. There would be meeting engagements, they would call them, you know, someone would pop up, pull up a gun, and then they'd get shot.

The resistance wasn't organized at that point, so even though you have a lot of gunfire, not a lot of it is well planned. It's a situation you run into when someone surprises you with two divisions. It wasn't organized resistance. A lot of shooting, a lot of stuff was happening, but it would happen, and it would be over very quickly.

It wasn't as if the person who had shot at my platoon was part of another platoon. It was one or two guys would shoot at us. That's not a good situation to be in, for them. The competency wasn't there that you would see later on. People got a lot better. The people who were gonna shoot at us that were bad at it or hadn't learned the valuable lessons you need to learn about shooting at people, they didn't know that at that point. That means they were going to die. It just happened. Quick. It doesn't take very long.

I don't really remember a lot of fear. Some of it is exhaustion. Some of it was bemusement. It was a mixture of exhaustion, amusement at people being bad at it, you know, especially the Iraqis. It was done in such an amateurish manner that you could tell they really wanted to go and kill somebody, but they didn't know how to do it at that point. Intellectually I knew, give them enough time, they get better.

It becomes a snap-shoot thing where people shoot first and ask next. That becomes within a day what everybody does. People stop asking because they felt what they did that first time. Those people who didn't know to shoot right away when they saw somebody with an AK-47, they knew next time. They didn't wait. Bam. OK, somebody pops up, shoot em. Done.

The idea of taking another human life, if somebody's shooting at me, I don't know whether it was the way I was raisedyou know, I've talked to the priest who confirmed me about it, who was a pacifist, who wouldn't shoot anybody under any circumstances.

I remember having conversations with my father along the lines of, somebody threatens my family I will kill them. If there's a credible threat, they're gonna die. I'm pretty much the same way in that. I don't seek out conflict. I don't get into fistfights. I don't ever want to be in that situation. I value human life. But people can throw away their life.

If someone is physically shooting at me, even if I think they're gonna shoot at me, if it's a credible threat, it just does not bother me. The idea of shooting that person and the actually pull the trigger on somebody in that situation doesn't bother me at all.

I know that it sounds odd, but I've thought that way pretty much my entire life. If I was an Iraqi, I would be shooting at me in that situation. I understand it's the way it works. People die. There's six billion people in the world, and they're shooting at each other a lot, especially in other countries. It's common as rain. That's the way it happens.

All the times when I shot at somebody in Iraq, it never really struck me as being something that I was gonna internalize as some kind of, like, great metaphysical wrong. I mean, death rate's running 100-percent, as far as I can tell, worldwide. Everybody dies.

I guess it's a values thing. People in my hometown will shoot each other on occasion. It's within the frame of reference. If somebody uses force against you, it is expected, it is a good thing to use force back.

When you send that paperwork to enlist in the Army, every single step is one small step to a very irrational place. No one would go and say, I'm gonna go and volunteer to get into a truck with no armor on it with people shooting RPGs at me and drive into Baghdad in an unarmored vehicle, the first people to go into Baghdad. That's not a rational thing. No one would rationally put themselves in that position.

But that moment when you step on that truck, back in that nice safe place somewhere that you've been at, you're just getting on a truck. It doesn't feel any different, or not much different, than if you get in your car, and drive to, you know, Indiana.

Rationally, I know there's something up. But it's not a huge jump to do that.

It was the very end of '03. It was the first week of December. My parents came down to pick me up. I got hammered drunk that night. I was on leave for almost a month. It was just a good time.

My wife says I will occasionally have nightmares, but I think I always had nightmares. I don't know whether it's combat related. I had friends that came back that had big time readjustment problems. One guy had never had alcoholism problems, but his brother had killed himselfhis brother was also in the militaryhad shot himself while we were in Iraq, when we had first got to Baghdad.

When we got back, for the next couple of months afterwards, he had problems, where he would drink too much, and everything else, and he couldn't deal with the stress. In that situation, I knew exactly why he was having problems.

When we first got to Iraq, when we were deployed into the city of Baghdad, no one had been killed yet on what became the Highway 1, the Murder Alley, or whatever they called it. He was driving back and forth from the airport, which is where our supplies came from, to our position in Baghdad, alone, in a Humvee, a single Humvee, something that's utterly unthinkable, even today. No one would do that.

He would say, Every day I get shot at. Every day people shoot at me. Every day I come back, and there's more holes in the Humvee. And he was just going to get MREs. He was risking his life for fucking plastic bagged food that tastes like shit that nobody wants to eat anyway. Every day he was going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Luckily enough, somebody else got shot first before he did, and they started giving him security to go back and forth. It was simply the fact that no one had been killed yet that they wouldn't take it seriously.

So, you know, we had flown back to Fort Campbell, he started having problems. I was thankfully that he confided in me about it. I referred him right to mental health. I was like, You need to have a talk about it. If you don't talk about it, and get it taken care of, it doesn't get better.

The reason why I knew is I had been around my father, who had had some combat stress problems from Vietnam, not where he's dysfunctional or anything, but where he had some nightmares, and my mom wouldn't wake him up because she didn't know what he would do.

I grew up in a town full of people who were in Vietnam. It wasn't a few people. Every man that I knew of that was of that age went to Vietnam. It's a poor town. It's a Southern town. Everybody got drafted. Nobody went to college. Everybody went. And a lot of those guys had problems.

So I knew that people were going to have problems. And I knew some people would have more problems than others. And I knew some people would deal with it fine. Who knows why.

I don't know what all of my fellow soldiers opinions of me as a soldier are. I don't know. All I wanted to do was be a competent soldier and not be more of a burden to the people around me than I was a help. That's my goal, is to be on the positive side of that measurement, to be someone who doesn't fuck shit up for everyone. That, in my mind, should be the method by which all people are judged. That's what I endeavored for.

Iraq is broken. Just shattered. I understand it was a fragile situation. It was an awful situation. But you drive the leader out, and shoot him, well, what then? There was no what then. I didn't see civilian reconstruction guys. I didn't see any State Department guys. I didn't see anything.

I generally care about the welfare of people everywhere. I'm not just an American. I'm a human being. I was raised to be, as best as I understand it, a moral human being, to make my decisions not based on what is good for me alone, even in the military values of, you ask, Well, what does this do to everybody else?

It is important to not be a shit to other people in the world. I was told, don't be an asshole, growing up, in no uncertain terms. You don't go sticking your finger in somebody's eye just because you can. I understand that there's more to it than that in Iraqbad situation, bad leadership, all kinds of bad problems.

But it's not that hard to make the rational judgment of, Oh, wait, what happens after we destroy the country? And that was obvious, that that's what was going to happen. Iraq was a chunk of shit, and we knew it was a chunk of shit going in. That's part of the justification for invading the country in the first place. Its leadership has run it into the ground.

OK, we want to take over the country, so now we own the country that's run into the ground. How many billions do you think it's going to cost to fix a country that's been run into the ground?

February of 2005. I didn't want to go back to Iraq, and it was pretty obvious that a couple months after that we would be deployed again. So I took the opportunity to go to school.

People in the Army, they fight to the death for friends. They're fighting for the guy to the left and the right of them. I know it's a clich, but, frankly, that was my motivation. Day to day, it was to protect your friends, to do the job as best you can without risking anybody's lives unnecessarily.

I don't have any real regrets. There's some things that I've seen while I was in Iraq that I wish I would've been louder about. And there's things that I would like to have done better. But, I mean, that's everybody.

In Iraq, we were outside of Baghdad. We got called out to do some manual labor. It was explosive ordinance disposal. We were getting these boxes of rockets, they were 104, 105-millimeter rockets, and I'm sitting here on this bumper out in the desert, and we're loading this stuff on trucks taking it out to be blown up, and I'm looking at a lot of the guys, and most everybody is younger than me, because I had been to college first, and then went into the Army.

It was all American rockets. It was all shit we'd sold the Iraqi regime during the Iran-Iraq War. I remember talking to people about it, and they were asking, Well, where does this stuff come from?

Well, we sold it to them. We sell guns to everybody in the world. Because if we don't do it, the French'll do it. And if the French don't do it, the Israelis'll do it. And if the Israelis don't do it, the Russians will probably be the first on the list to do it.

You know, it's just business.

George Zubaty served with Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment. He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003.

Last week saw an explosion of discussion around seed investing, including plenty of negative comments around VCs as seed investors.

While I agree that many VCs are crummy seed investors, I think there are some that are excellent seed investors.

This prompted me to write a post titled AngelList Boulder and Some Thoughts on Seed Investing where I promised to write up some of my thoughts on how and why VCs could be good seed investors.

Before I got around to starting, there were three excellent posts that, if you are interested in this topic, are must reads. They are:

• Fred Wilson: Lead Investors, Dipshit Companies, and Funding Every Entrepreneur
• Mark Suster: Understanding a VC's Seed Funding Policy is Critical
• Dave McClure: MoneyBall for Startups: Invest BEFORE Product/Market Fit, Double-Down AFTER

All three of these posts lay out clear points of view on the authors seed strategy. And importantly, Mark encourages all entrepreneurs to make sure they understand a VC's seed strategy before taking money, which I strongly agree with.

Before I start talking about good and bad VC seed strategies, I thought I'd explain mine. For context, about 25% of the investments we make at Foundry Group are seed investments. But before Foundry Group, my partners and I were involved in many seed investments, both at Mobius Venture Capital. In addition, I've made many seed investments as an angel investor in two time periods,1994-1996 and 2006-2007, and seen many more through my involvement as a co-founder of TechStars. Our strategy has evolved from this experience and is different from my angel investor strategy (which I've explained in my post Suggestions for Angel Investors.)

As a VC, I do not differentiate between a seed investment and any other investment that I make. At Foundry Group, we are comfortable investing as little as $250k in a round (a seed investment for us) all the way up to $10m in a round. We think about each investment whether it's $250k or $10m the same way, and commit to participating in the business for the long term.

Specifically, our seed investments are not options on the next round. We price our seed rounds as equity investments, always lead or co-lead (as Fred describes in Lead Investors, Dipshit Companies, and Funding Every Entrepreneur), and treat them the same way we would with a $10m investment.

I have three partners and all of us are involved in all of our investments. So, when we make a seed investment, it gets everyone's attention. We try hard not to smother it with love, but we recognize that we usually each have something unique to add to a seed investment and try to help accordingly. As a result, we are all emotionally involved in the investment (a phrase you'll see in later posts about this topic) which I believe is both beneficial to the entrepreneur and extremely important to the VC firm.

When we make a seed investment, we fully expect to invest at least the same amount that we invested in the seed round without thinking hard about it. One of our strongly held beliefs is that it often takes several years for a company to find its mojo and we are willing to work through the challenging first few years. As a result, we don't believe that there is a particularly critical go forward or not decision point immediately following the seed round. Now, this doesn't mean that the follow on round is blindly done we are very internally critical of the progress a company is (or isn't) making, but we try to firmly put ourselves on the side of the entrepreneur in this discussion and work together when things start off slowly, or differently, than expected.

At Foundry Group, we describe ourselves as being syndication agnostic. This means we are completely indifferent as to whether we fund something ourselves or with other VCs (e.g. each are equally happy situations.) In addition, we are equally delighted to co-invest with angels and super angels, or not. Basically, we are happy in any case, are making a decision to invest independent of anyone else, and defer to the entrepreneur on who they want to have involved.

Finally, we are deliberate about the areas we invest in (our themes). We see a ton of seed investment opportunities, but only invest in a few. Many of the opportunities we see are outside of our themes. We have consciously decided to only invest in areas we know well and think we can be meaningfully additive to and constrain our focus to these themes (although the themes expand and evolve with our experience.) This lens allows us to spend the vast majority of our time on companies we are either investors in or likely to be investors in, and limits our time exploring lots of things that have a low probability of being an investment for us.

Taking Mark's lead from his post, I'm going to put up a more specific post on the Foundry Group blog that lays this out in a very specific way. I'll also follow this post with some examples, as I've got seven to choose from: AdMeld, Gnip, Lijit, Mandlebrot, Next Big Sound, Standing Cloud, and Trada. And, in case you are wondering, here are two recent examples of how seed investments blossom: AdMeld Raised $15 Million Round from Norwest Venture Partners and Time Warner and Trada Raises $5.75 Million Round From Google Ventures.

Brad Feld has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over 20 years and is the co-founder of Foundry Group. This post originally appeared on his blog, and it is republished here with permission.

Sounds like a great conversation yesterday at Y Combinator's AngelConf in Silicon Valley. Anthony Ha of Venturebeat had a couple posts on it that I just read, one on Paul Graham's comments, and another on Ron Conway and Mike Arrington's comments. I would have enjoyed being part of that discussion so I'll join in now.

I second Ron Conway's hope that "any entrepreneur that has the guts to start a company gets funded." That is my kind of thinking. We need more entrepreneurship, not less. So I'm with Ron 100% on this. Of course getting funded does not means 10s of millions of dollars of funding for every entrepreneur. It means enough funding to actually build something and see if the idea and the team has the right stuff to build a company. Then market forces should take over and determine what ideas and teams get more funding and which ones should close the doors and think about what is next for them.

Mike Arrington expressed the contrary opinion, apparently held by many VCs (not me), that this mini explosion in angel investing is creating a bunch of "dipshit companies." I don't know what a dipshit company is. I haven't seen one. If you listen to the chatter on the Techcrunch comment threads, you will see that people think Twitter and Foursquare are dipshit companies. Fine. Many great companies have been built on a wall of derision and I personally think those two are going to join that list of laughed at great companies (and maybe already have). My point is you just don't know what is a crazy idea and what is a brilliant idea. And you don't know what is a great team and what is a weak team. Of course, we have our opinions on that. We make those judgment calls every day. But we are often wrong. VCs are wrong more often than they are right. It is good for VCs if 10x or 100x companies get angel funding. That is more opportunity for us.

Paul Graham rightly points out that that there is a "larger trend where founders have more power than investors." I've been saying that on this blog for a long time. And I also agree that founders are determining the financing structures that make the most sense for them. But I do not agree with Paul's opinion that the notion of a "lead investor" is going away and that is good for entrepreneurs.

This may just be me being defensive and protective of my chosen role. I am a lead investor. It is what I do. I don't follow very well. I like to get behind an entrepreneur and company and help them raise capital, hire a team, and build the business. And I think the entrepreneur needs a lead investor to play this role. Obviously they should pick a lead investor that will not "screw them over" and sadly too many times lead investors do just that. But there are many high quality VCs out there and thanks to the power of blogging and social media and the web, you can find out who they are and who to avoid.

Roger Ehrenberg had a great post on this yesterday. He says:

Coming to the table as a two- or three-headed syndicate beast without a clear leader is a big, big mistake. How many VCs like investing into situations where there is management by committee? Answer: zero. Why should syndicate-building be any different?

Just like the entrepreneur needs to run the business, he or she should find an investor to run the investor group. I am someone who does that so if you are looking for a lead investor for your company come talk to me. If you don't want a lead investor, then don't knock on my door because I don't know any other way to be.