On 15 February 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing 266 crewmen. American journalists clamored for vengeance against the Spanish authorities they wrongly blamed for the accident. Three weeks later the Fifty-Fifth Congress unanimously voted in support of President McKinley's $50 million bill for the “national defense” (Morgan 275). By May, Spain and the United States were at war.

Nothing had been published on women indigenous combatants until Ligia Peláez edited memorias rebeldes contra el olvido: Paasantzila txumb'al ti' sortzeb'al k'u‘l, a collection of essays portraying the voices of Ixil and K'iche’ women. During the Guatemalan Civil War they fought with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. When the war ended in 1996, they returned to their hometowns. About six hundred of them founded the Kumool Association in 1999. Peláez, an academic working for the Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences, met them in Uspantán in May 2006. She returned in June with her team, and by the second meeting, in July, the Kumool women chose to collaborate in the writing of a book about their experience.

Can a film based on fiction contribute to the restoration of historical memory? can films help fill in the blanks of history? What exactly is the filmmaker's position? What faculty and what means does he or she require to make such a prodigious feat possible? Are films capable of creating sites of memory, and by what means? What traces will make it possible to set up markers in a site of a scotoma? The questions become increasingly precise: Can cinema lift the veil that colonial history has thrown over the history of the Algerian War? And what can the nature of the blind spot be if every effort has been made to keep it hidden?

Hiroshima, October 2008. When I last came here, it was the summer of 1995, fifty years after the end of a war our memory factories had worked so hard to keep alive but were now being told to let go of. It was ten years after Ronald Reagan had declared at Bitburg that we had all been victims in that war. It was five years before a millennium punctuation mark would in fact make the twentieth century and its awful histories a base-10 past. And it was exactly that summer when the Smithsonian would put, with great controversy, the restored B-29 bomber Enola Gay on display in Washington for all to marvel at. In 1995 I had made my way in the intense heat of a Hiroshima summer (which made me imagine the heat of that day, as the Japanese say) to Peace Memorial Park, the beautifully groomed center of the city that all of us, worldwide, thought of as Ground Zero.

On 27 February 2009, The Essays for this PMLA issue on war were coming in, against a background of various wars. The Iraq War had claimed over 100,000 civilian lives. The newly elected Obama administration vowed to amp up efforts in Afghanistan. The rubble in Gaza still smoldered from the recent Israeli attacks. The ongoing conflict in Darfur had already left 300,000 people dead, not to mention the 2.5 million displaced. When President George W. Bush left office, his boundless war on terror had exacted more lives, money, civil-liberty concessions, and international goodwill than one could even begin to tally. These were just the newsworthy wars that happened to be featured that month in the New York Times. Other, “low-intensity” wars—the devastating fighting in East Congo, the ongoing Zapatista uprising, Colombia's fifty-year-old armed conflict, Sri Lanka's civil war, and similar struggles—simmered on the back burner. The topic of war seemed as urgent that February morning as it had two years earlier, when the editors proposed this special issue. Ironically, that morning's Times showcased “Weekend at War” in its Escapes section (Sokol). The oversize image showed a crowded ballroom full of happy dancers in World War II outfits swinging to a big band orchestra—the uniforms, insignia, hats, hairdos all conjured up another time. The caption read, “It's winter 2009, but for hundreds of reenactors, it's December 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge.”