The Voices of War

What do a soldier, an aid worker and a refugee have in common? They all share the experience of war. And while one is an active participant, one seeks to heal its wounds and one deals with its impact, their personal, raw and oftentimes visceral stories are rarely heard. Rather, war is too often depicted as clean, precise, and distant. It occurs ‘over there’ and happens to ‘them’.   Hi everyone, my name is Vedran ‘Maz’ Maslic and I am the host of ‘The Voices Of War’, a podcast with a simple vision—to bring to life the true costs of war, through the voices of those who have lived it.   My first experience of war was during the siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where, as a ten-year-old, the world I knew came apart. Not long into the war, I became a refugee in Germany where our life was precarious at best and outright dangerous at worst. Nearly four years later, my family was lucky to migrate to Australia, where I later joined the Army. Having served in Afghanistan and Timor Leste, I again saw the impact of war, except this time as a uniformed participant. Since then, I’ve established a not-for-profit in Bosnia, studied in Sweden, worked as a consultant in Iraq, lectured on intercultural and interpersonal communication, and now, back in the Army, I manage doctrine and instruct on interpersonal communication and human terrain analysis. Over the years, I’ve realised that most of our social narratives of war are simple, sanitised and rarely account for its true horrors and abject inhumanity.   It is this gap in our social discourse of war that this podcast seeks to fill. I speak with development workers, soldiers, refugees, negotiators, academics, medical practitioners, and anyone else whose life has been shaped by war, be they a survivor, perpetrator, mediator, or healer of it. My aim is to dissect war into its most-basic definitive parts to demystify and, perhaps more-importantly, deglorify it. I want to make lucid the magnitude and scale of human suffering caused by war within those professionally engaged with it—be they an advocate or prosecutor of it—as well as within those who merely observe and judge it from afar through mainstream and social media. By doing this I hope to dislodge, ever so slightly, our collective tendency to view war as the solution to our many local, regional and global challenges. Thank you for joining me.