Opinion |

On Telling War Stories

by Jerad W. Alexander

In a bar in the Poncey-Highland neighborhood of Atlanta, I sat across from a woman with eyes like wet iron and watched through cigarette smoke as she explained how her boyfriend had been murdered. He had been killed the previous May at a popular drive-in theater. After the movie had ended he discovered his car battery had failed him and he needed a jump. He walked to the truck next to him, tapped on the dark driver-side window, and for his troubles received a bullet to the chest which killed him as paramedics worked on him in the back of a speeding ambulance.

Her story put a zap through my spine, as I’m sure it would anyone. She cried almost mechanically as she told it. She was tough, and would later give testimony before a jury that would inevitably put the shooter away for life. But at the moment, there in the bar under a haze of beer and whiskey and chain-smoked cigarettes, was a reflection of old pains I recognized almost immediately. A savagery had taken hold, a bitterness. It was completely justified, of course, but I recognized it because I had once carried it within myself. It’s the kind of thing you can hear in the back of the throat—a sort of bile-damp gravel that curls the upper lip an almost imperceptible measure. You can see it as a hardening of the eye capillaries whenever pain creates rage; and I felt a dubious need to lay on some Old Folksy Wartime Wisdom. I had been in her world, at least in a certain psychic sense, and I wanted to offer perspective.

I told her a war story.

I told her of a lance corporal I knew in Iraq who was killed by an alpha-male nightmare and the comic error of bad driving. One afternoon, the staff NCO of the guard at our camp in western Iraq orchestrated a response drill. Basically, he wanted to see how fast his Marines would respond to a potential threat in the camp, normally a routine and completely justifiable action. However, the staff NCO of the guard, a massive gunnery sergeant with a booming voice and woefully arrogant demeanor who lead by fear and intimidation, whipped his troops into a stress frenzy. As the lance corporal rode in the bed of an open air Humvee the nervous driver misread a turn and flipped the top-heavy vehicle onto its back. The lance corporal was tossed from the bed and crushed between the roof and the ground.

I found out about it soon after from the battalion administration staff NCO who was a friend of mine. He had been called to identify the body a few hours earlier. Later, as I glumly walked toward my hooch to shed my gear I passed near the helipad reserved for the battalion aid station. Standing outside the entrance to the station were two facing ranks of Navy corpsman. A number of others, including the battalion chaplain, were on hand. Unsure of what was going on I stopped and watched. Within a few seconds a fat gray Marine transport helicopter clattered to the ground and dropped its ramp. Fine Iraqi dust flew in thick billows around all of us. The wooden doors of the aid station burst open and through the dust two corpsmen wheeled a gurney toward the back of the chopper. On it rested a rumpled black body bag. . .

Kestava - Wasteland It was at about this point in the story that I became emotional. Sitting in front of this woman in a dive bar in Atlanta my eyes welled slightly. It was an odd thing, the welling up. I had never done that before. I had told that story to a few close others, but never had I came close to weeping. And yet, even now as I write on this rainy summer night years later, I feel that same sad rush collect in my sinuses, and it makes me laugh because it’s such an old story now.

Back in the bar and next to the helipad, I shakily told her how as the corpsmen wheeled his body to the maw of the helicopter everyone gave an honest salute in good keeping with war movie clichés. But it was a bitter salute for me, and one that did not last very long. The bird revved its massive blades to liftoff speeds and sent the dust into a whirlwind. I told her how I swore it was the dust, that rotten dust that coated my eyes and inside my nose, that made me turn away and wipe the water from my eyes and beat a fist in rage against the concrete warehouse I stood near. I explained my vitriol toward the gunnery sergeant, toward the shaky Humvee driver, and toward the general lock-step stupidity. I told her I wanted to kill everything. I told her I hated the war and the marketed and bullying jingoism that put us all in that country to begin with, for her and for even you now.

But I quickly dried up and offer The Message—that I had long factored it all, come to grips with the war despite my spurring emotions, and had found peace with the war and my involvement in it, while maintaining an itch to express to others the savagery, oddities, insanities, and even the humanity of the Marine Corps and of Iraq War at large; and that hopefully in telling these things to others could expand on some larger truth that might spare us further damage, as Pollyanna as that lofty goal might be. I explained how she might have a similar opportunity when she was ready for it. She seemed to understand.

For years I figured other veterans shut up about their service because of some latent trauma. Perhaps I’m woefully naïve, but it never occurred to me they might stay silent because of the response they might receive. I don’t talk much about the military anymore, at least not in casual conversations or in detail with folks I don’t know very well. The subject has a tendency to spray a social gathering with what seems to be an ultrafine shit-mist, regardless of whether I’m talking about a wild barracks party during a hurricane or a day in Iraq when my buddy and I laughed and shoved each other like schoolkids as we lugged a machinegun to the roof of a building taking sniper fire. There’s often an unspoken assumption that I’m somehow damaged, that because I’m telling some wartime anecdote I must certainly be in the grips of some flashback just shy of some violent boiling point. While wildly inaccurate, this certainly accounts for all the stories of human resources managers and job recruiters who’ve skipped over veterans’ resumes because they don’t want to have a real life John Rambo (or their fearhead image of one) sitting in the breakroom with the regular squares during lunch break.

The sad truth is that while I’m completely comfortable telling honest war stories, I often wonder if the audience that needs to hear them the most—those who have built their understanding of the wars on dubious political or social perceptions—are simply unreceptive, or unavailable.

The Written Word about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has been shuttled off into easily digestible camps. There are the hero/war porn tales filled with soul-wounded sniper-death-kill memoirs, Navy SEAL vignettes, and whatever jingoist G.I. Joe/Greatest Generation war stories that pack up the Great White neocon newsfeeds. It’s the land of the battle hardened operator, the bonafide ‘Merican hero above reproach who makes the flyover states feel a little more comfortable in their dubious notion of American Exceptionalism. Alternatively, there is the often well intentioned-but-retreaded literary war fiction that feels beaten into the MFA copy of the Novel of the Last Big War while desperately trying to squeeze out Tim O’Brien for a spot in the next generation of high school English text books. They do a better job of portraying the battlefield, from both physical and moral standpoints, but they’re packed with so much wartime woe that any uneducated reader is bound to be chased off by the suicidal demons that crawl off the pages. The running narratives of these wars are wrapped up in either politicized chest-beating or as the showroom models of damaged goods. Veterans tend to favor the former while civilians edge toward the latter, if they’re inclined to go anywhere at all. Neither of them are completely accurate and we’re all suffering because of it.

As the night progressed in the smoky bar, and as she asked me questions about the war, her tone darkened. After downing shots and beers over loud Tom Waits and Johnny Cash she looked at me through cigarette smoke and her old bitterness churned alive. She looked sprayed with the aforementioned shit-mist, but for some atavistic reason kept wading through it anyway. After a while it felt more like an interrogation than a conversation. Finally, she interrupted me—

“You were a minion,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You were a minion, ok?. You did Bush’s dirty work. You’re a murderer? I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I don’t believe in any of it. How could you even do all that? It makes me sick.”

The music softened. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe I thought it did. Somewhere in the back of my frayed auditory cortex a concerned synapse must have turned down the worldly volume because everything focused on this one precise moment. All the recording devices of my mind clicked on as if I had tapped into some bizarre historical conduit too foul to let slip by. I had read of veterans returning from Vietnam with similar stories, but always assumed they were limited to the time period. And yet here it was: bold faced, stark, dry, and very real.

I know many combat veterans who would have gone completely sideways at mere notion of having anyone bounce such prejudices their way. A few might have ripped the table from the floor and broke the wood down to splinters. Others still might have even been tipped enough to get violent with even her, regardless of the state where her statements came from (which can only be half accounted to trauma). As for me, I pride myself on a certain level of emotional wherewithal. There is no perspective one can offer to assuage the emotional amputation caused by a violent death of someone close, or in some cases even nonviolent. Its only remedy is time and time alone. Even now I have to routinely remind myself of that fact. There is no other fix. Nevertheless, I quickly paid and washed my hands of the whole rotten scene. I was too stunned to do otherwise. Sometimes I wonder if shattering a few pint glasses on the way out might have been worth it, if only as a punctuation mark.

Are veterans obligated to Spread the Word out to the congregation? Is it worth wading across the divide between veterans and civilians? I know for me it is, at least in a certain respect, but walking out of that bar those years ago I had to rationally wonder if the waters are simply too high to cross.

Our Own Medicine

by Daniel Buckman

In 2009 my fourth New York novel was circulating in paperback. I wrote and published four of them in ten years and became terrified at the prospect of sitting in a room alone for another decade. I said goodbye to all of that after those four novels and writing time in Paris with my wife and started teaching the children of immigrants in my native Chicago. I fell in love with the kids with my wife, and my life-long need to write disappeared.

It seemed that I had to be a sheepdog for a while. I got adjunct professorships at community colleges in Chicago while teaching my high school kids in the afternoons—mentoring two men through West Point, and two women through Illinois Army ROTC. I had composition classrooms full of Army and Marine Corps infantry veterans, Obama Surge grunts young enough to be my sons. It was the beginning of the Recession. Money in education was scarce, but I decided to make sure my kids and the grunts in my classes got educated by Malcom X’s famous saying about how you get things done, which is “by any means necessary.” My need to write vanished and I did my duty. How can a former soldier walk away from hard-working immigrant children? How can an infantry veteran turn his back on young grunts coming home from the Obama Surge? I never will regret giving up writing for five years to help these young people. I couldn’t have written in those years if I tried. There was duty to be pulled with both the kids and the vets.

I joined MEA in 2012 and ran an online workshop with Travis Martin and Jerad Alexander for vets to write fiction based upon military experience. David Ervin took over this summer, and we have expanded our model of publishing any veteran who wants to write literary fiction and do as many drafts as it takes. I edited many volumes and conducted many peer-edit phone calls. I told them to read Hemingway’s short fiction and the novels of James Jones and Larry Heinemann. Like the immigrant children, the young, hungry vet writers took away my need to write, because seeing them best Hemingway a few times with a story was better than writing for me. They were nephews (OIF) and sons (OEF “Obama Surge”). I had kids becoming officers, a squad of OEF/OIF grunt students, and many vet writers needing my time. I never thought too much about writing for five years, no bitterness included.

My wife of twenty-three years died suddenly at home with me and our cats in Chicago on July 6, 2015. We met on May 15, 1992. It was unexpected, a flash of severe pain for her, and then my love had slipped this flesh and crossed the river. I was talking immediately after Rebecca’s passing with other MEA staff, especially Amira Pierce, David Ervin and Travis Switalski, and they gave me a dose of the pill I make vet writers swallow: You already run and read, so you better write to save your mind.

It was beautiful and humbling. Two veterans of OEF/OIF and my old agent’s assistant and friend, now an NYU writing instructor, helped me through the worst week of my life. Ervin and Switalski loaded me with writing assignments for the website and told me to get at another book. There was no argument from me. The publishing world is much different than 2001 when my first novel was released, but I was reminded not to get anxious. Also, I hadn’t felt the need to write with the intensity needed to publish in five years. Now two veteran writers who I taught the basics of narrative a few years ago (and watched them write great things on their own) have enrolled me, the Vice President of Military Experience and the Arts, back into our basic program. The same men I told to use writing narrative for mental clarity to focus their minds away from intrusive thoughts were returning that advice and telling me to write a piece by the day to stay out of rabbit holes.

My legs are getting stronger, but I know that I will need to take the “medicine” we offer at MEA for a good year of my life. I will be both managing editor of fiction and veteran mentee in non-fiction while I work with an editor to make my fledgling essays publishable. I help run MEA, but I also walk among you MEA vet writers who are learning how to write long-distance with one of our editors.

Please stick with us when the cold weather comes and work to tell your stories. I can tell you from experience that we’ll stick with you.

Traditional Students and Veterans: Using Drama to Bridge a Difficult Gap

By Gaby Bedetti

“Fantastic show, that’s what education should look like!” said Travis Martin’s generous e-mail in response to our class’s attempt to capture the experience of war and its aftermath in a play. “A wonderful, often moving piece of theatre,” wrote a professor about “From Shiloh to Afghanistan.” Neither suggested a disconnect between war and the students’ representation. Yet Daniel Buckman’s “Swords to Pencils: Thoughts on the Veteran Experience in Academics” articulates a troubling question: Did any of us develop a real understanding of the veterans’ experience?

Comprised of traditional students, our Eastern Kentucky University class spent spring 2015 armchair traveling from the American Civil War to the modern-day battlefields of the Middle East. Neither my co-teacher, Mason Smith, nor I have fought in a war, so, to mark the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, we focused on its bloodiest battle. To convey what they had learned from reading history and fiction, the students wrote, directed, and performed six one-act plays on May 7 in the Black Box Theatre of the EKU Center for the Arts. A jug band from the seminar performed brief interludes of Appalachian songs. The production concluded with “A Litany for Our Veterans,” constructed from lines of poetry about all the wars in which Americans have fought. The litany’s elegiac tone projected an earnestness its fifteen reciters may not have earned.

The students dramatized their generation’s stories in various ways. For example, in “An Ignorant Soldier” a time-traveling student journeyed back to the Battle of Shiloh, where he accidentally killed Gen. U.S. Grant and started a chain of events that altered the course of history. “Row Your Boat” depicted a straggler and a general at the Battle of Shiloh trapped as one struggled to row toward safety, and the other toward battle. Martin coached the writers to tweak the dialogue and behaviors to make them more realistic. He challenged the writer of “Homecoming,” whose brother is in the military, to aim for a more nuanced portrayal of a veteran with PTS in this excerpt:

LITTLE GIRL

(approaches him with a clip board in attempt to sell cookies)

Excuse me sir?

RANDY

(coldly)

Get away from me.

LITTLE GIRL

What, no? I just have a question for you.

RANDY

(panicked)

What are you hiding behind that clipboard?

(rips it out form her hands and she accidently falls back out of shock and cries)

What do you want? Get away!

LIBBY

(Libby hears the shouting and runs over)

Hey, hey, hey! Calm down she’s just selling cookies. What’s going on?

RANDY

She wouldn’t listen. I told her to get away and she wouldn’t. She needs to get away from me.

The writer modified the violence by having only the clipboard fall, not the little girl. A deeper understanding of those who have experienced war calls for a more authentic learning experience.

In order to respond to what Buckman aptly characterizes as the narcissism of the traditional student, academics could collaborate with the veteran community. In her article, “Veterans Studies: Expanding Notions of ‘Vet Friendly’ to Include the Curriculum,” Penny Coleman endorses Martin’s call to bring both veterans and non-veterans together. The course could be cross-listed in EKU’s Veterans Studies Program. Veterans would educate instructors about their needs and learning styles, as Sarah Gann suggests. Voices of Student Veterans and Verbatim Theatre could teach the kinesthetic learning style emphasized in military training and favored by traditional students today. While the class could never approximate the cohesiveness and camaraderie that Buckman describes in his all-veterans composition class, integrating drama may help bridge the gap.

Along with collaborating with veterans, instructors might focus the reading strategically. With so much excellent war literature available, we could pair works from JME with Civil War readings. We could showcase the experience of women involved in war, as Martin advised, by juxtaposing a female hospital nurse’s experience during the Civil War and Erin Byers’ “Dear America.” Another approach to making the course more genuine would be to have the class focus on a particular image the way Lund focuses on images of hands as a writing prompt and shortcut to agency. An alternative is to focus on a specific moment, such as the night before battle, a motif memorialized in Book VIII of Homer’s Iliad, and captured in the EKU student play, “Shootin’ the Breeze.”

Finally, instructors could more overtly use the course to bridge the gap between veteran and traditional students. To promote points of empathy, we could use a public blog to engage soldiers and veterans in virtual interactions. We could bring veterans into the course through JME and veterans on campus. A veteran could serve as a visiting instructor. Students in the course could help promote the field of Veterans Studies by presenting at the Veterans in Society Conference. A course titled “Battle of Shiloh: Drama for the 21^st Century” would be enriched by the coming together of veterans with traditional students.

Our hope is that by improving the course design, the military will exist beyond the university enclaves Buckman describes. Rather than carrying what Gann calls the “burden of seclusion,” veterans will help educate traditional students. As brothers, friends, and fiancés of people in the military, many traditional students have a degree of exposure to the moral and literal injuries of war. Gann presents the academy with an opportunity it cannot waste. The million current VA Education beneficiaries provide the academy with what Gann describes as “an occasion in which it can rise to greatness, to serve those who have greatly given in selfless service.” Bringing soldier and student together in the classroom to write and produce plays about the experience of war is a step toward healing and reconciliation.

The trailer for the play is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWXetx-jfeo.

A recording of the performance is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEPF-DaJOwY.

Swords to Pencils: Thoughts on the Veteran Experience in Academics

by Daniel Buckman

I saw the young veterans filing into my classroom before they saw me understanding them. They patrolled my school’s Greyhound terminal hallways where I taught English composition among rodents and balled fast food bags, a rundown college in Chicago’s Uptown where pistol fire popped in daylight hours from the three-way gang war over the lucrative narcotics trade in a neighborhood blooming with homeless addicts and halfway houses. The young veterans humped camo assault bags, containing US History texts and biology notes instead of spare MREs, 5.56mm ball ammunition, and Afghan dust. They kept sleeves down over tattoos of battle crosses, globes and anchors, the names of friends killed in Afghanistan. They were young men who had seen enough to lose their smiles forever, and none looked optimistic about doing two years with Purple Kush-reeking classmates who attended my college for the financial aid disbursement checks and the deans and tenured faculty who believed they had more than a full-time city job teaching remedial skills. Being an older grunt, a man who trained and served twenty years prior to these young veterans, I was no stranger to hiding my aversion for the innocence and untested idealism of my civilian peers by looking away and pretending that I saw something in the cinderblock walls except painted cinderblocks. This habit hurt me with civilians, and took time and patience for me to accept, and I wanted to make sure these young men weren’t held back by looking at brick walls like they were staring out windows.

I completed junior college, undergraduate, and graduate study by staring at many walls, drawing my eyes to keep them from rolling, and developing my method of appearing engaged by the surreal students and professors who hadn’t left a classroom since kindergarten. I had my military years away from the conventional experience of attending college after thirteen years of unbroken school time, and unlike my peers, I had discovered that not every problem in the world can be solved by well-intended dialogues. These young men realized, like I did, that being an outspoken veteran wouldn’t work in colleges because the young vets’ presence destroyed the academics’ ideal world and buzz-killed the young people who were sure they could rearrange the social order according to these professed ideals. In less than a month of US History and biology, I saw them mastering the skill of staring at walls like they were windows. I began to round them up.

They were former infantrymen, boy Soldiers and Marines morphed (in less than 90 days) into boy combat veterans who knew these community colleges saw them and their GI Bill as dollar signs, the deans wanted their enrollment but hoped they would keep their mouths shut about the war. Most Chicago academics weren’t comfortable with the progressive president they’d elected to end hostilities in Iraq suddenly surging thousands of our young people into the mountains of Afghanistan to win hearts and minds during an active drone campaign, a presidential war that would fail as badly as Bush’s adventurism in Iraq. They were Latin, African, Bosnian, and Polish Americans, first generation immigrant kids who walked the gauntlet of drugs and gang violence long before joining the First Marine, 82d Airborne, 10^th Mountain, and 101^st Airborne Divisions and deploying to the “shithole,” as they called Afghanistan, during Obama’s 2010 “Surge” into “the right war.” I introduced myself to the guys, self-identified as a Cold War paratrooper, and invited them speak about their military experience, make their arguments that war is the saddest part of the human condition, not a flu to be cured with antibiotics, and nagged them to use this educational time to define what being a veteran means before going into the post-college workplace and stuffing every feeling about Afghanistan to remain employable.

They became my nephews in short time, and they joked that I was really a defense contractor sent to “unfuck” them. We met in empty classrooms, a squad of USA and USMC infantry veterans of the Obama Surge, and drank the ice coffee and ate the cookies that my wife sent from home. I let them rant about getting asked how many people they killed by fellow students, how they could enlist to fight Bush’s war by instructors, and why nobody seemed interested in their specific experiences save for the scripted versions from Hollywood, MSNBC, or Fox News about why America was fighting in Afghanistan. The young veterans laughed, recounting their encounters with the storytelling ability that comes from pulling guard with your buddy during cold nights. We are lost with blood lust, they’d say with the jokey sarcasm of a homesick infantry sergeant to their noisy instructor, or relate to fellow student asking about killing by responding “I got twenty-two kills, but I never notched that knife kill; you know that gets you the Medal of Honor,” or telling a college peer that querying a veteran about killing is like a civilian being asked if their father enjoys having sex with their mother’s best friend.

I knew the guys weren’t liars. They mocked their own hyperbole, but back in Fall 2011, junior colleges were not understanding that veteran students freshly returned from the worst infantry combat since Viet Nam were attending classes in their systems comprised of 80% “come and go” adjuncts. The schools were happy for the GI Bill to come their way–anything for our vets, the college president with a German car told me while she was looking away, as if expecting a question about all the poor kids she helped by giving them the hope of a PhD and political connections so they could drive a foreign luxury car to an urban community college and preside over a four percent graduation rate someday – but nothing was done to build learning communities where a cohort of veteran students took the same classes for a year, helping them transition into academia and graduate, which is a rarity at junior colleges. I asked my tenured department head if we could have veteran organizations speak to faculty about how to teach a two-deployment infantry veterans since the military and the mainstream were more removed from each other than at any time in our nation’s history. She was uncomfortable, stalled, then said something about having to clear it with the dean of instruction, an entity who never seemed too interested in what was being instructed by my fellow adjuncts and myself, and less about insuring these motivated, young veterans succeeded despite culture shock, varying levels of PTS, and a legacy of educational stagnation from the “drop-out factory” Chicago high schools they attended before enlisting. These veterans needed attention and a level playing field, but all my college thought to do was hire a part-time veteran services specialist who was on campus when most of the veterans weren’t. The cultural critics were right. Patriotism (or simply doing the right thing for those who fought in your name) had given way to narcissism in 2011, and nobody felt that more than these young men who’d cheated death and fear for two years in Afghanistan. The selfless person and the narcissist can never speak the same language.

The veterans took this lack of administrative understanding hard, but they took security tailing them around campus with real sadness. They were first semester college students because they believed college was integral to success in America, and they sought a chance to be successful at something beyond surviving the Korengal Valley. The boys were always alone or with their fellow veterans, rarely finding a civilian peer that didn’t treat them as preternatural humans to be feared. Their disconnection from civilians based upon society’s disbelief that these men wanted to fight the war left them stranded in the memories of their old rifle companies and deployments via social media, and they laughed to themselves over private jokes first hatched while patrolling the mountains of Afghanistan with buddies who lived anywhere from Florida to Washington State. The retired cops that my college employed as security guards continued following them for laughing to themselves, and tried their best to give real Soldiers and Marines the classic asshole cop grin that promised violence. The vets countered with the same, loud grin. None of this was helping anything; assuming a veteran is violent because he has done violent things is the quickest way to hurt him.

Haven’t they ever had to laugh to keep from crying? The guys asked me of the faculty and administrators who always had security tailing them. No, I said. Not the way you have. Laughing solo labels you crazy in this world.

I advised the guys to close ranks and we were soon reading Heinemann’s Close Quarters, Jones’ Thin Red Line, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Some started writing. These old grunt writers, they said, are the only people teaching us anything here. Our informal sessions became the reason they came to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays since they had already figured an underpaid adjunct instructor stressed about personal finances wasn’t worth the GI Bill they survived to not waste and their close friends died hoping to have the same attitude toward the greatest benefit of military service. They avoided well-meaning instructors who gave them articles about veteran suicide in Sociology 101 and wanted to know—before the class—how they felt about the epidemic. The veterans started dropping classes, or stuffing enough into one year for a quick transfer to University of Illinois at Chicago, until the group was only forming to see each other, eat my wife’s cookies, and discuss the greatest American novels about war and return with their new buddies. We are done being taught by movie watchers and news junkies with lots of education, they said. It is a waste of my GI Bill. Does anybody here have a clue about what we just did, and what we want to overcome by seeking an education? I could answer by doing, by keeping them close and together for one year. There was little to say that might not be a lie.