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Spotlight: Daniel Buckman

by Travis Switalski, Sr.

The Names of Rivers by Daniel Buckman, his second in a cycle of four novels, begins and ends a dark, heartbreaking tale of the multi-generational dysfunction between fathers and sons who have both survived the major wars of the American Century. The patriarch of the Polish-American family, Bruno Konick, once soldiered with the First Infantry Division from Omaha Beach to the liberations of Dachau and Buchenwald, an experience that aged his body and forever disconnected his mind. The post-traumatic stress caused by his involvement in WW II affected his life, the lives of his two sons before they ever went to Vietnam, and the life of his grandson, Luke, who wanders Watega County, Illinois realizing that something bad has happened, but unable to understand the big whys.

“Bruno Konick is a compilation of my uncles and grandfathers who fought in the European Theatre of Operations during WW II,” Buckman said in interview. He describes two generations of war veterans in his grandfather’s basement playing cards on Christmas Day. The Vietnam veterans felt isolated and alone at their table, while the World War II veterans, living with their own silent trauma, felt embarrassed for sending their sons off to a war they never intended to win. “I think they had far less closure than 1950s and 1960s Hollywood would suggest. This experience is also framed by tough Depression childhoods as first-generation Americans. I found that these men were sent home to roll final credits on WW II that refused a conventional ending after Auschwitz and Nagasaki changed how people must think about war to win.”

The story of Bruno Konick and his sons intertwines with that of his grandson, Luke. The boy can see the toll that trauma has taken on his working class, Polish-Catholic family even if powerless as a seventeen year-old boy to change anything. “He has a great-grandfather who was gassed in the Meuse-Argonne, a grandfather that was left with malignant PTSD after WW II, and an uncle and a father who are Vietnam veterans that are existing with untreated PTSD and the mania that comes from being a 1980s Vietnam combat veteran,” said Buckman. He wanted to articulate the irony of the boy joining the Marines in order to break the cycle of trauma by potentially exposing himself to the very same trauma. “I wanted the novel to end with the reader wondering what will become of Luke as they already wonder what became of Huck Finn. Will Luke really get out and use the GI Bill? Will Luke get sent to war and lose his nimble wits and wander with untreated PTSD from both his experience and the experiences of three generations ahead of him? I wanted to write a novel about what continuing a military tradition in the family, which is often portrayed as fluffy on network morning shows, does to a family after some hard generations in American Century Wars and untreated PTSD running like an open sore between generations.”

When asked how he thought The Names of Rivers is relevant to America’s recent combat veterans, Buckman said, “I believe that today’s OEF/OIF veterans are much like Luke. He could have been in 1983 Beirut, which was the first major attack by an Islamic terror group on a hard American target, the Marine Barracks 1983. I know from teaching OEF/OIF veterans freshman composition at Chicago junior colleges as a Cold War paratrooper that many young vets from the recent crusade come from the same social conditions as teenagers from the divorce frenzy of the late 70s and 80s laced with untreated PTSD as when I served in the 1980s ‘mellow yellow’ period. I am much older, born in 1967, but my experience teaching OEF/OIF vets and hearing them talk about Korean War veteran grandfathers and Vietnam veteran fathers impresses me one way: This generation of combat veterans are full of grandpa’s and dad’s PTSD themselves. OEF/OIF didn’t escape the culture, hardship, and weird mythology that sprang up to define the wars of the American Century.”

Buckman is the Vice President and Managing Fiction Editor for Military Experience & the Arts. He has been committed since 2006, when OIF grunts started coming back in real numbers, to teaching veteran students to write college essays and mentoring veteran authors with the belief that writing can help individuals cope with their trauma. “Writing has historical credibility in helping veterans not only define their individual PTS into a manageable narrative that will need periodic adjustment over time, but it has made many veteran writers, who never dreamed they would be writers, become respected authors. Homer must have been a soldier.” Buckman challenges veteran writers and students to read books like The Iliad and The Odyssey, asking them if they identify with the characters, Achilles’ rage or Priam’s profound mourning. Most grunt veterans answered with a resounding “every single verse.” He later encourages them all to read authors like Crane, Hemmingway, Herr, Heinemann, O’Brien and Vonnegut to show them that veterans have been writing from pre-history until present day. “I have seen that the simple act of disciplined running, reading, and writing about the war has brought many vets back from real severe diagnoses. If they have these books close, they are never alone. If they discipline themselves to write well every day and do PT, they will begin to understand their experience not as an overwhelming mixture of experience and emotional reactions, but as parts of a larger story that they can begin to write and assemble. I hope that more veterans will use our services at MEA.”

The Names of Rivers is an important novel for all generations of veterans to read and embrace. It is of the same caliber of any of the novels that Buckman recommends to his students and veteran writers and is an outstanding example of the real contribution that veterans have given the literary arts. Buckman’s raw honesty and genuine, heartfelt sincerity come through in his writing, invoking the entire gamut of human emotions in the reader, setting a standard for all writers – veterans and otherwise – to follow.

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.

Living With Killing: Lifting the Weight of Moral Injury

by David P. Ervin

In “What’s It Like to Kill Someone?” Travis Switalski delved into the depths of an important question. He answered it adeptly, employing the kind of candidness that makes that conversation enlightening and worthwhile. It’s a dialogue that we are afraid to have with ourselves, much less with the vast majority of the society in which we live. It is a necessary one. And, of course, like any provocative piece of writing, he also raised another important question.

What’s it like to live with killing in war?

We live with it by going through a crucible of sorts, navigating our way through some dark psychological terrain. As Switalski wrote, calculated indoctrination and reflexes enable us to cross the threshold initially. Then the abstract justifies it for a time. For in doing this deed we have followed the rules of war. We have preserved the safety of our fellow soldiers. We’ve fulfilled our duty. Overall, we’ve participated in an act of violence that’s morally sanctioned by the state, something done to advance an endeavor intended to liberate others and protect our country. For a while, those metrics apply – long enough, at least, drive on and finish the mission.

But after a while those aren’t the means by which we measure ourselves and our conduct. We don’t look to them in the middle of the night to comfort ourselves.

In order to kill we tapped into something in ourselves that is frightening and grotesque. When the context of training, duty, and politics is stripped away, we feel we’ve perpetrated something that is terribly wrong. We deprived people of something far more precious than any number of abstract ideals. We deprived them of their life. We know that despite the goal of providing people with freedom we showered them with violence, misery, and bloodshed. It’s enough to shatter our beliefs about the world and our place in it, and it does. Killing can create a phenomenon known as ‘moral injury.’ It’s defined as the psychological impact of transgressing core human values and beliefs.

That is the part we don’t live with. Dealing with a moral injury fosters a plethora of damaging behaviors and beliefs. Overall, we consciously stop believing we deserve life, especially any semblance of a good one. It can be a major catalyst of suicide. Even if not taken to that extreme, it impacts us in more subtle ways. We sabotage relationships and isolate ourselves from the world because we feel our souls are somehow poisoned. We have a peculiar tendency to believe that anything good that happens in our life is a mistake that requires correction. We think any good fortune is an anomaly because the world is an inherently malevolent place. You could say that it darkens our horizons.

But it doesn’t have to.

Someone once told me that, “You should be the best man you can be because that is the most real way that you can provide justice in an unjust world.” Those words have resonated deeply, and I think of them often. There is more truth in that statement than there is in the belief that we don’t deserve to see the brighter side of life. And there is, in fact, a way to cement that more positive mindset.

The real atonement for perpetrating and witnessing such horrors is to transcend them. They can – and probably should – define us for the rest of our lives, but how we shape that definition is up to us. We can regain our belief in the goodness in ourselves and in others by being a good person and serving selflessly. There is a multitude of ways to do so. We can be helpful to our neighbors, generous with our time, and magnanimous in our daily conduct. We can volunteer in the community or simply be a comfort to someone going through rough times. By engaging in the type of altruism that makes the world a better place we can see that it is not all so dark. We can carve out a small place in it that we know is good.

By guiding others to a brighter place we’ve helped create, maybe one day we’ll find ourselves in it. Of course, even if we don’t, we’ll know that in our time we’ve given the world something more than misery and bloodshed. Above all, we’ll know that there’s something good in ourselves to give.

Blasted by Adversity

Excerpted from Blasted by Adversity: the Making of a Wounded Warrior, which chronicles Army SSG Luke Murphy’s two tours with the 101st Airborne Division, his recovery from an IED blast that took his leg, and his advocacy for wounded service members.

1_SSGMurphyInAshercat_ER — SSG Luke Murphy

April 24, 2006, the anniversary of Troy Jenkins’s death, three years earlier. Since he was blown up, that day had been bad for me. I didn’t want to be around people, I drank too much. I didn’t really know how to deal with it. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it because none of my buddies had been there. And the guys who were there were wounded and had moved on.

This day was shaping up to be just as bad. Our assignment was to guard FBI and CIA agents while they tried to identify mass graves as evidence against Saddam Hussein. Saddam didn’t like the Shiites, and Sadr City was Shiite central. He had murdered many and piled them in mass graves, so we were in a dump digging through trash trying to find bodies as little kids ran up and threw bricks at us. This was not a typical infantry mission, and I had a bad feeling about it, but you don’t ask questions.

Later that evening, back at the base, we were told we needed to go back into the city and recover a truck that had broken down. “Hey, sir, this is not us,” I told the lieutenant. “Please send somebody else.”

“Sergeant,” he said, “this is something we’ve got to do.”

“Lieutenant, would you just sit down for a second?” I finally told it to him straight, explained to him the meaning of the day, how Troy had died three years earlier. I told him how it affected me, and he listened, then said, “We’ve got to go anyway.” That was it. I resigned myself. Okay, we’re going.

It was close to midnight by the time we recovered the truck, but after working twenty-three hours straight without sleep. Our convoy was on the way out of the city on a road called Route Predator. That’s when I saw the flash.

After the blast and my realization that I’d lost at least one leg, I saw my driver, Shane Irwin, trying to put the vehicle in park because the brakes weren’t working. The round that went through me had lodged in the transmission. Military Humvees are really wide, not like the civilian ones. There’s probably six feet from the driver to passenger side, plus there’s all kinds of gear in between. So even though I was screaming, “Crash the truck! Crash the truck!” Irwin couldn’t hear me. A fire blazed behind our seats, and we couldn’t breathe. I saw him open the door; he wanted to jump. I realized, If this guy jumps, we are done. Then Irwin looked around in the vehicle and shut the door; he chose to stay in the fire. I remember thinking, Thank you, Irwin. Thank you. I can’t imagine what courage it took to stay in a fire and burn up rather than leave his men. When Irwin did finally crash into the wall, the force of the wreck almost knocked me out. I tried opening the door, but the blast had buckled it, and it was also blocked by the wall. I tried shouldering it and managed to knock it off the hinges. It’s hard to shove against a door when you don’t have legs to push with. When it fell open, I rolled out on my face and crawled what felt like a mile, though it was probably only nine feet. I had lost a lot of blood, my right leg was gone, and my left leg was blown in half, hanging by skin. Irwin was the first one to get to me, and he said he was getting help. I heard the medic, Ian Gallegos, moving from guy to guy, giving directions. When he got to me, he knelt and took off his huge backpack, filled with medical equipment. That told me triage had started; I was pretty sure I was the worst hit.

“How you doing, Murph?” Gallegos asked.

“I’m fine,” I responded.

“Do you need morphine?”

“No.”

“Good, he said, “because I wasn’t going to give it to you anyway.” He kind of laughed.

Gallegos was cool and didn’t show any sign of stress. You can’t teach that. Maybe they try in medic training, but putting it into practice is entirely different. One minute Staff Sergeant Murphy is walking and talking and fine. The next minute, he’s lying there smudged in black with just his femur hanging out from one leg, and mangled with bones from the other. The air smelled of blood and burned meat, and gunpowder and sulfur from the bomb. We were not sure the threat had subsided. Some of the young soldiers were freaking out, but the leaders were doing great, their responses flawless. And here was the medic cracking jokes.

There was no time for IVs, just a tourniquet to stop the blood, a quick check to make sure I’m breathing, and get me back to the trauma docs. As we drove onto the base, I saw the medevac coming down, but our vehicle turned the opposite direction. I thought, Guys, there’s my bird. Why are we going that way? My mind wasn’t one hundred percent sharp. I knew my life was on the line, that golden hour, and I knew I wanted to get on that flight.

They took us to an area I’d never been. I never expected to see every doc in the whole battalion in that tent. Doc Tenario, who had worked on Troy Jenkins, was working on me. They were checking tourniquets, getting IVs started, getting our paperwork together. We ended up being the worst our company would see the whole deployment.

A lot could still go wrong, and it almost did. They got us to the bird, and since I was the worst injured, they put me on last. The medevac Black Hawk choppers are painted green with a red cross on the side, and they’re not set up for carrying troops, only stretchers. Besides the pilot, there’s a crew chief who also serves as the in-flight medic and the gunner. With the long cable attached to the headset, he could barely get around and check on the patients being transported. It took him a minute or two to get all of us strapped down. In case the pilot had to do some evasive maneuvers, to dodge an RPG gunfire, they didn’t want us slamming into a wall.

The gunner put the oxygen mask on me but didn’t turn on the air. I lay there doing the fish face, sucking plastic. With my arms were strapped down, I couldn’t do anything, and the choppers are so loud, he’d never hear me anyway. As I tried to breath, all I could think was, You bastard, turn on the air! The chopper lifted off, and I knew I was going to pass out soon. He finally looked back at me, and his eyes lit up when he realized his error. He started the oxygen, and I was too weak to admonish him. I had nearly died, for the second time that night.

LukeAndBella_Dock — SSG Luke Murphy and his dog, Bella

Blasted by Adversity: The Making of a Wounded Warrior is currently available on Amazon. You can read more about the author on his website.