MEA Editors |

Book Review: The Life of Ling Ling, by Jerad Alexander

Fans of Military Experience and the Arts,

Click on the cover to purchase The Life of Ling Ling on Amazon for $2.99

We are proud to inform you of the release of Jerad W. Alexander’s first novella, The Life of Ling Ling.

Alexander is a writer and the Associate Editor of The Blue Falcon: A Journal of Military Fiction and editor-at-large for The Journal of Military Experience. From 1998-2006 he served as a U.S. Marine infantryman and combat correspondent with deployments to the Mediterranean, the Horn of Africa, and Iraq. He currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Life of Ling Ling is an”MEA Sponsored Publication,” a work of substantial length–a novella or short memoir–that receives editorial, production, and promotional assistance from the staff of Military Experience and the Arts. MEA Sponsored Publications represent the mission of “bridging the gap between military and civilian cultures through creative expression and scholarship” and all rights revert to the author upon publication. Authors selected for MEA sponsorship agree to support our mission by donating a portion of their proceeds to our publication and symposium efforts or, in the case of Alexander, by mentoring the works of fellow veteran authors and editorial service with Blue Falcon.

Alexander’s novella tells the story of one Marine’s choice to forgo his humanity and the shocking event that thrusts it back upon him in the form of a little Iraqi girl. Iraq War veteran Jerad W. Alexander proposes absurdity as the vantage point of postmodern troops at war and obscenity as the loudspeaker through which they must speak. The author’s writing reflects this reality, chiefly, through the appropriation of cultural fragmentation—a blowup doll named “Backdoor Beauty,” contraband airline liquor, cruising college bars, and the precise deployment of music, films, colloquialisms and references to life during the first half of the Iraq War—as a means of bringing together Marines and those of the same generation, teaching them war’s hard truths: the intermingling of gear, bodies, and blood at the epicenter of an IED blast, the discovery of one’s “true purpose” in a battle with an enemy sniper, and “grimy apparitions of someone else climbing up [a] wife’s leg.”

Alexander’s protagonist, a Marine named Sergeant Square, mirrors the desolate dogs he and his platoonmates meet near the Euphrates: “A product of its environment … mad, a companion turned mean and vindictive, protecting some feeble idea of personal space, futilely avenging some supposed wrong.” And he asks the uninitiated to relate with this mindset through the glamor and bravado of youth only to turn the tables and interrogates them through Square’s wife, Crystal, who becomes a disillusioned military spouse and disappears with her husband’s money.

As Backdoor Beauty earns her salt and Square accumulates an equally abrasive amount of sand in his crevices, they, like the dogs, change into something else: Backdoor Beauty is christened “Ling Ling” while Square gambles with his life, questions authority, and becomes something “more serious, deadly,” a leader who discards “hollow” memories of home and embraces war without realizing the futility of his efforts. When Square and his platoonmates stumble upon an Iraqi atrocity so profane that even battle-hardened, deadly Marines can’t stomach it, he is forced to see through the false dichotomy of the initiated and the uninitiated, realizing the inextricability of his own humanity.

The Life of Ling Ling is suitable for pleasure reading, scholarship, or classroom instruction. It is available on Amazon Kindle for $2.99 here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Life-Ling-ebook/dp/B00CU4JOWY/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_t_1_CBQB

For those without readers, you can read it on your PC or Mac with this app:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771

Excerpt:

“Sergeant Square bought a blow-up doll. It was called the “Backdoor Beauty” and it cost $49.99 plus shipping. He did it impulsively, for sheer amusement, and openly admitted to himself that he would have had neither the time nor inclination to look for it at all if only his wife had been home to take his call. He was completely comfortable with that excuse.”

We hope you enjoy Alexander’s work. This ebook is the first of many MEA Sponsored Publications that we hope to deliver to the masses. By helping talented authors like Jerad W. Alexander, we hope to break down barriers to publication and storytelling, enabling veterans of all generations to be heard. Thank you for your continued support of Military Experience and the Arts and the creative endeavors of our contributors and staff members.

Cordially,

MEA President

New York Times Features MEA Publications, Authors

The New York Times‘s Cecilia Capuzzi Simon recently highlighted the community-building, therapeutic outreach of Military Experience and the Arts in her article, WARRIOR VOICES: Veterans learn to write the words they could not speak.

In the article, Simon features work from several MEA authors, including Micah Owen, holding these examples up alongside other veteran authors and communities such as Veterans Writing Project’s Ronn Capps and Kate Hoit, and Army of Dude’s Alex Horton:

Mr. Owen’s story for the class — his first attempt at writing, beyond song lyrics — is a dramatic account of his convoy being ambushed in Fallujah. It was published in the first volume of Mr. Martin’s Journal of Military Experience, and it was the first time Mr. Owen’s family had heard about his military service. “I hardly ever spoke about it with them,” he says. “This was a way for my family to know what I had done.”

After reading the story, his mother cried. Mr. Owen urged his father, a Vietnam veteran, to write down the experiences he had never spoken of. At first his father balked. But in the second volume of the journal, there are two Owen essays, one by father and one by son.

he article discusses the use of writing and art as a means of healing in the wake of recent wars with a specific focus on the communities being forged out of the common purpose of creative expression…Read more.

The Arts and the Military: Dominic Fredianelli, by Tara Leigh Tappert

The work to launch the Arts and the Military/Arts, Military + Healing (AMH) week in the Washington, DC area this past May is beginning to do what we all had hoped it would do — the event is inspiring new and exciting ventures throughout the country, as well as bringing tremendous press coverage to the work of Combat Paper Project.

–

On view this fall were two Combat Paper Project exhibitions in galleries at two different campuses of the University of Maryland:

–

Click here and here to view the gallaries.

–

Denise Merringolo, a public history professor who teaches at the Baltimore campus, attended the AMH event at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and School of Art + Design. Moved by the Combat Paper exhibition on view at the Corcoran, shortly thereafter she began pursuing the possibility of a show on the UMBC campus for the fall, 2012 semester. Her show then propelled Jason Hughes, a student curator and artist on the College Park campus, to request another Combat Paper show for the Stamp Gallery in the student union. On December 5, 2012, an amazing critique of the UMBC exhibit, written by Bret Mccabe, was published in the Baltimore City Paper.

–

Mccabe began his review with a piece created by veteran/artist Dominic Fredanielli who participated in the Corcoran’s Combat Paper Project workshop this past May. The genesis of Dom’s involvement in the Arts and the Military/AMH event began nearly a year earlier when I attended the 2011 Silverdocs film festival and saw the Emmy award winning Where Soldiers Come From.

–

Set in a small town in Northern Michigan, and in the mountains of Afghanistan, the film follows the four-year journey of childhood friends, including Dom, who return as 23-year-old veterans dealing with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and PTSD. While this documentary beautifully captures the coming of age of these young men, there is another story woven like a “red thread” through the film — the artwork of Dominic Fredianelli and how he uses art making to cope with his war experiences. Care 4 Me . . . I’ll Remember You is the piece Dom made in the Corcoran’s Combat Paper Project workshop. It is a memento mori to his friend Josh Wheeler who went to war but did not make his way through the trauma when he came back home. Josh was killed in a car accident. He is acknowledged in the closing credits of Where Soldiers Come From, and also in Dom’s Care 4 Me . . . I’ll Remember You, an amazing image on Combat Paper that is now a part of the Combat Paper Project Exhibitions Collection.

–

Dominic is continuing to work as a practicing artist. Since the Arts and the Military/AMH week he has created murals in Chicago and in Santa Barbara — the first for the National Veterans Art Museum and the second for the University of California at Santa Barbara.

–

We thank all our collaborators and sponsors who support the Arts and Military/AMH event, and whose mission is to help those service members and veterans dealing with both visible and invisible wounds of war.

–

Tara Leigh Tappert, JME Art Editor and Founder, The Arts and the Military.

Book Review: The Living and the Dead – Brian Mockenhaupt

The Living and the Dead: War, Friendship and the Battles that Never End

“The worst feeling,” Sergeant Tom Whorl scribbles in a small spiral notebook, “is not knowing when your last step will be. That’s what takes a toll on your brain.” With those simple words, he captures the gut-wrenching day-to-day, life-and-death struggles and triumphs of the men of Patrol Base Dakota, fighting a war that many have all but forgotten and hear little about, save for sound bites about troop drawdowns and defense budgets. Their story unfolds at a Marine encampment in southern Afghanistan, but it could be the story of any young men in any war, trying to do their job when doing their job might mean, at any second, losing their lives—or watching their best friends lose theirs.

In The Living and the Dead, acclaimed journalist and Iraq War veteran Brian Mockenhaupt tells the gripping true story of three close friends—Tom, Ian, and Jimmy—and the reality of how twenty-first-century combat plays out in the lives of those in the fight. How walking through the Afghan countryside is a nerve-wracking gamble as they hunt for cleverly hidden explosives that can tear a man in half. How the families back home live in dread of men in uniform showing up at their front doors with news too grim to imagine. How the consequences of a split-second decision can replay over and over in a Marine’s mind and haunt him for the rest of his days. And how those who sign up to do democracy’s dirty work somehow manage to endure the unendurable.

The Living and the Dead is a moving and timeless account of bravery, friendship, struggle, and sacrifice in the face of unimaginable tests. It is an unforgettable tale of battles that continue to rage long after the final shot has been fired.

Brian Mockenhaupt is a contributing editor at Esquire and Reader’s Digest and is the nonfiction editor at the Journal of Military Experience. He writes regularly for The Atlantic and Outside. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Pacific Standard, Chicago magazine and Backpacker. He served two tours in Iraq as an infantryman with the 10^th Mountain Division. Since leaving the U.S. Army in 2005, he has written extensively on military and veteran affairs, reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq, hometowns, and hospitals, and even Mt. Kilimanjaro, which he climbed with a former soldier blinded by a bomb in Baghdad. Prior to joining the Army, he worked as a newspaper reporter in the United States and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, at The Cambodia Daily, an English-language newspaper, and as a contributing reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review, reporting from Cambodia, Burma and South Korea. He studied journalism at Northwestern University and has an MFA in creative non-fiction from Goucher College.