On a spring day in 1984 my grandfather, Leonard Clark, whom we all called Papaw, gathered his children, grandchildren, and friends around a little building on a patch of land near the French Broad River outside of Asheville, North Carolina – a place formerly known as the Snake Farm – to dedicate a tiny church he called the Little Brookside Chapel.  A preacher, one of Papaw’s drinking buddy’s sons, said a few words at the dedication; Papaw said he was “one of the good ones.” The Little Brookside Chapel was a small structure with white painted wood siding, narrow windows, and two rows of tiny pews inside that could seat about twelve people. At thirteen years of age, I didn’t want to spend my Saturday at a church dedication, and beyond that, I couldn’t understand why Papaw wanted to build a church in the first place.

Growing up in Barnardsville, North Carolina, and later settling in Woodfin, Papaw was a master of many trades. He served in the Marine Corps., worked as a baker, served as a policemen for the City of Asheville, worked as a prison corrections officer,  established his own hydraulics sales and repair business, and opened a convenience store, where on multiple occasions I saw him give groceries to poor folk who came in the store with children hugging their legs.  Papaw was a Mason, a real estate investor, a landlord, a city Alderman and even a songwriter, penning and recording a Christmas song called “Happy Magic Christmas” that is in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.  None of this explained why he was a building a church; Papaw never went to church.  He didn’t even like church.

To say Papaw had a complicated relationship with religion is a serious understatement.  When my sister, who had married a preacher, had problems in her marriage, my grandfather reminded her that he had warned her against the union, that she had been a “damned fool” to marry a “sorry preacher,” and that she would have been better off picking up a fella from a bar.  He often mocked how divorced people took up religion after their marriages failed. My parents, having divorced when I was 3, were both active in their churches and Papaw said they’d gone “plum church crazy.”  He would talk about how one could find God out in nature or in almost any place on earth, except a church.  At the same time, he would talk about how Jesus had blessed him over and over in his life.

You see, papaw didn’t dislike Christ. He disliked Christians.  Maybe not all of them, but damn near most.  He was an expert at finding and pointing out hypocrisy on the part of men of the cloth, or people in local congregations who were in church on Sunday morning, but anything but Christ-like Monday through Saturday. Papaw hated hypocrisy.  He would say, “I might be a real son of a bitch, but at least I’m honest.”  Once when a televangelist was exposed on the news for having an affair, Papaw jumped up from his seat and yelled with delight at the television.

So where did Papaw get the idea to build a church? In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, my grandfather took many vacations to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, along the seemingly endless stretch of highway toward Myrtle Beach, my grandfather stumbled upon a tiny church.  The church was in Conway, South Carolina, where it still stands – it is known as The Traveler’s Chapel. Built in 1972, the church is one of the smallest in the United States.  With narrow pews that will seat 12 people, the church is always open, with a big guestbook placed by the door for folks to sign.  So inspired was Papaw by the little Traveler’s Chapel, that he decided a few years later to build a similar church on land he owned on New Stock Road near Weaverville.  Because the site he chose had a small stream beside it, he named the church the Little Brookside Chapel.  Like the Traveler’s Chapel, Papaw put a white picket fence out front.

Of all his accomplishments, building the Little Brookside Chapel gave Papaw the most pride.  He would often talk to me about the church, and how he built it for sinners.  “Drunks and whores” are welcome to the church, he’d say, and “no one can judge them or look down their long noses at them.” He was proud they could come to the church anytime they wanted, as the church was open 24 hours a day.  The lights inside and outside of the church were always on, and my grandmother, Christina Clark, decorated the church with a nativity scene each Christmas. Papaw would say, “There won’t be no fighting in my church, ‘cause there ain’t no preachers.”

To understand the man and his animosity toward church, it is necessary to go back. Way back.  Papaw grew up in the middle of the Great Depression and he grew up poor. So poor that the one room shelter used by his family had no running water and the weather came in through cracks in the roof and walls on the children as the huddled in bed at night.  I will never forget his description of how in a hard snow, there would be lines of snow across the floor of their home, including across his bed. As a young boy, he would cajole as many cats as he could under the pile of covers to help keep his feet warm.  In this backdrop of poverty, the family’s misfortunes were compounded when Papaw’s father, my great-grandfather, went to prison.  When this happened, Papaw said everyone turned their backs on the family and left his mother and her children to fend for themselves.  Nowhere was this more pronounced than when his mother took her children to church. People at the church turned up their noses at the poor hillbilly children sitting on the pews in shoes with holes that showed sock feet. My grandfather told stories of how families would cross to the other side of the street if his mother and siblings were passing.  The churches, he felt, had been somewhat kinder to his mother when she was a longsuffering wife with a husband who had trouble with the bottle.  Sure she and her children were trash, but they made a nice a charity case for the church.  However, when Papaw’s dad went to prison, that all ended.

So the little church Papaw had found on his way to Myrtle Beach had intrigued him.  It was a church without the pain of his religious experience.  It was a church without people, just a place you could get off by yourself and pray.  In building the Little Brookside Chapel, he built a church for himself and others, but was also trying to heal an old wound that had festered over the years.  He had been deeply hurt seeing his mother treated poorly by “church people” but somehow he had never blamed God for this, understanding Psalm 118 better than most:  “It is better to trust in the lord than to put confidence in man.”  With the chapel, it was as if he found a kind of redemption and wanted the world to share in it.

In the late 1980’s and through the 1990’s the church became a popular community fixture, and several guest books were filled up over the years from folks who were passing through or heard about the chapel. There were numerous weddings at the tiny church. In the early 2000’s the church was vandalized repeatedly.  “Don’t they see,” I remember Papaw saying, “This church is for all the people! It don’t matter what you believe.”  He fixed the chapel repeatedly, had it repainted and kept it open for the sinners and tourists who might have a need.  Papaw would say that the vandals probably hated church because they had been looked down on, and that if they knew him they might have a lot in common.  In April of 2005, arsonists burnt the church to the ground.  After that, I saw the spark in my grandfather’s eyes begin to dim. He did not rebuild the church.  “Those bastards will just burn it down again,” he explained.  The Asheville-Buncombe County Arson Task Force never had any leads in the fire. The church had been open 24 hours a day, seven days a week for more than 21 years.

For many believers church is not just a building in which you pray.  For many, attending church is also about community, about making connections with other people.  Part of me mourns that my grandfather never found a church community where he found this kind of connection. But when I think about it, he found community in other ways. He loved to go fishing with drinking buddies, although it might be more accurate to say he loved to go drinking with fishing buddies.  He kept up with some of the policemen he’d served with, became involved in Woodfin politics, and had a large family with many grandchildren and great grandchildren to keep him busy.  He also loved animals, rescuing abandoned feral cats from the neighborhood, which he then chastised constantly for attacking the birds that flocked to his yard for the dozens of birdfeeders he’d installed and kept full.

We lost Papaw in October of 2012.  He’d lived his whole life in the mountains of North Carolina, where his ancestors settled after coming from Scotland before the Revolutionary War.  For the last several years of his life, he talked wistfully about the chapel, and it was such a fixture in his life that his sons, upon his death, had his and his wife’s tombstone engraved with an image of the chapel.

I visited the site of the Little Brookside Chapel last winter.  Back away from the church site there was a section of the little white picket fence that used to stand out front.  A sign from the church was also on the property, faded by time, the letters barely legible.  As I walked back along the creek behind where the church once stood I saw the wooden cross my grandfather had mounted between two large creek rocks there on the bank. It still stands there, defiant, marking a place where even a sinner like me can get close to God and say a prayer, unjudged by man.

In the summer of 1968, while starting several of the essays that would comprise her collection The White Album, Joan Didion began to suffer from a series of unexplained physical and emotional ailments. After an attack of “vertigo and nausea,” she underwent a battery of tests at the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, CA. In The White Album’s title essay, she shares some of the professionals’ feedback:

Patient’s [results]… emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitable to conflict and failure…

A month later, Didion was named a Los Angeles Times “Woman of the Year.” It did not seem to matter to her much. Instead, what she remembers of that year:

I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, and also the first reports from My Lai [in which more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, were murdered by American soldiers]. I reread all of George Orwell…[and also] the story of Betty Lansdown Fouquet, a 26-year-old woman with faded blond hair who put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit. The child…[rescued twelve hours later] reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for “a long time.” Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew.

She adds, a few pages later: “By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

*

Hyper-awareness has always been both Joan Didion’s secret weapon and her hamartia. Circa 1968, being seemingly everywhere at once, observing and recording at an unforgiving pace, there is no way the world could not have felt kaleidoscopic, splintered. In THE WHITE ALBUM, she attends The Doors’ recording sessions (but not for long), visits Huey Newton in jail and Eldridge Cleaver under house arrest. She analyzes the California Governor’s mansion, and the Getty Museum (which she sees as an artistic flub, “a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them least”); she rhapsodizes about water. The Manson murders, happening just down the street to people like her and the subject of her rumination in the title essay, seem a symptom of this summer of dread.

*

That summer, Didion also, improbably, starts watching biker films, a habit she continues over the next two years. “A successful bike movie,” she declares, “is a perfect Rorschach of its audience.”

I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook. I saw Hell’s Angels on Wheels and Hell’s Angels ’69. I saw Run Angel Run and The Glory Stompers and The Losers. I saw The Wild Angels, I saw Violent Angels, I saw The Savage Seven and I saw The Cycle Savages. I was not even sure why I kept going.

But she does know why she keeps going, and despite the humor of this absurd list and the thought of Joan Didion investing the time to consume it all (did she ever remove her sunglasses?), she begins to wonder what these storylines are giving their audience. “The senseless insouciance of all the characters in a world of routine stompings and casual death takes on a logic better left unplumbed,” she muses.

But then, of course, she plumbs it, and what she observes, given the current political climate, feels almost prescient.

I suppose I kept going to these movies because there on the screen was some news I was not getting from the New York Times. I began to think I was seeing ideograms of the future…to apprehend the extent to which the toleration of small irritations is no longer a trait much admired in America, the extent to which a nonexistent frustration threshold is not seen as psychopathic but a ‘right.’

I begin to imagine if the heroes of these bike movies had had Twitter. I decide to stop imagining that. They are people, Didion writes in closing, “whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made. [These people] are, increasingly, everywhere, and their style is that of an entire generation.”

*

Throughout all these mental rovings runs Didion’s usual vein of skepticism and aloofness. Danger, for her, is personal, never institutional. It’s the threatening man on the street or the hippie at the door with a knife. She’s not a revolutionary, not exactly a liberal (though she was one of the first to, in a 17,000-word essay for the New York Review of Books, advocate for the innocence of the falsely-accused Central Park Five). Visiting Huey Newton in jail, she mentions that “the small room was hot and the fluorescent light hurt my eyes.” A reader can’t help but think, at least for an instant, Suck it up, Joan! But mere pages later she’s on the campus of San Francisco State, which has been temporarily shut down by race riots, and her shrewd eye sees the truth: “Here at San Francisco State only the black militants could be construed as serious…Meanwhile the white radicals could see themselves, on an investment of virtually nothing, as urban guerrillas.”

*

Here in the summer of 2019, I can, in at least some minor ways, relate to the dread Joan Didion felt in the summer of ‘68. Today, it is August 10^th. On the third of this month, 20 people were killed and 26 others injured by a gunman who walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas at ten-thirty in the morning and began firing with a semi-automatic Kalashnikov-style rifle, aiming at anyone he suspected to be Hispanic. Hours later, nine more people were killed and 27 injured in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio. The Proud Boys are marching in Portland and the President of the United States has denounced only those who’ve come out to oppose them. (It should be noted that these are grown men who call themselves “boys,” and that is the least alarming thing about them.) A little over a week ago I watched Private First Class Glendon Oakley, a US soldier who had saved several children during the El Paso shooting and wept openly about not having been able to save more, stand at parade rest while the President pointed at him on live television and said, “The whole world knows who you are now, right? So you’ll be a movie star, the way you look. That’ll be next, right?”

Oakley looked stricken. “Yes, sir,” he said.

*

Now it’s August 13^th and there is a rally at the police station in downtown Colorado Springs. Ten days prior—the same day as El Paso—nineteen-year-old De’Von Bailey was shot seven times in the back while fleeing Colorado Springs police. I watch the unbearable video, circulating on the local news outlets, taken from an apartment security camera across the street. De’Von Bailey, young, short-haired, skinny as my son, runs across a sweep of pavement just like any you’d see in any suburban town. He doesn’t pull a weapon or even turn back to look over his shoulder. Two armed cops enter the frame not far behind him. Then, he falls, skidding in a seated position, staying briefly upright. For a moment, from this distance, in a still image, he could be merely relaxing, sitting with one arm propped behind him. Then he crumples forward and the police close in, cuffing his hands behind his back before rendering aid. In the hospital, De’Von Bailey dies.

Today, the attorneys for De’Von Bailey’s parents are holding a press conference outside the police station downtown. The Pike’s Peak Justice and Peace Committee has put out a call for citizens to show their support for the Baileys and their demand for an unbiased investigation. I like the Justice and Peace Committee, a group of tenacious old-timers who sometimes, at unpredictable intervals, convene to hold a giant sign in front of the Air Force Academy that reads, “WHAT ABOUT THE PEACE ACADEMY?” They mostly get yelled at from car windows. They have used the same sign for years; the phone number at the bottom has been whited over and repainted several times; it is canvas, more than five feet tall and probably ten feet long, printed with perfect spacing and propped by two wooden posts, so as to be quickly unrolled and then rolled back together for a quick exit as necessary. I joined them in a protest once, this past April, when Donald Trump spoke at the Air Force Academy commencement. I held one end of their sign. I was the only military spouse there, though there were a couple of long-haired Vietnam-era veterans. A man offered me eight hundred dollars to help pay our rent if my husband would divest from the military. “Just until he can find other work,” he said. He said he was helping another service member get out now, a chaplain. This man was incredibly earnest, thin, gray-haired, in jeans and a flannel shirt, with no pains taken over shaving or hygiene; I believed him. I thanked him, knowing full well my husband, an officer, is comfortable in his job and does not want to leave, knowing this man would be disappointed in what that says about us; and he shook my hand and said to call him, the church would help get us out when we were ready. I did not know what church he meant, but I am sure its people are good.

So if the Justice and Peace Committee wants me to show up for De’Von Bailey’s family, I will. I scrawl a hasty sign on a piece of foam core I bought at King Soopers: “NO POLICE BRUTALITY.” On an investment of virtually nothing, I drive downtown to the corner of Nevada and Rio Grande to see the street blocked off with traffic cones and police cars, a crowd visible already in front of the brick police station. Parking on a side street, I take my sign and head there on foot, along sidewalks with cracked concrete and sun-bleached grass growing up between the paving.  I try to face the words on the sign away from scrutinizing traffic. I pass the bail bonds shop from which Dustin and Justin Brooks, 33-year-old twins, set forth a week prior, wearing bulletproof vests and brandishing their handguns, to confront these same protestors. (Dustin and Justin Brooks are what Joan Didion might call men with an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made.) That was three days after De’Von Bailey’s murder. The brothers intimidated the predominantly black gathering until finally being arrested, shouting “All lives matter!” as their hands were pulled behind their backs. Seventeen riot police were dispatched in the skirmish, standing behind plexiglass shields. Hopefully the irony was not lost on anyone that a black boy had been killed for running from police unarmed and two white men could walk around waving handguns and shouting in a crowded area and simply be arrested, off to live another day. If the Dustin-Justin brothers hadn’t been shouting, they may not even have been arrested. Colorado is an open-carry state. Who feels safe in an open-carry state varies widely depending upon circumstance. On November 27, 2015, shortly after we moved here, an armed, agitated older white man was seen pacing around outside the CO Springs Planned Parenthood building at 11:30 a.m. Concerned employees and passers-by called the police, but were told there was nothing they could do. “It’s an open-carry state,” police said. Eight minutes later, the man, 57-year-old Robert Lewis Dear, Jr., burst into the building, shooting three people dead and wounding nine others. One of the employees killed was a Filipina-born Navy wife, who had enjoyed her new job in the Springs, her husband’s duty station. The Planned Parenthood location here has been changed at least three times, and the address is not advertised on their web site.

All this crosses my mind as I walk toward the police station. I do not feel at all in danger, and I know that statistically, I am very safe – far safer in virtually any situation than the other protestors, mostly people of color, gathered on the sloping space of lawn. Still, because of men like Dustin and Justin Brooks and Robert Lewis Dear, Jr., I have left my children at home.

*

The rally is peaceful, and sad. Greg Bailey and Delisha Searcy speak about the loss of their son. Their lawyers reiterate a demand for an independent investigation. Young boys hold signs: “Please Let Me Live Past 19.” “Hands Up Don’t Shoot.” Several signs say, “Imagine If It Were Your Son.” The black families console one another, embracing. Three black reverends are there. Their mood is markedly sadder than that of the “allies” like myself who have shown up and for whom the event, though attended with the best of intentions, could be described as almost recreational.

A prominent local Unitarian clergywoman – lean, energetic – is there in street clothes and her rainbow stole, wearing sunglasses, her short gray hair spiked. If not for the stole she might be some fitness celebrity, or a badass chef. There’s a contingent from Colorado College. A tall, thin young white man holds a sign that says, “JAIL ALL KILLER POLICE.”  The Justice and Peace Committee is scattered around (I don’t see my military-liberator friend from back in April), but they have (appropriately) left their “Peace Academy” sign at home.

After half an hour or so, as the press conference seems to be wrapping up, the crowd is less quiet, some people whispering to one another. I strain to hear the voice of an obviously distraught black woman who’s questioning the Baileys’ white attorneys.  “How do we know,” the woman is asking, “that any investigation will be impartial? How can it possibly be fair?”

(Next to me, three of the “Moms Demand” moms ask a bystander to take their picture. They turn, their blond ponytails swinging, to beam at the camera with the crowd behind them. I feel, almost desperately, that this is not the right time.)

“How will we know it’s fair,” the woman calls over the crowd, “if the committee is made up of all white men?…” Suddenly her voice catches, and a pause hangs in the air for just an instant. “…White women?”

She sounds so hopeless, so angry, so deservedly frustrated and hurt. I can feel the sharp point of tears gathering in my throat. I report this not so anyone will feel sorry for me but because it happened. I can’t hear what response the woman is given. People begin to drift away. It was the last question.

For the rest of the afternoon, I cannot get that moment out of my mind, the way the woman’s voice caught, her split second of hesitation before she said “women.” Before she said “white women.” What was it that gave her pause; was it some vestige of sisterhood-loyalty that she realized no longer applied?  I’d been hoping to briefly throw white men under the bus, let them take the fall. I wanted to huddle in my sense of at-least-some-shared-experience. It would have eased my discomfort. My discomfort does not need easing. My discomfort is no one else’s problem to solve. Anywhere from 47 to 53 percent of white women, depending on whose poll you believe, voted for the current president. 95% of black women did not. When she let the word “women” out, when she let the words “white women” out, it was the tiny slap-in-the-face of realizing the intersectionality you champion may not want you back. I am glad she said it. And for a moment– and I think it’s okay to say things we are ashamed of — I’d been hoping, so badly, that she wouldn’t.

*

That night I chat with my husband about Joan Didion and the late sixties and ask him if he thinks the upheaval we’re feeling now is anything like what people must have felt in 1968, when it must have seemed in some ways that the world was ending. He was a history major in college, so he tends to have a good perspective.

“No, not at all,” he says almost immediately. “Because think about 1968. Think about the instability. I think it was much worse then. The draft was still going strong. You could basically be called up from your own house and have to go fight a war with no choice at all.”

I recall Didion’s essay “In the Islands,” which I’ve recently finished, one section of which she spends watching the funeral of a young soldier at the military cemetery in Oahu, in the dip of an extinct volcano crater called Puowaina. He was the 101^st American killed in Vietnam that week. 1,078 in the first twelve weeks of that year. That essay, however, was written in 1970. Maybe 1968 felt somehow quaint by then. Maybe, by then, people were wishing they could go back.

“And you had Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death, RFK’s,” my husband is saying.

“And the Civil Rights Act had only been signed four years before,” I add. I have always liked brainstorming.

“Sure. Now I think it’s the onslaught of information, all this instantaneous, inflammatory news, that makes us feel that things are really unstable.”

I think he’s right. This is no summer of 1968. I start to believe that Joan Didion, less threatened by the events of the time than many, but more observant than most, held up pretty well, considering. And over time at least a few of the problems she was experiencing, some attributed to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and treated with lifelong prescriptions, waned. Others didn’t. She’s not a calm person by nature; she’s anxious; I imagine she cannot turn off her brain. She’s 84 now. She’s survived the loss of her husband and her daughter. I’m not sure how. I do know that ten years after the events she describes in the title essay of The White Album, finally completed in 1978, she ends with the admission, “writing has not helped me to see what it means.”

*

Even later that night, as she has all summer, my youngest daughter wakes me at exactly three a.m. She appears by my bed in pajama pants and a short-sleeved shirt, clutching her stuffed animal. The animals change nightly. Tonight it is Joey, a seafoam-green sheep. She whispers, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

She does have to go to the bathroom. But more than that, this is her new ritual, exciting for her, a very mildly transgressive foray into the dark of night, in which I stumble groggily behind her and she switches on every light in the house as she goes, Joey under her arm, chatting up a storm. It’s as if the hours of sleep she’s had already have bottled up a torrent of potential communication, and she wants to tell me everything. She had a dream where she was drawing faces on paper plates. She had a dream that we all got ice cream. She talks and talks, all shaggy red hair and freckles like tiny seeds scattered across her sleep-pinked cheeks; expressive, energetic eyebrows. Her mood is tremendously good. She washes her hands, dripping water even though I say dry them all the way, please, and I switch off lights as I go to tuck her back in. She is perfectly happy to go back to sleep; this was all she needed, this little check-in under the pretense of a bodily function; and so I have made no move to curb this new habit, and in fact almost look forward to it, sometimes waking up just moments before she comes into my room.

As I start to shut her bedroom door she calls out, “I’m excited for tomorrow!”

I turn around, laughing. “Why?!”

She laughs, too. “I don’t know!”

I quietly close her door and wander into the kitchen, where there’s only one light still on, above the sink. I stand and look at the few dishes and mugs there, then out at the dark, flat yard. There is no way I can go back to sleep, and it does not, now, seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 2019.

D.H. Lawrence once claimed that the “essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” This sounds nice, something to be proud of in a masochistic sort of way; unfortunately (or fortunately), it’s not true. Americans might be hard, isolate, stoic killers at times, but what people aren’t? Here is the D.H. Lawrence quote on America that matters: “The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is the rattling of chains, always.” This is a long Lawrence way of saying something rather simple: Americans are ridiculous.

Ben Fountain, the author of the 2006 short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, the 2012 novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and the 2018 essay collection Beautiful Country Burn Again, has always been particularly good on this fundamental aspect of the American character. Here is the U.S. aid worker protagonist from Fountain’s short story “Lion’s Mouth.” 

“So here was the joke: she’d come to Salone determined to lead an authentic life and had instead discovered all the clichés in herself. She wanted to be stupid. She wanted to be rich. She wanted to be lazy, kept, indulged—this is where her fantasies took her lately, mental explosions of the guiltless life.”

Here, in “Asian Tiger,” a former pro-golfer Texan half-wittingly enables a conspiracy between billionaire venture capitalists and Malaysia’s military junta: 

“Maybe you felt the urge to scream and rage around, maybe you felt like that would be the moral thing to do, but you sucked it up and stayed cool. Because out here the critical thing was to play it straight. To go along with the joke. To concentrate, he realized with something like revulsion, on golf.”

And here are two U.S. Army grunts in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Fountain’s novel about an infantry squad invited to the Super Bowl Halftime Show at Cowboy Stadium while on leave from Iraq:

“At staged rallies, for instance, or appearances at malls, or whenever TV or radio is present, you are apt at some point to be lovingly mobbed by everyday Americans eager to show their gratitude, then other times it’s like you’re invisible, people see right through you, nothing registers. Billy and Mango stand there eating scalding hot pizza and their fame is not their own. Mainly it’s just another thing to laugh about, the floating hologram of context and cue that leads everyone around by their nose, Bravo included, but Bravo can laugh and feel somewhat superior because they know are being used.”

Fountain’s characters consistently confront this American “joke”—that wild disproportion between “the floating hologram of context and cue” and the fact that they are, theoretically, choice-making dignified and sovereign individual human beings. This disproportion has little to do with the individuals themselves, who are, almost without exception, nice guys and girls, but with the fact that they were born in a country with more wealth than God. Add in the comically lopsided distribution of that wealth, a military budget larger than the next 7 countries combined, and a 24/7 entertainment industry that makes money off every hour of our waking lives, and it is difficult to be proportional. And to act without proportion—as Lawrence well understood—is to act ridiculous. 

***

Of course, just as one can’t “indulge the mental explosions of a guiltless life” unless one periodically aspires to authenticity, one can’t truly be ridiculous unless one occasionally takes oneself Very Seriously. Hence Democracy. Hence Elections. Hence the hope that despite the various horrors of our past—the slavery, the segregation, illegal wars, and ill-gotten wealth—there might be hope of renewal, straight talk, progress, and redemption. And hence the genius of the Guardian in commissioning Fountain to report on the 2016 U.S. elections. Who better than Fountain to document our 6-billion dollar circus of platitudes, sanctimony, cynicism, and apocalypticism? Who else could trace whatever it is in the American character that made Donald Trump not only a possibility—horrifying in itself—but president of an entire country with living people in it? 

Unsurprisingly the author of Billy Lynn rises to the ridiculous occasion. The introduction to Beautiful Country Burn Again—the Robinson Jeffers-inspired title of Fountain’s collected Guardian reportage—even has a relatively straightforward historian “thesis” to explain both the last election and much of American history: 

Our founding fathers, Fountain argues, promised us “meaningful autonomy,” but we got “profit proportionate to freedom” and “plunder correlative to subjugation” instead. In other words, the more money an American takes in this country, the more freedom an American has. Which seems pleasant enough, except for the opposite also holds true, in that the more wealth an American has taken from them, the less freedom they have. Thus, despite “all the sound and fury of the most bizarre election in the country’s history,” this unhappy equation persists and belies all the talk of “meaningful autonomy,” and until this equation changes, argues Fountain, “it’s still a chump’s game.”

But Americans today, some might protest, are educated, media-savvy, aware. We have internet. Color TV. Ironic cat memes. How can we be chumps? Fountain’s fictional characters often struggle in similar ways, agonizing over how they, who went into life so clear-sighted and full of good will, became like everyone else, actively aiding whatever it was they didn’t want to be. How could they, they ask, who so despise chumps, become chumps? Yet the reason for their failure is blindingly obvious, and all the more painful for being so obvious. 

Money.

Here is Fountain in “Iowa 2016: Riding the Roadkill Express” on Hillary Clinton receiving $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs for three hours worth of speaking: 

“The human mind wasn’t built to comprehend moneys of this magnitude; we need time to behold and ponder, time for the vastness to seep into our brains like a cognitive vapor, and there remains an awesome abstraction to it all….And so the realm of political money is beyond the understanding of most of us. This many millions here, shit-tons more millions there…we numb out.”

As money wears down the moral sense of characters in much of Fountain’s fiction, so too Hillary Clinton. So too the Democratic Party. So too the American Middle Class. So too the American Working Class. So to you. So to me. Couple this impossible wealth with a trillion dollar entertainment industry—which Fountain christens the “Fantasy Industrial Complex”—and you and me not only numb out to morality but cease to believe in the possibility of reality. 

“The old distinctions start to break down, the boundary between reality and fantasy,” Fountain says in “Two American Dreams,” an essay on the 1980s, Trump’s New York, and advertisement. “It becomes increasingly difficult to know what’s real anymore, especially there, inside those screens where so much of our daily existence takes place.”

Because how can you be moral or good if you don’t see a difference between the real and the unreal? How do the words we use to weigh democratic participation and civic responsibility compete with a fantastical simulacrum that consists of color blotches and furry-Star-Wars-Guardians-of-the-Galaxy-crossover fan-fic Reddit threads? Trump, in this American Dream, becomes our Shakespeare, the playwright of a peculiarly American art form, one that does not so much privilege fantasy over reality but turns fantasy into reality, and all of us sprint drunkenly into the arms of infinite disproportion for fear of the stubbornly proportional chump game—“profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation”—staring us in the face. 

“Easy to despise the political phony,” says Fountain of Trump’s success in “The Phony in American Politics,” “at least in retrospect. The harder work is plumbing the truth of an electorate that allows the phony to succeed. He didn’t create the situation of fear; he merely exploited it. What is it about the American character that allows the long con of our politics to go on and on, electing crooks, racists, bullies, hate-mongering preachers, corporate bagmen, and bald-faced liars? Not always, but often. The history is damning. We must, on some level, want what they’re offering.”

And that right there is the really hard question.  What if we, we of the oh-so-innocent and proletariat-like 99%, want what they are offering? What if we vote for the hate-mongers and corporate bagmen and bald-faced liars because we ourselves are hate-mongers and corporate bagmen and bald-faced liars? And, if so, do we gain a sort-of freedom by voting in the hate-mongers and corporate bagmen and bald-faced liars that reflect our hateful, corporate, and prevaricatory values? Did we, despite all our handwringing over illegal invasions, foreclosures, and student debt, find meaningful autonomy in Wal-Mart hypermarkets, Dallas Cowboy halftime shows, and Netflix binges? 

***

No. If you are wondering. The answer is a no. Fountain trots out an impressive array of historical evidence to prove the extent which Roosevelt’s New Deal and post-WW II prosperity have been sabotaged, how the middle and working classes have been robbed, humiliated, and manipulated by Reaganomic Republicans and Third Way Democrats, and how what happened in 2016, insane as it was, makes logical sense, given the historical record. In this view Clinton and Trump are less enemies, and more two sides of the same $100 dollar Monopoly bill, one selling the soul, dollar for dollar, piece by piece, the other telling us to just be you because there’s no such thing as a soul anyway.

Yet —joke of jokes—we buy what they sell. This is our “floating hologram of context and cue.” These are our “mental explosions of the guiltless life.” They leave us feeling like all insane pornographic fantasies do. Empty. Like chumps. Seen but not seen. Half existing. Manipulated (but ironically so!). Eating hot pizza in a giant football stadium.

So it’s our fault. We are the chumps. We sold our neighbors and ourselves time and time again. We bought into the fantasy of the corporate bagmen and crooks, of the fantasy industrial complex, of the military industrial complex, of the neurotic self-doubting complex. We said there was no other way. We watch cowboy movies. Game of Thrones. Toy Story 4. Trump hugging the flag. Hard. Isolate. Killers.

But this is part of the fantasy, isn’t it? The lack of choice. A Trumpian vision of callow sentimentality, ironic bombast, and murderous power politics thrives on the idea of necessity—“sometimes you get what you need,” the Rolling Stones sing at all his rallies—and the delusion succeeds because it allows us to imagine there is nothing but necessity. This is the force of his fantasy. It has all the appeal of reality. We need (or want?) to believe it is real so we don’t have to be real. 

It makes sense. Being real means making difficult choices. And Fountain’s uncanny understanding of the American character extends not from his belief that we have no choices, and that we are doomed to make the wrong choice, but that choices matter, and that we have made the right choice before (during The Civil War and New Deal), and, therefore, that we can make the right choice again. He believes the conscience is a thing. A real thing. God forbid. And that this thing should not be given up for profit. The artfulness of his fiction attests to this. So too the eloquence of these collected essays. His prose bristles with confidence, in the belief that there was once an America that believed in the possibility of dignity for all men and women, an America where sovereignty might not depend on one’s bank account, and that there can be one once again.

In the collection’s final essay, “A Familiar Spirit,” Fountain recounts the long depressing history of racial violence in the U.S. He shows how the codification of “whiteness” promoted and excused the murder and plunder of our fellow Americans. He shows how it’s back with a vengeance in 2016, and how this shouldn’t surprise us, as it never really went away. It is a tragic note to end on, and would seem to confirm Trump’s “American Carnage” horror show and Lawrence’s “hard, isolate, killer” bit, to prove that behind all the sanctimony, sentimentality, and sententiousness is nothing other than a moral void of blind hopeless hate and greedy violence. 

But Fountain does not actually end there:

“Fantasy offers certainty, affirmation, instant gratification, a way to evade—for a while, at least—the reality right in front of our face. It’s so much easier that way, but perhaps we’re fast approaching the point where the fantasy can no longer be sustained. The evidence won’t shut up; it insists and persists…Consciousness—historical consciousness, political consciousness—has been raised to critical mass, and to suppress it, to try to stuff it back in the box along with all its necessary disruptions and agitations, will destroy the best part of America. The promise of it, the ongoing project.”

The evidence insists and persists. And the fact that it insists, that people like Fountain are still writing, thinking, and voting based on this evidence proves that the idea of meaningful choice-making autonomy, while not exactly thriving, is not exactly dead either. The joke is there, yes. But the joke is not everything. It is a testament to the genius of Fountain and the power of this collection that he is able to point out the disgusting and disturbing schizophrenia so fundamental to the American character without giving up on whatever is good and true about the American experiment.  

I.

Under a ceiling topped by swirling fans and surrounded by walls whose windows had no glass, the Private lay on the bed like a slab of stone as hands went about the routine tasks that evidenced that, despite all probability, he was still alive, even if no longer whole. The hands stuck a thermometer in the Private’s mouth, which opened instinctively, and fastened a cuff around his bicep, then inflated it with a whoosh, whoosh. The hands searched his wrist for a pulse, and paused a while when it found one. They patted and tugged at the bandages that covered his pelvis and thighs, not in an intruding manner but with inquiry, before retrieving the thermometer from between his lips. 

The hands were soft and delicate with smooth short fingers and nails that occasionally scraped the Private’s skin. Sometimes, before leaving him, one of the hands would rest gently for a few minutes on the mound of bandages that encased the Private’s face. Then the soft hand would seek out that small square of his cheek that had been left uncovered like a forlorn orphan. The fingers  would stroke the Private’s cheek as if to convey to him that they knew he still existed, that he still was there, somewhere under the mountain of gauze and adhesive and plaster. 

Several times a week there were other hands, meaty and calloused, that would grasp the Private and roll and lift him  on and off a bedpan. Other times they would lift him onto a gurney and set him aside while they changed the bedsheets stained with the blood and slime that oozed from his wounds or and with urine and shit when he had gone without the pan being under him. The strong hands would wipe along the exposed parts of his body with deliberation and efficiency, but with no more tenderness than if he was a  tub that needed scrubbing. While he was set aside, they would change the sheets and then lift him roughly and return him, like an item being restocked, to his place in the middle of a bed smelling of bleach. 

These things were happening to the Private in the dark silent space that he had come to inhabit ever since the day he had been on a hill in Kaesong with Randall. One minute they were trudging up the slope same as any other day, then there was a click⎯just a low barely audible sound, like snapping with butter on your fingers⎯and he had been thrown into the dark silent void. 

Sleep came and went for the Private in the dark space, but there was no rest. Sometimes in the void, the Private smelled his Momma’s buttermilk biscuits baking in the oven or his Pops’ corncob pipe rich with his special blend of tobacco that he made from the first leaves of the harvest, which he reserved for himself and cured with slices of apple or pear until it had a sweet intoxicating aroma. And when the void seemed too deep and so dark that the Private was sure he might never leave, the musky scent of sweat that rose from Marren’s cleavage just after she came held him from the abyss. All through basic training at Fort Jackson, all during the long trip to Kaesong, and the stops at places with names he could hardly pronounce or remember, and then, even into the darkness, he had remembered lying beside Marren after they’d gone at it like a couple of rabbits in heat. He  would close his eyes and suddenly he would be beside her watching her ample chest heave and inhaling her special scent. 

The Private hoped that maybe one day he would have enough strength to leave the dark void.  He was willing to go to Hell and back just so he could bury his soul in Marren’s plump soft breasts until the light came again.

*

One day the Private heard a woman’s voice singing “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,” and it was like the voice of an angel because it had been a very long time since he had heard anything at all. 

And then there were other voices⎯the fast, accented repartee that went along with the meaty calloused hands that lifted the Private on and off a pan several times a day and instructed him to piss or shit, which the Private sometimes did, and sometimes didn’t. When he didn’t, the meaty calloused hands were accompanied by foreign curses. 

Most of the time what filtered through the Private’s dark void was a general chattering and a low dirge of constant moaning. But from time to time, he would hear a car horn or a scratchy radio station, and all too often a nightmarish wail. Nighttime in the ward brought the low hum of the man who mopped down the floors with a strong ammonia odor that whipped across the Private’s nose when the man splashed the mop under his bed. Then, the man’s melodic self-serenade floated over to the Private like a jazz riff demanding to be heard. 

Less frequently, other voices came; deep and authoritative, they invariably sounded irritated as big words flowed out. These voices were accompanied by the ruffle of papers, unanswered inquiries put to the Private, hurried questions to the singing voice, a few pokes and prods and occasionally the splat of a dropped metal chart. 

“Now keep your eyes closed,” one of the deep voices said one day as it unwound the bandage that had been tight around the Private’s head and eyes. “The glare may hurt at first, but you will get used to it. You won’t notice at first that the one is not there but eventually you will realize that you have a restricted view.”  

The Private struggled to open his eye lids against the crusty muck that had built up across them and the tears that flowed without effort. He finally succeeded with the help of a warm cloth pressed to his face. After a minute, he saw a midget of a man with very hairy eyebrows looking back at him.  The doctor stretched to shine a small flashlight into Private’s remaining eye and squinted through another instrument causing his eyebrows to move like fuzzy caterpillars.  

“How’s it look, Private?” said the doctor. “Looks pretty good to me.”

The Private didn’t say anything because he didn’t know what to say. Didn’t the doctor know that at that moment anything, everything, looked good to him?

“There’s some shrapnel in your eye, but it’s too risky to try and remove it. You’re lucky that it’s not worse. Over time your vision may worsen as it moves around. Can’t say how long before you notice a difference. Could be years, could be a decade. But it’s just too risky to try and get at it.” 

The midget doctor continued with his detailed explanation. He was an animated fellow and his face and caterpillar eyebrows bounced up and down as he looked at the chart then back at the Private throwing out words that pained the Private’s still recovering ears.

In response, the Private looked all around the ward trying to figure out just what he could see, and what he could no longer see, now that he was a one-eyed jack. The room’s lights cast an irritating glare that stung like a lightning bolt. It caused him to keep closing his eye even though that was the last thing he wanted to do. 

The Private heard the singing voice approach and turned to face a petite woman the color of toast, not Negro Colored like him, but different with a generous length of wavy black hair that fell down her back like a fine mule’s tail and almond shaped eyes, very pretty. 

“Good to have you back among the seeing, Private,” the singing nurse said patting him gently on the arm. The Private looked down and saw the smooth delicate fingers that he had previously only felt. 

“Maybe now, we can get you to say something too?” the nurse teased.

The Private watched the nurse with the singing voice as she cleaned up the spent bandages and scissors and returned the metal chart to the foot of his bed. She arranged his sheets and fluffed his pillows. Pausing by the head of the Private’s bed when she’d finished, she smiled down at him. The smooth square of his cheek that had not been covered by bandages now lay in what would have passed more for a plate of raw hamburger than a face; red and craterous. 

“I guess you’ll just talk when you’re good and ready, and not before,” she said squeezing gently his hand that swallowed hers. 

Once the singing nurse had left, the Private raised himself up the little bit he could; and saw what he had before only felt, the bulkiness of a cast that started under his armpits and ran down the length of his torso. He gingerly lifted the sheet and saw other bandages, great white mounds that were fitted uncomfortably around him like a diaper (but open in the middle), and which spread down his right leg, devouring his knee but not his calf. His breath quickened at the sight and he hurriedly dropped the sheet letting it hide the mess he had become.

Later, when the Private felt that he had to pee, he wasn’t on the pan and the men with the calloused hands were long gone. They had told him someone would come if he called. But he didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly. Maybe he was so messed up from the torrent of drugs that they were giving him to dull the incessant pain that he didn’t know what he was doing. But some part of his brain told him that a man did not piss lying down flat on his back. So, he was determined to try. 

The Private struggled out of the bed and onto his feet. It was rough going because the body cast did not allow him to bend. But he  managed to get his feet to the floor and to grab hold of a chair that they had planted beside his bed. Placing all his weight on to it, he proceeded slowly like a bruised leviathan, stopping every few feet as he crept towards the light that signaled the bathroom. 

At the bathroom door the Private stopped to heave breath into his lungs, exhausted. His atrophied muscles were overwhelmed by the effort and the weight of the cast. He almost hadn’t made it the twenty feet. He backed into the bathroom pushing the door with his ample body weight. He reeled and almost lost his footing from the harsh storm of whiteness that assaulted him. Glare from the fluorescent lights bounced off the white tile that covered the floor and crawled up the walls, where it met white paint. Along one wall were a long porcelain trough and a row of sinks, all white and shiny. The Private turned the other way, towards the stalls, barely seeing through his half closed eye. It was not the manliest approach, but he needed to sit. Suddenly, a  blurry image in one of the mirrors above the sinks caught his attention. He had thought he was alone. Out of instinct, despite the pressure in his bladder, he shuffled closer to it and as he did, the image multiplied into the neighboring mirrors. He rested a hand on the sink below him and leaned into meet the image, trying to make sense of it, and gasped. Then he lost his grip on the sink, and then the chair started to slide away from him. In the next instant, just as he lost his footing, and right before the floor became stained with his urine, his consciousness also fled as he realized that the horrific one-eyed monstrosity squinting back at him from the mirrors was, of course, him. 

II.

It had been a crisp sunny day when the Private and Randall had started on the recon mission shoulder to shoulder, slowly winding their way up a craggily path on the side of a foothill that had been used by local farmers and their goats for centuries.  The hill ringed their main target, the Hook, the bigger mountain in the distance outside Kaesong where the Communists were taking a stand even though they had heard solid rumors that a ceasefire would happen any day. where Movement on the backside of the hillock had been reported and the Private and Randall were just going up to scout the area. It was to be just a quick reconnoiter mission and back down to report. They hadn’t even been told to expect mines. 

About half-way up the path narrowed, and Randall took the lead. A few minutes later, the Private bent to tie his boot and Randall got ahead of him. When the Private heard the click, he instinctively looked up and reached out to Randall, but only grabbed air. Randall turn towards him as if in slow motion and mouthed the words, “Oh Shit!” Then, the Private saw Randall explode, his arms and legs flying in different directions, a bloody burnt hole where his chest used to be. In the next instant he saw that Randall had no more mouth, no more head; there was no more Randall. There was just a mass of bloody slime where he had been and then the Private felt that bloody slime all over his face and body and felt it choking him, and felt a thousand pieces of shrapnel and rocks cut into him like a storm of bees. He flailed about and screamed trying to escape but it propelled him to the ground and then into the dark space where he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, and couldn’t think or move. 

*

The Private had liked Kirby Randall, a gangly white boy from Minneapolis, Minnesota with enough height, at six foot five, to look him in the eye when most other men of any age or persuasion couldn’t . Randall would hang out with the Colored soldiers, drinking beers and listening to their special brand of foolishness that was so new to him. None of the other white boys hung out with them in Mr. Truman’s newly-integrated army.

Before Randall, no white boy had ever walked right up to the Private and offered him his hand like he too was white as rice, not in his whole seventeen years of living. But that’s just what Randall had done when he had first entered the barracks in Fort Jackson and saw the Private rearranging his army-issued supplies in his footlocker next to the only open bunk on account that there was sure to be an inspection that afternoon. Even though they were in South Carolina where folks just didn’t do that kind of thing, Randall had done so like he didn’t know no better. Right then, the Private had said to himself⎯ maybe this army gig was going to be all right after all, if he could just manage to stay alive. 

After a few weeks,  the Private had come to believe that the real reason Randall acted like no other white man he had ever met was that Randall just didn’t much care for the south’s special brand of divisiveness. He hadn’t known any Colored folk in Minneapolis, but his parents had been committed Lutherans who taught him to honor the dignity of all men since they were all God’s creatures. So, much to the chagrin of most of the other white soldiers, Randall treated the Private and the other Colored soldiers like they too were human and like he might one day soon need to rely on one of them to save his neck. 

III.

The Army patched the Private up. The eye doctor returned bearing a replacement made of glass that filled the caved-in socket on the right side of the Private’s face. They sent another doctor for his hearing who shouted that there was not much that could be done there. Likewise, for the discolored blur resembling raw hamburger that now was the right side of his face. They said that it would just take time. Shrapnel was like a million little red hot daggers; it makes a mess. In time they would know how much more they might be able to do for him.

The next doctor was the one who carved patches of skin from the Private’s buttocks and thighs and grafted them onto his torso to close up deep rips in his skin the exploding mine had left. He chatted away at the Private like he was a tailor who routinely applying patches to the elbow of a coat. 

And then the Army sent a doctor who removed the Private’s diaper bandage and pronounced that he was still a man after all.

“It could’ve been worse”, said the doctor while casually tapping the Private’s thigh with the little metal instrument that he had used to lift his penis and examine the underside while straddling a small wheeled stool in front of the examination table. The room was cold and the Private felt colder down there without the bandage diaper. 

“You’re a lucky boy. You are,” the doctor went on. “We’ve seen much worse.” 

The Private didn’t respond as the doctor lifted his Johnson, moved him about, and then scribbled notes on his chart. Instead, he ignored this doctor whose teeth flared out like a mule’s and were way too close to where they were never supposed to be.  He focused his one eye on the rows of bottles filled with colorful pills inside the cabinet on the wall behind the doctor. The doctor scooted back his wheeled stool and stood up, checking his notes and nodding in that way that indicated that he was satisfied with the job he had done. 

“Here’s the deal, Private,” he said while loudly snapping off his rubber gloves. “You took a bad hit down there, lucky to still have it, you are. But there was  lots of shrapnel. We did the best we could. Had to take one of your testicles; it was just shredded, a damned mess. But we managed to save the other one. The swelling and discoloration you see, that should go away over time.”

The doctor paused and waited for the Private’s response but the Private was trying to ignore the chill on his Johnson and was desperately taking inventory of how many bottles in the cabinet on the far wall held the all green capsules and how many held the half-orange, half-blue ones. He wondered what they were for and just how many of each, separately, or in combination, he would have to take to die. 

“Private, I know this is hard,” the doctor continued. He moved closer and laid a  hand on the Private’s shoulder and the Private realized that the mule teeth came with sour breath.  “But you need to understand what’s what, so I’m going to give it to you straight,” the doctor continued “It could’ve been a lot worse.” 

Maybe, the Private thought, if he just swallowed a handful of each color, that would be enough. It would be a coward’s way to die, the way a woman would take her life. He wished he had his pistol. One shot to the head and all this talk about whether he was or was not a man would end. But they must have taken his pistol so here he was contemplating the pussy way out. He’d just take the whole bottle, that should be enough to do the job.

“Once the swelling goes away, you should be able to go at it. Even with just one testicle, you should be able to get an erection and ejaculate,” the mule teeth and sour breath droned on. “It might take a while for you to get your confidence back, that happens, the body has to remember. But physically you should be OK. Remember that… I gotta be honest though, son, your sperm count, it’s just not there. . .  But you never know, Private, these things sometimes work themselves out. You have fun trying. With your luck, you just might be OK. It could’ve been a lot worse.”

*

They said the same thing again and again at every hospital over the next two years. The Private came to believe that it was something doctors were taught to say no matter how bad the injury─Tell the patient it could have been worse. The Private wondered─How? Lose two eyes. Have half his face blown completely away instead of being roasted and riddled by a storm of red hot shrapnel? Lose a leg? An arm? One of each? Loose both testicles and end up a total freak? How could it have mattered anymore?

They said it to him in Guam, Hawaii, San Francisco, Kentucky and Virginia⎯“You’re a lucky boy. You are. We’ve seen much worse.” 

The Private had never believed them. Their words had never held one ounce of comfort for him. He had never reconciled to this luck that everyone spoke of. He was nineteen. He’d been in the Army just eight months and in country only thirty three days, and just days before the whole damned shebang was over, his life had been torn apart. Some fucking luck!

IV.

The Army sent him home, back to the tobacco farm he loved and loathed because it was home and because his family had worked it for a white man for generations, something he’d vowed never to do, which was why he had enlisted in the damned Army in the first place. His ten younger brothers and sisters acted skittish around him, even though his mother, who had given him his stature,  kept telling everyone to stop being foolish. She insisted that he was the same boy who had gone away; the same giant manchild who could wring a chicken’s neck by the time he was seven, hand as many rows of tobacco as she by thirteen, and consume half a dozen of her buttermilk biscuits nonstop. She would not admit the truth to herself , even as she slathered fatback on his mottled patched skin and calmed her littlest ones when his screams in the night woke them.

But his father did. And this small man, from whom the Private got his redbone coloring and his fierce wanting for more, this man with a frame made smaller from years of bending to the tobacco plants and hands grizzled from tussling with the red earth and wrenching a life from pure adversity, he knew immediately that his first-born had left a great deal on that hill in Ko-re-a. He would load his giant of a son onto a wagon hitched to a tractor or a mule and drive him out to the backfield where the constant acres of cash crop finally broke and a kitchen garden bloomed. 

In these alone moments, the Private’s father would roll cigarettes with his special tobacco and they’d take long drags  as the cicadas sang their forlorn song and the bees violated one flower after another with impunity. In the shade provided by the full leafy crowns of the clustered trees, with the air swathed in the sweet aroma of the tobacco, the father would go to work.

“Son,” his pops would say, “ You got to talk about it sometime. You got to get it out of you.” He’d pull a long drag on his cigarette before continuing. “I’m not saying you can make the memories go away. Cain’t no amount of talking make something like that go away. But you needs to talk about it, to get some of it out, or it will just become a big pile of rot inside of you. It will rot you if you don’t get it out.”

The father would  let his words sit with his son as he wandered back among the garden rows to find the perfect melon.  He would quarter the cantaloupe, scoop out the web of seeds and hand the fleshy orange quarter-moon to his son. Under the cool of the elms, away from the blazing sun and everyone, they would slurp mouthfuls of the delicate fruit with gusto, wiping their mouths with the back of their hands. And eventually, the father would listen while the Private poured out some of the horror that was inside him. Then the father would hold his son as he shook with the dry crying that men do only when they can no longer stand the pain. It was his father who convinced the Private that life, though different, could still be worth living.

*

V.

The first time the Private rode to town with his father, children started to cry at the sight of him and even adults shrank away. It didn’t matter one bit that he was a war hero who’d been awarded a  Purple Heart, that he had been injured fighting back the Communist hordes, protecting the American way of life and keeping the world, their world, safe for Democracy. After that, the Private shrank into himself a little more and when his Momma hid his pills that kept the pain at bay, he tried to drown out the world with bourbon. 

He waited for Marren to come see about him.

She was the only girl that the Private had stayed with for more than a couple of months after she’d let him go all the way. Even at sixteen she had a way of making a man believe that Heaven lay right between her size 38D breasts and plump but sturdy legs. 

The Private had hooked up with her at the beginning of his junior year of high school and spent the Fall driving her around in his pick-up truck, which was a hideous green color and rusted around both front fenders. But that didn’t matter to the Private. He had bought it for only one hundred dollars with the money that he made the prior summer washing dishes at a beachfront hotel in New Jersey with his cousin Ray-Ray. The Private had brought Marren RC Colas for months before she finally gave up her stuff after the Christmas social at the Shiloh Free Will Baptist Church.  

By the next summer, when he left for the Army, the Private had made up his mind (but had not told Marren) that he would marry her when he got back. He thought that maybe they’d move north where his cousin Ray-Ray said he could get them even better jobs working indoors wearing  uniforms and waiting tables; they could make tips in addition to a wage. But he’d grown impatient waiting for Ray-Ray to send word to him and joined the Army instead.

Marren didn’t write to the Private while he was away. She wasn’t good at words or writing, but that he forgave. The other stuff he could not. 

He knew that Marren knew he was back as soon as he arrived. Everyone knew; it was a small, tight, community that prided itself on caring for (and gossiping about) one another fervently. About a week after his return she had sent word to his house that she was sick, then, that she had to tend to her sick mother, and then, that she had to watch over her sick brother. Well over a month passed before the Private had his brother Odell, who was just fourteen months younger and whom folk often mistook for his twin, drove him over to her place because he just couldn’t believe what he already knew to be true. 

By then, the Private’s face no longer looked like raw hamburger, but it didn’t exactly look like a face either. The chickens scattered as Odell brought the truck to a stop under a crooked old oak tree whose long branches spread majestically to overhang the front porch  thankfully shading most of the dusty yard. It had been scorching hot for the past few days and everybody was craving any little piece of shade.

Odell climbed down first and went around to help his brother out of the truck, but the Private gently pushed him off even though he had to stop every few minutes to steady himself, holding tightly to and leaning on the Moses-like staff his father had fashioned for him. He hobbled to the house and made the Herculean effort of climbing the two squat steps onto the porch, pausing to catch his breath before moving to the screen door that had seen better days and which was clearly losing the battle to the flies and mosquitoes that snuck through its many rips. He banged on the screen door, too loudly and too urgently because of the tremor in this hand, which he fought to control even as he desperately grasped his staff in the other.

 “What y’all banging on my door like that for?” Marren said sashaying towards the door full on like he remembered her. She was wiping her hands on a dish towel head down as she came but paused midsentence when she looked up and saw  him. She finished wiping her hands deliberately before tossing the towel aside and closing the distance between them. 

“Heyyyy TJ, I heard you was back, “ she cooed smiling brashly from behind the screen door. She didn’t rush to give her big teddy bear baby a welcome back hug and kiss and press her soft body into his as had been their usual greeting when they’d spent any time apart. 

“Been back over a month,” he mumbled. “Thought I’d a seen you before now.”

“Oh, you know how it is, folks getting sick. I’ve got to take care of them, she protested. “I didn’t want to come over there and bring all kinda germs on top of all that you got going on.” She narrowed her gaze and took a step backwards before looking him up and down, as if she could see just by looking at him all that he had going on.  Satisfied, or unable to reach a conclusion, she started to fan herself with her hand. “Sure is hot today.”

“All that I got going on,” he replied with a half-hearted chuckle, “ain’t none of your  germs going to make a difference.” He shifted his weight from one side to the other trying to keep the staff out of her view.

He saw that she’d put on a few pounds, which only made her curves more curvy. She wore a thin cotton dress, a slight, sleeveless number in a muted yellow with tiny red flowers all over. The dress had a deep “V” held together by four small white buttons that looked totally inadequate to the task of containing her glistening cleavage. It fell over her body perfectly, across her flat stomach and broad hips, ending at her calves.

“You look good Marren,” he said with as much of a smile as he could muster considering the scarred skin of his face, which at that moment felt  like there were maggots crawling all over it. “How you been?”

“You know, been fine. I’m fine, about the same. This my last year; graduating in the spring. Class of 19-55!” She did a quick twirl and raised her arms in celebration, before coming back to face him full of giggles.

“Yeah, that’s great. I knew you’d make it,” he said with a sigh. “Kind of wished I’d stayed and graduated.”

“Don’t you tell that lie, TJ,” she said sucking her teeth. “You been places, done things. You always wanted to go somewhere, and you did. TJ You’ve seen the world! Not many folks round here been to New Jersey and Ko-rea.”

She fanned her face and let out a few deep breaths. Then she rested her arms on top of her head. “It sure is hot as hell today.”

It was a habit of hers, unusual for a colored girl. They were usually so finicky about their hair, especially after pressing it with a hot comb. But Marren had just enough Cherokee on her father’s side, and enough gumption of her own, to make her auburn hair loose enough so that she didn’t bother with that.  She stood winding her fingers in her thick braids and shifting her weight from one trunk-like leg to the other. The Private couldn’t help noticing that her arms had been bronzed a deep chestnut color by the sun and now gleamed with perspiration. He loved how the sun just kissed her all over glorifying her even more.

Each of her armpits sprouted a tuft of curly auburn hair and every time she lifted her arms they flashed a torturous musky scent at the Private. Every time she took a breath, her glistening cleavage threatened to pop the tiny buttons that barely contained it. Her nipples pushed at the thin cotton as if desperate to escape. 

Without warning, she lowered her arms and leaned against the door-jamb. For the first time, she looked him full in the face and in the eye, “What was it like?”

He  looked down at her and tried  not to be too obvious about sucking the sweltering air. For a long minute he couldn’t bring himself to answer as the sweat ran down his temples and beaded up in his crotch and armpits. A bee buzzed at the screen door agitated that it couldn’t find one of the tears to enter through and finally moved away.

As he stood there, the Private admitted to himself that he had never looked at Marren’s eyes much before, but now he did. They were a warm brown, large and doe-like, surrounded by thick lashes and set deep in her beautiful dark face with its slightly broad nose and full lips. He saw genuine curiosity there in her eyes, but he was hoping for so much more. 

He shifted his weight from one side to the other and then back again, and opened and closed his right hand to calm the tremor before speaking. 

“It was war,” he finally responded flatly, not wanting for a minute to sully her with even the slightest hint of what he had  done and witnessed. “War is hell. Don’t let nobody tell you different.” He inhaled deeply, stopping himself from saying more and fighting the ache that was beginning to burn in his right side.

Marren crunched up her nose at his confession and twisted her mouth around as if tasting his words and considering what to make of them. “That’s all?”

“I thought about you every day, every minute of the day,” he blurted out. “I just wanted to stay alive to get back here to you. You kept me alive, Marren.” 

He poured out his heart to her, blabbering on through the screen. He stood  there like an idiot and clutched his staff as if for dear life, no longer able to obscure its presence. He tried not to show how badly he hurt just standing there mustering every ounce of muscle strength to stay on his feet and still the tremor, so he didn’t appear a spastic moron. 

He knew he was losing the battle as he  reached up with his trembling hand to wipe the sweat from his face. “I came back for you, I did.” Spent, he lowered his head and took a few deep breaths inhaling her scent as she fidgeted and played in her hair. She bit her lip and started to speak a couple of times but managed nothing but fidgeting.

He waited, wishing for the courage to reach out, yank open the door and pull her towards him. He so wanted to sink to his knees and bury his face, scarred and mutilated as it was, in the sweat of her cleavage for one last time for one fresh memory of the feel of her to go along with the memories that had sustained him through those cold wet mountains in Korea and then the dark silent void of a dozen hospital beds. 

But the strength eluded him as did the courage. What if he toppled over when he went to reach for the door? What if the door was latched? Which almost nobody did, but he couldn’t be sure what all had changed in the three years that he’d been away. If he reached for the door he could miss and punch through the flimsy screen. And even if he did open the unlocked door and reach for her, would she recoil from him as so many did?

 “I’m sorry,” Marren said finally. She peeled herself from the door jamb with an audible sigh and began shifting her weight from one leg to the other, which he saw  were just as bronzed as her arms, and which ended in bare feet whose stubby toes were painted a harlot’s red. 

“I missed you too, TJ. I really did, “ she purred benevolently. “You was my first and some of the best loving I ever had.” She closed her eyes for just a moment, and he saw her tongue slide absently across her full lips before she looked at him again.  “Not that I got whorish since you left,” she quickly added. “But I’ve grown up. I’m graduating. I’m a woman now, and I got to think of my future. . . .I just needs me a whole man.” 

The words, coming out of her succulent lips, out of that beautiful dark face that he knew so well and loved with all his being, cut into him like the storm of shrapnel that had attacked him on that hill in Kaesong. For a minute, he stopped breathing. Then he started coughing and  he desperately, jerkily, fought to regain his breath while fighting not to lose his footing. After a moment that seemed like an eternity, some instinct of self-preservation gave him back his breath and compelled him to retreat. The color of auburn and the smell of seduction painfully blended into one and chased after him like a taunting demon. 

The Private lumbered down the stairs like the rejected, defective soul that he was, tilting heavily.  Odell rescued him as he started to shuffle across the dirt yard. He had waited just five minutes as their momma had instructed him before getting out of the truck and standing at the ready. Equal in stature, he caught his older brother’s weight, and this time the Private did not resist as he bore him the remaining yards to the truck. As Odell reached for the truck’s door handle, they heard the screen door screech open and slam shut. Looking back, they saw that Marren had now dared to venture beyond her threshold and was standing at the edge of the porch.

“You lucky, you know,” she called after him, as if tossing a stray dog a bone. “You could’ve died over there. Don’t know what yo Mama would’ve done if you’da died over there.” 

VI.

The encounter with Marren chilled the Private for a long time and almost knocked him back to the dark void. It made him remember the stink of human flesh exploding and suffocating him on a hill in Korea and hospital beds that he knew only by their feel. It made him struggle with the taste of a revolver, steel mixed with bourbon and self-loathing. It made his momma order his ten siblings, from Odell down to three-year old Little Bit, to never leave him alone. And Little Bit, who had fearlessly taken to chasing the chickens around the dirt yard like a demon as soon as she could walk, took her instruction extremely seriously. She became her brother’s anchor and his shadow. When he woke up, she would be perched on the edge of his bed staring at him. When he ate, she ate. When he headed out to the outhouse, he had to convince her that no, she could not come into the little shed, but had to wait outside until he returned.  

Over time, the Private somehow managed to push the haunting thoughts that plagued him back to a far corner of his being. He knew he needed to stay out of the dark silent void. He knew with certainty, without knowing how he knew, that the next time he went there, it would be his coffin.

Eventually, he began to tell himself what his parents had been saying all along, that he wasn’t dead. He could hear most things. He could see out of his one eye. Thanks to the Army plastic surgeons, his face looked less like raw hamburger as time passed.  He didn’t yet know if he could get a woman, but at least he still had most of his equipment so maybe he could, and maybe one day it would work properly again. 

Little by little, day by day, the Private went on living. He limped around leaning heavily on his staff with Little Bit skipping beside him. And then he hobbled along without it. And then one day, after Marren and the Class of 19-55 had made their ceremonial walk down Shiloh’s center aisle, with the whole community, except him, cheering, he shuffled down to his old school and asked the teacher to help him study for his diploma. 

Mrs. Ruby Dee Jackson had received him with perturbation and reticence, rather than sympathy and enthusiasm. She had chastised him about going into the army in the first place. She had even driven out to the farm to try to convince his parents to forbid him from enlisting. 

“He should at least wait until he graduates,” she had plead. “A high school diploma is a valuable asset, especially for a Negro. TJ is a smart boy. He could make something of himself, if he applied himself.”

But he hadn’t listened, and his parents had backed his decision. 

Now, he spent hours listening to Mrs. Jackson, who had a face as plain as a paper sack but a mind as full as an encyclopedia, read him his lessons. She had graduated from Howard University in Washington D. C., and when she read to him the books and problems that he was to figure, her voice sounded like a news broadcast on the radio. His eye tired easily as he struggled to make out the words on a paper held an inch from his face and his damaged hearing was challenged to grasp the words as they tumbled out of her thin flat lips that she always colored in cherry red lipstick. But he persisted. 

They spent months with her patiently repeating a passage or stopping to explain a word that produced in the Private (who despite her high opinion of him had never been more than the most average student) only a blank look of confusion or a frustrated pounding on the desk. But over time, he absorbed enough, and he finally became a high school graduate years after he had become a disabled veteran.

The day after he received his diploma, the Private counted his discharge pay and the money the Army had been sending him. It wasn’t much in the big scheme of things, certainly not enough to compensate for all he had lost, maybe not much to somebody else, but it was something to him. The Private used some of the money to buy his parents the first Frigidaire they ever owned.  And to show his gratitude, he bought Mrs. Jackson a handkerchief on which he had her initials embroidered and a hat with a real ostrich feather sticking out of it that he sent for all the way from Raleigh. Mrs. Jackson burst out in laughter when he presented the hat to her and she caused quite a storm when she boldly stepped into the Shiloh Free Will Baptist Church with it perched on her head.

 Mrs. Jackson told the Private about the G.I. Bill and how this time  they were even letting Colored soldiers benefit too. She said that it could pay for him to go to college. He hooted at the thought, remembering the long painstaking hours it had taken for him to earn his diploma. “Don’t tell me you want to spend your whole life reading my lessons to me.” 

Mrs. Jackson assured him that as much as she liked him, she had other plans for her life. But she also told him that he could get a job with the Veteran’s Administration and a loan to buy a house. That got the Private’s attention.

“Now you talking,” he exclaimed, with one of his still infrequent grins. Since he was going to go on living, he would need a job. “Hell, that’s why I joined up in the first place. So, I wouldn’t have to hand tobacco for some white man all my life. Any job with the VA got to be better than that.”

And why shouldn’t he take advantage of all  the VA could offer him, after all that he had been through? And as for the house, he hadn’t thought much about it. But when  he did, he wasn’t thinking to live with his parents all his life. As far as he knew, none of his kin had ever owned any property; if there was a way that he could be the first, he might just have to do that too.

In the following months, as Mrs. Jackson and he worked through all the required forms and applications, the Private would often whisper to himself ─I’m alive. I’m going to go on living. He said it to fix it in his mind and to firm up his resolve.

But there were moments, despite his new-found prospects, when waves of despair would bulldoze him. Some new insult from someone in town would compel him to go out to the back field to sit alone and eat cantaloupe fresh off the vine, his body and soul aching so much that he often vomited. Or he would masturbate for what seemed like an eternity, until his flaccid penis was raw, without relief, which even a river of bourbon could not provide.  At such times, the Private’s thoughts would roam back to that hill in Kaesong and to that day that had changed everything. He knew in his mind he was lucky to be alive; but often he didn’t feel lucky. He could walk, but now his journey through life was an obstacle course paved with hot coals and barbs he had to navigate barefoot, scarred, half-blind and half-hearing, maybe always alone. He didn’t even know if he was truly still a man. 

At moments such as these, the Private would think that maybe Kirby Randall from Minneapolis, Minnesota was the lucky one. Randall, who was crazy about his mother and his Labrador Spike and who carried pictures of both in his fatigues, whom the Private had called friend and seen become a flying mess of bloody body parts the instant before his life changed forever, who had been granted the dignity of a body bag and a closed coffin in lieu of the best medical care the U.S. Army could provide⎯maybe Randall had been the lucky one.

Maybe.

Introduction:  Roy Scranton’s soon-to-be published Total Mobilization: American Literature and World War II expands upon Scranton’s controversial 2015 Los Angeles Review of Books article “The Myth of the Trauma Hero, from Wilfred Owen to ‘Redeployment’ and ‘American Sniper.’” The LARB piece asserted that American war literature over-privileges the emotional suffering of white male American combatants at the expense of their war victims, while ignoring larger social and political aspects of militarism and war. In Total Mobilization Scranton locates the birth of the trauma hero in canonical World War II fiction and poetry. He connects literature with culture by making two arguments:  1) Treating soldiers as easily-damaged and pitiable victims of war obscures moral reckoning with war guilt and effective reintegration by veterans into civilian society, and 2) identifying and isolating veterans as a sanctified social caste offers veterans a dubious cultural reverence that overestimates the authority of their experience, while satisfying a dubious logic that preserves soldiers their identities as good men and the wars they fought as good wars. In making this argument, Scranton shuffles the deck of World War II-writing, inviting readers to seriously reconsider the cultural work performed by canonical works, and asking them to pay more attention to a number of novels, poems, essays, articles, and movies that tell a different, more nuanced story about World War II and the decades after.

The interview was conducted via a series of phone calls and email exchanges.

— Peter Molin

PM:  When did the concept of the trauma hero as a literary trope and cultural reality begin to form in your mind?  Was it related more to your actual service in Iraq or to your reading and beginning efforts to write afterwards?

RS: I can pinpoint the origin of my conceptualization of the trauma hero and, in fact, the origin of what became Total Mobilization, in a graduate seminar I took on war literature at the New School, in 2007 or 2008. I was anxious about taking the class, because it was one of the first graduate seminars I was to take, and because I was highly sensitive about the way in which my personal experience in Iraq might distort the classroom dynamic. I wrote the professor an email in advance, asking about the course, expressing my concerns, and assuring him that I was really interested in the material, not in using the classroom as a space to talk about myself. He responded enthusiastically, encouraging me to join the class, and telling me that my personal experience need not be a focus in the seminar, though he was convinced the mere fact of it would help my fellow students better connect with the material.

The syllabus was fairly typical “war lit,” jumping from the Iliad to [Robert Graves’] Good Bye to All That and Wilfred Owen, then a bunch of stuff on Vietnam, then I think ending with [Anthony] Swofford’s Jarhead. What quickly became apparent, however, was that for the professor, all the material we were reading could only be understood through a combination of Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery and Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. For this guy, all war literature was a story of trauma. But not just for him: he was merely a particularly dogmatic preacher of what was, I soon realized, a pervasive cultural belief.

Now I’d loved Hero with a Thousand Faces when I read it in high school, and spent two or three years annoying my friends by breaking down every movie we saw into its constituent archetypal moments, the giving of the boon, the crossing of the threshold, confronting the father, blah blah blah. But that had been a long time ago, and I’d long since realized the limits of Campbell’s reductionist approach, despite the real insights it often offered. And while much war literature did seem to fit loosely within the adventure-story framework Campbell elaborated, reading something like [Ernst Junger’s] Storm of Steel, to take only one example, through the lens of trauma seemed deeply mistaken, not only missing what was most interesting about the work, but wrenching its central premises into an alien ideology. The same thing seemed true with the Iliad, which is deeply misunderstood when viewed through the lens of trauma (as in [Jonathan] Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, which misreads Homer and misunderstands Greek culture, though does nevertheless have real insights), as are numerous other works.

So I did what I do, which was to ask annoying questions, find counter-examples, and probe the professor’s all-encompassing theory for weak points. The entire seminar was soon taken over by our intellectual grappling: things rapidly spun out of control and devolved into a power struggle. I was fighting for my intellectual integrity, my authority as a veteran, and my grade, while he was fighting for—well, it turned out that his brother had gone to Vietnam and come home fucked up, and this professor seemed to have devoted his life since to fixing his brother by proxy. I did not know when I started the class that I was to be another such proxy, but when our conflict climaxed in him sending me an eight-page email telling me how sorry he was that I was so traumatized and how much he wished he could help me, I went to the department chair.

The professor was not invited back to teach. I saved my grade, wrote an essay about trauma and confession that was published in George Kovach’s journal Consequence (“The Sinner’s Strip-Tease: Rereading The Things They Carried,” Consequence, 2:1, Spring 2010), and started delving deep into the idea of trauma: where it came from, how it worked, and why everybody seemed to conflate it with socially organized violence.

PM:  At what point did you begin to sense that the trauma hero trope worked not as a redemptive effort by authors to “humanize” soldiers by illustrating the brutality of war, but a pernicious cultural mechanism that valorized an unhealthy way of thinking about soldiers, war, and militarism? Was there a specific book, thinker, or event that crystalized the impression?

RS: From the beginning, really, I was asking myself how this worked and who it served. Cui bono, right? I was also—let’s just say that I was deeply formed in the hermeneutics of suspicion, and at the same time as I was taking that seminar on war literature I remember reading Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Now Foucault… I’m not going to spend any time defending Foucault, as a thinker or a historian or whatever. I’ve always thought he’s the Jamiroquai to Nietzsche’s Stevie Wonder. But a key point of the History of Sexuality, which is a basically Nietzschean point, is that saying we’re not going to talk about something is a way to talk about it. Repression is a mode of expression. Foucault made this point about the Victorians and sex, but it’s worth keeping in mind anytime you start looking at cultural practices, since taboos and mysteries and so on are usually key to a culture.

This may seem sideways, but it’s important to remember that trauma is always “that which cannot be spoken.” Recall Tim O’Brien’s mystical lyricism about how there’s no such thing as a true war story (which I discuss in my chapter on trauma). Narrating the unspeakable is a power move: it designates you as a master of mystery. Now I already knew about and was suspicious of the moral authority invested in veterans simply by fact of their having joined the military. It was a pretty short step then to see how trauma functioned as a way of evoking and preserving a sense of mystery around that authority. Luckily, I happened to come across Israeli historian Yuval Harari’s magnificent book, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000, which provides a deep synoptic cultural history of how the experience of war changed in the west from being understood as a testament to one’s capabilities, like a bullet point on a CV, to being understood as a revelation of esoteric wisdom. That book was very useful for helping me understand how contemporary perspectives on the experience of war evolved and what kinds of cultural work they do.

PM:  Early in Total Mobilization, you list a fairly conventional canon of well-known World War II fiction and poetry. But these are not the works you want to discuss in Total Mobilization.  Instead, you bring to the fore authors such as poet Kenneth Koch and popular entertainment fare such as a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  Why? What do we get by paying attention to this “alternative canon”?

RS: Norman Mailer wrote in “The White Negro” in 1957 that “The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” Yet by the early 2000s, if not before, a clear mythic framework had emerged for understanding World War II, which can be seen in the pre-eminent WWII films of the late 1990s, Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, both from 1998, that re-interprets WWII through both the American war in Vietnam and the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War. This framework interprets World War II as primarily an individual traumatic experience of violence that leads the individual to a more enlightened state, in Saving Private Ryan to a deeper patriotism, in The Thin Red Line to a deeper Transcendentalist engagement with the non-human world. But these films come out of a major cultural revision of the meaning of World War II that happened primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, first in literature, then in film, which laid the groundwork for these more explicitly trauma-based narratives. The mere fact of this should strike observers as puzzling, since World War II was an unquestionable American victory, a war in which America suffered fewer casualties than any other major combatant nation, and the origin of a half-century of American global hegemony. Total Mobilization explores two questions concurrently: First, how did World War II (and by extension, all war) come to be identified with trauma? Second, what is this re-interpretation obscuring?

What I found in my research by going back to the literature of World War II with fresh eyes, discounting the academic and literary consensus which tendentiously declares that World War II “didn’t produce any great literature,” is that writers attempting to make sense of WWII—from Ralph Ellison to Herman Wouk, from Wallace Stevens to Kenneth Koch, from James Jones to Joan Didion—were obsessed by a set of problems I group under the idea of “the problem of the hero,” essentially questions about how the individual relates to society in a time of total mobilization.

What was at stake was a conflict between different kinds of stories society told itself about its values, which is to say, how Americans told themselves the story of who they were: on the one hand, narratives in which every individual was an equal and independent member of a commercial democracy where everything was for sale, and on the other hand narratives in which every individual was subordinated to the collective and the most important thing anyone could do would be to sacrifice their life for the nation. The total mobilization of American society to fight World War II demanded, in Kenneth Burke’s words, a “change from a commercial-liberal-monetary nexus of motives to a collective-sacrificial-military nexus of motives.”

In effect, World War II opened wide a conflict that had been building within the western world since the Napoleonic Wars: the conflict between nationalism and capitalism, specifically the conflict between the metaphoric logic of nationalism and metaphoric logic of capitalism around the issue of bodily sacrifice. This is the conflict at the heart of Total Mobilization, the conflict at the center of World War II writing from the 1940s to the 1960s, the conflict for which the “trauma hero” provides an imaginary solution. Looking at works that have fallen outside the canon—such as Kenneth Koch’s war poetry, wartime Bugs Bunny cartoons, Wallace Stevens’s wartime poetry (which is generally derided or ignored as war poetry), or James Dickey, who has been more or less deliberately abandoned—while also revisiting canonical works such as Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” Catch-22, and The Thin Red Line with new eyes, helps us see the complex historical reality that the post-Cold-War academic and literary framework erases and obscures.

PM: In particular, I was struck by your rereading of Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.”  How has that well-known very short poem been misunderstood or not appreciated in its full magnitude?

RS: Jarrell, as many readers will know, was drafted during the war, and served stateside as an instructor in “celestial navigation.” He never saw combat, but he did see plenty of men who were headed that way. One interesting thing about Jarrell is that he writes all these poems in which youthful, virile young men are sacrificed to state power, but his letters show a pervasive and thoroughgoing contempt for his fellow soldiers. What he thought of the actual men he served with (he calls them racists and says they are intellectually “indistinguishable from Cream of Wheat”), however, is less important than the use he made of them in his poetry, which was to revitalize the British trench lyric through a Protestant American mindset. In his poetry, pre-eminently focused on bombers, Jarrell is performing a complex ritual substitution: the victims of American political violence—German and Japanese soldiers and civilians—is being replaced by the agents of that very violence—the bomber crew. The picture is flipped, so that instead of seeing Germans and Japanese women and children physically wounded and killed by American bombing, we focus instead on the suffering that bombing causes the person doing it. With the fully developed trauma hero myth the suffering is purely spiritual, but we can see Jarrell working it out de novo, as it were, making the transition from the physical—as in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—to the spiritual—as in the poem “Eighth Air Force.”

The observation that Jarrell turns killers into victims isn’t new. As Helen Vendler noted in her 1969 review of Jarrell’s Complete Poems, “The secret of [Jarrell’s] war poems is that in the soldiers he has found children; what is the ball turret gunner but a baby who has lost his mother?” What I do in Total Mobilization is look at the context and mechanism for how this happens within the genre I identify as the “bomber lyric,” within the literature of World War II, and within broader currents of American literature from 1945 to the early 2000s.

As I write in Total Mobilization: “If we want to understand the human experience of war, we must come to terms with numerous difficult and unpleasant facts. One of them is that no agent of violence can be deemed innocent or faultless, even if that agent is drafted against their will to fight in a war ultimately considered just. We must understand the soldier first, foremost, and always as an agent of state power, since that is their objective social role. Hence stories of soldiers must be read in light of their complicity with and participation in sovereign power. Soldiers are the state’s killers. That’s their job. Jarrell’s efforts to excuse the men engaged in bombing the German people on the basis that they like puppies and opera, or because they are mortal, turn soldiers into victims of their own violence. Such efforts are not only deluded and obscurantist but ethically naïve.”

PM:  In the chapter section titled “The Hero as Riddle: The Negro Hero and the Nation Within the Nation” you tie together Richard Wright, James Baldwin, John Oliver Killen’s 1962 novel about a black quartermaster company in World War II And Then We Heard the Thunder to interrogate the racial dimensions of the trauma hero.  What is significant about the African-American literary perspective on World War II?

RS: What looking at the African-American literature around World War II really helps illuminate is how much the question of war literature, and the related question of the hero, are related to what Benedict Anderson famously called “the imagined community of the nation.” War literature qua “war literature” is fundamentally tangled up in questions about the national identity of the writers and subjects of that literature. This is why when people say “Vietnam War literature,” they typically mean [Tim] O’Brien’s The Things They Carried or [Larry] Heinemann’s Paco’s Story or [Karl] Marlantes’ Matterhorn, rather than Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War or Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge.

The single most important issue at stake in the African-American literature of World War II is the question of national belonging. As James Baldwin puts it in a reminiscence written many years later, “This was in 1943. We were fighting the Second World War. We: who was this we? For this war was being fought, as far as I could tell, to bring freedom to everyone with the exception of Hagar’s children and the ‘yellow-bellied Japs’…. I have never been able to convey the confusion and horror and heartbreak and contempt which every black person I then knew felt. Oh, we dissembled and smiled as we groaned and cursed and did our duty. (And we did our duty.) The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can’t betray a country you don’t have…. And we did not wish to be traitors. We wished to be citizens.”

As I discuss in the work of Baldwin, Richard Wright, John Oliver Killens, Gwendolyn Brooks, and most notably Ralph Ellison, the dilemma faced by many African-Americans under total mobilization during World War II was that they were being ordered to sacrifice themselves for the war, they wanted to sacrifice themselves for the war, but they were structurally incapable of actually sacrificing themselves—because while they could serve and while they could die in that service, like Messman “Dorie” Miller died, like Lieutenant John R. Fox died, like Sergeant Reuben Rivers died, their deaths were not recognized as legitimate sacrifices for the nation, since they were not seen as genuine constituents of that nation. In Jim Crow America, the negro was not regarded as a free citizen, hence while the negro was expected to give their life for their country—or indeed anytime it was demanded—that act was not regarded as sacred.

For writers such as Ellison and Killens, this problem emerged not only as a sense of having been prohibited from joining the (white) nation, but also as a provocation to understand their own identity as already existing within a “nationality,” what James Baldwin called “a nation within a nation,” which is to say Black nationalism.

When we take into account how nationalism is constructed through ideas of shared blood, either through inheritance or through sacrifice, we begin to see the powerful ideological work narratives of collective violence do in shoring up cultural hierarchies—or in opening them to criticism and question. It’s no mystery that the trauma hero in American war literature has been predominantly white, or that when we talk about “American war literature,” people mostly mean literature by white men. Militarism, American identity, and white supremacy are deeply intertwined, and in fact have been woven together since World War II over and over again, in novels and poems and films that focus on traumatized white citizen-soldiers suffering for the violence they themselves unleashed on countless unnamed Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, and Afghan bodies.

PM:  An author who is not a veteran and who is not often thought of as a writer with an abiding interest in World War II is Joan Didion.  But Total Mobilization asserts her importance in understanding how the American West and the World War II Pacific Theater were connected in ways that differed from the American East Coast’s connection with the war in Europe.  How can we think of Didion as a World War II writer?   

RS: One of the central conceits of so-called “war literature” is that it is primarily by and about men in combat: Wilfred Owen, Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien. But the violence of combat, as dramatic as it may be, is only one aspect of the larger phenomena of socially organized mass violence. Even thinking back to the Iliad, say, only parts of that work are about actual combat, and not necessarily the most interesting parts. Who can forget the scene on the battlements between Hector and Andromache, where Hector’s son Astyanax recoils from his father’s helmeted face in fear?

The Trojan War was perhaps the greatest literary and dramatic subject of Athenian culture, but the work addressing it was in no way restricted to narrow representations of the combat experiences of individual warriors. From Homer’s Odyssey to Aeschylus’s Oresteia to Sophocles’s Philoctetes to Euripedes’s The Trojan Women, we see Athenian dramatists and poets exploring a wide range of that war’s events and effects. Similarly, as I argue in Total Mobilization, World War II was a hugely important cultural event in American history, easily the most important event of the 20^th century, and when we take a wide view of post-1945 American culture, we can see that cultural and aesthetic representations of World War II have struggled to come to terms with its staggering historical, ethical, political, and psychological complexity in a variety of ways, in poetry, novels, musicals, history, television mini-series, comic books, video games, and films. From Pearl S. Buck’s novel China Sky, depicting American doctors caught in the Japanese invasion of China, to the first-person shooters set in World War II that appeared in the 1990s and 2000s, starting with the now-classic Wolfenstein 3D and continuing with the blockbuster franchises Medal of Honor and Call of Duty; from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos to George Lucas’s Star Wars; from Chester Himes’s novel of racial tensions in wartime Los Angeles, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, to Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the protagonist of which is a professor of “Hitler Studies,” the variety of American cultural production from the last seventy years that works explicitly, allegorically, and sometimes unconsciously with and through World War II is at once a testament to the war’s importance and an overwhelming strain on our efforts to understand it.

Yet if we were to go looking for the war’s impact strictly in the canonical “war literature,” which is focused on the traumatic combat experience of individual soldiers, we would not see it. The focus on trauma obscures and elides the historical complexity of the event. This is how someone like Joan Didion, for whom the effect of World War II on American society is probably the central subject of her career, can be excluded from the canon of “war literature.”

There is much to say about Didion’s work, not least to speak of its sheer technical brilliance, or of the interesting place she occupies in literary history, as the American heir of Conrad and Orwell and the progenitor of the pop-art merging of advertising and the Stein-Hemingway tradition we eventually see fully developed in Don DeLillo, for example. But first and foremost she is a chronicler of American empire, the complex way that the frontier mentality of “the West” transformed into the Cold War mentality of “the West,” through the crucible of victory in World War II. As a native Californian, old enough to remember Pearl Harbor but too young to do anything about, dragged around the country by her father (a reservist called to active duty), who saw her home state undergo a dramatic transformation from what was essentially agricultural feudalism to being perhaps the primary sector of the military-industrial complex and the utopian dream-space of suburban America, Didion was remarkably well placed to witness the disruptive and disturbing emergence of the post-45 American military Leviathan, which she tracked through her fiction, journalism, and memoir, from her first novel, Run, River, which is about the effects of World War II on agricultural life in the Sacramento Valley, to her memoir Where I Was From, which explicitly connects the frontier mentality of the Western pioneers with the emergence of American hegemony, while also elucidating the inescapable, long-term effects of military industrialization on Californian culture. Indeed, as she argues about modern Hawaiian culture in a key article I discuss in Total Mobilization, postwar Californian culture is inextricable from hypostasizing American militarism. And while it may be easier to see this in the west, in Hawaii and California, which only exist as they do today because of World War II, the insight applies to the whole nation. Since 1942, the United States has been a society mobilized for war, organized for war, even if only a small cadre do the actual fighting. Didion helps us see that.

PM:  To what extent do veteran authors and artists knowingly and culpably participate in the trauma hero narrative?  I would think, or maybe hope, that most would be horrified to think that their works instantiate or re-instantiate misguided, reactionary, and generally oppressive cultural and historical practices and patterns of thinking.  But you suggest that they do.

RS: The most generous response would be to say that we’re all figuring it out as we go. We have the stories we love, the stories we were raised on, like Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now and Star Wars, for example, we have the stories we take up when we’re trying to figure out how to make sense of an experience, we see how people respond to the stories we try to tell—and we make decisions as we go. Especially those of us trying to have careers, trying to reach a wider public; you can’t just say whatever shit you feel like. There’s some back and forth, whoever you wind up talking to, and sometimes there’s more freedom and sometimes there’s less, and most folks will take the path of least resistance rather than try to fight their way through to a deeper understanding. Some people maybe know better and choose not to give a fuck. But most people think they’re good people, most writers believe they’re trying to really get into the complexity, and that they’re doing the best they can. The deeper issue is that people lie first of all to themselves, but that’s just human nature.

One example we could discuss from Total Mobilization is Brian Turner. I know Brian, I like Brian, I respect Brian. I have long admired his poetry. I think he’s a good man and a good poet. But the situation he found himself in with the cover of Here, Bullet… The cover of that book is a striking visual example of the work that the trauma hero does to refocus attention from the typically brown-skinned victims of war to the spiritual travails of the white American soldier: it shows Turner himself, alone in an empty landscape, facing the viewer with a thousand-yard stare. As Turner describes the process that led to this cover (in an interview in the Virginia Quarterly Review), he and his editor decided to literally erase Iraqi bodies from the photo they used because he thought the blunt truth of his experience would repulse readers. The thing is, he’s not wrong. From a certain perspective, he made the absolute right choice. On the other hand, telling people what they want to hear, trimming off the unpleasant bits, leaving off the hooded Iraqi prisoners—all that contributes to a collective vision of the Iraq War that focuses on the psychological suffering of American soldiers at the expense of even seeing the bodies of the people we killed, never mind discussing the larger political context, which is an outright scandal. So do I sympathize with Brian, as a young poet making decisions about his first book, to minimize the unpleasant reality of the Iraq War and try to keep people focused on his poetry? Of course. But I think we also have to consider the big picture.

Several scholars have begun attending to the ways that the “veteran-writer” operates in the MFA economy of postwar American literature, most pre-eminently Mark McGurl, Eric Bennett, and Joseph Darda. What they’ve found is that the role of the veteran-writer has been privileged in the MFA-dominated literary economy as a form of white ethnic identity writing. Just like writers of color are expected and encouraged to put themselves forward first of all as representatives of their racial or ethnic trauma, so are veteran-writers expected and encouraged to put themselves forward as representatives of their war-time trauma (A broader critique of how identity-based grievance works to create subjects conformable to the commodity logic of neoliberal capitalism can be found in the work of writers such as Joan Scott, Allen Feldman, Wendy Brown, and Asad Haider, among others). These expectations function all along the line, at every level of gatekeeping, from MFA admissions to agents to publishing to award committees. Working against these expectations is profoundly risky, especially for emerging writers.

It can be done—Percival Everett’s wicked satire Erasure comes to mind, or Eric Bennett’s novel A Big Enough Lie, perhaps my own novel War Porn—but it’s not usually going to win you accolades.

PM:  My reading of War Porn is that its Iraq vet protagonist refutes sympathetic identification as a trauma hero, nor can we grant him the experiential authority of the “noble veteran.”  What is the relationship in your mind (and chronologically) of War Porn and the academic work that became Total Mobilization?

RS: I started War Porn pretty soon after coming back from Iraq, while still in the army and stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, then finished the first draft the summer after I ETS’d, in Berlin in 2006. There was a lot of revision ahead, but the main generative work was done. And as you suggest, I was even at that point working out a pretty strong critique of the trauma hero, even if I hadn’t distinctly articulated the figure itself. I feel like Total Mobilization is working out analytically some of the things that War Porn was working out narratively.

PM: Your framing of the issue seems divisive and perhaps even something of a betrayal of the veteran-writer community, which we might say you helped establish with the seminal 2013 Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War anthology (co-edited by Scranton and Matt Gallagher, and containing work by contemporary veteran-writing luminaries such as Brian Turner, Phil Klay, Colby Buzzell, David Abrams, Brian Van Reet, and Jacob Siegel, and military spouse Siobhan Fallon). Can you talk about the desire or efforts by contemporary vet-writers to form a veteran-writer community? Can you talk about how you see your work in relation?

RS: In the conclusion of Total Mobilization, where I talk about the end of the Cold War and shifting arguments about the meaning of World War II, I bring up as an example the National Air and Space Museum’s attempted exhibit on the 50^th anniversary of the end of WW2. The exhibit failed, largely because of pressure from veterans’ groups. One of the sticking points was the number of expected American casualties in the planned invasion of Japan, which was a key piece of evidence in arguments about whether the use of the atomic bomb was justified. The historical record—the consensus of professional historians—is clear: there was a clear path to surrender with Japan that would obviate any Normandy-style landing on Honshu and Kyushu, which invasion the US military at the time expected would lead to 30,000 to 50,000 casualties. The Air Force Association and others kept insisting that the language in the exhibit employ later estimates of 500,000 or more casualties, which come from Truman and Henry Stimson’s postwar memoirs and are unsupported by the historical record. As military historian John Ray Skates notes in his book The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb, “the source of the large numbers used after the war by Truman, Stimson, and Churchill to justify the use of the atomic bomb has yet to be discovered.” At one point in the argument, Tom Crouch, who was the chairman of the museum’s aeronautics department, put the problem neatly: “Do you want to do an exhibition intended to make veterans feel good, or do you want to do an exhibition that will lead our visitors to think about the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan? Frankly, I don’t think we can do both.”

Historian Edward Linenthal describes this as conflict between a “commemorative” view and a “historical” view. We face the same conflict every time we come back to the act of representing war, discussing war, talking about war literature, because—as I argue in Total Mobilization—war is one of the key practices through which human beings construct their collective identity. Every discussion about war, about a museum exhibit, about the cover of a book of poetry, about a poem, is a discussion about who “we” are, which is to say what it means to be American. And the conflict Linenthal describes, the conflict exemplified in the issue at the National Air and Space Museum, is over whether we should focus on commemoration—remembering together, emphasizing our bonds and our unity, reassuring ourselves of our basic goodness—or on the objective historical record, which often shows the American military and American government doing horrible things for morally unjustifiable reasons.

I’ve seen this play out in smaller ways in the vet writers community. When we were putting Fire and Forget together, around 2011 or 2012, it seemed like one major thing vet writers could do for each was to help keep each other honest: to help keep each other from telling readers what they wanted and expected to hear. I think a lot about Jake Siegel’s story from Fire and Forget, “Smile, There Are IEDs Everywhere,” in this respect: the experience of war the characters in that story are commemorating is so raw, so powerful, that the idea of betraying the experience is tantamount to betraying your battle buddy. But as the vet writers community became more definitively established, as the actual experiences of war have faded into the past, as people have built careers as professional veterans, I’ve seen the community grow increasingly hostile to dissent. It seems like there’s been a real closing of ranks, a sense of a community supporting and protecting each other, and any real critical function has been lost (present company excepted, along with a few others). Commemoration has won out over any concern for the historical record. This is no doubt connected to the way that the “vet writer” serves to recuperate white ethnic militarism as a commodifiable victim identity (as discussed above), a fundamentally unstable identity formation given the historical and contemporary privilege afforded white men in American society, and given the tendency of militarism (however tempered by liberal multiculturalism) to resolve into a fascistic worship of power as such.

PM:  The conclusion of Total Mobilization asserts that contemporary war-writing about Iraq and Afghanistan represents a continuation, even a doubling-down, on the trauma hero trope.  How has this come about and what are the consequences? 

RS: I wouldn’t say it represents a “doubling-down”—while I think trauma has remained central to contemporary war writing about Iraq and Afghanistan, I also think that many writers have looked for ways to innovate, if only to distinguish themselves from previous generations and each other. The film American Sniper and Kevin Powers’ novel Yellow Birds are the most obvious and conventional versions of the contemporary trauma hero story, but even Powers struggles to renovate the trope, as I argue in Total Mobilization, by pushing through O’Brien’s total negation of truth to wind up with something that is the obverse of Hemingway and Owen’s insistence on particular factual sensory data: representing the act of violence as the origin of linguistic indeterminacy and the font of literary production as such. And with [Phil Klay’s] Redeployment, [Brian Van Reet’s] Spoils, [Elliot Ackerman’s] Green on Blue, and [Will Mackin’s] Bring Out the Dog, just for a few of the most talked-about examples, you can see writers struggling to get past the trauma hero, with varying degrees of gumption and success. Overall I think it has to do with long-term cultural changes: trauma remains a powerful concept for understanding reality, but I suspect that it’s on its way out, and that a new emphasis on materiality is emerging. Which is to say, that which is both unspeakable and indubitable in trauma is increasingly less persuasive than that which is both unspeakable and indubitable in the body. But this is only a supposition. We’ll have to wait and see. But as soon as the traumatized veteran becomes useful again, we see him return. The trauma hero will probably be around for a long time.

PM:  In practical terms, how can understanding the trauma hero as a literary trope and cultural myth help us think better, more clearly, about actual veterans psychologically damaged and emotionally troubled by war?  What might the nation, or its military-medical apparatus, do to help them?

RS: Well, I’ve written a work of literary and cultural history, not a practical guide to coping with trauma. I would say, though, that the entire way that we understand “actual veterans psychologically damaged and emotionally troubled by war” must be understood as process of collective meaning-making. The psychologically damaged veteran is certainly suffering, but that suffering takes shape in performing a specific social role, which is the “traumatized veteran.” As long as we stay within the bounds of the discourse, there’s no way to “help” such a person by pointing out that their genuine suffering is culturally produced. I suppose we might tell them “trauma isn’t real,” but then what? They have to make sense of their experience somehow, and the best that could come from delegitimating a culturally dominant way of making sense of experience would be the emergence of a new way of making sense of experience. Are there better and worse ways of making meaning? I think so. But that’s another discussion. The only practical help my project might offer is, I would hope, some understanding of the ways that the “actual veteran” exists in relation to the “nation.”

I’m a Spinozist at heart, which means I’m a materialist, but it also means that I believe freedom comes first of all from understanding. Until you understand what compels you to understand your experience through certain roles, frameworks, and practices, you’ll be stuck performing those roles, seeing through those frameworks, and acting out those practices. Understanding may never provide physical or social liberation, but it can at least open a space for some freedom of thought and movement, and the possibility of equanimity toward the world as it exists, which is to say a sense of peace.

PM: On what grounds can a veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan feel good about his or her service?  On what grounds can a veteran construct a guilt-free life post-military?

RS: I’m not here to make former soldiers feel good about their experience. The whole premise feels a bit absurd to me. Nor am I interested in articulating a way for anyone to live life “guilt free.” I think guilt, like shame, can be useful and healthy. How else do you learn and grow as a person except by confronting your mistakes and owning them, internalizing them, recognizing what you did and finding a way forward? “Guilt-free” is an advertising slogan.

This goes back to what I was talking about earlier with the difference between “commemorative” and “historical” views about war and the role of the veteran in American culture. I feel no obligation as a scholar, critic, or writer to “commemorate” war or to “honor” the direct role some people play in America’s wars. On the contrary, I feel an obligation to be faithful to the historical record, objective facts, and unpleasant realities. Because I am myself a veteran, some people see a contradiction there, as if selling my ass to the US Army for four years somehow obliges me to participate in the collective myth-making of American militarism. But such an expectation is absurd. I refuse to play the role of the professional vet.

It seems clear that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjustifiable in any moral sense. Everyone involved was not only complicit, but an active agent in genuine evil and massive human suffering. You have to come to terms with that.

PM:  You also have a novel coming out this year, titled I [Heart] Oklahoma?  What can we expect?

RS: It’s a “road movie novel,” a vision-quest, a deep dive into the blood myths of modern America. Let’s just say there wind up being a lot of bodies on the highway. LitHub is publishing an excerpt, which I’d suggest as the easiest way to see whether you feel like taking this particular death trip.

The shine and swagger of a new day.

Great Recession? Not Hous­ton. And yet, and
yet there had been a speed bump in September 2008, sure, but that had been
assessed and corrected; and now the city of Brock Wharton seceded further from
the rest of the flatlined coun­try in the first week of September 2014. As
Wharton was considering whether to rearrange his weekend schedule to pencil in
sex with his wife, one of the strangest men he had ever laid eyes on breached
the space of his open doorway. Of average height, the boyish, sun-cooked man
appeared taller than he was as his askew brown hair lashed out in every
direction. His rangy build (accentuated by the too-small, off-the-rack, navy
double-breasted suit he wore as if he were a redneck admiral at a regatta that
Wharton would never enter) seemed pulled at the sinews’ seams. It was the sort
of flawed build that none of the South Texas ranching families would ever
breed. If not for the inten­sity of the blue eyes—divided by a comic eagle nose
that dived toward raggedly chapped lips—so nakedly sizing him up in return,
Wharton would have dismissed the figure as an apparition too absurd to be real.

Unnerved by the fixed eyes that looked through him
to some burning skyscraper or falling zeppelin outside the window, Wharton
twisted around anticipating to be hit by a tornado. But the downtown skyline
was undisturbed. Annoyed by this intrusion and humiliated that he had been
tricked into a search beyond his window, Wharton spun around in his chair to
regain the initiative. “Who—”

“You’re the man to beat?” A smile the size of the intruder’s
face tore through the puffy lips and exposed a series of swollen red gums
congregated around two monstrous white tusks for front teeth, which, if not
fake, the hospital-white fangs had avoided the yellow staining of the other
teeth and clearly swam in their own current in the man’s mouth. A muddy five
o’clock shadow surrounded the giant mouth, which surely, upon closer inspection
of this dark facial sandpaper, would be attributed to not shaving than some
celebrated regeneration of stubble.

His piney, log-cutting aftershave sprayed Wharton’s
office with his scent. A hand slithered in the air above his desk toward
Wharton. He stood and asked in a harsh tone that betrayed the mask of imper­turbability
he wished to project, “Who are you and what is the nature of your business in
my office?”

“I’m Mike Fink,” the man said in a mysterious
dialect, a dialect hailing from a region that Wharton could only place as from
the land of the lower class while his limp hand was grabbed by Fink. His fla­grant
confidence-man grin expressed an expectation that Wharton knew the name, if not
the reputation. “I’m here for the leadership position.”

I, Wharton declared to himself, will personally see
to it that that never happens. This was a case that needed no analysis. Wharton
pulled his hand from Fink’s clasp and came around from his desk. “Be that as it
may, I have never heard of you. I am sure we can resolve this misunderstanding
in no time if you would please . . .” But Wharton trailed off, watching in
horror as Fink plopped down unasked in the chair across from Wharton’s desk and
wriggled his lanky body to find an incorrect posture. This creature’s
cheekiness apparently knew no bounds. Wharton found himself slightly behind
Fink and facing his back; Fink tapped his right foot, waiting on the start of
an interview.
Wharton was not about to give
such an entitled lout. Leadership posi­tion? Papers rustled behind where
Wharton stood, but he could not take his eyes off the hunched back of Fink.

“I see that you used your Special Forces
navigational skills to find Brock’s office, Mike,” a squeaky voice said behind
Wharton.

“Too easy, Carissa. Didn’t even have to consult the
compass.”

“Consult,” Carissa repeated in a higher pitch that
no doubt carried a waving of a finger at clever schoolboy Fink for his
introduction of an unimaginative punning attempt to their colloquial exchange.
“A good consultant never consults a compass.”

“Miss Barnett, what is going on?” Wharton asked, as
he swung around to see the top-heavy recruiter giggling and swaying her head to
the savage’s tapping beat. Was she blushing? Her lips certainly now bore the
mark of lipstick, adorned in a Valentine’s Day red to match a pair of six-inch
stiletto heels that had magically sprouted up from her earlier flats like weeds
in a trailer park. She was without her jacket, and it appeared that—was it
possible, even amid the other illusions?—she had lost three or four buttons,
too, judging by the excessively gratu­itous amount of breast on exhibit. All at
once, Wharton felt the butt of a joke, a weary traveler who had stumbled into
some rustic country inn for shelter only to be mocked by the randy bar maiden
and the regular patrons.

“Oh, Brock, I’m so sorry. I guess you hadn’t been
notified that Mike would be interviewing this afternoon. He was traveling from
New Orleans and wasn’t able to make it for the morning block of inter­views.”
She ruffled through the stack of papers in her hand and pulled a badly mauled
page out and passed it to Wharton. “Here’s a copy of his résumé. Like I told
Mike, you are the only one left to interview him before the meeting in the
conference room in half an hour to decide on who the new hires are.”

Wharton waved her on before she disclosed any more
details of the hiring process. Oblivious to the intent of his wave, she leaned
over to Wharton with the bright eyes of a much younger child, a mercurial
silver sparkle that screamed antidepressants, and whispered audibly for Fink to
hear, “He’s a Green Beret.”

“I don’t care if he’s the pope, Carissa, as I have
only a half hour
to give an intensive
interview,” Wharton said truthfully, for despite his conservative Christian
upbringing, he now cared little for religious figures. Indeed, besides possibly
salvation, little reward stemmed from religious fervor beyond the required
Christian affiliation among his strategic-friends crowd. Wharton thought even
less of people in the military, despite the nauseating resurgence of post-9/11
glorification of a segment who’d been the frequent subject of derision prior to
that day. In Wharton’s youth, the military was the last stop for the talentless
who could not do anything else in life. It usually wasn’t even much of a
choice: You can go to prison, or be all you can be in the Army. Now
everyone was expected to shake their hands, pick up their checks in
restaurants, turn over their first-class seats on airplanes, and worst yet,
stand up and clap for them at sporting events while nodding that the only
reason the sport is even being played is because of heroes like them fighting
in some country with cities no one can pronounce. An inane rah-rah
yellow-ribbon patriotism, a shared ritual offering peace between the jingoes,
Middle America, and pinkos where everyone emerged feel­ing good about their
participation. Doubtless this explained how this Fink character was granted a
CCG interview.

“Well,” Wharton said to Fink, shutting the door on
Carissa, “it ap­pears I am to interview you. I’m going to take a minute to scan
through your résumé.”

“Take your time,” the applicant advised the
interviewer. “There’s a lot there.”

There, Wharton quickly realized, was not a lot
there: current em­ployment listed as none, no work experience (unless
ten years in the military counted), a 2.9 GPA, and a bachelor of arts in
English litera­ture (was that not the easy major?) from Tulane University (a
bottom first-tier university that CCG did not even review applications from)
the same year Wharton graduated. Lo and behold, Fink’s résumé was actually a
mirror out of a fable, in that if you held it up, your exact op­posite looked
back at you.

“An English literature major?” Wharton murmured,
bringing the CV closer to his eyes.

“With a minor in theater. I read
somewhere that English majors make the best consultants. Stands to reason.”

Had recruiting seriously thought the special forces
bullet in bold letters at the top alone merited an interview? Special Forces
could not be that special if Fink lacked the cognition to apprehend that he did
not belong at CCG. That his presence, an interloper squandering his time, was
offensive to a Brock Wharton, who had conducted a life cultivating a résumé.
Fink was a great example of a candidate not hav­ing researched CCG; how had he
passed the first-round interview? In fact, Wharton assessed it to be the most
heinous résumé ever submit­ted for his review: not even the oversized font or
alignment from sec­tion to section was consistent in what amounted to only a
stretched half page of largely questionable achievements (high school senior
class president?). Wharton looked up at Fink in time to see him fon­dling his
Texans football!

“Put that down!” Wharton pointed at the ball holder
on the wall next to Fink, who on his orders positioned the ball upside down on
its seam.

“I apologize. I had forgotten that you were drafted
in the last round after playing for UT.”

Wharton searched the blue eyes sunk back in the
triangular face for an intended slight in the usage of “last” to describe the
still-prestigious seventh round. What it seemed Fink hadn’t forgotten was the
chatter of sports columnists, recruiters, superfans, and boosters who had once
ranked Wharton the top high school quarterback in the South and proclaimed him
the next UT football savior. He in turn ranked this same mindless mob number
one in cowardice after four years of enduring their catcalls every time he was
injured and being denounced by them for betrayal when their impossible
expectations for their fair-haired boy were not met on the field. “Were you
drafted as well after graduating college?”

“Drafted by our country,” Fink said, startling
Wharton with a belly laugh loud enough to be heard down the hall.

Wharton avoided Fink’s face to conceal the anger he
was sure must be reddening his own cheeks. He found refuge in Fink’s résumé. A
review of it demonstrated that the undereducated Fink knew abso­lutely nothing
beyond the art of exploiting some tax credit for busi­nesses that interviewed
veterans. Another bending of the laws, no less egregious than allowing veterans a pass in public
with their PTSD service dogs while their pit bulls created anxiety for everyone
else. Wharton pushed aside the flash of resentment that made him want to
physically kick Fink from his office. He settled on an approach he was
convinced would inflict far more damage to this impertinent CCG im­postor’s
candidacy: cede the stage to an unwitting Fink and allow the veteran to shoot
himself, hailing as he did from a demographic statisti­cally known for its high
suicide rates.

“Thank you for your service. Now why don’t you walk
me through your academic accomplishments?” Wharton began anew, chumming the
waters of that pesky foe of Delusion: Fact. “I see here that you had a
two-point-nine grade point average at Tulane.”

“Two point nine four five to be exact, but if you
round that up it is a two point nine five, and if you’re really telling a tale,
you could round that to a three point zero.”

“CCG, almost as a rule, requires its applicants to
have a GPA of three point six or above from a top-ranked college. You are
applying for the position of consultant with an undergraduate GPA of two point
nine against a field of applicants that all have MBAs, and, in some cases, two
advanced graduate degrees. Have you done any graduate-level course work at
all?”

“The Special Forces Qualification Course.”

Fink was making this easy for Wharton. “I don’t
think I follow,” Wharton said, baiting him to continue his charm offensive and
ram­bling lack of reflection, which conformed ideally to Wharton’s plan of
wrestling back control of the interview. “Can you elaborate specifically on how
this course qualifies as graduate school and how it relates to a career in
consulting?”

Fink straightened up in his chair. His arrowhead
chip of a face leaned in over the desk. Was he applying for a job or auditioning
for a small part in a play?

“De Oppresso Liber,” Fink said, enunciating
each Latin word for Wharton’s appreciation.

Wharton stared dramatically at the now confirmed
lunatic and awaited a further terse three-or-four-word inadequate explanation that was not forthcoming. It
was not as if Wharton lacked experience playing a part; he knew full well what
was expected of him in life’s star­ring role. Finally, Wharton asked, “Excuse
me?”

“Motto of the Green Berets.” Fink thumped his chest
with his fist (in the spot where the handkerchief, which could have been the
only item to make his costume more ridiculous to Wharton, was missing). “It
means ‘To Liberate the Oppressed.’ ”

“What does this have to do with consulting?”

“For a decade I trained not only on how to
operationally liber­ate the oppressed, but also how to free my mind from the
oppression of conventional thinking. A consultant referencing unconventional
thinking in a plush CCG office and actually being unconventional when the
stakes are high are as different as a yellowbelly catfish is from a bullhead
catfish,” Fink exclaimed. He had also managed to concur­rently use his hands to
grotesquely elucidate the contrasting courage of each subspecies by forming
what Wharton interpreted as human female and male genitalia. “Like consulting,
it’s about being adaptable. Who is the most adaptable? Ain’t that America? Now,
I’m not a big war story guy, but you asked me to describe a situation where I
had to lead a group of people and convince them that an unconventional solu­tion
was the right way and to that I say: how about every day in Iraq! If
that—”

“I didn’t ask you anything of the sort. You are
barking up the wrong tree.”

“I once stared the bark off a tree I was so riled
up,” Fink offered as further qualification. He laughed and winked at Wharton.
“Too much time overseas in the sandbox dodging death this past decade will do
that to you. The relevance of my graduate work in the Special Forces
Qualification Course is that I have unique professional training and a record
of success in solving and analyzing complex problems. As I explained to the
senior partners, and this perhaps fails to come across in a limited reading of
a CV, there is a value in being able to establish networks of influence—”

“Influence,” Wharton repeated. “You are claiming to
have ac­quired this from the military?” Here was a hick who could not influence the next banjo number at a
hoedown—could Wharton get a witness among the kinfolk (because they’re all
related) messing around on the hay bales?—and yet Fink thought himself up to
CCG snuff. The true tragedy of these small-town military applicants not being
that bright was that they were unaware of it. Seeing how everyone else was
afraid of the possibility of veterans returning to the office and shooting up
the place, Wharton saw it as his duty not to coddle military candi­dates, but
rather to use the interview as a teaching moment to direct them to their
intellectual rung below dieticians. He did not doubt that they probably thought
his posture that of a cheese dick. But comport­ing yourself as such was part of
the game, be it assimilation of the fit­test douches. In Wharton’s CCG class,
there had been an ex–Naval Academy nuclear submariner who had lasted a year out
of the Houston office with his conventional mind-set, his pervasive logical
staleness onsite incapable of turning the client ship around. He’d even had a
gut.

“May I please just be allowed an opportunity—” But a
knock at the door cut Fink off before Wharton could cut him off again.

Nathan Ellison, a senior partner in his midforties
with the body and energy of a younger man able to both network around town at
all the right social gatherings and find time to teach Sunday school, stepped
inside. “Didn’t realize you were still doing an interview.” He apologized to
Wharton, then noticing Fink, asked, “Is Brock giving you a real pressure
cooker?”

“Can’t complain, no one’s shooting at me,” Fink
said, bounding up from the chair to straighten his corkscrew backbone into an
erect fig­ure of authority for a handshake, with a nod to Wharton. “Yet.” Their
hands met and held, arm wrestling blue veins popping out in the kind of
kingmaker handshake set aside for finalizing backroom palace coup plots. They
smiled at each other and continued to ignore Wharton as if he were a naked man
changing in their locker room row. “Only jest­ing. He’s great, Nate.”
Wharton brooded over the liberty taken with Nathan’s name, paraded as it was by
Fink, who no longer sniffed the air but deeply inhaled the noxious fumes that
he had introduced to the office.

It dismayed Wharton that the late-afternoon autumn
light from his window slightly softened the crags of Fink’s bird-of-prey
profile, the challenging mannerisms and hillbilly hostility of the hawk-nosed
dive bomber jettisoned for the litheness of the assassin, high on hash and his
mission, who moves limberly along the corridor wall in wait on the balls of his
feet. “Unlike our intellectual discussion, Brock and I were sparring about the
value in establishing networks of influ­ence onsite with clients. I suppose we
represent differing schools of thought”—Fink motioned with his hands to group
him and Nathan on one side against Wharton on the other—“regarding the best
method of how to mine pertinent data to achieve effective results. Just waiting
on him to give me the case, but if you two are in a rush to get to your
meeting, I am happy to skip over the bio part.”

“Can’t talk about it,” Nathan said, and turning to
Wharton added, “or he’d have to kill us.” Was the newly christened infantile
persona Nate, once a sober CCG senior partner by the honest Christian name of
Nathan, as high as Fink?

“Influence.” Fink flicked his wrist in the air to
snap an imaginary towel at Nathan, who laughed and closed the door. Fink’s
reciprocal laughter, forced to begin with, stopped the moment the door shut.

Wharton hypothesized that Fink’s true intellectual
capacity could be brought to the surface quite easily with the right
application. Deployed not to the Middle East but to the far more unsympathetic
region of high finance, how would Fink operate in the world of big money?

“Let’s play with some numbers. We have to know that
you are com­fortable with numbers and speak the language of the business world
while coming up with unconventional solutions to complex problems, as I recall
you endeavoring to frame it earlier. The best way for us to discern whether you
have the skill set required for the intellectually rigorous environment of
consulting is by walking you through a case and seeing how . . . you . . .
compete.”

“I like to win . . . in . . . life.”

Win? Was Fink attempting to commandeer winning,
the very ethos Wharton lived by? Wharton handed him four clean sheets of paper
and a clipboard with a pen attached. “How many in-flight meals were prepared on an average day
last year for flights from George Bush Intercontinental Airport?”

“Forty thousand.”

“Come again?”

“Forty thousand.”

Wharton could not have been felled harder had Fink
launched his entire gangly frame at his knees. In point of fact, Wharton
would have normally explained if Fink had not rendered him speechless, the cor­rect
answer to the market-sizing question was forty-three thousand after factoring
in the four thousand meals for the international flights. Wharton attempted to
salvage some dignity from this unfathomable opening checkmate that had always
stumped even the smartest busi­ness school students by an incorrect margin of
at least ten thousand. “Would you care to illustrate how you arrived at that
number?”

“For the reason that around forty thousand is the
right answer,” Fink charitably clarified.

“I am interested not in Hail Mary guesstimates but
your thought process. That you were on the runway for ten minutes and watched
two other planes touch down that you then multiplied by six to calculate how
many per hour. You then extrapolated out that there were three runways total
and each plane on average carried one hundred forty-five passengers. Which you
multiplied by twenty instead of twenty-four, as the time from midnight to four
in the morning is essentially a dead zone for departures. And that, of those
domestic flights, only twenty-five percent of them provided a meal service.”

“Which is how I arrived at around forty thousand
meals. Just do the math like you just did. I solved it like I had one shot, one
kill. Some of us applicants have been vetted—and I don’t mean at an investment
banking desk job playing with myself and numbers.”

Fink released a cackle of a laugh aimed to pierce
what patience Wharton had left. The Prohibition gangster–suited Brer Rabbit
across from him had duped Wharton into illustrating a method aloud that backed
Fink’s wild-ass guess, now claiming ownership of Wharton’s mathematical
reasoning. What next: squatter’s rights to Wharton’s office? After Fink’s
barrage of assaults on football, his manhood, and the nonvetted like himself who had played with
themselves while in­vestment banking, Wharton suspected that his colleague Piazza
was behind all of this. The explicit attack on investment banking by Fink was
an overplaying of the inside information he had been fed, reveal­ing the puppet
strings. It was time to cut them, as Fink was still an applicant applying for a
job at Wharton’s firm. Why hadn’t he stuck with the Dr Pepper case, a
straightforward branding case? Fink could not even articulate his own identity.
“You will need to write down your calculations and structure an outline for the
remaining part of the in­terview. And I will be collecting your notes when we
finish for confi­dentiality purposes.”

“I understand. You’re talking
to a holder of a Top Secret security clearance.”

It occurred to Wharton that
such a fact, if true, did not bode well for national security. Wharton got up
and walked to the window. “For the sake of simplicity, let us use the number
forty thousand meals a day.” He faced Fink and began the mad minute of firing.
“Our client, a company called Swanberry Foods, is responsible for fifteen
percent of the daily in-flight meals at George Bush Intercontinental Airport
with a profit margin of one dollar per meal—but the meals only stay edible for
eight hours. Recently, management at Swanberry Foods has been considering an
overhaul, moving to frozen meals that stay edible up to twenty-four hours,
enabling our client to increase its profit margin twenty-five percent per meal.
The technology and new equipment to switch to the frozen meals costs fifteen
million dollars over five years.” Fink’s pen lay untouched atop the paper.
“What would you advise our client to do under the circumstances? You may take a
minute to struc­ture your—”

“I’d pull the trigger and double down on this new technology if our client’s only objective is to maximize profit over the long run. You’ve got to roll the dice to make money.”

“Please demonstrate beyond the
usage of military and gambling metaphors how our client should strategically
approach this decision. This time, be so kind as to walk me through your
calculations that support your hypothesis after taking a moment.”

Fink held up his index finger
to Wharton and began to scribble manically. The same index finger reappeared
two more times sepa­rated by three-minute intervals between flashes. It took
all the reserve in Wharton not to snatch the finger on its third appearance and
break it.

“What do your numbers say?”
Wharton asked, putting an end to the longest ten-minute silence of his life.

“Profits of almost six million
dollars a year if Swanberry switches to the proposed plan. That’s before I
shave their fixed costs to trim them down.”

“I think you mean variable
costs,” Wharton said, allowing a laugh to escape at such amateur histrionics.
He leaned over to try and read the chicken scratch on the top piece of paper.
He was enjoying this and shook his head slowly at the illegible writing,
indubitably representa­tive of the mind that had dictated it. “God only knows
where, but I’m afraid you have an extra zero or two in there somewhere. I don’t
know where to begin helping you because I can’t make out a single number on
your paper. This is why a successful applicant will use this as a dia­logue
and voice aloud each major step in his or her explanation; that way we can help
guide you a little should you stumble in one of your calculations. Had you done
the math correctly, you would see that at their projected rate of sales
Swanberry would lose almost a quarter of a million dollars a year over the next
five years, and that it would take almost six years just to break even after
the investment if they could withstand the initial losses.”

“I was shooting for long term,
the big picture.”

Like the trajectory of a clay pigeon, Wharton had anticipated this
rationalization before he fired. “If you were thinking ‘long term’ and the ‘big
picture,’ you would have noted they needed to increase their market share by
marketing to airlines that their newly designed meals would last longer and
save the airlines money compared to the other products being offered by
competitors. Even acquire a competitor and streamline costs. And that’s only
after analyzing whether the indus­try is growing. You would have recommended
that they diversify with other products or at least expand their current market
into supermar­kets, hospitals, retirement
centers, prisons, and even your military base chow halls. And that is exactly
what we did, because I worked on this for eleven months—though the real company
was not called Swanberry.”

“Not bad, though, for ten minutes versus what took
you a year, right?”

Wharton did not bite on this tease designed to
distract him from closing in for the scalp. “Where’s your outline or structured
strategy? I need to collect your scratch paper as well.”

Fink first handed Wharton a sheet from the bottom,
the out­line. “There might be a gem or two buried in there y’all could use,” he
thought he heard Fink say as Wharton gazed transfixed on the only two things
written on the paper: profits = revenue –costs, and cir­cled below it, always
look at the revenue.

“ ‘Always look at the revenue.’ I don’t even know
what this means,” Wharton muttered in shock, letting the outline float down to
his desk. “This is your foundation?”

“Winning,” Fink instructed, standing up and tapping
with the fa­miliar index finger on the written equation at the top of the
outline. “Or in the more narrow terms of this particular world, maximizing
profits. In a wildcatting oil town like Houston, a thin line—”

“I must conclude this interview, for I have to
attend our office meeting,” Wharton said, rising from his chair and sparing
himself from Fink’s clichéd interpretation of the essence of Wharton’s home­town.
“Do you have any questions for me?”

Fink held up his hands as if about to make a
confession. “I’ve got nothing for you.”

Wharton thought it was the first valid point Fink had made.

Excerpted from King of the Mississippi, Copyright © 2019 by Mike Freedman. To be published by Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, on July 9. Excerpt published on Wrath-Bearing Tree with permission.

For the amputees of Walter Reed Army Hospital, Segways were the new fad. It had become common to see roving gangs of them, upright and speeding across campus and through the hospital, riding in elevators and waiting in line at the cafeteria or pharmacy, causing a flurry of complaints from doctors and staff. And when Doc Rodriguez looked up from his physical therapy mat and saw Anthony cruising down the hall on one, a public affairs officer plastered against the wall as he sped by, Rodriguez couldn’t help but smile.

Rodriguez had been feeling sluggish, unmotivated. Kristen, his therapist, had tried getting him to do some core work with a medicine ball, but he stopped as soon as her attention moved on to another patient. He was about to leave when, through the glass windows that made up the room’s far wall, he saw Anthony. Anthony had gotten his Segway a few weeks prior from an organization that was donating them to wounded vets, and he hadn’t gone anywhere without it since. Rodriguez had tried riding one, but it bucked him off like a horse when he awkwardly attempted to step up with his prosthetics, and that was enough for him. Anthony parked the Segway against a wall and then joined Rodriguez on the stretching mat.

“What’s up, Rod?” Anthony asked.

Rodriguez shrugged.

“Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Hey, we gotta hit up some Halo later.  Gotta practice for the tourney next week. Can’t let Jeff and those army assholes beat us again.”

“For sure. Talk to Juan and the guys lately?”

“Nah, haven’t seen them online for like a week. Wonder what they’re up to?”

“Getting ready for another deployment, probably.”

Anthony paused.

“Miss those guys.”

They were silent for a while; Rodriguez picking at an ingrown hair on the stump of his left leg, Anthony brushing dandruff off his shoulder. There was a commotion in the hallway and Rodriguez looked up to see some officer striding towards the entrance with a gaggle of aides scurrying around him, one of whom broke off ahead and opened the door shouting, “Officer on deck!” to everyone in the PT room. When the officer, a colonel, entered he waved his hands saying, “At ease, at ease,” despite no one having gotten up to begin with.

“Must be the new base commander,” Anthony whispered. “Looks like an asshole.”

“That’s just how officers look,” Rodriguez said.

The colonel was now walking towards the center of the room, “Don’t mind me, gents.  I’m Colonel Darby, new Commanding Officer of Walter Reed. I’m here to introduce myself and get the lay of the land, to see how the sausage is made, if you will.”

His aides, a group of lieutenants and captains, stood behind him, their hands on their hips.

“Definitely an asshole,” Anthony said.

The room then shifted back to its normal atmosphere. Patients returned to their workouts and conversations, therapists moved from mat to mat, treadmill to treadmill.  Colonel Darby stalked around the room, asking questions about exercise machines and what unit people had served with, which they grudgingly put up with. His jovial attitude wore off slightly with each conversation. When he moved on, a captain appeared and handed the patients a heavy challenge coin with the Colonel’s name on it.  Eventually, he made his way to Rodriguez and Anthony.

“So, what are your names?” Darby asked, arms crossed tightly.

Time for another life story, Rodriguez thought. They had all been through these conversations before with every fucking VIP that came by. He was about to speak, but Anthony beat him to it.

“I’m Anthony and this here is Rod,” Anthony cracked his knuckles, causing Darby to flinch.  “We got blown up together, which is pretty cool. I think. We were both—”

“Do you have a rank?”

Rodriguez and Anthony exchanged glances. “Well, I’m a lance corporal.”

“And you?” Darby nodded.

“HM2 Rodriguez.”

“HM2?  I’m not familiar with Navy ranks.”

“It means I’m a petty officer, an E-5.”

“Sir,” Darby said.

“Hm?”

“You will address me as Sir, HM2 Rodriguez,” Darby said, drawing out the syllables in Rodriguez’s name and rank and jabbing his finger into Rodriguez’s shoulder.

The room was quiet again and he could feel a dozen pairs of eyes on him.

“I’m an E-5,” Rodriguez repeated. He lowered his eyes to the floor, deflating his previous confidence, before adding, “Sir.”

Darby smiled and leaned back.

“E-5. An NCO. Tell me, petty officer, how is it everyone here is so undisciplined? Going by first names, not respecting rank. Have you forgotten you’re all still soldiers? Why are you not ordering them to wear authorized PT gear? Why do half the soldiers in here not have proper haircuts? I didn’t want to believe the reports of poor morale around here, but now I completely understand.” He was no longer speaking to Rodriguez but addressing the whole room. “There are going to be some changes around here.  It’s time you all started looking and acting like soldiers again instead of a bunch of moping civilians.  You’ve lost your pride.”

“Actually, some of us are Marines, sir,” Anthony said.

Darby glared at him and then stormed out of the room, followed by his aides.

*

Every now and again, despite not having feet, Doc Rodriguez took the bus up Georgia Avenue to the Wheaton Mall and bought a pair of shoes. These were the only trips he took outside of Walter Reed since arriving from Iraq eight months ago, and so he liked to make the most of them. Months in a wheelchair had taught him how people tip-toed around him, afraid to make the slightest insult. It amused him to watch them squirm.

Col. Darby had been in command for over a week now and the hospital was beginning to feel even more suffocating than usual. Every wounded warrior (a term Darby had grown fond of repeating) living in the barracks now had to attend 0700 accountability formations. Authorized PT gear was made the uniform of the day, no longer could they wear what they wanted or what was most comfortable. Wounded warriors had to check-in and out with the SNCOIC every time they went to an appointment, which was often multiple times per day. There was even talk of a curfew being put into effect. Rodriguez needed some kind of escape. So he went to the mall.

When he reached the shoe store, Rodriguez rolled straight to the athletic section. Two salesmen behind the counter exchanged looks of confusion with each other before pretending to be busy on the computer. No doubt hoping he would leave, Rodriguez thought. After a few minutes picking up shoes, checking the flexibility of the toes, comparing their weight, the younger of the sales reps, a lanky teen who hadn’t yet filled out his overgrown frame, cautiously approached.

“Looking for a gift for someone?”

“Nope,” Rodriguez inspected the tread of a running shoe.

“Well, that’s a great runner right there,” the rep said, rubbing his hands together and looking back at his comrade, who was still feigning interest in the computer screen.

“It’s got great tread for cross-country and is very light weight. And the sides here allow your feet—” he paused, a hint of panic in his eyes. Rodriguez said nothing and waited for him to continue— “um, they allow your feet to breathe.”

Rodriguez raised an eyebrow, wondering how long the kid could last before bursting into a frantic apology. But he’d had his fun, and instead asked if they had them in size ten; a good, solid size, he thought.

The sales rep made a quick glance towards Rodriguez’s nonexistent feet. “Let me go check.”  He disappeared into the back of the store, the other rep following close behind.

Rodriguez knew he was being an asshole. It made him feel good, normal, like he still had some control over his life. If that meant some ableds had to feel uncomfortable for a minute or two, then so be it, they could walk it off.

The lanky rep came back out, alone this time, and Rodriguez met him at the cash register.  The rep removed the security tag and boxed up the shoes, asking Rodriguez how he would like to pay. He was relaxed now that he was making a sale. Rodriguez was about to respond when he was grasped around the neck. Whoever it was squeezed tightly.  Rodriguez could feel their body pressing against his back and shoulders.

“Excuse me,” Rodriguez said.

The arms gently released and he turned to see an old woman. She was somewhere in her sixties, seventies maybe, judging by her gray, dry hair and purple fanny pack. He could see tears welling up in her eyes.

“Oh, I’m sorry I just couldn’t help myself. I saw you and just had to come over and hug that poor soldier. I just can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”

“Sailor.”

“What was that?”

“I’m a sailor,” he said, pointing to his shirt which read “NAVY” in big block letters across his chest. “A Navy Corpsman.”

“Oh, I apologize, I just assumed. What’s a corpsman?”

Rodriguez sighed. Nobody ever knows what the fuck a corpsman is.

“A medic for Marines.”

“That sounds wonderful, sweetie. A real hero! Please, let me buy these shoes for you.”

She had already pulled out her card from the fanny pack and was handing it over the counter before Rodriguez knew what was happening.

“No, ma’am, it’s really all right.  I can—”

“Oh no, don’t you worry.  It’s the least I could do to thank you for your service.  You boys really have done so much for this country.”

“Thanks, but—”

She pulled him in for another hug, nearly yanking him out of his chair. When she was done, she kissed the top of his head, signed her receipt and left. What the fuck? The sales kid was stifling a laugh.

He sat at the bus stop, waiting to return to the hospital and hoping no one else would talk to him. Other than a few confused glances at his shoebox and the empty space where his legs used to be, no one bothered him. He wanted to shrink into his chair and disappear.  When the bus arrived, he waited for everyone to board before moving to the door and asking the driver to lower the lift in the back.

“Didn’t notice you there,” the bus driver said. He was a big man and had to rock himself forward a few times to build enough momentum to get out of his chair, but once he was up the bus driver was surprisingly quick. “My apologies, folks.  Gotta help get this young man get loaded up.”

He met Rodriguez at the back of the bus. “This’ll take no time,” he said, reaching for the lift controls, as if Rodriguez hadn’t done this a hundred times before, and didn’t in fact know that the lift was slow as hell. Rodriguez could see the other passengers watching through the windows, visibly annoyed that their ride was being delayed. When the lift was finally lowered, he reached for his wheels, but the bus driver beat him to it, grabbing onto his chair and pushing and guiding him onto the ramp.

“Hey,” Rodriguez said, “I got it.”

“I just want to make sure you get on nice and straight. See?”

“Fine, whatever.” He just wanted to get on board.

“Make sure you lock your wheels, I’d be all shook up if you rolled off backwards once this thing is up in the air.”

“I’m good. I’m holding on to the rails.”

The bus driver ignored him and locked the wheels himself.

Rodriguez wanted to scream at the man but didn’t want to make this already ridiculous scene any bigger, and so he bit his lower lip instead. The other passengers were huffing and sighing, checking their watches and phones with annoyance. It was embarrassing to be such an inconvenience. When Rodriguez was finally aboard, the bus driver pulled out some hooks and straps, and used them to anchor the chair to the floor.  Rodriguez again tried to protest, he hated the idea of being locked in place, unable to move until someone came and untied him, but the bus driver, all smiles and stupid jokes, ignored him again.

*

Back in his room, Rodriguez tossed the shoebox on top of the dresser and transferred from his chair to the bed, shoving a pile of clothes out of the way. He was tired, mentally drained. No, it went deeper than that, he thought. Spiritually drained, that was a better word for it, but not in the religious sense. Mentally, he could take anything, had taken everything, but this place was wearing him down in other ways. And now Darby.  Rodriguez was still pissed about their first encounter. Address me as Sir, he thought.  Act like soldiers. Where the fuck did he think he was? Like we don’t have more important shit to worry about than getting a fucking haircut every week. And that dumb grin. He should have just stuck to his guns.

He couldn’t dwell on it, he thought. Negative emotions will just demoralize the patient, making their survival less certain. Always direct their attention elsewhere. He began to run through the procedure for bandaging a sucking chest wound: stop the bleeding, seal the wound with plastic, you don’t want any air entering the chest cavity, place a bandage on top of the plastic and tie it around the chest for good pressure, roll the victim onto their injured side while awaiting evacuation, monitor for shock. When he was done with that, Rodriguez moved on to treating immersion foot, pitted keratolysis, where to place a tourniquet and for how long.

After several minutes his phone chirped with a text message: get online bitch. It was Juan, one of his old squad mates still down at Camp Lejeune. Rodriquez reached over to the nightstand for an Xbox controller and microphone and logged on.

“Hey, Doc, how’s it goin, dude?”

“Same old shit, man,” Rodriguez said, “It’s good to hear from ya.”

“Fuck yeah, man.  Ain’t nothin new here, just playing some Call of Duty while the boots do working parties.”

“Ha ha, just like the old days.”

Rodriguez wished he could be back there, dealing with all the bullshit, but these game sessions went a long way to make him still feel connected, still part of a unit. When he first arrived at Walter Reed, the doctors and therapists kept going on and on about his “new normal” and how once he got adjusted he wouldn’t feel different at all. A life of adventure awaited; wheelchair basketball, handcycling across the country, sit-skiing down Breckenridge, fucking hiking up Kilimanjaro, and all that other inspirational horseshit everyone expected them to be doing. New normal, he scoffed. Fuck all that. He just wanted to feel normal normal.

“Aint the same without you, Doc. These new corpsmen we got are boot as fuck. Could use you down here training ‘em up.” There was a commotion on the other end and Rodriguez had to pull the headphones off when the sound started banging around and scraping in his ear.

“Yo, Doc, you legless asshole.” It was his old roommate, Benjamin, clearly drunk.

Rodriguez laughed. “Benji, what’s up, brother?”

“Corporal Benji to you, you fucking squid.”

They continued like that for a couple hours, shit talking back and forth, Rodriguez asking what training they were up to, if they got their next deployment orders yet. Afghanistan, Juan said, though he didn’t know where exactly. They were heading out next week for mountain warfare training in California, they’d be gone for a few weeks. Even though he had hated combat, hated how afraid it made him, hated bandaging up his friends, had felt relief when he woke up in Germany with no legs, knowing he’d never have to do it again, Rodriguez had a sudden, deep longing to go with them, and when he logged off and turned out the light, he fell asleep fantasizing about not having been blown up, about getting drunk in the barracks, about training in California, about the mountains of Afghanistan.

*

The next day, after physical therapy, Anthony came over to Rodriguez’s room to play some Halo. It was a usual routine for them after PT and helped them relax after working out for two or three hours. Though Rodriguez would never admit it out loud, playing video games made him feel like his old self, back when he didn’t need any kind of handicap or special equipment to play sports or any other activity. They were the one thing that made him feel like he was still equal and whole.

There was a knock at the door and Anthony got up to open it. It was Jeff, their Halo tourney rival. He pushed past Anthony and walked in.

“Yo, you trying to steal our strats or what?” Anthony said.

“Like I need to.  You noobs can practice all you want but you’ll never beat me and the LAN Warriors.”

Rodriguez rolled his eyes. “You idiots still using that dumbass name?”

Jeff waved him off, “I’m not here to talk about that. Colonel Darby is doing room inspections. Just finished with the second floor.”

“What, here?” Anthony said.  “Are you serious?”

“Yeah I’m fucking serious. Asshole just burst into my room and chewed my ass out for leaving one of my arms on the bed and clothes on the floor.”

The three of them surveyed the room. The “barracks” they lived in was actually a former hotel, converted for use as overflow patient housing when amputees began coming home in unexpectedly large numbers, and like most hotels was not an ideal long-term living solution. Every inch of floor space not necessary for wheelchair traffic was covered in luggage bags and spare limbs, a collection of t-shirts and knitted blankets lay in the corner, growing with every new tour of American Legion and VFW groups to come through. Clothes were haphazardly piled on the guest bed and the small garbage can was overflowing with empty Red Bull cans and soda bottles. The bed sheets were open and scrunched to the side. A collection of magazines, pizza boxes, and orange pill bottles lay across the desk.

“Well, it smells all right,” Anthony said.

The door swung open and in walked Col. Darby, who gave the room a quick once over and then stood in front of the TV.

“HM2 Rodriguez, why am I not surprised?”

“You tell m—”

“I’ll tell you why, HM2 Rodriguez. I’m not surprised by the state of this,” Darby scanned the space again, “room because every gosh darn room so far has looked exactly the same.  Clothes every which way.  Pizza boxes, spit bottles, pop cans,” he hesitated, “pornography.”

“And I’ll tell you something else, HM2…”

Rodriguez could have sat there silently and taken the ass-chewing like he did earlier. Just stare and say a couple of “Yessirs,” maybe squeeze in an “Aye Aye, sir” just to throw Darby off a bit, a slight stick of the needle so he could feel smug about it later. Then toss him some platitude like “I’ll get right on it, sir” with no intention of actually following through, but offering just enough to make Darby feel like he had accomplished something so he could leave.

And that’s exactly what Rodriguez did, Anthony and Jeff following his lead. But when Darby finally reached the end of his self-indulgent tirade he said something that caught Rodriguez off guard.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I said, HM2, that I’m tired of seeing all of these Nintendos.  I don’t believe in coincidences and I believe there is a direct correlation to the lack of discipline around here and those darn machines.”

Nintendos? he thought. “Do you mean video games, sir?”

“Don’t correct me, HM2. Give me anymore attitude and I’ll be speaking with…whoever it is in charge of you.”

“Aren’t you in charge of me, sir?”  Rodriguez allowed himself a slight grin.

“You find this amusing, do you? Well, I think I’ve seen enough here. It’s obvious what the problem is. Captain!” An aide appeared at Darby’s side as if she had been there the whole time. “I want you to call IT and instruct them to shut off network access for all…video games.” She nodded and pulled out a Blackberry.

“You can’t do that,” Anthony nearly shouted.

Darby regarded him, “It’s my base, son.”

“You can’t mess with our personal time like that,” Rodriguez countered.  “We’re,” he searched for the right word, something Darby would understand, “off-duty!”

“You’re never off-duty when you live on base.”

“But, we’re fucking hospital patients!”

“And that’s exactly my point. You all need to get back in the right mindset. You’re not hospital patients, you’re soldiers! And soldiers don’t play video games, they train. You should be working on PMEs for promotion boards or taking online college courses. There are plenty of more productive activities you could be doing. Believe me, I’m doing you a favor.”

“But, sir,” Rodriguez pleaded, all the resistance in him from a moment before had drained out, “I know it’s hard to understand, but this is important for us. All of us. It’s how I keep in touch with the guys in my unit.” He hoped that would be enough, that Darby could at least sympathize with that.

“You have a cell phone, don’t you? Shut it down, captain.”

She was still holding the phone to her ear but gave a thumbs up.

“Why don’t you three spread the word.”

*

They gathered at the smoke pit in the courtyard. A few dozen soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in wheelchairs and on crutches. Some listened from their windows, their heads and arms dotting the walls of the hotel which surrounded the courtyard on three sides.  They were angry. They were powerless. Who do we blame? The colonel?  For most of them he only existed in the abstract; some liminal force both real and unreal, capable of controlling their lives, their actions, manipulating their fears and desires towards his own ends.  Another authority free of accountability. And so they blamed each other.  Arguments spread over who hadn’t been keeping their room clean, who spent more time playing Xbox or Playstation, who didn’t cut their hair, shave, bathe, didn’t render a proper salute, act professionally, ate too much pizza or Chinese takeout—

“Enough!” Rodriguez shouted.

He made his way to the front of the group, wheelchairs parting to let him through. All eyes reluctantly turning to him.

“Are we really going to turn on each other? Over one asshole’s stupidity?” That got him a few laughs. “An asshole who’s been here all of a few days and already thinks he knows how to the run the place, who thinks he can barge into our rooms, our PT building whenever he pleases? Humiliate us?” Hell no, someone shouted. Rodriguez pointed at Jeff, “How long have you been here?” Thirteen months, Jeff replied. He pointed at someone else, “How long have you been here?” Ten months. “And you,” he pointed to his left, “how long have you been here?” Two years, was the answer.  Rodriguez paused and let that sink in.

“Walter Reed exists for us. We are the reason for that state-of-the-art PT building. We are the reason celebrities and politicians come here, supplying them,” he pointed towards the administrative buildings, “with good PR and propaganda. We are the reason their budget has been doubled.” Hell yeah! Damn straight! The crowd was nodding and clapping in agreement. “I don’t know about you all, but I’m tired.” Real fuckin tired! A shout from the middle of the crowd. “Tired of people grabbing my chair without permission.”  Yeah!  “Tired of having my therapy interrupted by some chicken hawk senator or b-list actor offering to take a picture with me.” Fuck those douchebags! “Tired of being told about my ‘new normal.’” Hear, hear! Hell, yeah! Speakin truth! “Tired of being forced to live up to everyone else’s expectations of how we should think and act!” Furious applause.  “And I’m fucking tired of thinking we have no control around here!” The crowd was wild, clapping and waving canes in the air, surging towards him. “WE run this place!” Rodriguez shouted over the noise. A chant began seemingly from everyone all at once, “No play, no work!  No play, no work!  No play, no work!”

Back inside the group gathered around Rodriguez. It had grown larger as more people came down from their rooms and into the open lobby.

“What are your orders, Doc?”  Anthony asked.

“I’m not giving any orders. But we do need to organize. We’ll need volunteers.”  Everyone raised their hand. “Good, strength in numbers. First off, we’ll need some counter-intel.  People who can make some posters for propaganda and psy ops.”

“I can do that,” Anna said. She was an air force staff sergeant who had lost her left arm in a rocket attack. She was fairly new, having only been here a few months. Normally, she kept to herself in her room, went to PT in the afternoon when fewer people were there. She wasn’t timid, Rodriguez thought, just quiet. He nodded to her and she raised her one fist in acknowledgement and then left to gather more members for her team.

“Okay, hopefully we won’t need it, but a direct-action team would be nice.”

“That’s got my name all over it, Doc,” Jeff said.

“Focus on gathering stuff to use as barricades, we’ll need to be ready to block the entrances and stairwells in case they try to force us out.”

“Roger that.”  Jeff raised his fist.

“Everyone else should help out where needed. Prepare some defenses or gather up enough food and meds to last us a few days. We’re not going to ANY appointments until we get our video games back. They can’t punish us all if we stick together!”

Rodriguez turned to Anthony. “I’ve got a special mission for you.”

Two days later they were still holding strong. That first night, Rodriguez had called Darby’s office and stated their demands. He hung up before the colonel’s aide could respond. Soon after, all internet access in their rooms was shut off. They’d heard nothing since. But morale among them had never been higher. With no instruction they had eagerly organized themselves into four-man fireteams, each responsible for a set of windows or hallways. A rotating guard shift was set up at every entrance and a direct-action team waited in the lobby ready for anything. The building custodial staff had given them the keys to the building, raising their fists to Rodriguez when they handed them over, and now they had unlimited access to the cafeteria as well as the roof, where they posted lookouts. The staff had also donated a few sets of walkie talkies, which were distributed throughout the building. If Darby thought he could wait them out, Anna had said, he was mistaken.

“Man, we shoulda done this sooner,” Jeff said. “I’m fuckin’ pumped.”

“It’s nice to feel useful again,” Anna replied.

“I’m just glad to be a burden on my own terms for once,” Rodriguez said. The others nodded.

OP1 to HQ, movement on the northwest of the courtyard. Coming down the path, looks like Darby and some aides, over.

Anna clicked on her radio, Roger that, OP1, out. “Looks like he finally wants to talk.”

“We’ll see,” Rodriguez said.

They waited for Darby to come closer, so he could see what they had left for him. All along the building, along all three sides of the courtyard, the windows were plastered with posters. NO PLAY, NO WORK was the most predominant, with others like FUCK THE POLICE and ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US interspersed throughout. A large pirate flag hung from a window. From behind the glass doors Rodriguez could see Darby carefully scanning each sign, his disgust evident by the ever-growing scowl on his face. His aides stood nervously behind him. Rodriguez instructed the guard to unlock the door and then rolled out to meet him.

“This little insurrection of yours ends right now!” Darby said as soon as Rodriguez was out of the building. “If it doesn’t, I’ll have every last one of you charged and court martialed!”

Rodriguez snorted, “Good luck with that.”

“Listen here, Aitch. Em. Two, this facility will not be held hostage and I will not negotiate with insurrectionists. This insubordination will end—”

“I’m sorry but we don’t really care what you think is going to happen.”

“How dare you, you—”

“And we don’t much care for your indignant attitude.” A round of banging echoed across the courtyard as those watching from the windows drummed their canes on the window frames. “It’s time you recognized who holds the power around here. Us. You’re here to serve us, to make sure we’re getting the proper care we need. We’re through with being treated as if we were children on timeout. Now, turn the internet back on and restore our video game access and we’ll gladly return to our duties.” More drumming. The aides took cautious steps back.

“I will not be ordered around by some enlisted man, a petty officer! I’m in command here and you will shut this, this, this charade down!”

“I think we’d prefer not to.” Rodriguez smiled and crossed his arms.

“Fine. Seize him!”

Darby’s aides hesitated a moment, and then rushed forward. A lieutenant grabbed his left arm and Rodriguez punched him in face. The lieutenant let out a sharp squeal that even had Rodriguez feeling embarrassed for him and crumpled to the ground. Before Rodriguez could reposition himself two captains clutched his arms from behind and tried to pull him out his chair.

“CHARGE!”

The captains paused and turned back to the building entrance. Out from the building burst Anthony on his Segway wearing a Che Guevara shirt followed by two others on Segways. They were wearing helmets and elbow pads, and wielding canes. Anthony pointed his cane forward like he was Patton galloping towards the enemy upon his steed.

“Go for their legs!” He shouted and soon they were upon the aides and slashing down on them. They rode circles around them, smacking and beating their thighs and calves.  Projectiles were now reigning down from the windows; shoes, challenge coins, tomatoes; someone was firing BBs from a slingshot.

“Retreat!” Darby ordered. “Fall back!” The officers, laying in the fetal position, scrambled and stumbled to their feet. They sprinted shamelessly, trying to catch up with the colonel.

“NO PLAY, NO WORK. NO PLAY, NO WORK.” The chant grew louder as they shouted from their windows. The officers ran faster. Anthony and his team escorted Rodriguez back inside where the direct-action team prepared for a possible counterattack.

“Lock it down!” Rodriguez shouted.

Jeff reached for his radio and gave the signal, Turtle up!  Turtle up!

A flurry of activity ensued as they locked the doors. Empty wheelchairs and spare limbs and unused furniture that had been kept off to the side were now piled against the entrances. Fireteams on each floor pushed more wheelchairs down the stairwells. Every lookout and post were doubled up as they went to 100% security. Food and water were evenly distributed. Their time had come.

*

Over the next thirty-six hours, the base MPs made several probing attacks. The colonel’s goons first tried to get in through the front entrance, rather than attempt another courtyard gauntlet, but found the way blocked by a lifted, yellow H2 Hummer and a black Mercedes Benz AMG (both courtesy of the government’s tax-free $50k/per limb compensation to each amputee). They then attempted a night raid through the courtyard, thinking the resistance would be asleep. They were beaten back by a combination of million-candle-power flashlights and water balloons filled with urine. Jeff was particularly proud of that idea. Then, on the fifth day, the real assault began.

They heard it first. The unmistakable sound of boots on pavement, marching. The lookouts on the roof confirmed what the others already knew, this was no probe. I count at least 50 headed towards the courtyard, over. It took ten minutes for the MPs to file in, riot shields over their heads, boots clomping in a methodical rhythm, but the resistance held their fire. They formed up five troops wide, all that could fit through the doors at one time. Rodriguez, Anthony, Jeff, Anna and two dozen of Jeff’s direct-action team stood ready to face them at ground level, a mountain of twisting metal and rubber separating the two sides.

Panic seized Rodriguez for a moment as he considered what was about to happen and all he had done to bring it about. He may not have forced his comrades into mutiny, but he couldn’t help but feel responsible for the real danger they all now faced. Had he been right? Were these actions justified? Was their cause doomed? He began to cycle through a dozen similar questions he hadn’t contemplated before and the weight of it all nearly sent him to grab the nearest white flag, until Anthony placed an arm around his shoulders.

“If we could only see us now,” Anthony said, smiling.

Rodriguez looked up and down the line and saw the same determination in every face.  His panic passed. Doomed or not. Right or wrong. They were together.

It happened all at once. The MPs rushed forward, quickly smashing through the glass doors. The window teams opened fire with an assortment of heavy and disgusting objects. The MPs responded with pepper spray, but their range was limited and could only reach up to the second floor. Both sides dragged away their wounded. The front rows of MPs were grabbing and tossing all the debris in the blockade aside, passing it over their heads to be carried back and out of the way. “Hit em with the balloons!” Jeff barked. They crashed and broke against the barricade, spraying the MPs with all their contents. The front row disappeared as they retreated out of the line of fire but were quickly replaced by those behind them. The two sides repeated the cycle for several minutes, but the MPs were removing the debris far quicker than the resistance could deplete their ranks, and eventually the MPs broke through.

“LAN Warriors, charge!”  Jeff sprinted towards the breach. Rodriguez nearly choked laughing, but he and the others followed right behind. The next moments were a blur of canes and batons being swung back and forth. Two men, one in a chair, the other on crutches, fell to the floor, blood spilling down their faces. They were quickly dragged off.  Rodriguez and the others were slowly being pushed back by the MPs, lacking the leg power needed to hold their ground. The MPs had given up on pepper spray now that they were in close quarters, switching to their tasers instead. Two more amputees on the left flank went down, bloodied, forcing the remaining men on that side to fall back and cede ground. The MPs quickly took advantage and Rodriguez and Jeff found themselves surrounded, batons coming in from all sides. Rodriguez fought back with all he had, swinging his cane like a baseball bat, chopping down like an axe. He smashed one MP in the nose, sending a gush of blood spraying out. Jeff knocked another out cold, he had lost his cane and was now punching any uniform he could reach. An intense pain surged through Rodriguez and he lost control of himself as his body seized up. He fell out of his chair and was convulsing on the ground as two MPs tried to drag him off.

He heard a scream from somewhere in the mass of bodies and he couldn’t tell if it was one of his or one theirs, but then Anna burst from the crowd and threw herself at the MPs dragging him. “Get Doc outta here!” There were new hands on him now, dragging him away from the fight, further inside the building. Anthony screeched by on his Segway and drove straight into the mass of uniforms, disappearing as he flew over the handle bars.  The last glimpse he got of Anna before the MPs surrounded her was of her swinging her prosthetic arm like a club.

*

Now in the casualty collection point, Rodriguez had time to think again. He was badly bruised and sore from where his muscles had tensed themselves up into knots after being electrocuted but looking around it was clear he had gotten off easy. Nearly two dozen people lay about the floor in different states of shock and injury. Most had blood leaking from gashes in their heads, some lay unconscious, others had their arms in slings. A group in the far corner were busy pouring milk over their faces and sitting in front of large fans.  A man Rodriguez didn’t recognize lay next to him, struggling to wipe the blood from his eyes with the stubs of his arms. Rodriguez leaned over and pulled a bandage from his pocket. He did his best to wipe the blood from the man’s face and then applied the bandage to the wound on his forehead.

“Thanks, Doc,” the man said before groggily closing his eyes.

It was all too much for him now as the panic crept its way back into his chest. How many had new concussions? Rodriguez thought. How many broken bones? How long would their recovery now be delayed because of these new injuries? He began to shake and he lost the strength in his arms, and fell back against the wall. He took another look around the room and nearly burst into tears. “I thought I was done with this,” he said to himself.  He could still hear the sounds of battle going on in the lobby. The banging, the shouting.  He tried to cover his ears but the sounds were too loud and slipped past his fingers. There was only one thing he could do. He pushed himself back up and crawled from patient to patient, tending to their wounds.

The fight went on for thirty more minutes until the MPs retreated. A second direct-action team had arrived as Rodriguez was being pulled away and managed to hold the lobby. Jeff found Rodriguez and gave him the quick AAR: half of their resistance was injured, and of those, half could still fight. Several members were missing, including Anna and Anthony, and were presumed captured. They’d depleted all their water balloons and most of the projectiles. But, Jeff said, we still own this place. No MPs got past the lobby.

Rodriguez was quiet. Anna. Anthony. Everybody. They sacrificed themselves, for me, for my dumb plan, he finally said.

“No. They did it for themselves,” Jeff answered. “Look around, man. Even with blood and pepper spray in their faces, they’re laughing.”

Word had spread of the MP’s retreat and the mood in the room had shifted to an exhilaration not unlike that after a firefight. The exhilaration of fear and of being alive. Of having fought and won. It became clear to Rodriguez that the outcome of this mutiny no longer mattered, had probably never mattered. He climbed back into his chair and he and Jeff headed to the lobby.

A voice from a bullhorn echoed in the courtyard.

“HM2 Rodriguez. I think we’ve all had enough of this and are ready to come to an agreement.” It was Darby. “Unless you’d rather I throw your friends in the brig.”

Rodriguez and Jeff approached the window. Darby stood in the courtyard with a team of MPs in SWAT gear. Anna and Anthony sat handcuffed and bandaged at his feet.

“That motherfucker,” Jeff said.

“I’m willing to restore full internet access and grant everyone immunity if you end this rebellion now,” Darby continued, “Well, not everyone.  HM2 Rodriguez will have to face punishment. Someone has to, after all this destruction.”

“Fuck that, Doc. If anyone needs to be punished it’s that asshole.”

“No. We’ve won,” Rodriguez said. “We did it.”

“But you can’t just turn yourself—”

“I don’t want anyone else hurt over this.” Rodriguez looked over his shoulder at the guards by the doors, still defiant despite bandages on their heads and torn shirts, one of them raised his fist. “We got what we needed.”

Jeff nodded reluctantly and clapped his hand on Rodriguez’s shoulder.

*

It was silent when he rolled out to Darby. The grin and arrogance from Darby’s face was gone. It was clear he hadn’t slept at all for the past five days and looked as though he had lost twenty pounds, his uniform hanging off his shoulders and arms. Rodriguez raised his fist at Anna and Anthony and they both smiled in return. Darby said nothing to him, didn’t even look at him, just signaled for the MPs who came and handcuffed Rodriguez’s arms behind his back. They took hold of his chair and began pushing him towards a patrol car on the far side of the courtyard.

They were halfway down the courtyard when a single voice shouted from the windows, “NO PLAY, NO WORK.”

Others joined in and the chant quickly spread around the courtyard.

“NO PLAY, NO WORK.”

A prosthetic leg came sailing out from a third-floor window. Another came from the second floor across the way. Then an arm, a foot. More and more came tumbling out of the windows in a cascade of limbs all around the courtyard. The chant got louder and built up to a thunderous echo, bouncing off the walls and the trees, rising, rising, rising above the buildings and out across the street and into Rock Creek Park, down Georgia Ave and downtown and into the Capitol, the National Mall, the White House.

“NO PLAY, NO WORK.  NO PLAY, NO WORK.”

Rodriguez laughed and laughed, tears streaming from his eyes, as he was wheeled down the path and out of sight.

No more than 10 percent of the United States military was special operations when I got out. Being in special operations or “specops” as it was known at the time was something to be proud of. There were Rangers and Special Forces and Marine Special Operations and Force Recon and the SEALs like me, and the boat guys who did infiltration aka infil operations for the SEALs, and the different task forces, and CAG (I’m sorry I don’t know what the acronym stands for) otherwise known as Delta Force. Then there were the pilots for helicopters and planes and who knows what else all. There was a lot of special operations, is my point, but that amounted to about (again) 10 percent of the military, maximum. Special operations meant something. It was special.

Now, man, whew. The number’s closer to eighty percent. No joke. Eighty percent of the military is special operations.

I had to join again, is how I found out. When I left the military to get an education and pursue a career—back when I had dreams like that—it never would have occurred to me that one day the military would be people wearing different colored berets and taking part in top secret missions to countries I’d never heard of. But the education I got outside didn’t amount to much. And the career, working for some jackknife-grinning moke named Carl doing financial spreadsheets didn’t go anywhere either. I guess I’m just unlucky that way.

So I slunk back down to the Army recruiter’s office one cloudy Tuesday on my lunch break. I’d been posting on Facebook about how well things were going with my life and the job, but in reality it had been a mess. The beard and tattoo photos, the birthdays with kids, a promotion—sure, they’d happened, and online they probably seemed impressive to everyone who wasn’t there, but living those moments had been stuffing my mouth full of ash. I needed back in “the game,” as we special operators call it, but was so embarrassed that my former buddies would see me and find out that I couldn’t make it on the outside. I asked the recruiter what openings they had. “Anything except special operations,” I said, certain that they’d open the book for me.

The recruiter, a former sniper in the Ranger Reconnaissance, looked over my resume, and then laughed. “Buddy you want to go into the Regular Army? What are you going to do, water logistician?”

“Yeah,” I’d told him. “That sounds good.”

He’d jumped out of his chair. “The fuck do you think you
are, squid, walking in here and asking to be a water logistician.” His face was all snarl, but I wasn’t afraid of
him. Ranger Recon Sniper infiltration teams were tough, sure, but we special
operations folks knew that the Rangers barked harder than they bit. I stood my
ground.

“That’s right pal. Hook a trident up.”

“Look around. You notice anything?”

I scanned the room using my SEAL powers of observation, and
realized something odd. Everyone was a Ranger or a Special Forces Green Beret,
or a CAG sniper from Delta.

“What’d I walk into, special operations recruiting command?”
I quipped.

I had, which made it all the more appalling how few options
were open. There was a 10-year waiting list for water logisticians, and a bunch
of other lousy jobs in the Army. They were the most coveted positions around,
according to the recruiter.

I leaned over the desk and grabbed the Ranger by his lapels.
“Listen, I don’t have time for your b.s. Are you telling me that everyone in the military is special
operations?”

He gritted his teeth. “Geddoffa me, you bum,” he said
through clenched teeth. It was good special operations talk, strict, macho, and
I appreciated it, so I let him go and dusted off his shoulders.

“Sorry, don’t mean to be sore. I’ve been out for a while,
this seems really different from the military I was in before,” I explained,
hoping to assuage his anger. It worked: he calmed down.

“Let me see what I can do,” he said. “I’ve seen your record. You did a lot of good work sniping terrorists when you were in. Saved a lot of special operators. And that still means something to us.” He tapped my file meaningfully. “We stand by our own here.”

He sat down in his beaten swivel chair, purchased by the
limitless dark cash swilling about the special operations community (which to
remind you here was basically the whole military at this point!!) and punched
up the employment system only us JSOC / SOCOM folks had access to
(again—literally eighty percent of the military). He scanned through the job
listings for a minute, then turned to face me, his chin resting contemplatively
on a pyramid made by his fingers and thumbs.

“How does this sound. Human waste disposal specialist. Fort
Polk, Louisiana.”

His offer was not suitable, and I told him so.

“Let me hit you with this then, cowboy—more appropriate for
your skill set as a SEAL. Are you ready? Okay. Chaplain’s aide. Comes with a
two-year stabilization incentive. Fort Irwin, Kansas.”

That wasn’t it, either. I would’ve asked for things like
infantry or armor, even artillery, but those jobs were long gone. The Germans
and Poles handled those duties, now, and some Ukrainians. The professions I
could’ve fit into were no longer available and hadn’t been for years. “Got
anything in communications? Signal, public affairs, anything like that?”

He laughed, a harsh and insulting laugh, the more so for its
apparent sincerity. “Look,” he said, wiping tears away, “I got one more
opening. Veterinarian. You go around putting meds up the ass of sheep, donkeys,
that sort of thing. Think you can handle that, hotshot?”

Now, normally, I’d have walked right out. But I could see what was what. If it was between cleaning actual human shit all my waking hours, having to sexually service some randy old clergyman (that’s what chaplain’s aides did and do, it’s a fact, look it up) and slathering up sick animals with medicine to keep them walking, well, dang. I might not’ve made it in the real world, I might’ve been just another financial stock-whatever day-trading bro with a 29-year-old shift manager named Carl who was a cousin of Eric Trump or something screaming at me as though I was a child, and all of my SEAL skills might have come to naught, but dad didn’t raise no fool.

“I’ll do option number three,” I said. And that’s how I got
back into the military, and learned how few people were outside special
operations any more. It wasn’t what I expected, but it wasn’t all bad, either.
The only thing I wish were different (apart from everything about my job) was
that there were fewer generals. I think the exact number is 19.8%, 19.8% of the
Army is generals. And I, dear reader… I am not one of them.

Ozzy
stuck pennies in Huey’s door, wedging it shut, and we all stood in the hallway
and laughed as he tried to get out. Serinson and Crater built a wall of beer
cans and set it outside Gregg’s door so he crashed into it on his way to the
shower the next morning. Butthead and No-neck tied a rope to the handle of two
doors across the hallway from each other so no one in either room could get
out, and I have to say I found the shouts amusing, quizzical and comical at
first, growing increasingly angry, until the entire dorm was filled with the
word fuck.  

On Sundays Simpson wandered the perimeter of the tennis courts collecting lost balls; late Sunday night, from his third floor window, he and I aimed them at the cars below us in the lot, setting off the alarms, shattering the one night of stillness on campus. Devins threw Skoal packets in the washers and dryers in the community laundry, and Jenkins filled the soap dispensers with mayonnaise. Every night someone flooded the sinks, and every morning some new witticism like “Here I sit broken-hearted” had been scrawled on the toilet stalls.

When Pace passed out we drew a penis on his face. When Stevenson slept we shaved him, then short-sheeted his bed. Davids we ducted-taped his wrists and ankles together, and the only thing that kept us from taping shut his mouth was we were afraid he might choke on his own vomit, drunk as we all were.

What
we didn’t do was go to class. I’ll say it was because we were too tired from
constantly watching our backs, or maybe it’s that we only have so much
creativity inside us, and when we use it coming up with ways to attack others,
we forget to expand ourselves. It’s also possible we had given up. Or were so
busy trying to lock someone else in that we shut ourselves out, too busy attacking
to protect.  

That first semester we had all been friends. It was only in the winter, when the First Gulf War began, that we tried to hurt each other. This was after watching the news every night: the bombs over Baghdad, the Tomahawk missiles flying in from the Red Sea. We didn’t know then how war would loom over our adult lives, how we’d move from one war to another without even realizing we’d moved. No wonder we were too tired to go to class, or care. No wonder we built so many walls, shut so many doors. It would be years before I quit sabotaging others, and still more before I realized there’s no end to the creativity we can control, it’s only that there’s a limit to how much emotion we can handle. I’ll prove it to you now. Tell me, when’s the last time you remembered we were still at war?

Paul Crenshaw is a writer and essayist. His essay collection “This One Will Hurt You” was published by The Ohio State University Press in spring 2019. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, anthologies by Houghton Mifflin and W.W. Norton, Oxford American, Tin House, Brevity, North American Review, and Glimmer Train, among others.

Nearly eighteen years. That is how long America has been at war since the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. Many Americans have forgotten this or have stopped caring; most active-duty military, veterans, and their families, however, have not. Regardless of status—civilian or veteran—as citizens we are all equally responsible when our country goes to war. Let us also not forget that the War Powers Clause of Article One of the Constitution, reinforced by the War Powers Resolution of 1973, grants the U.S. Congress the sole authority to declare war and allow the U.S. Armed Forces to be sent abroad.

Here at The Wrath-Bearing Tree, our editors, including their families, have spent a collective total of eighteen years at war. For some of us, it seems like a lifetime ago. We were all much younger, and most of us were stupider when we first signed up. Some of us claimed to be “apolitical,” as good soldiers are supposed to be. A few of us didn’t really mind when we invaded Iraq, and a couple of us were even happy about it. But today, none of us have any qualms, any excuses, any sense of hesitation. We have our lived experience, and a certain set of values that we trust in deeply—now more than ever.

Some things are morally justified, but illegal. Some things are legal, but immoral. Some things are neither legal nor moral.

None of us at The Wrath-Bearing Tree are pacifists. We believe there are times when war is necessary. But those times are vanishingly rare. We try our best to see through propaganda, shun conformity, and tease out nuance. We aim to see things truthfully, though we don’t always succeed.

This much we firmly believe: War with Iran would be illegal, immoral, unjustified, and catastrophic. There is no web of lies that the masters of war can spin that will erase those truths. We hope that, like us, the American people have learned from the past and refuse to accept this action for what it is: war profiteering, political distraction, and state-sanctioned murder.

In Solidarity,

The Wrath-Bearing Tree Editors:

Adrian Bonenberger                Amalie Flynn                          Rachel Kambury

Michael Carson                        Matthew Hefti                       Drew Pham

M.L. Doyle                                 David James                           Andria Williams

August 2011

I remember when you first joined, I used to tell you that the Army would be four years, the way that college had been four years, and that really used to help you. These days, I’m not so sure. You called me this morning on my way out the door. You know the routine, the sun’s still not out yet so I go out onto the landing looking down on the parking lot to wait for the carpool of teachers so we can drive the hour north to Clinton. Closer to Mississippi than Baton Rouge, but we don’t pick where we’re assigned, you of all people know that. I was smoking my morning cigarette—God, I’m turning into my mother—when you called me and told me you’d killed a man. I didn’t know what to do with that—I don’t know what to do with a lot of the things you tell me. So I told you to wait, wait until you got home. We would deal with it together. You said you didn’t feel anything, weren’t you supposed to feel something? But then Jimmy and Becky and Mormon Rick showed up in the carpool, headlights jumping at the speed bump and I told you I had to go. You said you knew. Hung up.

#

So why did I stay with you? Maybe because I remember the string lights hanging above us like torch flies when we’d kissed. The smell of the East River as you’d walked me to the train. The sound of your voice after midnight, how it felt like biting into something alive. The vacuous kinds of things people with marriages that never last say. Maybe because I looked at you, and there was a sadness on your face that you’d been born with, like the freckle beneath your eye or your fullness of your lips.

You told me about your mother, your father during the war, and I envied them. I thought your parents took up so much space in your heart, and I wanted to take up as much as they did, to be carried as you carry them. Maybe I’m just another white girl with a savior complex, but then, all those Peace Corps kids can always go home. It can’t be like that for me; I need you. I’m struggling to figure out why. If you would just talk to me again in that open way you do like when we’d first met and it was like I’d known you all my life, if you’d topple those walls of sandbags and pull away those spirals of razor wire you put up around you, if you’d fucking say just one honest thing to me instead of going out there every day, rifle in hand, and pretending like you’re doing something good even though you know you aren’t.

When I hear your voice, I know that something else sits there in your heart, beside yours parents’ memories. I should’ve known it was never them—a woman I’d met twice, and a man I’ll never meet—who’d, like a festering tumor, plastered itself to that beating organ. It was always war, wasn’t it? It grew, it grows, it will grow, and one day it’ll kill you. I shouldn’t have to compete with something so big for possession of you. Any sane woman would be long gone. But I wonder if that’s what love is, a kind of insanity, an irrational urge to never wash your pillowcase and sleep in the dip you’ve left in the mattress. A mnemonic kleptomania of the way your hair feels between my fingers, the way your sweat smells stuck to all those worn out shirts, the way your eyes look in the sun—not black, but a deep, warm brown masquerading as the absence of color. A manic episode of binging on the way you smiled. A depressive plateau when I realize I may never see that smile again. I hoard these pieces of you and each one slices into me, bleeds me. It’s the only thing that’s real anymore, the pain of it. And I fear if I ever let go, I’ll be letting go of a piece of myself.

#

Things That Quicken the Heart

(After Sei Shonagon)

How fewer egrets there were after the oil spill. Imagining you with an infant on your chest. Laying down to sleep and dreaming about waking up from this life into another. Looking into a broken mirror that splits me in two. A beautiful woman with a simple request who makes me forget you for just a moment. The weight of a camera, to spool a ribbon of cellophane into it and walk out onto a strange boulevard somewhere, and even if I’m nowhere special, I feel a drunken kind of pleasure knowing I can capture thirteen moments in time. After all this waiting, on a night someday soon, knowing that, like the summer rain, you’ll come back to me and drown the stifling sun with the heat or cold of your body, making my heart quicken.

#

You disappear for days or weeks at a time, and when I don’t get an email or a phone call, I’ll make whoever is driving us to work or home turn the radio to NPR so we can catch the BBC World Service or Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne read the news. I’ll hear things like, five dead in Kandahar, drone strike in Helmand, bombing outside the embassy in Kabul, and Becky or Mormon Rick might say, oh God, but I’d tell them it had nothing to do with you—probably. I often stew over their ignorance, tell them for the fiftieth time you’re in Wardak province, Wardak goddammit, and they forget again the next time, but I guess I can’t really blame them. They don’t have maps of Afghanistan pinned to the walls of their bedrooms.

There was the week you sent me a short email, told me to check the news, and I looked up the Times and there was a developing story about that helicopter full of SEALs that’d been shot down, how it was the biggest loss of life in a single day since the beginning of the war. You called when you got back, told me how, on the last day there in that valley, you’d killed that dog—a bitch you called her. But then you surprised me and said you wished you hadn’t. You said there were pieces of men scattered all through the branches like Christmas ornaments; how the valley smelled like raw crab and you didn’t think you could ever eat crab again. I didn’t know what to say, then. I guess I don’t know what to say still.

Then there was the day bin Laden died. I came home, turned on the news, watching those fraternity bros and sorority girls partying in the streets. I thought, they’re the ones who should get drafted and they’re the ones who should be sent over there, because I wanted you back here with me. It should be them, not you, over there fighting. But you don’t know that, do you?

We say so little when we talk, always speaking around and past and between one another. You want to know more about home, and when I tell you what’s happening in Louisiana, back home in New York, it only makes you seem further away than ever. I want to tell you, instead, how tragedy magnifies beauty, how this pain stitches us together, how I hope that someday all this distance and lack and yearning will be useful, one day. I want to tell you that you need to survive so we can start a family together, like we always wanted. I want to tell you that I know you’ll be a good father, no matter how afraid you are of becoming one. Instead I just talk about the radiators in my classroom cranked up to eleven and phone bills and what so-and-so said at that party I’d half forgotten because I drank too much. If I could go back, change anything, I think I’d like to say what I feel more often.

#

At the beginning of your tour, when we spoke on the phone, it felt like you were right next to me. Now you sound like you’re on an entirely different planet.

#

July 2011

When you told me Sergeant Finley died, I thought of his straw-haired wife, that EMT. I wondered if she would get a flag at his funeral, seeing as they’d been divorced. Or would they give it to her boy? I wanted to give you all the time and space in the world to grieve, I wished you would cry, if only to remind me that the man on the phone was the same man I’d fallen in love with. It’s selfish, I know. But you didn’t, so I cried for you.

#

There’s still time, that’s what I kept thinking the whole time you were on mid-tour leave. Then it ran out and we missed our chance. Now, with all this—a dead man on your conscience, all that fighting, all those moral compromises that have shaken you, I can’t help but think of where I went wrong, what I could’ve done differently to persuade you to run across the Canadian border. Now I worry that even if you make it home in one piece, it wouldn’t matter, because I’ve already lost you.

I know there would have been consequences if you had run. Maybe you would never be able to come back to the States. But it was never your country—not really—anyone could see that. Just a flag and a bunch of stupid rules everyone agreed to. But then again I’m not one to talk, am I? I pay my taxes and have a bank account and drive a car to work every day, I follow the rules just like you, like everyone else. Sometimes I wonder if you think I’m a hypocrite, turning my back on my convictions. You used to say my life was politics, but now, I wonder if you think you couldn’t trust a college anarchist who’d once shouted about abolishing the state, only to become one of its many drones. Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe telling you to run was selfish of me, a way for me to stay true to the woman I’d used to be. Or maybe this was a way to keep you all to myself.

I thought I knew your heart well enough—you were always selfless in a way that you refused to see—and if you didn’t to it for yourself (how could I ever believe you’d do something for yourself?), then at least you’d do it for me. I forgot about your boys. You were thinking about them after Finley died, weren’t you? What you could have done differently. But if you’d gone AWOL, you wouldn’t have been there and it wouldn’t have been your fault and you wouldn’t have to carry that around with you.

I also forgot about Afghanistan. The first few weeks you were there, you’d write me, saying that you hoped there’d be peace soon so I could see it. No place as beautiful in the world, you’d said, you could understand how people believed in God—just seeing how small it makes a man feel, you’d said. Sometimes you’d write angry e-mails or be flustered on the phone over how the people around you refused to see the Afghans as people. Mothers and fathers and children just like us. You’d wanted to do everything to help them, and I was proud of you, but now I wish I hadn’t told you that, because I know your heart is over there, and not here with me.

Sometimes, I dream that you did run off, go AWOL. I see you rowing the little aluminum boat up Champlain, going north, and I’m worried you’ll get lost or caught, but I’ll remember that you’re a soldier and I should have faith in you. In the dream, I wait months or years—impossible to say in that floating life—but I find you, we start our lives over. I go on teaching, you become an artist, we start a family—in Montreal, maybe. I dream our kids have miraculously red hair and wide smiles and you see them and forget all about that faraway country and the mountains that made you feel small. I dream this dream, and when I wake up, I half expect you to be in the kitchen making coffee, frying eggs.

#

I worry sometimes that you’ll kill yourself and leave me all alone to put the pieces back together. Maybe you wouldn’t do it by your own hand, but let the enemy do it for you. That way you get to die a hero. I think about you, sitting on the bank of the Mississippi in New Orleans, before you deployed. We watched the barges and container ships easing past as slow as honey. You joked that if you were killed over there, I’d be able to pay off my student loans with the life insurance money.

#

I’ve been thinking of writing poetry, like Shonagon’s The Pillow Book. I like the idea of a book composed of lists. I like the way that, in Japanese, every word stands on its own.

#

June 2011

When you were on leave, we developed rolls of your film and I saw all those smiling girls in the school you’ve been helping to support. I wish I could speak Dari and I didn’t have asthma and I could come to Afghanistan and teach in your girls’ school. I would teach math, just the same as I do here, teach them to make cranes from square sheets of paper, how to make garlands of them to hang in the classroom. We might have to share the same discomforts and dislocations and disappointments, but at least we would be sharing them together. At least that way, I’d be making a difference. Not like teaching to a test my kids will fail because they’ve got bigger problems, like grandparents on dialysis and electricity getting turned off and their unemployed parents and the revolving door of principals at the school.

If we actually did what we said we were supposed to—get kids to graduate and go off to college and rise out of this backwoods Jim Crow town, that’d put this whole white savior factory out of business, wouldn’t it? I fantasize about flying away from this place every time I go to the dollar store to buy school supplies to send you. When I pack boxes full of crayons and notebooks and pens and coloring books, with a carton of cigarettes or a can of shag tobacco on top for you, I feel like I’m sending myself over there piece by piece. I wish that were truly the case; that I could just mail myself out of here.

I used to look forward to teaching, but these days I’m just looking forward to the end of the week. One of my kids has been acting up since her father left, and one day poured a soda out on one of her friends. I didn’t want to send her down to the vice principal’s just to get smacked around a bit. I told you about the vice principal, didn’t I? Has this big paddle hanging on the wall with air holes drilled into it and a handle wrapped in leather. My student’s grandmother, who has taken over raising her, told me just to whup her right there in front of the whole class. That’s what she’d said, whup. Said if I didn’t want to do it, she knew enough teachers who’d be glad to. I thanked her and hung up. When I told it to one of the other teachers—a scab like me—she said I should’ve let the vice principal take care of it. These kids can be animals, she said. Her eyelids have become a sleepless shade of red, her skin—I used to marvel over how it was so clear she never had to wear foundation—was caked to cover up the way her skin looks like spoiled milk from all the stress. When she said, animals, there was a rusty creak in her birdsong voice. We were all so idealistic when we’d started. How much a year can wear on you.

I don’t think you remember when I told you this on one of the nights we talked. Our conversation lasted only a few minutes—you’d just gotten back from a long patrol rotation. You didn’t say much, but when you spoke, I heard that creak in your voice too.

#

May 2011

After you started helping that Afghan school, I felt something else. A little worse than envy. It seemed like your work was the most important thing in the world and I took a back seat. You, playing the man, the savior, the martyr, the hero. You get to be Odysseus. I’m typecast as Penelope.

You fucker, can’t you see how hard I’ve tried, how much work I’ve done for you? I do the taxes, I pay the bills, I go apartment hunting, I manage the bank accounts. I’m the one on the phone with the rear-detachment commander every time we get a red message, a white message, seeing if there’s anything I can do for the families of those dead and wounded boys. I’m not some shrinking violet in the damn wives club, and even if I were, they’ve got kids to raise while you men are off playing GI Joe. Can’t I be the hero of my own story?

But I don’t suppose you know that. A little like how I can’t know what combat is like, how I can’t feel it in my veins.  So how could you ever know what it’s like waking up every morning and wondering if today will be the day two men arrive on my doorstep to tell me you’re dead? How do we balance the two? How do we reach across these shores?

If I were the hero of this story, it would be the war at home, not the one over there that I’d fight. We’d march on the Capitol, throw off the government and hang the profiteers and politicians from their neckties, line Pennsylvania Avenue with their corpses and leave them for the crows. I’d build schools where we taught girls and boys that life isn’t money; it’s clear September days and the way the leaves are most beautiful before shedding in death and how finishing a book is as bittersweet as saying goodbye to a friend. If I were a hero, I’d go over there and rescue you, my damsel, and all the soldiers toiling and bleeding and dying. If I were a hero, I’d have a little agency, a choice to make, a journey with arcs and morals and an ending well earned, but this isn’t that kind of story.

#

March 2011

Here is a List of Things That Make My Heart Lurch:

-Strangers’ footsteps in front of my door.

-The country code +93 before a number beckoning on my phone.

-The word Afghanistan.

-The words America and liberty and freedom, and how I don’t know what they mean anymore.

-The words Standardized Testing.

-How the word rifle, which figures so heavily into the stories you tell me, is so violating, as if a stranger goes through my things each time I hear it.

-A scowling parent and/or guardian.

-The sounds of police helicopters overhead and how I look up and wonder if you too are looking up at a metal bird beating its wings.

-The way I sometimes confuse your dismay at what you’re doing over there with my dismay at what I’m doing here.

-Other couples with their cliches, couples who wonder if their lovers are looking up at the same moon. For you and me, that’s impossible. The moon can’t show its face to both of us at once, and my day is your night.

-Sleep deprivation combined the hour long commune to East Feliciana Parish at 5am.

-What waiting feels like.

-What nothing feels like.

-What knowing that no matter how hard I try, I’ll fail feels like.

-The nightly news.

#

February 2011

There’s one memory I save for special occasions. I hide it away, use it sparingly to keep its blade sharp. It comes out when I’m alone and the night is cold like it had been the night we’d met. When I see a couple all tangled up in one another’s arms. When the news reports six dead in a suicide bombing at a remote forward operating base. In it, you walk me to the train. I wear your coat. You even swiped onto the platform to see me onto the car. Then I gave you my number. Then the train took me home. You forgot to take your coat back. Then you called the next day. No one does that.

#

January 2011

I wish my great-grandmother Ada were still alive today, so she could tell me what it was like to see her husband enlisted in the Navy and sent off to the battles on the Atlantic. I wish I were as lucky as she; to learn that the war had ended ahead of schedule, sparing my great grandfather, sparing the generations that followed from meeting our ends at the hands of a German submarine captain. I’d want to ask her what was in my great-grandfather’s heart when he’d sworn that oath of enlistment to a country that hadn’t considered us Jews any more American than they consider blacks or Latinos or anyone or Vietnamese. I’d want to know what my grandfather’s skin felt like when they reunited, if the sun had tanned and cracked his face, if ropes had calloused the palms and fingertips his large hands, if there were other changes—in his heart for instance—which took years to undo, changes which could never be undone.

#

November 2010

I sometimes wonder if it was right to follow you to this place. I wondered it the day you left, and I saw you march to the buses that’d take you to the plane that’d take you away. I had to drive the two hours back to Baton Rouge to get to work on time, and I got lost in a cornfield because I couldn’t stop crying long enough to notice I’d taken a wrong turn, and I thought why the fuck did I follow you here? I don’t mean Louisiana.

#

October 2010

I hadn’t been able see you when the whole brigade assembled on Honor Field, patchy with carcinomas of dead grass and barren dirt. You said you you’d be in the first rank, and that may have been true, but I didn’t see you. You said you saw me there, in my green dress with my Yashica in hand, waiting to snap a six by six of you, my soldier husband. I thought I’d show it to our children one day, and they’d say it was funny how daddy’s body blended into the bodies around him, your uniforms melting into the half-dead landscape. A hot day, and the medics had their hands full with soldiers passing out from standing in the sun so long. Everyone wore those bladders of water on their backs, and you seemed less like brave soldiers and more like brigade of hunchbacks. They played some Sousa march from speakers hooked up to a CD player. It reminded me of high school football games. I thought of our future children again, and what you said to me when your orders came through for Afghanistan—there was more danger here, in America. That I ran a higher risk of dying in a car crash than you did in combat. Look at the numbers, how few people died anymore. Saved by the wonders of modern medicine, all the clotting agents and cargo planes turned into ICUs and little strips of velcro and ballistic nylon used to stem blood from severed limbs. You told me about all these things that were meant to reassure me, but didn’t. You marched past and I couldn’t find you, so I snapped a photo of a row of soldiers, their heads turned to face the reviewing stand.

#

September 2010

At the cavalry ball, you men all wore your ridiculous cowboy hats and silver spurs on your shoes as if they made you like those horse soldiers on the plains, as if they tied you to history. It would’ve been amusing if I was drunk, but I stayed sober so I could drive us the hour home. I stewed. At our table, Barker kept making jokes about the red snapper, and I told him to shut his mouth. I think his wife, Kelly, smiled at that, but I can’t be sure. She didn’t say anything all night.

You sang your damn songs and waved your damn flags, and I thought it was all a nice bit of trickery, all this ceremony and pomp. What is it Napoleon said, that he could persuade a man to die for a pretty piece of ribbon? You were getting drunk with your soldiers, who had their arms around you, pulling you towards the dance floor, and I could see how uncomfortable that made you; how you couldn’t tell where the line was between fraternal love and fraternization. But they were—we all were—just a bunch of dumb kids.

I didn’t talk to the officers’ wives; we didn’t have anything in common, not really. Tupperware parties and boozy breakfasts and needlepoint or whatever it was they did with their time. The enlisted wives—who were covered in tattoos with jobs as bakers or smile-worn shop girls or soon-to-be de facto single mothers—all reminded me of people back home, a little creased and windswept, even though they were, for most part, youngish. Two of them were still in their teens; they could’ve been plucked out of the graduating class of my anemic Upstate high school. They were both knock-kneeed and vine-armed and clinging to each other while their husbands—barely old enough to drink themselves—fed them booze for what I’m sure they thought would be a romantic night. They reminded me too much of home, so I kept to myself. I was alone, even then, even with you just a few yards away. That’s not why I came to shindig, to sit by myself and watch a bunch of grown men act like kids who’d broken into their parents’ liquor cabinet.

You and I used to sit in laundromats and make up stories about strangers passing by the big storefront window or eavesdrop on diners in the restaurants we could barely afford, whispering jokes about their problems and arguments and bougie sensibilities. We’d been so sure we would never be those people. I remember once, it had rained while we were out buying books and it didn’t let up, so we’d had to spring to the L and rode home soaked. You put my book—I can’t even remember what I’d bought—and stuffed it under your jacket so it wouldn’t get wet. We stripped out of our clothes when we got home and you made tea. I lay in bed naked, thumbing through a graphic novel—The Photographer—and there was something about all those images, the real contacts sheets and fictive illustrations, and the way the protagonist cried that’d given me the idea to give you a camera to take with you over there. You brought in the tea and we drank it. Got under the covers of your thin twin mattress, and stayed up talking about all the nothing we’d do after you were done with the Army, talking about where we’d live and what our kids might look like—if we wanted them. We’d talked about how, sometimes, the most important thing in an image wasn’t its subject, but what lay just outside the frame. We’d talked until we stopped, and we stopped because we slept, and we slept through the soundless night in your windowless room and it felt like the world had ended and it was just the two of us in our abandoned city. When I woke, I was disappointed to hear your roommates shuffling around outside the door, to hear that life had continued without us.

Here it was again, all this life around me marching forward, but this time I was alone. Your men kept pressing drinks on you, and each time you refused, but took it anyway, and you were all were singing, I wanna be in the cavalry, if they send me off to war. So I went to have a cigarette, out in the air, which was somehow as sticky hot as inside, and found a bench out front. I hadn’t noticed that Barker had followed me out. He asked me if I was okay, and I just shrugged, and didn’t say anything. I gathered he wasn’t used to that—not being listened to. He started talking about my dress, if this was one of those ironic things people my age did. Something about making a statement by dressing like a flapper instead of wearing a ball gown like all the other women. It was an A-line, a formal mid-century modern piece I’d found in a thrift store, but I didn’t bother to correct him. I was a little afraid of him, the way he looked at me, the way he swayed ever so slightly. He was drunk, and I might be able to throw a mean punch, but he’s a large man and we were basically alone. I crossed my arms, like I was cold. He offered me his jacket, which I didn’t want. He sat down beside me, fanned himself with his Stetson. He said I shouldn’t worry, he’d do what he could to bring me back. He said it’d be hard, what I was about to go through, told me how when he’d come back after Iraq, things with Kelly, well they’d never gone back to the way they’d been before. I thought these were just the musings of a drunkard who’d stayed in the Army too long, who’d lost touch. These days, I wonder if he was trying to warn me.

#

Here is a List of Things I Would Do if I Left You:

Here is a List of Things I Would Do if You Died:

–Drink Find something less cliche to do, something warm and numbing, something that feels like early-onset dementia—and permanent.

-Find someone new to sleep with and feel nothing.

-Gather up a handful of blow-flowers and instead of doing what the name commands, set them on fire.

-Think about suicide without making a plan.

–Eat a handful of pills. I could eat a handful of pills, but someone would find me because I’m a broke-ass teacher and we share everything, like cars and bar tabs and apartments and a pool of school supplies which always comes up short when you go looking for another manila folder or calculator battery—and yeah, we share pills too—so that’s out.

-Think about suicide and try not to look at the Huey P. Long bridge—the second smaller one, its steel bones oxidizing to death—or the Mississippi. Think about how stupid people are when they believe water will somehow be softer than concrete at that height.

-Go to the funeral.

-Push everyone away.

-Quit TFA and leave all the future politicians padding their resumes and the twenty-two-year-old scabs who don’t know better and the white saviors with their Jesus complexes behind.

-Nothing.

-More nothing.

-Enough nothing to get behind on the rent, which, as you know, is not at all like me.

-Live out of my car for a while.

-Consider moving to Arizona like my doctor had suggested when I’d been hospitalized for asthma for the fifth time in a year. Consider doing something with turquoise, maybe. Remember how much I hate sand and heat and the sun and fucking turquoise.

-Move back in with my parents.

-Climb the Adirondacks

-Try not to think about suicide when I make a climb in the rain. Try not to hope for an accident, a slip, a broken neck, a painless death.

-Write poetry, let one be titled: Here is a List of Things I Would Do if You Died.

            -Write a poem titled: Here is a List of Things I Would Do if I Left You.

-Burn everything I’d written.

            –Never write poetry again.

-Never shave a hair on my body again.

-Never date another man again.

-Never look at anything that reminds me of you.

-Never start wearing makeup.

-Never date.

-Never say never.

-Drink, and try to think of less cliche things to do with grief.

-Apply to every job that’ll take me to the place that took you from me.

-If rejected from every job for which I’d applied: book a ticket to Kabul anyway.

-Make a list of things to pack. A camera will be at the top of it.

-If visa to Afghanistan gets rejected, buy a ticket to Pakistan, plan to sneak across the border.

-Come home alive or die there or never come home at all or abandon all those plans—I haven’t decided yet.

-Buy a hairless cat, name him/her/they Gefilte Fish. (I’ve always wanted a cat.)

-Live longer than my cat; remember that nothing lasts, especially not love.

-Find the shoeboxes and musk-laden clothes and books and 35mm negatives that remind me of you and start a fire and burn it all and immediately regret what I’ve done.

-Find some small town—preferably in Vermont—with an empty role to fill, a need, a lack. Occupy that unoccupied space, and with time, become a familiar fixture, a woman with graying hair, a woman past her prime and alone. Become someone everyone wonders about, worries about. Become an enigma, a mystery. Let them say, there’s Old Lady Fishman, off to the library/animal shelter/schoolhouse/tollbooth, what a sad story—even if they can only speculate. I’ll put my lights on at Halloween and give out full-sized candy bars. I’ll put out food for all the neighborhood strays and the town will try to stop me, but they won’t succeed. I’ll teach a class to the local kids on how to photograph, just like I’d taught you; I’d teach them to think about the picture plane and what lies outside it and how absence is sometimes more poignant. Maybe I’ll find another lonely woman, let her fall in love, never her tell her anything. (She’ll leave eventually.) And when I’m in my autumnal years, I’ll think of how trees are most beautiful before they die and think about you and not think about suicide and fade and fade and finally go, and I’ll die thinking that if I can let you go in this life, it’ll make the next one, our next meeting, our next reunion, that much more sweet.

#

March 2010

Our honeymoon was one night in a fancy hotel. The next day, you drove two days south to your new unit.

#

Our wedding day, in the living room of my parents’ creaky old farmhouse, was a string of mishaps. It was rushed. So much went wrong. My mother was sour that we hadn’t asked the rabbi to conduct the ceremony, but a county judge. At least he looked Jewish, she said. When your family arrived, your grandmother brought me a jade bracelet as a wedding present, but it wouldn’t slip over my knuckles, not even with a little grease, so I couldn’t accept it. Then I heard your little brother whisper to my brother how he’d just enlisted, and to not tell you, because last time you saw him, you’d told him not to join. Then we even saw each other before the ceremony, and my mother rushed you back into my bedroom where you were changing. It’s a stupid tradition to keep bride and groom apart, but I guess that’s what I’d signed up for. Some anarchist I am. Just to make sure, you practiced breaking the glass under the chuppa half a dozen times, and each time you did it perfectly.

But then none of it mattered, because I saw the tears in your eyes and heard the shudder in your voice when you recited our vows. I wasn’t thinking of tomorrow or the next day, just this moment together. If you weren’t wearing your dress blues, we could’ve pretended we were just like any other couple in the world. But I hold onto that moment, that idea that a wedding ring represents infinity—I hoped, for once, one of these damn symbols would hold up. My father put the glass on the ground. You brought your foot down on it, but it slid off, breaking only the stem. I wonder now if it was an omen, but you’d always been the superstitious one, not me.

#

After we got our marriage license, we threw ourselves a little engagement party. You were on leave. The old rad crew was all there, belting out Defiance, Ohio songs and dancing like the tomorrow would never come to that indie electronica garbage you like so much. There were gifts, even—like we were real adults. Sara brought us that Spanish wine that we didn’t know would, turn to vinegar during the move to Louisiana. Daria brought us pralines from New Orleans without knowing I was allergic to all those tree-nuts. We got a few cards, a leather-bound edition of Arabian Nights from Ranya, which, if you’re wondering, I call dibs on if we ever get divorced. I don’t know why I joke like that. I don’t know if I could’ve stood any more gifts than that, and thank God all our friends lived on day-old bread and bottles of Four Roses and were too broke to give us anything but their presence—or pretended to be that poor, at least.

Everyone marveled at how we were getting married, how young we were—I was 21, you were 22. I guess we’re still young, in a way. I know some people judged us for it. Judged me, really. They were my friends, anyway. All those dreadlocked boys with their bandannas tied around their necks like their convictions and girls who’d thought freeing the nipple was the first step towards the revolution. That’s the thing, we were so young, believed so ardently that things like matrimony and jobs are quaint antiquities that belong in museums. But that’s not real life. They didn’t have to worry about the things we did to pay for college like holding three jobs or joining the military, and still leaving with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. If I told them how it is now, waking up in the night, thinking there’s a knock at the door, and two men in their blues are waiting outside, what would they say? If it were them, what would they do? Anyway it was my choice.

Arianna was there. You already know all about us. You already know she was never right for me. But she’s loyal, and my friend, and I couldn’t just throw that away. She watched the two of us dancing our asses off, dancing and drinking because it all hurt so much was already on our shoulders. I found her crying in the stairwell, her voice bouncing off the breezeblocks. She’d told me she asked you why you were doing this—the Army and all that. You said you had to go. She told me, he’s got you, Mir, and now what’re we going to do? I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she was drunk, and I pulled her up and folded her into my arms. She held the hug for a little too long, pressing her nose into my hair. She pulled back and looked at me with her head tilted to the side, her eyes half-closed. I don’t know when I’ll ever get around to telling you this, Dave, but she tried to kiss me. Like it was the easiest thing in the world to get me back, like real life and marriage and hardship and poverty were quaint things best left in museums. I dragged her back inside, told her she was drunk.

#

November 2009

I decided we’d get engaged, there in the whispering gallery with all those Metro North commuters buzzing past. We were going to my Aunt’s place in Westchester. You were on pass; flown in from Armor School for Thanksgiving. I was thinking how we had so little time, how fast life was moving—and wasn’t it crazy that two kids had to rush like this? But it wasn’t rushing, it was the right time. How we knew, and couldn’t explain it, but we did. I was thinking, at least if he gets hurt, I’ll get to come to the hospital. At least if he dies, I’ll get a folded American flag. A Gold Star in my window. The excuse of a lifetime. I was thinking how I’d look in a black dress and a black veil and what it’d feel like to watch your body lowered into the ground and how selfish I was—that’s what came to mind, selfishness—to fantasize about your death.

And/or I was thinking of simple things—the ways your eyes snatch the light out of the room, how your face opens up when you see a film, the way your hair feels between my fingertips. How our words curl and nest into each other’s and I feel like something missing had been found. Does that make sense? Let me try another way of saying it. When you speak, I can’t help but listen. When I talk, I can’t help but feel heard. And without you, I’m mute to the world, deaf to its music. How no one else in the world can do that to me. Fuck me, I’m drunk and you’ve got me talking all purple. I’ve always hated over-qualified language. But it’s always the small things, the details.

I thought these things, and decided—in a split second—to tell you to stand in one corner and press your ear to the tiled wall. I hushed my words up the vaulted ceiling and over the bustling commuters’ heads and into your ear. I slipped those words in like my tongue, and I could almost taste the bitter wax and delicate hairs when I said marry me. I thought about how I could stick my tongue in your ear, and that’s all I needed to get you going. I was thinking how much like foreplay it was. How our children might look, what features they’d steal from you, from me. What your body would look like beneath a closed casket, because I can’t imagine it being anything but closed. How there’d be a hunk of me carved away and how I’d wake up each morning you were gone and be surprised that I’d waken up at all.

#

October 2009

As a birthday present, I sent you a copy of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. You said it was the best gift you’d ever received. Then, you sent me the diary you’d filled since you’d started training. I was dismayed at how often you’d sketched scenes of your own death.

#

August 2009

You went back and forth between the city and all those joint bases and forts and posts where you’d trained. Each time, you’d come back to me a little changed—though I don’t think you’d noticed. After Fort Benning, your manner had stiffened. You told me how one of your training sergeants said you were too polite, that it just wouldn’t do in combat. They asked which branch you’d been assigned to, and when you told them Armor and Cavalry, they laughed. No room for good manners among tankers and scouts, they’d said. Still, you spent nearly all your pay on flights back to me when they gave you the rare weekend pass. I thought that’d be enough to keep us—this—going.

#

July 2009

There’s a photo you took of me in Montana, on the first leg of our cross-country road trip. That was supposed to be our send-off. The last hurrah between college and the real world. We’d agreed that this was how our relationship would end. I look at that photo now; I use it as the backdrop for my computer, and sometimes I think it’s a kind of self harm, like I’m carving hatch-marks into my skin every time I set my eyes on it. I’m the subject in the photo—a strange sensation. I’m wearing your plaid flannel, cleaning my camera. There’s a layering of images—you’re on the other side of the motel window, the reflection of a parking lot of cars superimposed on our room, the ghost of your silhouette imprinted on the pane of glass. I see me as you see me, and that makes the distance harder. Don’t ask me to explain how that works. I’m looking at the photo, and it’s only been a year, but I’m already thinking, I used to have such good skin, I’m already thinking, we used to be so young.

We went out to dinner that night at the motel bar, where they served us steak and fries, and when we were done, we got a six-pack of that skunky beer they called Moose Drool, which I hated, but which you liked just fine. When we finished it, we had sex on the motel bed with a movie flickering on our bodies, and it felt desperate, like something out of a neo-noir film, like we were on the run from gangsters or cops or both, and of course they’d all have ridiculous accents. Cawfee. Shawtgun. Brawd. I wished it was real—that we were on the run, I mean. And if the villains caught up to us at the end and we made our last stand in some seedy parking garage staring down a dozen goons with automatics, that would be fine by me.

At the time, I was thinking about how far we’d come to just end it. It couldn’t; I couldn’t. We saw Ohio and all that flat farmland, Chicago on the shore where you reached down and dipped your hand into Lake Michigan, the Twin cities where we imagined ourselves settling in a brick house if New York ever sank into the Atlantic, the Crow Reservation where I wanted to go one day, to teach, and past Billings and Bozeman and Butte and Missoula and into the Rockies. How much further we’d go. Past the mountains, into Idaho, through Coeur d’Alene, where you’d be terrified of the way down, coasting the whole winding descent. We’d strike forth into the Eastern Washington scrublands and desert, into the Redwood forests and onto the coast, the briny-aired Pacific coast. And I’d imagine it’d be a new beginning, just the two of us. I would’ve let that air stay in my lungs forever if I could, but it wasn’t the start of a new life, just a brief interlude.

When you reported to your first duty station—a temporary posting to train cadets, just like you’d been a year ago—I flew back to New York to my para job at PS 21 and the ICP gig. You’d given me all those rolls of film and all those moments  from out trip, and when I developed them, I was surprised to see how many you’d taken of me. That image of me in your flannel, the ghost of you on the window. I thought about asking you to marry me.

I’m thinking about that damn photo, and thinking about taking it down, replacing it with a black field, because when I look at it, I remember that what I’d felt when we drove across the mountains and forests and plains and cities of this God-forsaken country, how I felt like the last woman alone left on Earth with the only man in the entire world, and that hurts, Dave, you can’t imagine how much that hurts.

#

May 2009

I gave you my dad’s old 35mm before we graduated, and we went out into Carroll Gardens to practice shooting. You didn’t load the film right—the sprocket holes hadn’t lined up. I took it to the dark room and found one long, empty strip. I still have photos of you from that day—you on top of a traffic light control box, you at the edge of the F and G train tracks, you in front of Rocketship Comics aiming your lens at me. You thinking you’d captured all these moments.

#

I try writing about things, like they’ll make them easier to say. All that comes out is bad poetry, fragments of memories.

#

Do you remember how you’d been saying that you knew distance was hard? You never said you were thinking about your parents, about the day your dad had left.

#

Do you remember our first date, not the time we met at the Waverly, but our first real date? Film Forum was showing Sans Soleil. You left the theatre in a haze.

#

I can’t seem to describe a sun as a sun unless it’s radiant. A spring is not a spring unless it’s limpid.

#

I remember the first time you said, I love you. It wasn’t when you thought, not at the top of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, but in your sleep when you came to stay the night in the dorm where I RA’d.

#

January 2008

I follow my friends to your place for a party, a rent party they called it. There you are, thinking you’re so smooth, but you’re drunk off your ass. Handsome in your own awkward kind of way, and not stringy like all the beanied bearded hipsters. At least you’re not dangerous. At least I’ve got my friend around me.You ask if I’m Jewish, and I think that’s an odd kink. I want nothing to do with you; I’m looking to hook up with another girl. I’d broken up with Arianna a few days before, but I won’t mention that. And you’re still here, acting like a schmuck. The music’s playing, some David Bowie cover band. You pour me a beer that’s ninety percent foam, grinning at me the whole time.

A few minutes later, I witness you making out with someone else. (Did you forget you’d been hitting on me?) You had the nerve to come back, trying your bungling German pickup lines (I’d told you I spent a semester in Berlin). I was a little down, and hell, you ask nicely, so I let you kiss me. We make out, and it’s nice because I can forget about my two jobs and student debt and financial aid and Arianna. I can forget, and you’ve got wide, soft lips, and the press of your fingertips just wrap me up in this second. You try to convince me to stay the night. I laugh, tell you I’ve got work in the morning (I lie). Just a little make out session, that’s all it’s supposed to be. That’s all I need. But you sober up. We talk a little, dance a little, there’s a DJ on now. When I want to go home, you offer to walk me all the way to the train in the snow. It’s not snowing, but it’s a nice flourish, and that’s how I’ll choose to remember it.

You wear your flannel shirt, and I wear your workman’s coat. The streetlights all take on fuzzy haloes and toss our shadows far ahead and behind us. You tell me you listen to electro-clash and hip-hop and folk music. I stare at the warehouses that go for blocks, the ones under demolition and the fishbowl condos taking their places. You tell me how when you hear Pete Seeger play Frank Proffitt’s “Going Across the Mountain” the banjo sounds just like a dan nguyet, how that song about the Civil War might as well be a Vietnamese song. We’re all wrapped up in history, I say, and you ask me if you can hold my hand and I say yes. A hipster dive is still open on North Fifth. A Polish bar is still open on Bedford Ave. But they’ll be closed soon. We’re racing daylight for a few hours of sleep. The warehouses end on a block of vinyl-sides row-houses and shutters shops and restaurants. I expect you to leave at the corner of the station, but you walk down. I expect you to say goodbye at the turnstile, but you swipe in. We wait on the platform and I tell you about folk-punk, which you think sounds a little funny, but say makes sense anyway. You apologize for being so forward at the party, and ask to see me again.

The train won’t be here for another fifteen, and you tell me about your future, what the next couple of years hold. The Army. I write my number in the notebook I find in your coat pocket, a fresh one with a few sketches—a dead rat, a woman holding a child, the facade of a brownstone being demolished, but the rest is still fresh, blank. It’s the empty sheets of paper which appeal to me the most. I say I’d like to see you again, but what I say is overpowered by the announcement that the train is here. It howls into the station and the doors open and I enter and you’re on the edge of the platform and I’m on the edge of the car and for a moment that’s nothing between us and you ask to kiss me and I nod but the doors close. I try to tell you that we have all the time in the world for a kiss, but the announcer is too loud, the doors too thick. Then the train takes me away.

“Japanese Poetry Never Modifies” first appeared in the Columbia Journal, November 12, 2018.

Photo courtesy goodfreephotos.com.

In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

One: Complicity

Every time I read another account of sexual assault
in the armed forces—most recently, when I read Senator Martha McSally’s recent
statement that she’d been raped by a senior officer, hadn’t reported the
assault, and continues to support leaving the prosecution of sexual assault
cases in the hands of military commanders—I think of the last thing that poet
Audre Lorde ever said to me.

I said goodbye to Audre one night shortly before her
son Jonathan and I reported to Naval Officer Candidate School in 1988. I didn’t
know then that it would be our final conversation: the breast cancer she’d
survived a decade earlier had metastasized in her liver, but homeopathic
injections prescribed by a doctor in Switzerland had been keeping the tumors
under control for four years. Audre was a warrior, and at that time she seemed
invincible.

Still, she never wasted time or words. If she spoke,
what she said mattered. One listened with respect, and remembered.

She put her hands on my shoulders and looked directly
into my eyes: “Jerri,” she said, “don’t let the Navy steal your soul.”

In the decades that followed, I often wondered if I’d honored my promise or if the culture of sexual harassment and assault in the armed forces had stolen my soul. Like Senator McSally, who commissioned a few months before me, I was sexually assaulted on active duty. Like her, I did not report the assault. And like her—like almost every military woman of our generation, if we’re being honest—I was complicit in a culture that enabled systemic misogyny and abuse.

Two: Assault

Unlike Senator McSally, I was not raped. My assailant
was not senior to me. He was a foreign midshipman and I was a lieutenant, three
paygrades senior to him.

The midshipman was a foot taller and at least fifty
pounds heavier than me. He drank enough at a shipboard dining-in to imagine
that I was interested and he was desirable. He followed me to my stateroom,
pulled me inside, slid the pocket door shut, and grabbed me in a nonconsensual
liplock. I waltzed him around until I could push the door open, and tossed him
out so hard that he bounced off the steel bulkhead on the other side of the
passageway.

I didn’t report him. In the summer of 1994, the first
women to be permanently assigned to American naval combatants had just been
ordered to their ships. I didn’t want my experience to be used as an argument
that women didn’t belong at sea. The midshipman, like many of the men who
harass and assault military women, was technically proficient and behaved
professionally when he was sober. His entire career lay ahead of him, and he
had potential to contribute to the defense of his nation and to our alliance.
Most importantly, I didn’t want to tarnish the success of a joint mission with
an important ally, or diminish my own contribution to it. Like all good
military personnel, I prioritized mission accomplishment over personal
inconvenience.

And by the time I was assaulted, I’d been groomed to
accept abuse and to remain silent about it.

Three: Grooming

Military culture grooms women
in uniform for abuse like a perpetrator of domestic violence grooms a partner
for victimization. Military women are too often isolated from each other,
desensitized to sexual aggression, encouraged to accept abuse of power as the
norm, rewarded for compliance, and then silenced if they dare to object. Commanders
would consider those behaviors unacceptable and inexcusable if they occurred in
any other criminal offense against another servicemember.

Military culture mixes rewards—camaraderie, a sense of
belonging, the right to see oneself as successful and strong—with elements of
abuse. The grooming process isn’t linear. The techniques of desensitization
vary, but they’re familiar to anyone knowledgeable about  domestic violence and sexual assault.

Grooming often begins in accession training.

***

I met my first
military sexual predator at Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode
Island. Our first eight weeks of training included a class in maneuvering
board, a system of solving relative motion problems graphically and
mathematically. The instructor, a chief boatswain’s mate, made no secret of his
contempt for women. We were of no use in his man’s Navy; women’s sole purpose was
gratification of male sexual desire.

Another officer
candidate, a prior enlisted woman who’d served as an operations specialist on
an oiler, whispered to me in the passageway outside of the classroom that the
best way to handle him was not to draw his attention. Don’t ever get caught alone in a classroom or deserted passageway with
him, she said. She didn’t need to say Don’t
bother reporting him.  He was still
an instructor: one needed to know only that to read between the lines. I’d
survived a violent sexual assault two years before I joined the Navy; I was so
uncomfortable around that chief that I choked on the final maneuvering board
exam and failed it.

The cadre brought
me before a board to discuss whether I should repeat just the exam or the entire
first eight weeks of training. I claimed that a relapse of bronchitis kept me
up all night before the test, and showed them that I could estimate a target
angle—a basic maneuvering board skill— using the photo of a destroyer on the
wall. They allowed me to retake the exam. A different instructor proctored it;
I passed easily.

I assumed that
the horny chief was an outlier. Some of the men in my class didn’t exactly
approve of my presence, but none of them behaved unprofessionally. Listening to
women in the know and avoiding the occasional bad apple seemed to be reasonable
strategies for sexual assault prevention—which I understood to be my individual,
personal responsibility. I didn’t realize how many bad apples were in the
barrel; that a network of street-savvy, collegial women didn’t exist everywhere
in the Fleet; or that some men worked hard to prevent women from trusting each
other and sharing information.

***

Several months
later, I attended the Intelligence Officer Basic Course in Dam Neck, Virginia.
The only other woman in my class of twenty had a girly-girl name and an open,
friendly smile. She spent Friday and Saturday nights at the officers’ club at Naval
Air Station Oceana, home to hundreds of Navy fighter pilots.

Our male
classmates told me, She’s always talking
about the pilots who take her out to dinner: where they go, what they eat, and
how much they spend on her. She’s just
in the Navy to find a husband. And if
you pal around with her, people will think you’re fucking every pilot at Oceana
too. You’re a professional, though,
aren’t you? You’re one of the good ones.

It didn’t take
long to figure out that sailors laud promiscuity among men and loathe it among
women. I learned never to use the phrase “double standard” to describe this
phenomenon; every man who heard it changed the subject to complain about gender
differences in scoring on the physical fitness test.

I wanted the
men I worked with to consider me one of the good
ones, even if it meant being judgmental about another woman’s love life, isolated
from other women, and often lonely. I stayed cool and distant around the other
woman in my class. She showed even less interest in getting acquainted. I
wonder now what our classmates told her about me.

***

In December 1989, I reported to my first duty station at the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Center (ASWOC) at Lajes, a village on the island of Terceira in the Azores archipelago. I was one of two women naval officers in the command; both of us were young, junior in rank, and single. The command’s mission, straight out of The Hunt for Red October, was to locate and track Soviet submarines transiting the central Atlantic using P-3C Orion aircraft.

In addition to
serving as the station intelligence officer for two years, I was to earn
qualifications to be responsible for the safety of the aircraft in flight, and
to debrief the missions and report submarine contacts back to intelligence and
antisubmarine warfare headquarters commands in Norfolk, Virginia, and
Washington, DC. Although 10 USC § 6015 still prohibited women from flying
combat aircraft in 1989, the P-3C community had accepted women in support roles
for several years and was considered to be less aggressive and hostile toward
women than the carrier aviation community.

The first
person I met at the ASWOC was a Limited Duty Officer ensign, formerly a senior
enlisted man. He shook my hand and asked, “Are you going to be like our last
female intel officer, and sleep with the commanding officer of every squadron
who comes through?”

By then I’d
learned the value of a snappy comeback. I batted my eyelashes at him and
simpered. “Why—I don’t know! Do you think that’s a good idea?” Then I turned
away and walked past him as if he didn’t exist.

Later he and some
of the other watch officers introduced me to that day’s duty air crew. “I’m
Lieutenant N-.,” said a grinning pilot. “the plane commander for Crew Six. Are
you like our intel officer? She only sleeps with O-4s and up.”

I shook my
head and stomped my foot a couple of times like a Navy instructor who wants students
to remember something important for an upcoming test.

“Gentlemen,” I
said, “I am not out here to get laid. I’m out here to catch Soviet submarines.
When’s the next mission?”

First
assignments in the Navy are, as the saying goes, “like drinking from a fire
hose.” I told myself that I had no energy for sneaking around and no time to be
lonely. And since the men I worked with apparently had the right to police my
relationships, I decided that dating and sex were out of the question
altogether for the next two years. I earned my qualifications as fast as I
could, stood my watches, and learned to write intelligence reports and personnel
evaluations. I dated one man, an Air Force logistics officer, in the last few
months of that assignment.

***

Women could fly
on P-3C missions as long as the crew wasn’t expected to drop torpedoes on an
enemy submarine. My supervisor in Lajes, the operations officer, wanted me to
fly as often as I could. For my first flight, the detachment officer in charge assigned
me to ride with a crew that always read the same excerpt from a fifty-cent book
of pornography aloud after they completed the preflight checklist. While the
plane commander chanted a graphic sex scene, I tried not to think about the
implications of being locked in a flying tin can for the next ten hours with a
dozen men who’d just gotten themselves all hot and bothered. I refused to look
down, and attempted to make eye contact with every member of the crew. Some wouldn’t
meet my gaze. Others squirmed and looked away.

One asked
quietly afterwards if their reading had bothered me. I smiled and said, “The
bodice-rippers I read are hotter than your crew’s shitty porn.”

I didn’t
complain. If women wanted respect, we had to act tough and never, ever spoil
the guys’ fun. The crew’s porn ritual, just words, didn’t hurt me. Acting tough
and depriving bullies of their fun generated a lovely dopamine rush. I refused
to think too hard about the effects of accepting bully behavior as the norm.

***

On another day, a pilot invited me to the hangar to learn about the squadron duty officers’ responsibilities. When I arrived, he and another lieutenant called me into the squadron duty office and told me to shut the door. On the back of the door, they’d hung a Penthouse centerfold of a naked blonde (I am also blonde) sitting in a spread-eagle split. My face was exactly level with her crotch. I could count her short-and-curlies. Suppressed snickers confirmed that the placement had been deliberate.

Looking the poster up and down slowly, I considered the options. If I complained, every man in the command would label me a “bitch” and a “whiner.” If I ignored the behavior it might stop—or the aviators might choose to escalate the harassment in hopes of getting a reaction. If I pretended that the prank was no big deal or made a joke of it, I might convince them to think twice about messing with me. I might even win their approval.

I turned to
the smirking lieutenants, shrugged, and pointed my thumb over my shoulder in
the direction of the poster’s focal point. “I think she dyes that, too.”

When I left, I waved cheerily at the centerfold. We had something in common, but for years I didn’t want to think about what it might be. Many of the strategies women use to access and retain some of the power men try to exercise over us and over our bodies become maladaptive. Even damaging.

***

Over the
course of the two-year assignment to Lajes, three of my married colleagues
propositioned me. Each time I declined: Flattered,
but not interested. They accepted the
rejections with grace; I had no problems continuing to work with them.

I never told anyone
about the propositions. Certainly not the married colleagues’ wives, who
already suspected me of sleeping with their husbands—or trying to—just because
we worked and traveled together.

In a “he said,
she said” situation, either the men or their wives might accuse me of having
invited the propositions, or accused me of sleeping with a married man—conduct
“prejudicial to good order and discipline” and a violation of the Uniform Code
of Military Justice. I told myself that I had too much self-respect to hook up
with guys who cheated, and that I deserved better. I allowed myself to feel
morally superior to my colleagues, and to pity their wives.

But I never
learned to feel comfortable with the old Navy adage about detached service, What goes on det, stays on det. Officers
are supposed to follow a code of honor and report violations of the Uniform
Code of Military Justice. Every time I lied by omission, I felt like I’d ripped
off another piece of my integrity and flushed it down the shitter.

***

For weeks before the summer antisubmarine warfare conference, held that year in Lajes, the only other single woman officer in the command (the administrative officer) and I endured repeated badgering from the executive officer and my supervisor, the operations officer, about who our “significant others” would be for the Saturday night dining-out event at a local seafood restaurant. The executive officer wasn’t satisfied when we told him we were going stag. Practically licking his lips at the picture of two young women paired with two hot-to-trot pilots, he ordered us both to bring significant others to the dinner.

At the Friday night reception, the admin officer and I cornered the two admirals attending the conference. We explained the situation, and asked them to be our dates for the dining-out. One had to depart for a family emergency, but we picked up the other from the VIP Quarters, stuffed him into the admin officer’s little two-cylinder hatchback for the drive out to the town of Praia da Vitoria, and arrived at the restaurant a few minutes late.

We made a grand entrance on the admiral’s arm and announced: “XO! OPSO! You ordered us to bring significant others to the dining-out. We’re high achievers, so we brought the most significant other we could find. Will this one do, gentlemen?”

Everyone laughed but our supervisors, who turned bright red. They left our love lives alone after that.

The master’s tools might not have brought down the master’s house, but taking a whack with them from the inside and knocking down a little plaster afforded us the illusion of success.

***

In the summer
of 1990, a married pilot deployed to Lajes heard that I planned to go camping
on Serra de Santa Bárbara, the crest of Terceira’s largest extinct volcano. He
invited himself to go with me. He insisted that he would join me even after I
told him several times that he wasn’t welcome.

I didn’t complain,
but my fellow watch officers overheard him and offered to straighten him out if
he was scaring me.

I thanked them,
but told them I could handle it. If the
pilot gets anywhere near the top of my volcano, I said, I’ll just push him off the side of the mountain
and watch him die. With pleasure. I meant it literally.

I went camping
alone and kept watch on the one-lane road up the mountain until sunset. Not
even a Navy pilot would risk the hairpin turns with no guard rails, the
three-thousand-foot plunge to the sea. The pilot never showed. I slept
fitfully.

I told my
colleagues that I’d managed the situation and enjoyed the campout.

Not all
empowerment stories are true. Mine wasn’t. But I told it so many times that I
began to believe it. Fake it ’til you
make it.

***

A naval flight officer, a lieutenant commander known for harassing women—especially enlisted women—returned to Lajes for a second deployment.

Both the watch
officers and the enlisted sonar technicians assured the women in the command
that they wouldn’t leave any of us alone with him. The sonar techs wouldn’t
even go behind the sonar equipment racks if I sat at the debriefing table with the
lieutenant commander.

During one
mission debrief, he put his hand over mine and leered at me. Every enlisted man
in the room stopped working to glare at him.

I didn’t smile. His hand, I moved firmly off my body and out of my personal space. Then, with eye contact and a facial expression, I indicated that he’d better not do it again. He shrugged and grinned: Can’t blame a guy for trying. I didn’t report him.

The next day, the
operations officer—the supervisor who’d teased me about bringing a “significant
other” to the dining-out—called me into his office. The sailors had told him
about the handsy lieutenant commander. He asked why I hadn’t reported it. He’d
already arranged for the squadron’s commanding officer to put the lieutenant
commander on the first flight back to Rota. He insisted that he would never
tolerate sexual harassment.

I pretended to
see no irony in his statement. I considered myself lucky to work with men who
were pranksters and occasionally bullies instead of rapists. I wondered what would
happen to the women at the antisubmarine warfare operations center in Rota, and
what might already have happened to the women in the deployed squadron. I
didn’t wonder too long: they weren’t in my chain of command.

I’d completed
the qualification process for “handling it.”

Four: Silence

In 1991, the
same year I began congratulating myself for being tough enough to handle
military misogyny, Navy helicopter pilot Paula Coughlin reported sexual assault
and misconduct at the naval aviation community’s “Tailhook” professional
conference. I admired her courage in speaking up, and saw her as a role model.

The Navy had
one more lesson to teach.

In her essay “Cassandra Among the Creeps,” Rebecca Solnit describes concentric rings of silence, through which women who dare to speak up against powerful men descend. Navy women watched Paula Coughlin descend, and we learned.

Almost immediately, most Navy men—even the Naval Investigative Service personnel charged with investigating the allegations—either dismissed Coughlin’s story or attempted to discredit it.

Then they began to discredit Coughlin herself. The Navy grounded her and questioned her mental health. Suddenly, everybody knew somebody who’d known her: in ROTC at Old Dominion, at flight school, in the squadron, on the staff. They said she was brash, foul-mouthed, promiscuous (why else would she have gone to Tailhook in the first place?), and a shitty pilot. Claiming that she hadn’t earned the honor of being an admiral’s aide, those same men reasoned that the job had been given to her at better pilots’ expense because the Navy was pushing to integrate more women into naval aviation. That was the first year I heard the term “political correctness.”

Speaking up in Coughlin’s defense was a one-way ticket down to the next level of silence: bullying and intimidation. Are you one of those feminazis like Pat Schroeder? It takes a special kind of man to be a Navy pilot—what happened at Tailhook’s just the culture in naval aviation. Do you think this investigation will actually change anything? Coughlin’s career is toast, whether or not she wins her case. And the witch hunt is ruining the careers of good aviators who cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars to train. Would you ruin a man’s career over something like that? It’s not like she was raped or anything.

I disagreed.

Aw, we thought you were one of the good ones, Lieutenant.

Lesson learned: no woman would be awarded the Medal of Honor for jumping on the sexual assault grenade.

Coughlin resigned her commission in the Navy. I decided to stay, took another big gulp of the Kool-Aid, and jumped feet-first down to the bottom of the pit. The need for silence, I internalized as a personal survival strategy. I didn’t speak up in support of Coughlin again. Women who challenged military bullies and predators risked criticism, ostracism, lower marks on performance evaluations, or trumped-up misconduct charges that could lead to discharge from the service—even dishonorable discharge. Few senior women were around to serve as role models or mentors; those who would discuss sexual harassment advised us to keep our heads down and pick our battles. We couldn’t rely on women who agreed with us in private to stand with us in public. Men were even less likely to offer support.

In 2005, my graduate fiction advisor suggested that I write stories from the perspective of women in uniform. “Military women don’t ever tell those stories,” I replied. “That would just make things worse for every woman still serving.” That had been my lived experience, and I believed every word when I said it. I didn’t start writing about the Navy for almost another decade.

Five: Barriers

Senator McSally needed years to decide to break her silence about her assault. Many of us do. If you’d asked me when I retired in 2008 if I’d been sexually assaulted on active duty, I’d have said no: I’d handled the incident with the handsy midshipman and moved on. Senator McSally may have thought she’d handled her sexual assault, too.

An admission of complicity in the culture that
permits and encourages gender and sexual violence in the armed forces, and the
realization that there is no contradiction in being both the victim of abuse
and an enabler of it, can take much longer. Responsibility for sexual harassment and
assault in the military rests squarely and solely on the shoulders of the perpetrators;
staying silent to survive, or to remain employed, in no way equals consent to
being assaulted. But men and women who served and are still serving bear the responsibility
for tolerating and perpetuating an abusive culture that creates conditions in
which sexual assault can occur more frequently, in which victims who come
forward are routinely silenced, and in which those who courageously insist on
being heard are denied justice.

Complicity costs
us a fortune in integrity. Worse, when we fail to recognize and acknowledge the
ways in which we individually enable toxicity in the culture, we pass some of
the cost on to other victims. Military sexual trauma factors significantly in
depression for many veterans, female and male. It’s a risk factor for substance
abuse and homelessness. It’s almost certainly implicated in the suicide rate of
women veterans (250 times the national average for women). Complicity allows
the culture of gender and sexual violence in the armed forces to appropriate
our souls—or to steal them outright.

Audre Lorde wrote in her final book A Burst of Light: And Other Essays: “While we fortify ourselves with visions of the future, we must arm ourselves with accurate perceptions of the barriers between us and that future.” Visions of an armed force in which gender and sexual violence is prevented to the extent possible, and properly addressed when it occurs, must begin with accurate perception. This begins with an understanding of how the culture of sexual harassment and sexual assault functions in the armed forces. It’s a slippery slope that leads from inappropriate stressors in training, to the acceptance of gender-based harassment and sexual abuse as norms. Military leaders must also develop an accurate perception of how toleration of sexual harassment and assault, and silence about it, have for too long been the price of approval, acceptance, camaraderie, and privilege in the armed forces, especially for women.

Senator McSally’s task force will need to develop
accurate perceptions of the systemic barriers to reducing gender and sexual
violence in the armed forces. Department of Defense leaders resistant to change
and jealous of their authority, and conservative pundits with an antiquated
understanding of strength and of sexual violence, will likely attempt to reward
the task force for tolerance of the status quo and continued complicity in the
culture of harassment and assault. Members of the task force, and Senator
McSally, must refuse to allow their integrity to become the price for approval,
acceptance, camaraderie, and privilege. I wish Senator McSally and her task
force all success in tackling the challenges of sexual harassment and assault
in the armed forces, and welcome her, with sadness and regret, to the circle of
those who have finally found the courage to break our silence.

Jerri Bell is the Managing Editor for O-Dark-Thirty, the literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project. She retired from the Navy in 2008; her assignments included antisubmarine warfare in the Azores Islands, sea duty on USS Mount Whitney and HMS Sheffield, and attaché duty at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia. She also served in collateral assignments as a Navy Family Advocacy Program Officer, Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) Program Officer, and sexual assault victim advocate. Her fiction has been published in a variety of journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; her nonfiction has been published in newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Charleston Gazette-Mail; in journals; and on blogs. She and former Marine Tracy Crow are the co-authors of It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan.

OLD IRONSIDES

she is
most days
a ship armed to the chin
cannons at her sides
her mast a sea of kelp and urchin

melting down my iron sides
for ammunition
she pours me
hot and slick
into molds I want to fit
but cant

what does her
naked belly show to sea’s floor?

I want to see
I rubber my neck to her sides

only to take in salty sick
and the brim of her
matted cap

I pretend I am inside her—
below deck
she aches with barrels of cider
churning into
drink
to feed her crew
I want to be that crew
get paid little to feed her fuel
to work the nights
as the sea works her over
pandering toward open casks of
sea here
inlet there
till we drop anchor

FISH IN THE CREEL

At the end of summer we had a party for you
do you remember why you didn’t show?
You’d been fishing in central park again
with your rod and your tackle box.
You told me you’d use the flies I tied
the ones I made to look like junebugs.
You said they were the most cunning things
you’d seen, that they’d put fish in the creel.
I had no idea what a creel was and I
didn’t care. I just knew we’d be eating
fish for dinner and maybe after we ate
you’d show me your lucky tooth collection.

When you left the apartment I got the neighbors
to come over and made your favorites—lime jello
and ants on a log. I waited about three hours, the sun
had gone and the neighbors left too. That’s when
I heard the phone ring. It was the police. They’d
found you in the Harlem Meer. You’d caught
the big one they said, you’d hooked a willow and
sank thigh deep into the muck. They hung up
when I asked if they’d bring you home.
It was late and I had my rollers in.

I hosed you off in the alley. No fish for dinner
instead we boiled your boot strings. You said
when you were flopping in the Meer you thought
a lot about my recipe for bran muffins and
where I got the hair to tie those flies. I couldn’t
bring myself to tell you that hair was mine
that they may have looked like junebugs but
they were tiny red-eyed me’s destined for
a mouth or three.

ANSWERING MACHINE: APRIL 29th, 1992

for Rodney King

Rodney. Rodney. If you’re there pick up. You haven’t answered my
calls for months. I’m worried. This isn’t like you. You may be in pain
and that pain is very real but we could talk about it. We could get
lunch Rodney. We could go to Joe Jost and get a pickled egg.
It’s on me. I’ll tell my old lady I had to step out, buy some smokes.
Remember that night in Monterey when she came down the street
in her curlers holding that baseball bat? I saw my balls flash before
my eyes and I’d never seen you laugh so hard. She hated you because
you liked the drink. I’m a horrible drunk but I love a good story.
Rodney. If we go to lunch you could tell me about the time you met
Larry David in that carpark in West Hollywood. I wish someone
famous pissed on my door handle. I liked that story and I like you.
Always have. What do you say? Those eggs won’t stay pickled forever.

FAMILY TREE

I come from a long history and as such a lineage entails, it started rather far back into
antiquity. this is important because the past is neither present in this narrative or
relevant. it is somewhat disturbed as soil often is because if it were undisturbed it would
be a fossil waiting in vein for the unearthing.

my death began like any other—with my birth. I was, for lack of a better word or
phrase, entangled prolapse of a hemorrhoidic kind.

for I, my heart was beating and my blood did it’s gyrating as gravity let on to itself and
the core of the earth(made, they say, of ore, of silken iron) pulled me toward it’s
embrace.
this embrace had been stalled for 7 months 8 days and a handful of empty bucket nights.

the hole in mom’s throat. lump. puss. cyst. anchovies. pizza hut.

back seat sister

baby baby amy grant

du-rag

batman shirt

I come from a long line of liars. the kind that look you in the eye and say trust me and
then walk to your house and throw
themselves on the porch, their hair pasted to an awkward side in autumn sneaking out of
their parents house to kiss you on the mouth.

I misread the signs misspell at the spelling bee uttering instead, thinking that I was going
north. I was so far south that the snow had leapt off the pavement, off of the back
window till the skin on my eyes rose a quarter of an inch off my face.

holy hello to you and that
braided mustache halo you wear on a lipshits tone. your mother says that only we can be
spun like this we can only be thawed
on the defrost setting. my freezer burn itches and peels in monochrome white.

daddy found his way into a type of trope a type of makeshift reminder that if I keep up
the tune I might as well be a dumfounded thirty watt light bulb.

lozenges

I come from long lines of card players
I come from a long line of card player
breathing for the tobacco that fills the air, the acid rain that comes washing down and
the inlets that form a secret sharer. Their secrets hide
past loves and the fold of older men
that seem to haunt me or just never leave, always leaving their dentures soaking on the
night stand.

ninja turtle gummies melting on the dashboard

banana boat sun screen

pores so big we soak in them

techno music on the radio

the family home now a car park, sleeps in sediments and the time capsule we planted will
grow a tree with no trunk. a briefcase with no lips. a leaky faucet spits out blueberries.
mother buys frozen orange juice concentrate. an ice core orange grove thawed out as the
tree frogs watch from the window. I step on one as I crouch in the bushes. its lungs push
up and out gasping for air it cannot use.

I come from a long line of lovers. lovers of farmer’s tans and personal pan pizza. if we
can meet in a chatroom we can meet in real life, use the back of our throats as putting
greens or even better sand down the chimney stack and use its remnants for homegrown
tattoos.

Fish photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife service.

Correction submitted by Delta Company paratrooper: five, not four, paratroopers died from the IED. “Matthew Taylor died September 27th, 2007 from wounds suffered from the IED. Rogers was killed along with Davis, Rogers, Johnson, and 1SG Curry in the D11 vehicle.”

Not every man has a positive relationship with his brother. Tim Davis did; he loved his younger brother Adam, and looked up to him. Tim was shy, but Adam was gregarious and outgoing. The two brothers grew up in Idaho, had the same History teacher in high school, and attended the same Basic Training class in 2006. They dreamt of joining the same unit. Things didn’t work out the way they planned, though. And when Adam deployed to Afghanistan in May of 2007 with the 173^rd, Tim wasn’t there—he was in Fort Hood, Texas. That July, driving down a dusty road in Sarobi District, Paktika Province, Adam died in an IED blast that killed his First Sergeant and two other soldiers. He was 19 years old.

A part of Tim died, too—a hole opened up in him that he attempted to fill with alcohol to no avail. After being discharged from the Army, he grew suicidal.

“Everything he did from the time he failed Airborne School
was affected by what he perceived as letting Adam down,” said Tim’s father, Tim
Davis, via Facebook. “His job, as far as he was concerned, was to keep Adam
safe.”

Life is filled with connections and causes that seem obscure
at the time. One of the reasons war holds such fascination for its participants
is that causal relationships all become clear in retrospect. A man dies,
another man lives. A brother or son or daughter dies, a brother or sister or
father or mother lives. One can trace grief back to a particular choice, a
moment in time. Grief is knowable. Loss is comprehensible. Guilt is something a
person can carry with them like a boulder, like alcoholism, drug abuse,
despair, and suicide.

This memorial is for Adam Davis, a Charlie Company and then Delta
Company paratrooper and Sky Soldier of the 173^rd Airborne Brigade
Combat Team. It is also to his brother Tim Davis, a National Guardsman who
never got over Adam’s death, or the pain of separation that preceded that
death. It’s the story of two men from America’s heartland who wanted to serve
their country together, neither of whom are alive today.

Adam Davis

Adam Davis was born on July 27, 1987 in Twin Falls, Idaho to
Tracy Carrico. His grandfather served in the Navy during WWII. In his obituary,
Adam’s described as a fan of science fiction and fantasy novels. The obituary
describes him as having enjoyed spending time with his horse, hiking, and
listening to music.

Jerome, Idaho, the town in which Adam is buried, has been
growing steadily since 2000. Since the census placed the population at 7,780,
it has expanded to over 11,000 people, driven in part by expanded employment
opportunities, and partly by the spillover from those opportunities (15% of the
population lives below the poverty line, a bit above average for the U.S.).
Located a few km northwest of Twin Falls, it’s also a few kilometers north of
the Snake River. The entire area was nicknamed “Magic Valley” at the turn of
last century, when two industrial dams “magically” tamed the Snake River,
transforming previously uninhabitable territory into beautiful land, ideal for
human habitation.

Nearly 12% of Idaho resides in the “Magic Valley,” or about
185,000 people. Adam was the first from the area to be killed during Operation
Enduring Freedom.

Long way home

Adam dropped out of high school, but finished his GED at a
local community college. When he joined the military, he had a plan: qualify
for the GI Bill, go to college, get a degree, and become a professor of
English. When he finished training, he received a piece of unexpected news:
rather than going to the 82^nd Airborne with his brother Tim, Adam
was to be sent to the 173^rd Airborne, in Italy.

His introduction to the 173^rd was rocky, as it
often is with elite units. When assigned to 1-503^rd’s Charlie “March
or Die” Company, the first thing he did was walk up to the hardest sergeant in
the unit, Sergeant Berkowski (a mountain of a man and a great non-commissioned
officer to everyone who knew him), wearing a Weezer tee-shirt with his hands in
his pockets and said “I’m supposed to be in Charlie Company.” One of the squad
leaders in first platoon, Adam Alexander, remembered this episode and the
‘smoke session’ (a physical reminder of the importance of discipline) that
followed via email, and described Davis as a competent soldier who “had a lot
of heart.”

Adam’s first roommate at the 173^rd was Phil
Massey, a soldier who’d arrived in Charlie Company’s 1^st Platoon (to
which Adam was assigned) a week before. Davis was plugged into Weapons Company
as an ammo bearer for the 240B medium machinegun, and stood out among the other
paratroopers for his size (he was shorter than most) and his tenacity (he made
up for his height with his determination never to quit or be last). Massey
developed great affection for his small roommate, writing via email that Davis
“in PT would sometimes take on the task of bigger guys and lead the way… he
would clean his weapon as fast as anyone else in the squad, and was always
there when needed. He was a soldier and a paratrooper, and nothing stopped the
little guy’s spirit.”

Davis’s platoon leader, Matt Svensson, had similar things to
say about the Idaho native’s resolve, discipline and professionalism.

First Platoon’s Platoon Sergeant at the time, then-SSG
promotable Steven Voline, highlighted Adam Davis’s professionalism while
discussing his value as a soldier, and went out of his way to describe why
Davis was ultimately moved from Charlie Company to Delta Company, the mounted
heavy weapons platoon: “Everyone loved having him around because he kept the
mood light and always had a smile,” Voline said. “Even when times were tough
and training was rigorous, he continued to keep a positive outlook.”

Voline described evidence of the young paratrooper’s resolve. “I remember being at a range somewhere in Italy and we were doing CQB (close quarters battle) qualification tables and his magazine changes were too slow. If I’m not mistaken, he stayed awake doing magazine changes through the entire night iteration training for each Platoon. It ended up being an extra 3-4 hours with his Squad Leader (Sergeant Berkowski) just dropping a mag and inserting the follow on.”

As every soldier knows, maintaining a sunny disposition and
positive outlook under those circumstances is trying for the best tempered
soldier. Having a paratrooper like Adam around was a boon for his fellow
soldiers, and Voline said that’s why he sent Davis to another Company when the
tasking came down from higher to send Charlie Co soldiers to Delta Company:
“Adam was the type of soldier who’d succeed anywhere,” wrote his former Platoon
Sergeant.

Delta Company

When Adam moved to Delta Company, he was quick to make
friends there, and developed a reputation as an easygoing, good-natured and
dependable soldier.

“Davis was a lot like me,” wrote Matthew Frye via email.
Then a First Lieutenant, Frye was Delta Company’s Fire Support Officer, and
remembered the last time he saw Adam. “He was a funny kid who kept his platoon
on its toes with his shenanigans.” Days before Davis’s fateful final patrol in
Afghanistan, he was talking with Lieutenant Frye about a soon-to-be-released video
game, Medal of Duty: Airborne.

“Occasionally the officers would square off with the
enlisted in a video game where we could bond with them in a somewhat
professional manner,” wrote Frye. “Some smack talking would be involved and a
few pushups for the losers would be owed at the end. I had ordered the video
game a couple of days prior and told him when he got back from patrol it would
be game time.”

That game time would never arrive.

Tim Davis

Tim Davis died, some say, of heartbreak over the loss of his
younger brother Adam. Things started going badly for him when he went AWOL from
Basic training in order to be closer to Adam—the two believed they had signed
up for an Army program that guaranteed they’d both be assigned to the same
unit. While Adam was assigned to the 173^rd, though, Tim came down on
orders for the 82^nd Airborne.

“Adam was so happy he came down on orders for Italy until Tim told him that he got Bragg, then everything went sour,” said Anthony Roszell, who went to Basic training with the brothers. Roszell, who ended up in C Company’s first platoon with Adam, described the brothers as especially close, “pretty much attached at the hip,” he wrote via Facebook. They always hung out together, with Tim staying on at Fort Benning to keep his brother company, even though he’d gone AWOL and missed his chance at the 82^nd Airborne on Fort Bragg.

We are the product of our backgrounds, and especially so the
network of relationships we build during childhood. Tim and Adam built up a
very powerful bond, so powerful, in fact, that they joined the military
together. When Adam was assigned to the 173^rd Airborne in Italy, it
came as a shock and a great disappointment to Tim.

The outrage of what Tim saw as the military’s betrayal impacted his performance at Airborne School, and he failed out. He was sent to Fort Hood, where he served with the Army until Adam’s death.  After that, it was a sequence of bad choices or plans that didn’t amount to much. He was never able to reverse the string of disappointments; a successful stint as an Army National Guard recruiter was not enough to permit Tim a combat deployment, as he hoped, in 2010; following that, he was discharged, and worked toward a career in cabinetry. None of that made up for the dashed hopes of serving with his brother. While life had never been easy for Tim, when Adam died, something in Tim’s life stopped, too.

“Tim had a very hard time in life,” said Amber Watson, Tim
and Adam’s sister. “He was always worried about something, or thought something
was wrong.”

A phenomenon of the Social Media age, Tim’s Facebook page is
still active, here.
This means one can read his wall, and see his struggle unfold in real
time—anger with life, struggles with faith, sadness at having lost his brother.
Frustration with a senseless world where relationships and events don’t have meaning, necessarily. Where
things don’t work out. At one point, he mentions running into his high school
crush, who’s named. This person exists on Facebook. From her profile, she’s
married, with children—happily employed.

“I’m sure [Tim] felt like he let Adam down,” wrote their
father, Tim Davis. “He said Adam wanted them to be together. Tim was glad to
return to Fort Hood.”

A mission south

Paktika Province is a sparsely-populated area about 33%
larger than the U.S. state of Delaware that includes desert, mountains, and
intermittently-fertile valleys. Those valleys where rain falls in sufficient
amount to sustain life hold most of the people. The remainder of the areas hold
scattered tribes who make do the best they can in a harsh and uncompromising
climate. The elevation varies from 6,000 to over 9,000 feet on some mountains.

In 2007 the Army was pursuing Counter-Insurgency (or COIN)
Doctrine. The purpose of COIN is to defeat insurgency by refusing the enemy
military or propaganda victories, while allowing the government to provide
people with more and better assistance than the insurgents. The common term for
COIN was “winning hearts and minds.”

At the time, units would “own” battle space—be responsible
for defeating enemy activity there, and also for spreading goodwill among the
populace. Adam’s company, Delta, was a bit smaller than the other units.
Geographically, they were responsible for a larger space than some of the other
units, but in terms of population, their area was the least populated. Afghans
were spread out in villages of some dozens or hundreds of people, depending on
their proximity to water, roads, or the riverbeds (wadis in the local
tongue) that served as roads in many areas.

According to Matthew Frye, Delta Company had been training
Afghan National Police (ANP) in far-flung district centers when the unit
arrived in May of 2007. By July, it had become clear that the distances required
to travel were exposing the unit to risk, and making it more difficult to accomplish
a key tenant of COIN: living with the population one was attempting to protect
or train. When the unit had arrived in theater, there was no obvious place to
quarter an entire unit’s worth of paratroopers, so Delta began evaluating
suitable locations for a permanent Company base as part of their training
missions. On July 23^rd, during a mission south from the Battalion
base in Orgun, a Delta convoy struck an IED in Sarobi District. Adam J. Davis,
Michael S. Curry, Jr., and Travon T. Johnson were killed immediately. Jesse S.
Rogers expired later from his wounds.

The IED

Improvised Explosive Devices or “IEDs” were becoming more
sophisticated and prevalent in Afghanistan in 2006-07. For years, the U.S.
military hadn’t needed to worry about roadside bombs in Afghanistan,
encountering ambushes and sometimes large enemy attacks in the mountains,
instead. But trans-national insurgents or terrorists would take successful strategies
from one place—in the case of IEDs, Iraq—and bring them elsewhere. IEDs began
making their way into Afghan roads, and then, became increasingly deadly.

As is often the case with weapons, the Army found itself in
an arms race with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, in which the Army would develop a
way to defeat IEDs, and then the bomb-makers would develop a new method or
procedure to overcome the military’s technological advantage. In the beginning
of the conflict, the most popular type of roadside bomb in Afghanistan had been
pressure-plate or pressure detonated IEDs, where the weight of the vehicle
would set off the bomb, blowing anything above it to pieces. This had the
undesirable (from insurgents’ point of view) effect of killing civilians as
often as it did Americans. By 2006-07, they were relying increasingly on
“remote detonated” IEDs, triggered by someone with a walkie-talkie or cell
phone, who could ensure that the correct target (US forces) were being struck.
As a result, US forces equipped their vehicles with signal-jamming devices that
prevented signal-initiated devices from detonating. Delta Company had such
devices installed in their vehicles.

The IED that struck Adam’s vehicle, on which he was turret
gunner, was a large pressure plate IED. The electronic jamming system was
useless.

A sickness of the soul

The deaths of Adam and the other paratroopers—especially
Michael Curry, who was nearing retirement and had a great reputation among his
peer NCOs—struck Delta Company hard, but also took a toll on the Battalion.
July of 2007 was a difficult month for the 173^rd Airborne Brigade,
with Major Tom Bostick of the Brigade’s cavalry unit (another beloved
paratrooper, and former Bravo or “Legion” Company commander in Adam’s
Battalion) dying in combat in Nuristan, and Juan Restrepo of 2^nd
Battalion dying in Kunar Province (a documentary named after
an outpost named in Restrepo’s honor is one of the finest of its type to
describe fighting in Afghanistan).

The paratroopers who died that day are still remembered by
the people they served with, and by their families. But the memory of Adam was
too much for Tim.   

“TJ and I became close as we got older,” said Watson, Davis’
sister. “I was the one he’d call when he wanted to talk… the night before
[Adam’s] funeral he went and had the coroner open the casket, and it made him
very unhappy.”

Watson wrote that Tim struggled with suicidal thoughts, and
even attempted to act on those impulses. “I went to see him in rehab a couple
times,” she wrote. On January 18, 2016, he passed away. His
obituary reads “the most we can tell is that he succumbed to a sickness of
the soul which had been with him since his brother Adam passed away nine years
ago in Afghanistan.”

Breathless

If you say “I am not a monster”
Into the mirror and turn around three times
A better version of yourself will start to take root in your heart.

If some nights you cannot make your mouth say the words,
If you cannot make your lips make the sound,
It is okay to say “I am not always a monster”.

If your friend tells you that you need to forgive yourself
Before you are consumed by the weight of your own actions
It is okay to drink until you believe them.

If you have pushed all your friends away and are standing on the edge
of a bridge and a voice in your head says ‘Don’t jump’
That voice is your friend
and it is okay to listen.

To the Woman Who Finds My Ex

You will find him shaking on the couch

With his hair plastered to his forehead

And his body covered in sweat.

He will say

Help me

But he won’t want your help.

You will think of the words

Addiction

      Overdose

      User

But you will stop short of death.

He will glow in the dark.

He will take pleasure in his pain,

Smear it over his life with a spatula

And call it impasto,

Call it progress,

Call it hope.

He’ll say the drug is the only love that he believes in,

The only love that hasn’t let him down.

You will think of the words

      Betrayal

      Ungrateful

      Sacrifice

But you will stop short of leaving.

It was not rare to see horses on Main Street when I was growing up in this town. I was spindly and spry then, when distances were calculated by how much jerky and water to pack, when the idea of pocket-sized computers was still the realm of science-fiction, the same stuff as teleportation devices and alien invasions. Around the house an intricate network of deer trails canvased the woods like a sense of smell. I’d run them through the sagebrush and chokecherries, shivering in the shade of dense lodgepole pine stands. Still panting, I’d knock on a neighbor’s door and ask a mother if her child could go to the river.

We’d walk miles in our minds, finely-tuned to the snapping of dry branches in the needle-cast, summoning to our soft skin the possibility of predators emerging with the warmth of a late spring day. The distant sound of swift water rushing over boulders always made us start running.

Rays broke on the surface and scattered as if through a fractured emerald onto the slick stones below, shimmering off the scales of large trout and made hazy where their tails whipped up a cloud of fine silt, spooked by our careless approach. In the deeper pools heated by afternoon sun there was no place for our bodies to know their own boundaries. It was a richer kind of air through which every motion rippled to the bank and returned to us, but slower, expanding.

Where the May and June runoff cut the bank from beneath a large cottonwood its roots reached exposed like tentacles into the water. By mid-summer we could entwine our arms in them and float on the surface cutting the gentled current with our heads as we looked to the bottom and into the shadows, hoping the fish might not mind our company and maybe even glide along the length of our bodies. We would bask on the smooth, day-baked stones, let the sun dry us, scratch the sand from our scalps and feel clean, even a little magical walking home.

In late summer my father would wake me before dawn with his large hand on my shoulder, the smell of coffee drifting in behind him. A quiet blue light through the trees laid our shadows down before us on the trail, fishing poles sprouting from our heads like antennae. Sleep still in my eyes, I imagined being led to the river by some dreamed extension of myself, one who might rather do anything than trick a fish into swallowing a hook just to turn it back to the current, stunned and bleeding. Tearing barbs from their mouths and throats then holding them like trophies while they mouthed the air was a suffering I learned to fold into layers of pride. I’d ask why we didn’t keep them and was told there was no need.

The temperature dropped sharply near the river as soon as it could be heard. My skin raised with the chill and my heart sank to hear my father’s pace quicken. He inhaled the cool morning into his nostrils with pious vigor. Later, looking upstream, he welled with pride to see my pole bowed down to the weight and fight of a large trout. He laughed and shouted, “Fish on!” as he made his way toward me with the net in his hand.

————     

I knew they were Cal’s boots stomping around on the hardwood. His restless energy vibrated through the floor and into my head. I gathered my jacket back into a lumpy pillow and tried to fall asleep again. He opened the front door then stomped back, smacking me on the head as he passed with the rolled up newspaper he had retrieved then trumpeted the first few notes of reveille through it.

Every minute or so, just as I started to doze off, he’d loudly clear his throat, pick up the paper by either side and pop it as if to freshen the news before smoothing it back down on the table. I squinted with one eye and leered at him across the room with all the hungover evil I could conjure. His hair was cow-licked where his head had finally come to rest after the long night of drinking and dancing, embellishing war stories, and doing whatever we thought those stories gave us license to do.

Every couple of weeks it seemed we began making feints into blackout territory, each night a fresh chance to regain the thrill of courting death and going once more unto the breach, as Cal liked to call it. Empty bottles stood gathered together on the table. From my floor’s-eye-view they looked like a city of glass buildings. I remembered Cal upending one then musing woozily to it, “Thank you for your service,” as he added it to the skyline. I remembered dancing wildly to Louis Prima and an almost inhumanly beautiful, dark-haired young woman yelling at me and storming out into the snow—Oh, Marie! Tell me you love me. I let out a long dramatic groan and rolled onto my back.

“Where’d she go, Cal? Where’s the girl of my dreams? The love of my life?”

Even when he wasn’t reading the paper he never really listened to anybody. He ignored me and started reading out loud: “At 3:36 a.m. a woman reported a nude man at Main Street and 3rd Avenue jogging with a hammer and chanting….” In the seven years I’d known him, reading the police blotter had become something of a ritual, one which required coffee to be fully appreciated first thing in the morning. I reminded him of this. He told me to get up and make it myself.

“Wouldn’t go in there barefoot,” he added without looking up from the paper as I pulled myself off the floor.

“Why not?”

He scoffed.

I stepped into a pair of Cal’s beat-up cowboy boots by the door and walked to the kitchen. It looked like a grenade had gone off. Cabinet doors were splintered on the linoleum or dangling from their hinges, the breakfast table and chairs laid upended surrounded by shards of bottles and dishes. In a corner the coffee machine was in pieces, all of it soaking in pools of wine. My eyes rolled over the scene turning up little flashes of memory. My stomach began to turn. I knew what had happened but I asked Cal anyway.

“You happened, you crazy bastard. You went dark as the devil.”

I was locked inside my skull again, where Cal’s voice echoed absently like some tired machine switched-on and abandoned. I remembered a dream-like space where time and gravity unfixed themselves and there was nothing to give my body shape but vague, immovable objects where the waves crashed; where I wanted wild and inexplicable things; to catch a rattlesnake, kiss it on the mouth, grip it by the jaws and pull it over my head like a balaclava. I wanted to vibrate. To hum and rattle into pieces.

————

Cal and I would jog from downtown calling cadence like the ghosts of soldiers, released to haunt everyone’s dreams on those snowy, sleeping streets. We would call on the emptiness to recognize us, to embrace us as its own: Mama, mama can’t you see…what the Army’s done to me? We’d wake up and drink coffee and read the paper like we’d aged a hundred years overnight.

Cal said we needed to quit blowing money on hangovers and buy a couple horses already. I could usually count on this train of thought after a night of dragging our drunk bodies around town. “All my old tack’s just gatherin’ dust in my aunt’s barn. Bet she’d probably cut us some slack on a couple geezers. Get us started anyway. Get us outta this shithole and into the wild anyway.” He’d dream us there and try to convince me it was what we were put on earth to do. That one cool morning we’d saddle those horses and disappear like phantoms into some blue shadowland, as if somewhere just beyond the horizon a paradise was waiting to be reclaimed. “We’ll sell everything and just go. What’s the song say? Rob the grave of the setting sun.”

He’d pop the paper as if to set it all in motion. I’d go along, too sick and tired to pretend like I had a better idea. Not to say he didn’t have something. Cal had vision. If anyone did, he had the drive to turn back the clock, or if not, at least smash the damn thing and start from scratch. He accused the world of trying to pull one over on him, trying to wash his brain clean of some ancient instinct. He knew better though. He could see it all happening right before his eyes. And he’d be damned if so-called progress was going to catch him sleeping. He’d roll a fat joint and lay on his back on the hardwood floor, blowing clouds of smoke at the ceiling, picturing exactly how he was being screwed out of his destiny.  

————       

In a sterile, over-air-conditioned conference room Cal pictured a three-point-plan written on a dry erase board. He could hear the whisk and thwack of an aluminum pointer striking the whiteboard under each number as a buttoned-down agent eyes one of the many pale faces around the table. “One,” said the agent with detached authority, “Disenfranchise.” Cal saw him swat the board under the next word, scan and lock eyes with a different face. “Two,” he shouted this time, making his victim pucker and quiver, “Romanticize.” Then a thwack and a new face for the third and final pronouncement: “Commodify.”

The room nodded in obedient assent. “It’s that simple, men. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” He then led them in a three-count, swatting each word down the list for punctuation and lastly under the slogan written above them all, which they uttered in solemn unison. I heard Cal’s voice before I walked in. He was laying on the floor, chanting at the ceiling: “Kill the Cowboy, save the boots!”

      ————

When Cal came home from areas he often referred to as the “wild west,” he felt everything harassing him, closing in on him, telling him he was too late. “Too many goddamn people on this earth. Zombies,” he’d correct himself, “and their kiss-ass little cyber-lives; big-money buyin’ up the whole goddamn valley, pricin’ out real goddamn people; fuckin’ movie-star wannabes turnin’ working ranches into playthings….” He’d work himself up and have to roll a joint. Though he would never admit it, he was paralyzed with fear. He saw the way of his father and grandfather, his birthright, the way of the cowboy “going the way of the Indian,” as he put it. He laid on the floor throughout the day exhaling thick clouds at the ceiling and rubbing his temples. Images of conspiracy and betrayal loosened and drifted from his mind. Like Judas, he thought, feeling suddenly a new, special kinship with Jesus.

He pictured a resurrected Christ clinching a thin cigarillo between his teeth and squinting through the shadow of a sharp, felt brim. He saw the hand of God drawing the cold, heavy steel from his holster as he considered a man in a business suit kneeling before him, shielding the sun from his eyes. Arrayed in that righteous light, thumbing back the hammer and tenderly touching the muzzle to the man’s impure lips, Jesus smiled—Cal smiled. “Kiss this,” they said.

————

When I came home I burned my uniform with all its ribbons and badges. Made a ceremony of it and everything. Cal considered it an act of treason and shunned me for months. But, for better or worse, I was bound to him. And him to me. Without Cal’s kind of animal sensitivity and callous justice, I might not have made it home at all.

————

We put it behind us, both desperate for an old kind of familiarity, even if a false and decidedly immoderate one. I had developed lofty ideas of self-deconstructionism, that I was somehow dismantling something broken inside my head. And I did truly believe this. But after a couple bottles of wine it became tiresome and all I had was bleary aim at something near pleasure. I could at least hit the present moment, it being a pretty big target. In it I surrendered to a sense of time and gravity backing their screws out of my bones. Every motion seemed fluid, intuitive, rippling out from my body toward some mystical integration, but ultimately retuning a kind of lazy hypnotism—the kind of magic you long to believe but also loathe for the weakness that longing betrays. That was the general, dull ache of it. Things that could never truly be, maybe never were at all. Out of place. Out of time. But we soldiered on through the illusion, allowing the selves we remembered being to manifest friction for traction.

————

It was a Friday night. Every Friday night art galleries on main street opened their doors and offered complimentary wine to anyone who entered so long as they pretended to care about the stuff inside. Cal and I used to make it our duty to impose and make sure that no wine went to waste. We filled and refilled plastic cups as if hydrating for a mission. Once loose enough, we’d liberate bottles from the table and walk around with them, standing in front of Western landscape paintings, probing the air for volatility.

“Me. Oh. My,” Cal would say, adding a little whistle. “A damn sight better than the real thing, you ask me. Who in his right mind would ford that river horseback in real life? You know there’s rattlers in there will swim right in your saddlebag and take a nap, and you never even know it till you reach in there happy as an idiot for the wineskin…then fffft, ffft fft…,” he struck my forearm, shoulder then the side of my neck with his fingers as fangs, “It’s goodnight, Irene, goodnight.”  

I’d hum and turn the price-tag, speaking with a degree of dismay, “How could you live with yourself knowing someone else walked out of here with this beauty?” Then feigning a scan of the gallery for someone to talk to, I’d say, “I must have it.”

The night would go on like that until we reached a kind of critical mass, finally just walking out the door, bottles in hand, whistling, humming, leaning into a kind of warning buzz.  

      ————

Some mornings after a night of unraveling Cal and I would meet in a coffee shop to spool back into the form of something socially acceptable. We’d read the paper at a corner table and psychically loom. The walls were almost always hung with big glossy photographs of wildlife. Under each photo was a little wooden placard with a title and price. Above Cal’s head was a photo of a herd of bison. Hungover and slightly nauseous, I sipped my coffee and stared at it osmotically.

I looked down at Cal. His head was lowered to the paper. Not moving his eyes from an article he took a sip from his mug and made a sound like he was expelling steam.

“Did exactly what I knew they would,” he said without looking up, after a minute going on, “Abandoned their tanks and guns…our tanks and guns…burned their uniforms and ran away like babies from the boogeyman.” He loudly folded up the paper in disgust and stared off toward the front windows. “You can lead a horse to water,” he said to himself, raising his mug again. “Fucking cowards.”

I looked up at the photo then down at Cal. Nothing mattered all of a sudden. I felt the urge to throw my coffee in his face, walk out and never think twice about anything ever again.

Cal had his visions. I had mine.

The feeling surged then dissolved. I looked back up at the photo and imagined us just out of frame sitting our horses, Cal’s eye laid down the barrel of a rifle. Very near us the photographer stood aiming his camera down the slope. Cal tested the wind then reached to make adjustments to his sights as the photographer made adjustments to his camera. Seasons altered when I blinked. The river valley below flashed white and frozen then vibrant and lush, full of grazing bison, then hazy red as if lit by a smoke-veiled sun.

Cal spun his horse a half-turn then kicked up his legs and spun his body the opposite way. He laid his barrel across the horse’s hindquarter, lowered his body behind it and wrapped his legs around the horse’s neck. Chinning a mocking glance at the photographer then looking down at the heard, he wagered he could shoot more of them. They both squinted with one eye, fingertips poised.

I couldn’t discern the explosion of gunpowder from the snapping of the shutter. They were simultaneous and unmitigated. Cal seemed to levitate above his horse, purring with the recoil and instantly, expertly retracting the bolt with the meat of his palm, extracting each cartridge with a shimmering ting, then racking the bolt forward, slightly adjusting his aim and firing again. His zeal was as lethal and endless as his ammunition. The stampeding herd was swallowed up in a cloak of dust but Cal continued shooting, now indiscriminately, wildly into the cloud until finally spinning on his haunches back riderwise, sheathing his rifle and trotting down the slope.   

Streams of blood merged into pools, gathering momentum through dirt for the river, then dripped viscous over the bank and into the current, carried down-valley, frothing over boulders and swirling into sun-warmed eddies. Our horses emerged on the other side as if dipped up to the withers in rusty oil. We made camp atop the opposite plateau.

I saw our fire spitting embers up at the night. I saw Cal’s face warping through the flames, a mesmerized glimmer there. I saw him get up, walk to his horse and reach into his saddlebag for the wineskin.    

I wanted to tell him he was nothing, tell him to swallow his tongue and get out of my head. But I drank my coffee and agreed. “Fucking cowards.”

————

We rolled cigarettes and sauntered from one art gallery to the next, getting drunker, whistling and humming obnoxiously. Cal hurled a wine bottle like a grenade over his head and didn’t look to see where it shattered. All glass started to pulse with fragility. From the street the galleries looked like snow-globes, I thought. We watched them sip their drinks and attempt to shake their evening into something special. Cal and I joined them. I overheard someone suggest that the price-tag dangling from a bison skull was “irrelevant, really.” I laughed out loud. Everyone seemed to be laughing. I drank deeply from a bottle and laughed again. A laugh I hardly recognized.

From the sidewalk I peered back inside through my reflection in the window, suddenly paralyzed. They swirled their cups. A weird light shifted through the window onto them. I saw a race of aliens discussing a different skull: “This,” one said, cupping it like a wineglass, “this was one of the snow-globe dwellers. They were the first to be eradicated or relocated. They seemed to possess no memory nor useful skill to contribute to the re-cultivation of these once fertile lands.” The alien swirled it and took another drink. “We were baffled, and quite frankly horrified, to see them building their settlements on the richest soil in the valley. Even worse, they hunted large creatures for the size of their crowns, not the yield of their sustenance. They tricked fish into swallowing hooks on strings that they might enjoy the suffering and fear transferred to their hands, just to rip the hook from their flesh and throw them back to repeat the ritual.” Exhaling sharply then making a motion to drink but balking, the being continued, “In fact, we have discovered evidence that their economy relied heavily on these ‘sports,’ as they called them.” They all drank and another chimed in, “Where they got the food they actually consumed is another story entirely.” Their long antennae wobbled as they shook their heads and sipped from their cranial vessels, “Savages, I tell you. Real savages.”

Apparently, there was one more gallery, though I couldn’t really say.

————

The last thing I remember is standing in front of a hundred old machine parts—gears, springs, brackets—all tack-welded into the form of a giant bison skull. Its hollow eye-sockets glowed with electric lights timed to change every few seconds from white to green to red. I looked around and saw everyone taking photos of the sculpture with their phones then bow their heads. Their faces glowed piously, bathed in the light of their screens.

I saw them growing undead, praying as though from that liquid crystal had whispered a promise of immortality. I saw the ghost within it baiting them, desperate for them to vacate their own minds that it might take up residence and power there. I saw them offering their knowledge and memory, their lives as tribute.

I saw horses and a long, cold winter. I saw ribboned stacks of paper bills, photographs, paintings and furniture piled high in the center of a room. I saw fire in the floor, fire licking at the rafters. I saw blood rising to my skin in a vacuum ravenous for it, inhaling me as if for the marrow in my bones, as if to extract from my body that which my dreams had promised it.

I saw white then green then red.

————

The judge gave me my own private cell and some time to think about my life choices, as he put it. Miraculously, the only book I could get my hands on when the library cart rolled by was The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch. Jim Loney is my age, estranged from his community and going “gently insane” on his drunken descent toward “noble, inevitable self-destruction,” as one reviewer suggested. I had to laugh. I read it in one sitting. Then I cried. Simple tears at first as I reluctantly turned the final pages, feeling that the resolution would be far too costly. Then involuntary, spine-binding weeping to the edge of suffocation and back. An hour, maybe two, three before the waves subsided. Rolling over, I mouthed silent, unknown things at the ceiling, staring holes through it. I traced forms of animals on the naked cinder-blocks and wanted to die.

The night before I was released, I dreamed. I stood under bright stars at arms-length from a fire. I reached in with my hand and held it there, entranced by the impossibility of not being burned. There was a metallic clink followed by a voice. “Will is fate,” it said. I turned to see him bent to the ground with a hammer in hand. Around his wrists were manacles attached to a length of chain rooted in stone. He set the hammer to mark his aim then raised it above his head and swung it, sending the sound into the night and a splash of sparks to the ground. Without looking up he said, “Until it breaks,” and marked his aim again. He punctuated himself with the slow but deliberate rhythm of a simple machine made to mark its own rate of function: “Will is fate…” clink… “Until it breaks…” clink…. And on and on, chanting through the night.

I turned back to the fire and felt the memory of stepping into it. There was a vibration each time the hammer struck. The light began to pulse. A step closer brought a roar like waking up at sea in a terrible storm followed by a deeper vibration, a kind of rhythmic thudding and a drone of voices. As I stepped fully into the flames figures appeared to be weaving themselves into each other, their bodies bound up in one form of writhing then another, their desperate faces mouthing the air, their arms and hands hitting me unfeelingly as I pushed my way through. Everything mounted into a violent, unbearable wave of anguish. I was knocked to the ground and began scrambling furiously. The thudding grew in my hands and knees, in my stomach, vibrating everything into one densely concentrated center until it could no longer contain itself. Light flashed from the core of an explosion, consuming everything. Then darkness. Silence. I felt the coolness of night as if directly on skinless muscle.

I woke up and stared at the ceiling, something inching its way from my stomach into my throat and finally over my lips, so delicately that even I could not quite make it out. Though I understood. Kill the soldier, save the man.      

————

Cal picked me up. He rolled around the corner of the jail in my 1986 Land Cruiser. The old leaf spring suspension had long since lost its spring and took all bumps under the tired, squeaking protest of its joints. From a dead stop it coughed up a little cloud of exhaust and could putter up to sixty-five mph given a long enough, flat enough stretch of highway. I smiled to see it parked at the curb.

Cal waited for me to move but I just stood there and stared at him through a fog of breath. His hand went up as if to ask if I was getting in or not. He eventually got the picture, opened his door and circled around front to the passenger side, lunging toward me, shouting “Shotgun!” in my ear as he passed. He didn’t even have a driver’s license.

In fact, I wasn’t sure if Cal existed at all. As far as I knew he had gone completely off the grid. In his mind, veterans of our stripe were all on a secret government watchlist. He believed the state was not so obtuse as to train us to abandon empathy, kill on command, send us to war, and then simply release us back into the world with a pat on the back, an unlimited prescription for drugs and a suicide hotline card without at least keeping an eye on us, see if we could still play the game without getting too wise. Cal had it all worked out. When he smoked he became very lucid, almost telepathic, he claimed. He’d lay on the floor blowing thick clouds at the ceiling and intercept conference calls from the Pentagon between a handful of politicians, a data-storage gate-keeper, and a spooky DoD agent going on about “the imperative to track and, when necessary, guide liabilities as they are released back into the mainstream.” There would be unofficial requests for sensitive information and off-the-books transactions.

Cal would close his eyes, point to both of his temples and see top-secret memos appearing in encrypted email inboxes regarding a surveillance operation to acquire location- and activity-intel on veterans who meet signal criteria. He’d start listing them: “…combat…college…debt-free…single…,” as if straining to receive each word which, according to him, constituted a probability of ideological disillusionment and sedition sufficient to red-flag an individual for life. According to Cal, one of us was on the fast-track to being “disappeared.” He’d relight his joint and blow smoke, occasionally mumbling another paranoid stream of thought: “If credibility is established by credit…and credit is debt….” He’d take a long drag and ash in the big planter pot then keep going: “…and debt is forced labor, and forced labor is the mechanization of humans, and…,” and on and on.

He tapped out a short couple of beats on the dash board. “The Colonel’s looking for guns,” he said to the windshield, waiting to see if I’d respond, then continued, “I told him we’d meet just as soon as I could spring your sorry ass.” What he meant was hired guns. The Colonel was actually a retired Army Colonel who by whatever nebulous network of connections was eager to put together a private security team to head back into high-conflict areas. His types of teams ran defense and often offense for god-knows-who, doing things that made for long redactions in official reports. The one certainty was the money. “A hundred fifty Gs for six-month’s work, boy.” I could tell by his voice Cal was already there. He never really left. “Fuck it,” he said, “I’ll text him right now.”

I don’t know why I didn’t tell him not to. The cold, clean air drafted through the window and I was just glad to be feeling and breathing it. I couldn’t summon the energy to negate anything that was going to happen. He plugged the auxiliary cable into his phone as he read the Colonel’s text. “Sanctuary. One hour.” He cocked his head at me, “There it is. Let’s get a few freedom beers in you, partner.” He scrolled down his screen and selected Oh, Marie by Louis Prima, rolled the volume knob, drummed the dash with his hands and yowled as the cymbals and sax really kicked in, “Once more unto the breach!”

————

I righted the table and chairs, found a broom and swept all the glass, mopped the floor and fastened the cabinet doors best I could back on their hinges. Cal sat at the table with the paper, occasionally reading out loud something that twisted up in his mind just right. I finished putting the kitchen back in order, poured myself a glass of water and sat down across from him. Without looking up he said something about meeting the Colonel again to iron out the details, sign some papers for clearance. It hadn’t registered to me that a decision had been made, as though I was simply caught up in some kind of entropic undertow. I didn’t even know how many days I’d been waiting to get spat out and wash ashore. But there I was. He told me I better go warm up the beast.  

On cold mornings, because the cable was broken, I had to pop the hood of the Cruiser and manually wedge the choke closed with a stone that had sat in the console for years and just so happened to be the ideal size, apparently waiting for that very purpose. We cut tracks through a couple inches of fresh snow, hit main street and headed downtown. The sidewalks were empty. We sipped coffee at our usual table in the corner and waited for the Colonel.

Every few feet on the walls were different glossy photos—a silhouetted elk, spotted whitetail, nesting blue herons, rainbow trout. Above Cal’s head was a photo of a single bison, its eyes like polished obsidian squinting against wind-driven snow directly into the lens. Written beneath it on a little wooden placard was the title and the price: Winter Hunt, $290. It was number four of twenty-three prints. I scratched out the math on a napkin and said the amount to myself. Cal asked what it was. Ignoring him I looked around the shop counting the photos with similar placards and did that math. “One hundred thousand, fifty dollars.” I sat there waiting for whatever else was rising to the surface.

Cal sensed a shift and switched to recruiter-mode. “Don’t get weird on me, son. We’ll be out of this sorry shithole by tomorrow. There’s a zero-six-thirty to Seattle, Seattle to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to a nice desert paradise, eighty-five degrees. Masters of our own destiny again.” He kicked my chair to get my eyes off the photo. “Hey, you listening to me? Don’t forget you’re getting paid to get the hell out of this phony-ass town to do some real shit again. It should be the easiest decision you ever made.”

I stared into my coffee and spun the mug a half-circle by the handle and muttered it back to myself. “The easiest decision.”

“The easiest. What’s there to think about?”

“You ever wonder why it’s easy?”

“Christ almighty. Is your head screwed on? I just told you why.”

“I don’t think I need easy. I don’t need a way out of here.” I sort of rolled my eyes around the coffee shop then leveled them across the table. “I need a way out of here,” I said, reaching across the table and tapping Cal’s temple with my finger. He grabbed my wrist and stared at me, then through me as he let go. He wasn’t there anymore. I stood up sharply, knocking my chair over. A couple heads turned to see what was happening. I picked up the chair, gathering myself upright, then pushed it back under the table and inhaled slowly. “Thank you for your service, Cal.” I apologized to no one in particular then turned and walked out the door.

     ————

The Cruiser stuttered faithfully into action. I pointed west and drove until all signs of civilization faded but the road itself and a few old ranch houses. I drove for an hour, then two, in silence except for tires on pavement and crisp air whistling through a crack in the window. I knew where I was going. Soon the road turned to frozen dirt and up ahead cut through the crest of a ridge at the base of a giant V in the earth before descending sharply into the river valley. I could hear the glimmer in my father’s voice telling me I’d better hold onto something as the truck accelerated toward what looked like the edge of the world.

Even though I knew what was coming my stomach would rise into my throat, out of my body it seemed, and stay suspended somewhere above in a moment of perfect weightlessness before rushing back into me like a flood as the wheels received the full weight of the truck again. With a big youthful grin he would gently apply the brakes and, taking in the view, exhale as though to slow down his heart. I let myself believe that was the memory which accompanied him over the edge when his heart finally slowed to a stop.

The width of the valley was marked distinctly by sheer plateau walls like far-reaching bookends. It spanned maybe a mile at most and was never so narrow that you could throw a stone from one side to the other. The road sort of disintegrated into a primitive two-track used occasionally to hay cattle and check fences. But there were no cattle to be seen and all the post-latch gates were laid open. Where the way intersected the river I turned left paralleling it upstream through dormant, snow-dusted grass and sagebrush. In the narrow sections of river the water was frozen solid like frosted glass and I wondered how thick, if it could be driven across without breaking through or getting stuck. A couple of times I passed large stones and nearly stopped to hoist them from the bank down onto the ice but decided to keep going.

Eventually the road curved out into the field and then back toward the river-crossing. I held the wheel at an angle and the slight pull felt like being in a slingshot. Depressing the pedal and bracing either side of the wheel my head hit the roof as I sped over a sharp dip at the bank. Ice shards and water instantly cascaded over the hood and windshield. I instinctively ducked and held my breath, pinning the accelerator to the floor, feeling each stone under the tires claim a little more momentum. And like a beast whipped to the brink, hissing plumes of steam and coughing, the vehicle limped up the bank on the other side. I managed to coax it to the foot of the escarpment, where it sputtered to a halt alongside a small juniper. There was no sense in trying to start it again but I tried anyway, turning the ignition over and over until there was nothing. I opened the door, stepped out and closed it, reluctantly accepting I was stuck there.  

When I was just a boy, standing very near that same place, I’d look up the steep slope to the base of the cliff with dread anticipating the burning in my lungs and thighs, the terrible thirst and having to claw through the crevice at the top. Somehow everything I’d seen since in no way diminished that feeling of dread. I started hiking.

Halfway up I kicked through the snow a bit, more for the memory than anything. In the summer if you dug around in the talus you could sometimes find tooled stones, pieces of spear or arrowheads, even bison remains, bone shards. I was so much smaller then, when the world went on forever yet seemed closer somehow. Peering up to the top of the cliff I would shudder to imagine an entire herd leaping one after the other from the edge and plummeting toward me, the frantic adrenaline in their eyes, the earth heaving under the impact of their massive bodies. Young men would peer panting from the edge down to the bloodied arms of women expertly stripping those bodies of their hides and carving the meat from their bones. They would be all around me as I made my way up the slope to the base of the cliff wall.

The only way to the top was through an opening there wide enough for one person. It led through the stone where water had eroded its way for thousands of years through weaknesses and where very little light penetrated. Acute claustrophobia held each breath just out of reach as I inched my way up and through, relieved only in the assurance that at least in the winter, rattlesnakes lay dormant, brumating in their dens, their hibernacula. In my mind they were coiled tightly together, purring through dreams in the buried warmth of the earth around me. My skin ran flush with a surge of heat then shivered in the last shadow as I pulled myself finally from the hole at the lip of the plateau. Catching my breath, I turned to survey the valley. Behind a thin veil of clouds the sun was soft and low on the horizon. I stepped back from the edge and picked a couple of rocks from beneath the snow. Flinging them underhand I watched them spin silent in the air and tumble down the slope. I threw one half-heartedly at the Cruiser before sitting down and staring out across the valley.

It seemed there was nothing in sight to indicate when I was. It was all time and no time at all. I plucked a sprig of sagebrush, rolled it in my fingers and held it under my nose, inhaling its sweetness, cool like mint in the back of the throat. I scratched up a small handful of icy snow, compressed it in my palm and sucked the moisture from it. Tracing the river upstream I saw sun-baked ground and fine clouds of dust rising along the banks behind horse-drawn travois, the sinew-lashed lodgepole bowed under a winter’s rations. I saw naked young men and women washing blood from their bodies where the current was swift. I felt everything slow and waited for darkness.                     

This happened in the 1980’s. Maybe it was after I joined the military or before, when I was thinking about it. In either case, I was sitting in a cabin in New Gloucester, Maine with my Aunt Helen and my cousin, Kim. Somehow, we got into the topic of women in combat. I made some comment that we needed to decide if that’s really what we wanted as a country. My cousin and my aunt both snorted.

I don’t remember the exact words, but my Aunt Helen said something like, “Who the hell is ‘we’?”

It sticks out in my memory like I got slapped. Even as a self-centered, male teenager, I had to admit they had a point.

I’m still trying to remove myself from the center of the universe and imagine what life is like from someone else’s perspective. I read a book during Women’s History Month called It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (Potomac Books, 2017). It’s filled with stories that address a question my aunt might have asked, “Why should it be so difficult for a woman to serve her country?”

I served alongside women in uniform from 1985 to 2013. In peacetime and in combat. Officers and enlisted. Pilots and ground personnel. Active Duty and Air National Guard. I went to the Air Force Academy not long after women were first admitted there. When I first joined the Air Force, women weren’t allowed to fly fighters. I eventually served in units where women were flying in formations with me. I’m married to a retired Air Force veteran and Air Force Academy graduate. Her older sister, also a grad, retired as a major general in the Air Force. I should already have a first-hand appreciation for what strides women have made and the challenges they’ve faced in military service. But Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow, the editors of this book, gave me a new perspective on where my three decades fit into the larger scheme of things.

It was a new perspective that I needed, for a couple of reasons. For one, my wife had a positive experience in military service. She’s tough, but quiet. When I push her on the topic, to find some hidden story of struggle or discrimination or mistreatment, she has almost nothing bad to say. Frankly, she seems like an exception. Secondly, I served in the US Air Force. My perspective is limited to my branch of service.

In It’s My Country Too, there are stories about women in all the branches of military service, even disguised as men so they could fight. There’s even a story about a woman who served in the US Lighthouse Service. The breadth and depth of the stories the editors included is remarkable. There are uplifting stories and ones that are ugly. Another thing that makes these stories compelling is that they are first-person accounts. There’s a lot of background provided by the editors, but the stories come from the women themselves. This is a great accomplishment, because, as it says in the book regarding Korean War nurses (but the sentiment is true for women’s stories in general), “None published memoirs.”

The editors mention Louisa May Alcott who wrote Hospital Sketches about her time as a civil war nurse. She served under a woman at the Union Hotel Hospital named Hannah Chandler Ropes, my relative. Ropes is buried in the town where my parents live in Maine, the same town where my aunt schooled me about what “we” means. Her writings were published in Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes (The University of Tennessee Press, 1980) edited by John R. Brumgardt. Bell and Crow inspired me to pull this book down off my shelf for another look. I was disappointed to see that my copy, that I read years ago, didn’t have a single dog-eared page. Say what you will about desecrating physical books, but mangled pages are how I leave breadcrumbs. I read it again.

Ropes served as a volunteer nurse in that hospital in Georgetown. She showed up there on June 25, 1862, the day that the Battle of the Seven Days started. Her nephew Charles Peleg Chandler died fighting at Glendale during that battle on June 30, 1862, the same week she arrived. In a July letter, she says she’s worried about both Charles P. and Charles Lyon Chandler, his cousin. I’ve been researching Charles P. and Charles L. Discovering that their aunt wrote a letter wondering whether her nephews were okay was like getting an electric shock. I have Bell and Crow to thank for helping me learn what I should’ve known already. In a strange convergence, it was Charles P. who inadvertently motivated Ropes to become a nurse when, two years before, he sent her a book about nursing written by Florence Nightingale. Sadly, Ropes and her two nephews would never see the end of the war.

At one point as the head matron of the hospital, Ropes was so horrified at the mistreatment of the enlisted men who were patients, she complained to the head surgeon. Getting nowhere, she went in person directly to the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. Once Stanton verified what my relative said was true, he threw both the head steward and the head surgeon into prison. Things improved at the hospital. I was a squadron commander once, so it stings a little to read how she went around the chain of command. But she cared more about the treatment of the patients than how she was perceived. She was also a single mother after being abandoned by her husband in the 1840’s. In the 1850’s she moved to Kansas as part of the freesoil, anti-slavery movement to help make it a free state, but that’s another story. The point is that she was well past being bashful or “proper.”

The very last thing that Ropes wrote was a letter to her daughter on Jan 11, 1863 where she let her know that she was ill along with many of the nurses she supervised. She said “Miss Alcott” was “under orders from me not to leave her room.” Both of them had typhoid pneumonia. Hannah Ropes died on January 20, 1863 at the age of 54. My son and I ran by her headstone the last time we were in Maine. Louisa May Alcott pulled through and wrote Little Women. Funny how lives circle around and intersect in the past and the present.

Two stories struck me in It’s My Country Too because they seemed universal to me, regardless of the sex of the author. One was the moving piece by Lori Imsdahl. Maybe it was because it dealt with Afghanistan, where I’ve looked down on scenes like this from the air and yearned to know what it was like on the ground. Or maybe it was because she talks about luck. Or maybe it was simply because I was transported there by her outstanding writing.

I’m a pilot, so another passage that hit me hard was by Cornelia Fort, who dodged enemy aircraft in her plane as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor (another incredible story). But this next bit was universal for a pilot, whether you’re a man or a woman:

None of us can put into words why we fly. It is something different for each of us. I can’t say exactly why I fly but I know why as I’ve never known anything in my life.

I knew it when I saw my plane silhouetted against the clouds framed by a circular rainbow. I knew it when I flew up into the extinct volcano Haleakala on the island of Maui and saw the gray-green pineapple fields slope down to the cloud-dappled blueness of the Pacific. But I know it otherwise than in beauty. I know it in dignity and self-sufficiency and in the pride of skill. I know it in the satisfaction of usefulness.

When I read this passage by Fort and the story by Imsdahl, I don’t feel like a man or a woman. I feel like a human being.

Which reminds me of something Hannah Ropes wrote on December 26, 1862. Her hospital was overflowing with injured soldiers from the Battle of Fredericksburg. The dead and the dying and the amputated limbs. She wrote: “The cause is not of either North or South—it is the cause of, and the special work of the nineteenth century, to take the race up into broader vantage ground and on to broader freedom.”

Is she talking about emancipation? She was a vocal abolitionist. Is she talking about the advancement of women? Her writings are clearly feminist. I read all around the quote in that letter and in the book to try to understand what she meant. The editor Brumgardt infers that she means the whole human race. I hope all of those meanings can be true simultaneously.

 It’s My Country Too brought me to broader vantage ground and helped me face my aunt’s question: Who the hell is “we”?

In Which I Serve as Outside Reader on General Petraeus’s Dissertation

[The current version of the Army’s Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24, originated as a doctoral dissertation written by David Petraeus at Princeton.]

Premise flows from premise like water over the edge
of a waterfall, entrancing those not caught
in the turbid spray, those not lingering in the limestone
chutes that channel the first descent. Dulce et decorum,
those molecules in free fall, powerless to reverse
dictates of gravity, whether they be composed
of dollars or bodies. A theorist must maintain sense of scale,
must view war at an appropriate distance, so that its beauty
may emerge like a cold, perfect moon that draws the restless
from their beds with dreams of space flight. The best way to lie
is to get one big whopper on the table and move on quick
to crystalline truth after truth in a train of plausibility
so compelling we don’t see how down becomes
up, so convinced are we by the quality of our reasoning
that be leads to see and eventually to eff and tee, and the best
first lie aligns with ones we’ve already bought, like how we cheer
Frost’s traveler in the yellow woods longing for the road
not taken, nodding along with his glib boast that non-
conformity explains contingency because we can accept
failures chosen on noble grounds more than unforeseen
leaf-covered ways that erupt when footfalls complete
the circuit of pressure plate IEDs. Mr. Petraeus, your counterinsurgency
tools could only work in countries we didn’t create, republics not birthed
by death from above, and so I regretfully conclude
this dissertation presents the naked assertion of imperial power
as the contribution of a helpful guest, final proof that
intelligence and gulled innocence, in general, betray us.

Double Rainbow at Dawn, 15 North at the 10

The rubberneckers slow down
as they do for other hazards,
brake lights merging into
the penumbra of a double rainbow
due west of the traffic lanes,
while in the East the rising sun
irradiates vapor-soaked air.

We are all late, looking askance
at the fireworks of nature,
wondering how our priorities
match up with this display.

Double, not just one: two arcs
of vibrant color proclaiming
peace on earth if we
don’t kill each other
trying to take it in.

Andria Williams: Brooke, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with Wrath-Bearing Tree. We are all excited to feature an excerpt from your debut memoir, War Flower: My Life After Iraq. In a starred review, Kirkus called it “an absolutely compelling war memoir marked by the author’s incredible strength of character and vulnerability.”

How long was this book in the making? How does it feel to finally have it out in the world?

Brooke King: It is a bit nerve-wracking to have it out in the world, but then I remember that it took me four years to get it there, and even longer to try and write the book. I struggled with what people would think of me and what I have been through in my life, and then it dawned on me. The 19-year-old girl I was then doing all those things is not the same person that I am today, and so I gave myself permission, in a sense, to just let the criticism slide away. Yes, there are going to be people that judge what I did or shame me for falling in love with an officer when I was a married woman, but to me, that girl no longer exists. A mother of three no, I don’t even know who that girl is anymore because I am so far removed from who she was and to me, that is what makes it okay to have this book out in the world for all to read.

AW: I have to ask, because my kids (especially my 11-year-old son) are magnetically drawn to the book’s cover: what’s the significance of Boba Fett? Is that your tattoo?

BK: So, it’s funny you should ask. The Fett tattoo is mine. It’s located on the inside of my left forearm. I originally got it because I wanted to get a tattoo that symbolized my nickname, “War Flower.” And because I am a writer and symbolism is everything, the meaning behind it is kind of cool, but also very nerdy. Boba Fett is a bounty hunter form the Star Wars lore. And here is where my nerd shows through…. He ultimately was a war byproduct of his father Jango Fett who was a general for the Clone Army during the Clone Wars. The symbolism behind it is that during his hardships of growing up, he turned away from the traditions of the Mandalorians and chose to follow his own path, and so having him blooming out of a flower seemed to be a perfect metaphor for War Flower. The design staff over at University Nebraska Press asked for what my interpretation of War Flower was and I mentioned that I had it tattooed on me. I sent them over the image of my tattoo along with the meaning behind it and they loved it so much, they decided to use it.

AW: I’m a fan of the Fetts, so I think that’s pretty cool. (I have even dressed as a Mandalorian, but that’s another story.) Anyway, I love your tattoo, and it makes a perfect cover.  

So, the book’s synopsis begins, “Brooke King has been asked over and over what it’s like to be a woman in combat.” I found an intriguing hint of an answer to that in the line, “Here is where a girl is made into a woman and then slowly into a man.” What does that mean, exactly?

BK: It means that there is a time in every female soldier’s service where she is forced to grow up. But for me, as a female soldier who saw a lot of things that normally I wouldn’t have, I was forced to grow up, but then thrown into a situation that normally is reserved for a male soldier sort of forced me to become emotionally and mentally like a male soldier. In a sense, I was forced into survival mode by adapting to what male soldiers would normally go through in the harsh condition of combat.

AW: And yet, even though many women have served in combat over the last decade and more, you share an anecdote about being driven by your grandfather to the local VA upon your return home and encountering not one, but two VA employees who meet your explanation of combat trauma with disbelief and even hostility: “A man comes in, asks me to follow him to the TBI and spinal injury ward. He points to the men inside the room, tells me to think long and hard about lying about combat before I tell him anything more.” 

First of all, what an asshole. But also: How is it possible that such a disconnect can exist, not only between female veterans and the civilian public, but even between women vets and the civilian professionals meant to serve them?

BK: I think it stems from the concern that women are supposed to be the bearers of life, so to think that a woman can be hurt in the same way as a man at war, it makes people uneasy. However, I think the disconnect about female veterans comes from lack of knowledge. Civilians just didn’t know to what extent women were involved in OIF and OEF, and because of that, they have a hard time believing when a woman comes in for help with combat PTSD or combat related injuries. In order for this stigma or misconception to diminish, the government and female veterans really do need to speak up and account for that missing link of information. I know that personally speaking up has helped thousands of other women because I was one of the first women to go through combat PTSD treatment from OIF. I went through a lot of trial and error for years until I was able to find a regimen that worked for me.

AW: War Flower alternates between sections of traditional first-person memoir, and brief chapters of creative nonfiction in which you imagine your way into the minds of other people–a teenage Iraqi girl, a tormented young boy–and even (as in “Dog Tags”) inanimate objects. How and when did the structure of the book become clear to you? Did it begin as a more traditional memoir, or did you always know that you wanted it to be more of a kaleidoscopic view of war and homecoming? 

BK: I began writing the book several years ago and it wasn’t until I ran into a part of the memoir where I couldn’t remember all the details correctly enough that I began to imagine what it would be like to be that person. I am referring to the section “Ghosts” where I imagine what it would be like to be an Iraqi girl on the other side of the war. After I wrote this section, I realized that memories are a jumbled mess of information recollected over time, and someone with combat PTSD has memories that are distorted by their trauma, so when I went back to rethink the structure, I decided that the structure should mimic my memories; fragmented, disjointed, and at times kaleidoscopic.

AW: Your wartime experience appears to have given you an empathy with veterans of former wars, and particularly for Vietnam veterans. In the chapter “Legacy,” you very sensitively craft a sort of plural voice of Vietnam vets: “I am nothing, they would say. I am the fault of my government, my father. I am plagued with nothing but lies. I did what I was told.”

This tone seems matched by one of your early observations about your time in Iraq: “We didn’t know the names of the streets or which roads led to nowhere. When shit hit the fan, sometimes we didn’t know which direction to fire the bullets…In the end the only thing we knew for certain was that we were all soldiers stuck in the same godforsaken country until the military let us leave or we died, whichever came first.”

Do you think there is a particular understanding between veterans of Vietnam and the GWoT?

BK: I think there is a sort of “oneism” that comes from being a combat veteran. There is a silent understanding that even though your war was somewhere different, you can still share that bond of knowing they went through hell as well. So you adopt with it this perspective of empathy towards other combat veterans of foreign wars. You know their struggle because you are silently struggle with the same issue. Though by no means was the homecoming I received the same as the Vietnam veterans, but it is that quiet understanding amongst us that to suffer and see war changes you into someone else, that there is a slow coming back process that each veteran must take. Some get there sooner than others and some never find their way back to the person they were before war.

AW: You mention reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises while in Iraq. I’d love to hear more about your reading (and listening!) life during your military service–boot camp, wartime–because it seems that this kind of inner world is so linked to a person’s state of mind at difficult or transformational moments. (Did you listen to the Grateful Dead in Iraq, for example, or did that just bring back too many memories of your dad?)

BK: When I was deployed I listen all sorts of music. On days when I needed to unburden my soul a bit, I would turn on the Grateful Dead and listen to Jerry’s guitar in “Stella Blue” crying out to me, allowing me to feel the emotions that I needed in order to get through another day. Other days, I would stare at a blank page in my notebook unable to write a single line. Halfway through my deployment, I stopped reading and writing all together. I stopped listening to the Grateful Dead and listened more to heavy metal like Cradle of Filth and Dark Funeral. Some of soldiers around me listened to Slipknot. Sometimes I went days without anything but the sound of mortar rounds exploding and helicopters flying overhead, soldiers laughing and arguing in the smoke area, and sometimes, I just listened to the wrench I was holding while I laid underneath a truck ratcheting a bolt down. The sounds of war and of home coagulate if you let them, so I made it a point to never let the two intermingle for too long because I become either homesick or pissed off that I was still stuck in Iraq.

AW: Metal! Were you a fan before you went to Iraq, or did you start listening to it there?

BK: I listened to Pantera and Slayer, and I think I even listened Iron Maiden, but I really didn’t listen to it too much before. I was a punk rock kid growing up so I listened more to the Ramones, Rancid, Anti-flag, and Bouncing Souls, that sort of stuff. It wasn’t until the guys in the PSD team put on Slipknot and Cradle of Filth that I began to listen to more mainstream metal. And even then, it was only because one day I was smoking a cigarette and I began to really pay attention to the lyrics and was honestly blown away by how poetic Corey Taylor’s lyrics were, and it sort of resonated within my soul how I was feeling at the time and gave me some sort of tragically fucked-up sense of peace to know someone else had a dissonance within themselves they were wrestling with, in a way listening to it made it few as though there weren’t two different women inside of me trying to tear my body in half so that they could both be free. I felt that the war for me was a constant struggle between who I wanted to be as a human being and the person I had to be in order to survive, and for me, music sort of helped calm the tearing apart of my soul.

AW: Well, I think that’s a really powerful explanation of what music does best.

Is there anything you left out of the book that you wish, in retrospect, that you’d included?

BK: I think every writer wishes they had put something in the book that they forgot, but for me, I struggled with whether or not to include more about my late ex-husband. He passed away right after I signed my contract and though he was happy that the book was getting published, I wish I had incorporated more about our marriage, more about how he was the one to save me in Iraq from not only the war, but from myself. He truly was a wonderful man and I wish I had incorporated more of that in there. The next book, however, does pick up where this one left off, so maybe there is time to redeem myself.

AW: I was very sorry to hear of your loss. For what it’s worth, I think the book paints him in a positive light–as a mostly helpful, concerned person for whom life was not particularly easy.

What were the hardest and most effortless parts of the book to write?

You always want to say that the easiest parts of the book are the ones where you talk about your family, but for me, the easiest part to write in the book were the wartime sections. Because I had gone through so much therapy and introspective at myself and war, it became very easy to write it down. To me, the hardest part was writing about my family. I really didn’t want to write about my upbringing. It wasn’t something I wanted to put in the book simply because I couldn’t dedicate enough space to the matter that it needed, and so I ended up summarizing those parts and it really pained me to do that in  particular because I knew I would be leaving huge sections of my life out that needed to be discussed fully. I also feel bad about it because I shed some of my family members in a very negative light, much to their dismay, and I have gotten flack for it by them, but in my defense, I did tell them that the next book was going to discuss more of family and less of war. It also was extremely hard to dissect my marriage that at the time I was writing the book was in steady decline. How was I supposed to write about falling in love with my husband when I knew he was somewhere else with another woman? But I found another reason as to why to tell that love story; my twin boys, who the book is dedicated to. I wanted them to know who their father was when I met him and even more so now that he has passed, so I wrote everything down as though we were still in love and tried to remember those memories instead.

AW: In the Sierra Nevada MFA program, you were able to work with writers who were not just talented at their craft but are also combat veterans. What did this mean for you in developing confidence as a writer? Do you think your MFA experience would have been different if it had not included other veteran-writers?

BK: Being in the SNC MFA wasn’t just about being surrounded by combat veteran writers, it was about being surrounded by talented writers. I found that I was more so inspired to tell my story from the non-veteran writers than I was the faculty that were veterans. Of course, it helped that I had other vets cheering me on in my journey as a writer, but writers like Patricia Smith reading “Siblings.” Gah! It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it now. Colum McCann. Rick Moody. Writers, truly amazing writers inspire and light a fire underneath your ass, and I think the director bringing those writers is what really helped me become the writer I am.

AW: I love hearing that. I had a similar feeling when I went into my MFA program, too–that I was finally joining a creative culture that I felt I’d been seeing from the outside for a long time. And we can all use a creative fire lit under our asses, I suspect. What projects are you working on next?

I have started writing my new book, nonfiction of course. It really does pick up where “War Flower” left off, and traces the roots of my childhood while raising my children, the ups and downs of my marriage to James, my struggle with PTSD, and the death of James which damn near almost broke me. To say that this second book is going to be a hard one to write is an understatement, but I think will be almost like an emotional enema, and will really be interesting for readers who are struggling with PTSD, or the loss of a veteran to suicide, or even being a parent struggling to raise your kids. What made “War Flower” so unique was that I was a woman with combat PTSD, but having PTSD while trying to raise kids is a whole other beast that I really didn’t tackle full on in “War Flower” so the next book is really going to explore transgenerational trauma and female veteran related issues that surround combat PTSD.

AW: Can’t wait to read it. Thanks so much for talking with me, an sharing your work with Wrath-Bearing Tree.

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a friend named Ted. Ted is a fellow veteran, and classmate of mine from the Air Force Academy who may be forgiven his obsession with Moby Dick. We were pushing our kids across the ice of Westchester Lagoon, a large pond here in Anchorage that the municipality grooms for ice skating, exhaling thoughts on books and writing into the winter air. Phil Klay’s Redeployment had recently been released to critical acclaim, and our talk turned to authenticity in war literature. There was something about this war—this forever war—that we agreed was allowing for a wider interpretation of war. A public affairs officer, and not an infantry type, had written a well-received story collection that felt like it might end up as thebook of our wars. It seemed to signal a paradigm shift.

Jon Chopan’s Veterans Crisis Hotline (2018, University of Massachusetts Press) reinforces the idea that war literature is no longer the sole dominion of those who’ve participated directly in combat. A winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2017 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the collection joins a growing canon of quality writing about war by authors who lack the first-hand combat experience traditionally associated with war literature.

As the title indicates, Veterans Crisis Hotline focuses on contextualizing war from the individual level. More specifically: how the Forever War affected those who voluntarily participated in it. This connective tissue links each story. With the exception of the first short story, which shares (roughly) the book’s title, each story that follows begins with a title page that includes a partially redacted name, location, tour dates, and call duration that frames the stories as having originated from a call to a veterans crisis hotline. It’s a somewhat effective artifice that allows Chopan to present narratives told, without exception, from a first-person point of view that establishes immediacy and narrative authenticity. I only say “somewhat” because the title story is the sole piece in the collection that relies on a fictional narrative built on interactions between a crisis hotline caller and operator. The crisis hotline itself does not appear in the remainder of the stories, which results tension between the collection’s physical narrative structures. I wasn’t looking for a collection built off transcribed fictional dialogue, but the greatest harmony between structure and narrative in the collection exists within the pages of the first story, titled “Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1.” It’s a haunting piece in which the narrator, a veteran named Byrne, works at a crisis hotline center, where he fields calls from not just veterans on the brink.

“[O]ld widowers. Some were lonely bachelors who were looking for dating advice. Others were fine, except they needed an audience to tell a war story to, someone who’d yet to hear it. Reliving it gave them a sort of pleasure, or maybe catharsis. One man who was in his nineties called me every week. Each time he called he asked for me by name, caught me  up on the news from his neighborhood, “current events” he called it. Mostly it was gossip about the young soccer mom next door, the cheating husband. He talked about them so much that I felt like they had become characters in my own life. He was a veteran of the Second World War, but he never talked to me about that.”

Byrne goes on to establish a friendship with an amputee named Eddie who shares a bus with him, and the relationship progresses to an intense level of intimacy that Byrne cannot replicate with his girlfriend, a nurse at the local VA hospital. In one scene, Byrne finds Eddie in his apartment, sick for days and burning with fever. Before Eddie can go to the hospital, he asks Byrne to help him take a bath.

“Later, they would diagnose him with pneumonia, He would recover, of course. He was young and strong and had a great desire to live. I’d learned that much in my time with him. But there, in his dimly lit bathroom, as I scrubbed him and rinsed him clean, as I put shampoo in his hair and gently poured water over his head, he wept and I said nothing knowing, finally, that this was the only comfort he would ever ask of me.”

It’s a gorgeous literary moment that illustrates the bond that can exist between men who’ve shared war, and a stirring rejection of the unique brand of toxic masculinity the military tends to breed. This isn’t to say Chopan shies away from the ugly side of veteran homecomings. There’s the vigilante justice executed in “Men of Principle,” the wanton self-destruction of “Battle Buddy,” and the veteran suicide of “On Leave.” But Jon Chopan goes to great length to ensure Veterans Crisis Hotlinepeels back stereotype in his quest to understand the complex nature of military service.

The book suffers from a couple of little inconsistencies that rang hollow: the mention of a recently closed paper mill in Anchorage for example, when I’ve been unable to find record of a paper mill at any time (I live in Anchorage). But these are mere chips in the facade, and have nothing to do with Jon Chopan’s ability as a civilian to effectively convey the post-9/11 veteran experience. No, the trouble with Veterans Crisis Hotline is the company it keeps. As a short story collection that relies on first-person narration, it belongs on a shelf next to Phil Klay’s Redeployment. Sitting next to a National Book Award Winner, well that’s just tough.

The most audacious of Chopan’s stories, however, does not feature a veteran come home, but the son of a soldier whose father goes missing for some time before being declared dead. Child narrators, even the teenage boy of the story “The Cumulative Effect,” are tricky. Writers must walk a fine line between over-privileging their narrator with sophisticated language that strains authenticity, and infantilization. Nothing about the story’s narrator rang hollow, however, and at all levels, the story is a beautiful heartbreaker.

I’ve long argued that it’s time to replace Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courageas an example of good war literature produced by a civilian. The last time I read through, I found it a hackneyed appropriation of veteran material manipulated to further an individual viewpoint. I firmly believe it doesn’t survive the modern era’s standards for writing outside one’s experience. And frankly, there’s no time like the present—in which a fraction of the American society fights on behalf the rest—for a non-veteran to step into the arena. Jon Chopan has achieved this feat with Veterans Crisis Hotline. With great care, he has written outside what he knows, and in doing so proven willing to grapple with societal norms and uncomfortable issues. Viewed this way, Veterans Crisis Hotline is a welcome addition to my shelves of war literature, neighbors be damned.

A handsome couple strolled arm in arm down Central Park West. The man, tall and athletic with a thick, well-brushed mane, wore a black, fur-trimmed cloak over an Armani smoking jacket. The lady, slim but curvy with lustrous blonde hair done in a complicated braid, wore white mink over a low-cut black Prada gown. Though bedecked in high-heels, the lady adeptly kept up their brisk pace past tourists, joggers, baby-strapped mothers, and other assorted humanity either living in or making their pilgrimage to the world capital of wealth and culture. Curious eavesdroppers would have been able to hear snippets of the couple’s conversation as they passed.

Did you see who Angelica left with last night?

You mean the French gentleman? What’s his background?

Apparently his family owns the Laurent-Perrier champagne house. Why else would she look at him? By the way, what’s on the playbill tonight?

Let’s see, there’s Handel, Ravel, Mussorgsky, and of course Beethoven.

Is that the best Alan could come up with? Which Beethoven are they doing?

The Fifth.

How uninspired! We can’t be staying for the entire show, surely? I’d like to change before Camilla’s soirée. Oh look, is that Dmitri and Sveva over there?

They continued across the piazza, stepping past a beggar at the base of the steps before going up and into the packed lobby of the Lincoln Center.

The beggar’s name was Daryl Jack. He started sleeping in his car two years ago; after it was compounded by the police he began sleeping outside. At first he stayed in North Harlem, then gradually worked his way down Central Park and the Upper West Side—much greener panhandling pastures. The last two months his main turf had been the prime territory around the Lincoln Center, which he worked along with his friend and ally, Mikey McAdams. The two men had met at the Saint Ignatius soup kitchen and hit it off right away. They found that they had been in the same infantry division and had both been to Iraq for the same deployment. They joked about the division Sergeant Major Fat-Ass who had called out Private McAdams more than once for uniform violations—dirty boots, crooked beret, badly shaven face. Private Jack had got to know that senior NCO much more intimately during his second Article 15 hearing when he had been accused of smoking marijuana on the night shift. No one had actually seen him smoking or found any weed, but he had the misfortune of already possessing a disciplinary record—drunk on duty and fighting with a white sergeant in his platoon. The case was sent up to the division commander who quickly recommended Private Jack for a Dishonorable Discharge from the U.S. Army. Three months later he found himself back at the Washington Heights housing projects he grew up in. For a while he didn’t think about work and drank away the little money he had left to his name. By the time he got around to looking for a job he found that nobody was interested in a high school dropout and former infantry grunt with a bad record.

Daryl Jack and Mikey McAdams took shifts pulling alms duty in front of the Center, while the other one set up camp across Broadway near the edge of the Park. Daryl had already developed his go-to gimmick—a big Louie Armstrong grin with bobble-headed nod. He supposed it made people feel safer and happier, which made them more generous on the whole. Somehow, Mikey, a former supply sergeant’s assistant, had recently scored costumes for both of them that brought in even greater returns. A jacket with tails fit for a butler and a tattered top hat for the tall, wiry Daryl; a threadbare tweed jacket and deerstalker for the short, stocky Mikey.

The first day after sporting the new (old) threads they raked in a combined $37.35, an all-time record. That night was an unforgettable bash for the “Baghdad Boys”, as they had taken to calling themselves. They each splurged on burgers and fries at an all-night joint; they chugged their way through a couple bottles of Olde English malt liquor; after midnight Mikey found a local pusher to score a few grams of herb. They parked themselves in some tree-cover a stone’s throw from Tavern on the Green and lit up a sizeable blunt. It was life itself they were celebrating—tonight they felt good, no matter what tomorrow would bring. Around 3 am, they located a prostitute near the pond and spent most of their last earnings on a two-for-one bargain trick. 

The next morning the bright sun was not kind to the two revelers who had camped safely through the night without being spotted by police. Parched mouths and pounding headaches limited their mobility until park security finally zeroed in and sent them packing. Daryl dragged himself vaguely westward, towards the Center. Incredulous passersby looked on when he stopped to lap up a stomach-full of water from a public fountain on the way out of the park. He found a good marble step on the shady side of a Deutsche Bank branch, where he spent the next twelve hours alternately sitting and dozing. He exchanged few smiles and even fewer words for the better part of the otherwise crisp autumn day, his energy still sapped from the previous night’s blow-out. Darkness fell and he peered into his upturned hat set out in front of him; near emptiness is what he saw. A few coins that totaled $3.51. He cursed to himself and then to some of the few walkers in the area, who exited the scene warily glancing over their shoulders. “Food or booze?” he thought to himself. “Let’s go see what Mikey’s got going on.”

Daryl remembered his friend telling him about a new rendezvous point, further up the west side. Apparently there were some new gangs trying to work the area and it was better to stay one step ahead of them. Daryl joked that those suckers would have their hands full if they scrapped with the Baghdad Boys, but Mikey thought avoidance was the best strategy. He had heard those other boys were playing for keeps. Daryl dragged his skinny body up block after block, keeping to the middle of the sidewalk, mostly looking down at his feet. Couples coming from the other direction had to suddenly split up and jump to the side as Daryl ominously and unrelentingly advanced. One man reacted too slowly and got shoulder-bumped, after which he berated Daryl in an angry but ultimately non-threatening manner.

Daryl turned left at 82nd Street and entered a shuttered construction site. As he negotiated a broken chain-link fence he heard the sound of glass and someone screaming inside the building. He continued without speeding up or slowing down through the doorway, where he saw Mikey holding a broken bottle surrounded by three dark figures. 

“What’s going on here?” Daryl asked Mikey. They all looked up at him, while simultaneously a bald man took the opportunity to stick a blade into Mikey’s blind side. Mikey howled.

Daryl watched his friend struggle to stay upright. Daryl felt rage take control of him. He grabbed a length of metal piping that was lying in the rubble around the entrance and ran towards the unknown trio. Two of them split up to handle his onslaught while the knife-man covered Mikey. Daryl swung the pipe at the nearer of the two men. The man tried to dodge but was nonetheless caught offguard by Daryl’s ferocity and sunk to the ground after taking a crunching blow to the shoulder. The second man came from behind trying to stick his own knife into Daryl, who swiftly brought the pipe down on an over-extended arm to a loud cracking sound. 

Meanwhile, Mikey was attempting to fend off the original attacker with his bottle but had proved too slow. He received another quick counter-stab to the upper back and dropped the bottle, after which the bald man immediately pounced with a final thrust to the chest. Daryl witnessed this last action just after dropping the second man to the ground. Mikey’s eyes widened and then rolled back as he buckled and hit the ground. The last man remained relatively calm as Daryl, in full berserker mode, closed in on him. The man narrowly avoided Daryl’s first swing and made a long gash down Daryl’s arm with his blade. Daryl’s second strike connected and knocked the man back. As he stumbled Daryl continued the assault with a wild overhead swing. The man violently lurched upwards with his knife and caught Daryl across the face just as Daryl brought his own weapon solidly down on the bald head of this unknown combatant. Daryl knelt beside his friend while the man twitched unconsciously nearby. The two others had fled the building at some point during the climax of the battle. Daryl reached out for Mikey’s hand, now lifeless on the cold ground.

Daryl awoke in the back of an ambulance, and then later in a hospital ward. After being patched up he was interviewed by a detective. He told the whole story, including the party the night before and his and Mikey’s shared service in Iraq. The detective didn’t say much as he jotted down notes, but the next day a social worker stopped by and offered to help Daryl get his life back together. She spoke of the range of opportunities there were to earn his keep honestly, like helping a construction clean-up crew, for example. Daryl told her to get lost; he wasn’t cleaning up for anybody. The social worker left a card in Daryl’s jacket pocket with her name and number. That night Daryl exited the building and walked back onto the street without anybody noticing or taking account of him. The nasty scar on his face didn’t make it easier to beg, but some people still took pity and gave.

By the night of the concert a week later, Daryl had been pondering his life for the better part of the day. He watched well-dressed people and happy families walking past. Where had he gone wrong? Why hadn’t he been born into money, or happiness? He had never known his father. His stepfather drank and often beat him, until he and Daryl both got too old for that game. Daryl had friends, but never the kind that a mother would have wanted for her son. They always seemed to get into trouble together, with Daryl typically catching the blame. Mikey was the first one he could remember who actually cared about Daryl as a person, who gave back as much as he took. Now he was dead, and Daryl didn’t even know why. He started from his trance by the sound of high-pitched laughter and looked up at a particularly beautiful couple that had just brushed past him. He imagined that the man and woman were mocking his ugliness and squalor as they floated up the steps into the opulent sanctuary above. He looked down at his upturned hat on the sidewalk—total emptiness. “Goddammit all to hell,” he said aloud to himself in a raspy voice. “I’m gonna jump in the river.” 

He struggled to his feet and shuffled around the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 65th Street towards the dark waters of the Hudson. At the edge of the sidewalk at the end of the block he glanced left and saw two men coming out of a door and jumping into a large white van parked on the curb. The engine started and the van lurched forward onto the road just a few inches from Daryl’s face. He didn’t notice this close call; he was looking intently at the still slightly cracked open door. There was no one else on the sidewalk. He turned back and crossed the threshold. There was no one inside the corridor in which he now found himself. He had entered a rear service entrance of the Lincoln Center, the mysterious palace outside which he had spent so many futile hours manning his post. He never connected the geography or even the purpose of the building itself to his own situation. He walked aimlessly down the corridor, like an escaped zoo animal on a temporary reprieve. He stopped short of a junction ahead and instead tried the handle to a side door, which was unlocked. He entered and found scattered pieces of orchestral and theatrical bric-a-brac: chairs, music stands, a set of kettle drums, unmarked wooden boxes, folding set backdrops, bundles of heavy curtains, a fake marble statue, and an old couch, beside which someone had left a half-empty box of chocolate chip cookies. Daryl made for the box with the quickness of someone who hadn’t eaten all day. Having devouring its contents, he was then content to lie back and take a moment’s rest. He had almost forgotten the comfort of reclining on a soft divan—he closed his eyes and entered a timeless, dreamless sleep.

DA-DA-DA-DUH. Daryl rolled off the couch and jumped to his feet after being awoken by a thunderous sound just above his head, the likes of which he had never before heard. His instinct told him that it couldn’t be human in origin. He squatted at the foot of the sofa, holding his quivering hands to his temples, hounded by incessant horn calls above and all around him. He rocked back and forth, more conscious than usual of his nearly permanent state of headache and hunger. “Is that you, God?” he said aloud looking up at the shaking ceiling. The cacophony continued unabated, seemingly oblivious to his question. Inchoate rage bubbled from his brain and down his spine, eventually taking control of his whole body. It was of a different species altogether from the emotions surrounding the recent murder of his friend. This rage was directed towards the world at large, to the heavens, to his fate, which had never cut him a break and now was pounding him over the head, literally, in mocking, pitiless tones. He gnashed his teeth and pulled at the unwashed curls of his hair and beard. A collage of wordless images and scenes passed through his racing mind, stoking his hatred: his mother, his stepfather, his sanctimonious half-brother, all the white cops who ever harassed him, shopkeepers who watched his every move even when he wasn’t shoplifting, the self-satisfied army recruiter who lied to Daryl and unconcernedly modified records to facilitate his enlistment, the black drill sergeant at basic training who always singled him out for extra duties, the other drill sergeants who laughingly went along with it, his racist squad leader, who in Iraq constantly uttered the phrase “sand nigger” in Daryl’s presence, and escaped punishment while Daryl got busted down and docked one month’s pay for fighting, the fat sergeant major who called Daryl a “worthless piece of shit” to his face during his Article 15 hearing, the baby-faced captain who barely looked at Daryl as he calmly signed chapter papers and said “That’s your problem, sport,” when Daryl asked what he was supposed to do outside the army, the rich bastards and their gold-digging women who never even threw him a dime, the constant hordes of tourists who didn’t know there was more to New York City than lower Manhattan, the gangs that roamed Harlem and further afield, the bald man, who could burn in hell.

Daryl collapsed and bent over double in front of the sofa, not exactly relaxed but at least mollified for the present. Lyric string arpeggios above sounded like chords of despair. The heat of his anger subsided as he realized, unconsciously at first, that the music was now softer and sweeter. He began to weep. Mysteriously, Daryl’s anger at his own fate transformed into a profound sorrow for the fate of all living things. He extended his own feeling of doom to everything else. He had wanted to kill himself tonight, to end the tragic joke of his life. He understood now, instinctively, that everyone else around him and everyone he had ever known would perish just like him, no matter their fortune or station in life. Somehow, though he remained in the same hunched position, a change was happening inside him, unbidden and inexplicable. The time of his tears and anger seemed ephemeral, and now he reentered the flow of time’s stream. Spontaneously, his fingers started tapping to the surrounding rhythm. He started swaying in time to a braying theme that sounded like the hunting horns of some dark deity. An elephantine passage of low strings moved almost imperceptibly slowly upwards, from darkness to light, like leaving the underworld for the solid earth.

Daryl leaped to his feet as a thunderbolt struck and charged him with its primordial energy rather than smiting him. A wall of sound louder than anything he had ever heard—a shrieking fanfare worthy of the gods. The mighty New York Philharmonic was more overpowering than the Chinook helicopters, the tank columns, or the 155mm howitzers that used to buzz, grind, and explode all around his plywood hut in Baghdad. He raised his arms and waved them vigorously as if he were conducting the unseen orchestra. He hummed along to the music as he perceived it, eventually howling as the melody carried him away faster and faster, a runaway train, building to a fire-breathing cadence that left him gasping for air at its triumphant conclusion.

A security guard entered the room after the finale and took a moment to make sense of the dark, wraithlike intruder with bloodshot eyes. Daryl, opening his mouth and speaking to another person for the first time that day, asked, “What was that music?” The guard, looking at him with either pity or indifference, said, “Beethoven.” “BAY-TOV-EN,” Daryl sounded out the vaguely familiar syllables to himself in a hoarse voice. He tried to think when he had heard this name before. After a moment he said, “I thought it was God.” The guard chuckled and said, “Plenty of folks around here probably think they’re one and the same.” He took his arm and gently led him down the corridor towards the exit. When they reached the door, the guard said in a conspiratorial voice, “Listen, I don’t usually do this—I’m supposed to wait for the police, but, to tell you the truth, I think it’d be better off if you just disappeared. Don’t try anything like this again though.” Daryl, looking down at the floor, reacted with neither surprise nor gratitude, but shuffled slowly out of the building towards the road and the river. He felt a small piece of paper deep in his jacket pocket, which he turned over slowly. Suddenly he raised his head, looked the guard in the eyes for the first time, and asked, “Can I use your phone, brother?”

Ghosts

The young Iraqi girl stared back at me, her face covered over in black; only her eyes shown out from under the cloth. For years the girl I saw in the marketplace haunted me. I used to wonder what she saw. We were almost the same height, and though I had armor and a weapon, she stood there across the street from me staring at me as though she couldn’t decide if I was a friend she’d once known long ago when she was child. We did not speak to one another, but I often wondered what I would have said to her, what she would have said to me. She stood beside her mother, who was waiting for water and aid from one of the soldiers who was handing out supplies from an LMTV truck bed. The girl’s hands were clasped onto one another, her gaze direct. Her abaya and hijab covered her figure and her hair, only leaving the eyes for me to see. They were restraints from her religion, but they did not seem to bother her. She had lived that way as long as she could remember. She watched her mother carry out the same routine in the morning before she ever left the house: this is how you wrap the hijab around the head to cover the hair, she would say, pin it here underneath the throat and wrap the rest up and over the head. As a girl, she practiced it every day. Now a young adult, the girl had a hijab that was perfect, wrapped tightly and neatly around her head, the black shielding her from me. Her eyes peered at mine, locked in an understanding that this was her home, her street, the marketplace where her father sold spices, and though I was only there to make sure she received water and medical aid, I felt as though I were an intruder. I smiled at her, and it was then that she looked at my rifle. Two days from now the marketplace will be a pile of trash, rubble, and bodies. She will be dead. Her mother will cry out for her, not knowing in the chaos where she is, and the next time I look at her in the eyes, there will be no life in them. But I did not know that now. Right now, she stared back at me, as if to acknowledge that we were both trapped, that at some point one or both of us will die, and that for a short while we must continue living, if only to come to the understanding that the world consists of people waiting to die.

The Only Stars I’ve Seen

The Paladin tanks of First Cavalry, Eight-Second Field Artillery, had been firing shell rounds for an hour, creating a low-lying fog around the base from the barrel smoke of their guns. Their constant firing echoed like thunder and the flash bangs from their turret barrels reflected off the smoke like lightning. The war-generated storm that had engulfed our base reflecting the mirage of a foreign battleground from history’s past. Atop the back wall of our base, our brigade colors flew true in the slight wind that had picked up. It had made the battle sounds of firing guns less persistent, as the artillery unit battled not only the wind but the incoming barrage of mortar rounds that were starting to land inside our concrete barrier–lined base.

It had been a few months since my near-death experience with the mortar round, but I still couldn’t sleep; the residual pain in my healing shin and the noise outside kept me awake. I’d climbed to the top of my tin-roofed hooch, and as darkness fell I sat there thinking about what every soldier far from any familiarity would think about—home. I thought back to Kyle and the last night I spent in his pickup, his hand trying to find a space on my leg—how he finally settled on my knee, firmly holding it with his sweaty palm. I remembered wishing that he had found a place for his hand closer than my knee. I thought back about what I could’ve said in the silence of that cab or what I could’ve done, but I knew only a good fuck and an “I love you” would have made him wait for me. I looked out beyond the concrete walls lined with razor-edged concertina wire and realized how stupid I’d been to leave home and come to this hellhole. All I wanted now was Kyle’s loaded “I love you’s” and the warmth of his suggestive hand on my knee.

The outgoing fire had ceased. The smoke from the barrels was too thick, making vision nearly impossible. From my perch, sitting in the rusted lawn chair I had acquired earlier from the smart-mouthed medic who lived behind me, I watched as the smoke slowly rose into the air. I’d been trying to fall asleep when the outgoing fire started, but I now found myself looking up at the night sky, waiting for the out- going guns to start up again. It was the only sound of war I looked forward to.

Whenever the cannon cockers of Eighty-Second Field Artillery began outgoing fire, it was tradition for Tina and me to watch the outgoing shells. The artillery unit had missions only when the sky was completely clear. Normally it was covered with smog, sandstorms, or clouds. Tina and I missed the clear skies of our homes in California—dark nights full of twinkling stars and crisp, cool night air that could suck the breath out of you if you didn’t wear enough layers. Of course it was dangerous to be outside because of the return fire, but we braved it. It was the closest we could get to seeing the night sky, a taste of home. I had gotten the bright idea one night to sit on top of the roof of our hooch while incoming mortar rounds were whistling into the perimeter of the base, but it only took one time for Tina and me to be sent scrambling from incoming mortar fire for her to say that she was never going up there again. But those nights were few in number. Most times I sat for hours by myself on the roof looking up at the stars. When Tina joined me, I’d sit down on the stoop with her, swapping funny stories or talking about our families, and sometimes we just sat without saying anything, just looking up at the clear night sky, listening to the incoming and outgoing fire.

Tonight Tina had been called into company headquarters for the first shift of radio duty, and so I was left alone to watch the night sky by myself. The military field chair I had acquired from outside of First Sergeant Hawk’s hooch stood beside me empty, as I sat in the white plastic chair I stole from a Charlie Company medic for mouthing off to me in the showers the night before. The smoke was beginning to lift, but I guess not fast enough for the Eight-Second’s gun bunnies because they began to shoot flares up into the night sky, staining it with red streaks of bright light. The flares’ light gave away my position, and Sergeant Lippert, who happened to be passing by, looked up and found me sitting on the roof.

“King,” he shouted up, “just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The sound of his hard voice shouting up to me made me jump. Soldiers were not allowed on their roofs because of safety issues, something Tina and I ignored at least once a week. We had managed thus far not to get caught.

“Hey,” I said, clearing my throat, trying to come up with a bullshit explanation that he knew was going to be a lie. “I just wanted to get a look at the action that’s going on by the back gate.”

He glared at me in disbelief. Normally soldiers didn’t intentionally put themselves in harm’s way, but that didn’t matter much to me anymore. He kept staring up at me. I knew he was contemplating whether or not my excuse for being on the roof warranted his attention. A couple of seconds had gone by before he looked like he’d come to the conclusion that I was up to no good.

He yelled at me and pointed to the ground, “Get the fuck down from there. It’s one in the morning. You don’t need to see anything but the back of your eyelids.”

I leaned forward in my seat and peered down at him. “Not to be a smart-ass or anything,” I said, as I gestured down at him, “but you’re not exactly slamming back zzz either.”

I was still sitting in my seat atop the roof when Sergeant Lippert stomped closer, with a heaviness to his stride like he was putting out a fire with each step. He didn’t looked pissed off, but his stiff and quick gate suggested he was none too thrilled at my remark. In a few seconds he was next to my front door and I was stuck on the roof, cornered. For a couple of seconds he disappeared and then reappeared again.

“Hey, King, how the hell did you get up there?”

I leaned out of my chair, cringing as if he was already within arm’s length of me with his hand stretched out trying to snatch me up. “You’re not going kick my ass or anything, are you?”

“No, now tell me how you got up there or I am going to kick your ass.”

For a split second I contemplated whether or not he was bluffing about kicking my ass, but looking down ten feet at him next to my front door, I realized that either way I was fucked. I sighed and said, “All you do is scale the side of the concrete bunker by sticking your feet in the metal rings on the sides. Then when you’re on top of the bunker, swing a leg up onto the roof.”

He started up, his combat boots slipping on the bunker wall. “It’s easy, once you get the hang of it,” I said, as I watched him struggle up the side. He looked like a dog trying to scale a chain-link fence to get to a cat. It took him three tries before he finally got to the bunker roof, and next thing I knew he was sitting next to me in First Sergeant Hawk’s chair.

“This chair looks familiar.”

“Really?” I said, looking away from Sergeant Lippert, who was inspecting the chair. “It’s Specialist Kennedy’s.”

Trying to shift Sergeant Lippert’s attention from the familiarity of the first sergeant’s lounge chair, I quickly changed the subject.

“So,” I said with a nonchalant smile, “what brings you up here?”

“I wanted to see if your bullshit excuse about being able to see the action was true. But from what I can see, you have a pretty good view of the back gate.”

“Yeah, well,” I paused. “That bit about the artillery wasn’t exactly true.”

We both looked at the back wall; the gun bunnies had reloaded the guns and were getting into position inside the turret. The fog from the guns had started to lift and the night sky was visible again—the stars breaking through the haze in patches.

“I thought so,” Sergeant Lippert said, as he shifted his weight in the chair to look at me. “So what the fuck are you really doing up here?”

“Don’t laugh, okay?”

Private, tell me what the fuck’s going on or I’m going drag you down from here,” he said, pointing to the ground, “and smoke the shit out of you.”

“Okay, okay.” I took a deep breath. I knew he wasn’t going to believe me, but telling him the truth was better than doing pushups until I couldn’t feel my arms. “Specialist Kennedy and I come up here when the artillery is going off because it’s the only time you can see the stars at night.” I pointed up to the sky. “That’s what we do up here.”

As I spoke, he looked up, then back at me, and then back at the sky as if to study if I was fucking with him or not. For a minute I watched him, his head tilted back, quietly looking up.

“You know,” he said, his voice dropping a little, “if you sit on the deck of my parents’ house back in Austin, Texas, you can see a whole sea of stars. So many stars, you can’t even begin to count them.” He leaned back in the chair, arching his neck so he could get a better view. “I used to love sitting out there on summer nights with my kids. I used to point out the constellations. The kids would point at other stars, trying to make them into different things.” He was smiling with his hands on his chest. “Jeanie, my youngest one, she loves horses. She’d swear up and down that Orion’s Belt was really a horse.” He laughed and glanced at me. “You couldn’t tell her anything,” he said, shaking his head, “stubborn, just like you.”

I looked over at him. He didn’t say anything for a minute but sat there quietly squinting up. I could tell he was thinking about the same thing Tina and I thought about when we came up on the roof to look at the stars—home. Though he was probably thinking about more memories of his wife and kids, I was thinking about my dad and where he lived now in Colorado. He always used to tell me about this lake, Turquoise Lake, where he would go camp out underneath the big Colorado sky. I wanted to be there now.

I turned and looked back up at the sky and said, “You know what’s great about the stars?”

“No, but I’m sure you’re going tell me,” he said, as a smirk cracked across his face.

“Constellations never move, only the earth does, so no matter where you are in the world, your loved ones are staring at the same sky as you are right now. It’s like looking up at a little piece of home.”

For a while, Sergeant Lippert sat there staring up at the sky. Then he looked at me and nodded before he got up from the rickety chair and started scaling back down to the ground. “You okay?” I asked, as I watched him move down the side of the bunker and then disappear out of sight.

Below me, the gravel shifted and rustled. I stuck my head out over the edge of the roof to make sure he’d made it down all right. After a moment he reappeared below, brushing off some dirt from his ACU top. He shouted up to me, “King, don’t fucking stay up there all night, you hear me?”

I smirked. “You got it, Sarge.”

I watched him walk down the aisle of hooches. He’d just disappeared around the last hooch on the corner when I heard Tina call to me. I chuckled at Tina’s skinny, gangly legs striding out of sync as she walked toward our hooch, flinging gravel behind her.

I called her name as she got closer to the door. She looked up. I smiled.

“No way in hell.”

“C’mon, I got you a chair.”

Slinging her M16 over her shoulder and scaling up the side of the bunker, she shouted, “We better not get in trouble for this!” I decided not to tell her about Sergeant Lippert or the fact that I had thrown her under the bus a little bit. As she made her way onto the roof of the bunker and then onto the roof of our hooch, I said, “You’ll be fine.”

“Where’d the chairs come from?”

Smiling coyly at her, I said, “You really want to know?”

With one eyebrow raised, Tina said, “Ah, something tells me no. I heard over the radio that the outgoing fire is going to start any minute now.”

“Did you happen to grab any munchies?”

She plopped down in First Sergeant Hawk’s chair, set her m16 next to her, opened both cargo pockets of her ACU pants, and pulled out two bags of Hot Cheetos. She handed me one of the bags.

“Thanks, battle.”

“Anytime,” Tina said, smiling.

Opening our bags of Cheetos, we leaned back in our chairs. We peered up at the clear night sky as we waited for the out- going fire to start up again, both content to sit and gaze at the stars all night. Again my mind wandered home. I missed the routine sounds of familiarity, the slamming of the front door, Grandpa yelling, “Don’t slam the door!” The low chuckle Nana used to make every time I purposely slammed it so I could hear Grandpa holler at me from wherever he was in the house. I missed Dad’s loud music, the crackled sound of the stereo blaring Grateful Dead that echoed in the driveway like an amphitheater. I missed how Dad burst in the door every night, yelling with a crescendo in his greeting, “Hello!” I thought about the last time I’d called home just to hear their voices. I’d only gotten the answering machine, the sound of Nana’s voice, “Hello, you’ve reached the Kings. We’re not home right now, but if you leave a name, number, and a brief message, we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you and have a beautiful day.”

I closed my eyes, trying to see the faces I knew so well. But the memory was blurred. I clenched my teeth in anger. I needed home right now.

“Do you think it’s too late to call the West Coast?”

Underneath her patrol cap, Tina was trying to figure out the time difference as though it were a calculus equation. Using a Cheeto and an invisible chalkboard, Tina leaned out of her chair, counting the hours with her Cheeto, trying to deduce the correct answer. Nodding her head in agreement at her calculations, she turned in her chair and said, “I think it’s only five in the afternoon in California.”

I lifted up my ACU sleeve and looked at my watch. It was one in the morning. Nana was always my first choice. Counting nine hours back from my time, I realized that it was only four in the afternoon California time.

“Tina, you suck at counting.”

“What?” she said, raising one hand in the air, a Cheeto caught in between her index finger and thumb.

“It’s four in the afternoon, not five.”

Throwing me a cocky look, Tina’s green eyes stared at me, daring me to challenge her again. “No, Brooke, it’s five.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, shaking my head. “You count back nine hours from our time. It’s one in the morning here, which means it’s four in the afternoon in Cali.”

With a furrowed brow, Tina threw a Cheeto at me. “Whatever.”

It bounced off my forearm and onto the tin roof. “Waster,” I said, leaning over and tossing it into my mouth.

I decided to give a phone call a shot, hoping to reach Nana. It was Thursday, which meant that she’d be home from her stint at Saint Therese’s, where she sat in the chapel every Thursday for an hour to pray. As I pulled out my phone—a red Motorola Razor, the only perk of being stationed so close to the Green Zone in Baghdad—I contemplated what to tell Nana. I couldn’t tell her that I was having a hard time being in Iraq and that I was seeing way more combat than I anticipated. You just didn’t say those things to Nana. She was a gentle and sensitive Old Italian grandma who got what she called “worrying stomachaches.” Ever since she’d had her bleeding ulcer two years back, I had tried not to worry her about my army stuff. She was having a hard enough time with the fact that I’d been deployed.

I dialed my home phone number, hoping that Nana would pick up. I let it ring twice but then closed the top of the cell phone and hung up. It felt wrong to call home, but I needed to hear her voice. Her gentle but frail voice always reassured me that everything, no matter how bad, was going to be okay. I opened the phone back up and dialed again. I sat waiting, looking up at the stars, thinking of my bedroom back home. For my seventh birthday I had begged my dad to buy me a packet of plastic stars that I could stick on my ceiling. Grandpa had said no, but Dad ignored him and bought them anyway. The night of my birthday my dad woke me up at midnight to give me my gift: the ceiling above my head covered with stars and even a glow-in-the-dark full moon. He had snuck up to my room and put them up while I was sleeping. Of course Grandpa was mad, but by the time I was in high school I had bought enough stars to cover the whole ceiling, so I had the constellations inside my bedroom. I looked up at the night sky and thought of my room with all the twinkling stars plastered to my blue ceiling as I sat there waiting for someone to pick up the phone at home, but it rang four times before going straight to the answering machine. Nana’s voice—a resonating crackled sound that echoed through the receiver I held to my ear. Tears welled in the corner of my eyes. From the other end I listened to the background noise of the greeting—the living room TV turned on, the sound of someone shuffling past in the kitchen, the distant sound of Molly, my Alaskan malamute, barking at the back door. As the greeting came to an end, Nana’s voice grew louder as she said to have a beautiful day. The usual cadence of silence passed before I was prompted by the answering machine beep to leave my message. In a shaky crackled voice I said, “Hi, Nana. I couldn’t sleep and just wanted to hear the sound of a familiar voice. I guess you’re still at the church, probably praying for me not to die here. I guess I’ll call tomorrow or something. I, ah . . .” I tried to rush the rest of my message before I totally lost it. “I miss you and love you. Talk to you later, bye.”

I slapped the phone shut and shoved it back into my pocket. I was a total wreck. I threw my hands over my face and bent forward, resting my head on my knees.

Looking up from her bag of chips, Tina asked, “You okay?” I turned my head toward Tina, wiped my tears onto my uniform, and said, “Ah, no. I think I successfully just left the worst message a granddaughter, who is at war, could’ve left on the family answering machine.”

Leaned back in the chair with her legs crossed, Tina canted her head toward me, raised her eyebrows, and nodded her head in agreement as she said, “Yeah, that was pretty bad.”

Chuckling, I wiped snot from the back of my hand onto my black pt shorts and said, “Oh gee, thanks, Tina.”

“Eat a Cheeto.” Tina handed me the one in her hand. “It’ll make you feel better.”

Shoving the Cheeto into my mouth, I let the hot flavor of the chip dissolve in my mouth, hoping that it would take away the longing for home that I felt, but it wasn’t making my home-sickness go away fast enough. I started shoving them in one after another until my mouth felt like I had just shoved ten habaneros inside of it, but I still didn’t feel any better. I didn’t feel anything but the need for the normality of home.

“Ease up on the Cheetos, Brooke.” Tina put a hand on my arm, preventing me from putting another Cheeto in my mouth. “You’re throwing those things back like some anorexic chick who hasn’t eaten in days.”

“Fuck you,” I said, spattering half-chewed debris from my full mouth.

Tina just shook her head at me, eased her hand off my arm, pulled another chip from her bag, turned to me, raised one of her Cheetos in the air, and said, “To home.”

I leaned over out of my chair, put my arm on her shoulder, raised a Cheeto, and with my mouth still stuffed full, I echoed her toast, “To home.”

A loud booming sound rippled through the air like a shock wave. The outgoing fire had begun again, but it didn’t bother me. I was thinking of my bedroom, of home.

“Ghosts” and “The Only Stars I’ve Seen” have been excerpted from War Flower: My Life After Iraq by Brooke King (Potomac Books 2019).

Here’s how it happens: you get a text. Or you see a cryptic post about the
importance of friendship and “reaching out” on Facebook. Or an email. Then, the
phone call comes.

“Hey man. Don’t know if you heard, but Jack Smith died.”

And you already know what that really means. Gun, drug overdose, poison, car
exhaust. One of the many ways to undo or interrupt a fragile system.

Last year I totaled up the number of people I knew, personally, who had
committed suicide—people I’d met and hung out with, something more than a quick
“hello.” The number was seven. I knew of three people, personally, who took
their lives when I was a boy or a young man; two boys killed themselves in my
orbit when I was in my teens, and a high school classmate and lacrosse teammate
took his life sometime after college, perhaps in my mid-twenties.

Since that time, at least four soldiers with whom I served or whom I knew,
personally, took their own lives.

Not surprisingly, the event that precipitated this introspection was the
suicide of a captain whom I’d covered while reporting on NATO
maneuvers in Romania for Foreign Policy.
He was the eighth person I knew, personally, to kill himself. When we’d met, he
was acting as the S3 of an armor battalion as a senior captain (something I’d
only ever seen done by higher-ranking officers), and he was highly respected by
peers, subordinates, and superiors. I heard that he had a wife and kids back
home, in the United States. He’d sat down on train tracks and waited.

But eight doesn’t tell the full story, because those were just the people to
whom I had a direct connection, who decided to send themselves West for reasons
only they know. One Sunday in March, after climbing into bed, I scanned
Facebook a final time (always a mistake) and saw people that I served with
discussing the suicide of someone with whom I’d served, a soldier I didn’t remember.
And that experience—the experience of seeing other veterans process
the untimely death of a friend or loved one that I’d met in passing, someone
with whom I’d stood in military formation, suicide by one degree of separation—is
something I’ve processed more times than I can remember. Fifteen? Twenty?
Thirty? It happens, I’d say, around once every two or three months. Making that
calculation conservatively, at once every three months, for the eight years
I’ve been out of the military, produces the number 32.

That doesn’t count the soldier who shot himself rather than return to
prison, or the soldier who got so blinding drunk out one night that when he
decided to drive home, he forgot to buckle his seatbelt, and ended himself in a
wreck of metal and glass. They’re two of the eight.

It does include the brother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan,
himself a veteran, who died of “soul sickness,” according to the obituary—and
many others whose families and communities would prefer not to characterize the
death as suicide, though it is. It does include a soldier who hung
himself when I was on active duty with the Army. They’re two of the estimated
32.

The most
recent statistics from the Department of Veterans Affairs says that the
problem of veteran suicide is bad and getting worse. A
story from The Military Times from September of 2018 headlined
“VA: Suicide rate for younger veterans increased by more than 10 percent” did a
good job of quantifying the problem:

In 2016, the most recent data available, the suicide rate for veterans
was 1.5 times greater than for Americans who never served in the military.
About 20 veterans a day across the country take their own lives, and veterans
accounted for 14 percent of all adult suicide deaths in the U.S. in 2016, even
though only 8 percent of the country’s population has served in the military.

Numerical terms, though, are abstract. You read “twenty a day” and think,
maybe, that can’t be right or it’s horrible, or what about the context or those
poor veterans or any of the other socially conscientious things a person
might think when confronted with an impersonal tragedy, and it’s still too far,
too distant.

In the coming months and years, as the remaining soldiers and sergeants and
officers I know transition out into their civilian lives, 32 will increase to
33, and then 34, and so on into the uncertain future. At some point—not too far
off from now—I’ll have lost more comrades to suicide than we lost to the
Taliban. The count will continue its irresistible climb.

Suicide is on my mind not only because of the actions of those around me,
but because it is something I have considered in the past.

It crosses my mind occasionally, the vigor of its allure weaker than before,
now more an echo of a masochistic urge that is dismissed as quickly as it
arises. But I used to think about it often. I became accustomed to thinking
about death. I fantasized about dying in battle (gloriously) or by accident (absurdly),
and that fantasy conquered and remains in a compartment of my heart. Each time my
heart contracts, pushing blood through my veins, that compartment whispers—“what
if this were all to stop?” Over time, the thought became habit.

It took a lot to break me of that habit. I had to learn not to covet some
brief control over the terms of my demise. PTSD therapy at the West Haven
Veterans Affairs helped, and finding my wife, and friendships, and work.

But then, many of those soldiers who ended their lives had wives or husbands,
too; they had friends, and children, and jobs. Their Facebook pages were
active. They shared their happy memories of comradeship in times of war—of
exhilaration, and love, and respect. They were not so different. Their hearts,
too, must have asked, “what if?”

That’s what makes it all so maddening. Sometimes a person’s suicide seems
rational—a response to hardship, or the accumulated result of smaller bad
choices and regrets. When one hears about a promising life gone to drugs and
debt, nobody thinks “how could that have happened” (and everyone’s grateful
when it doesn’t), and similarly, something about the experience of being in the
military lends itself to this type of sensible suicide. Then, sometimes, it
makes no sense at all, from a rational perspective, or from the emotional side.
There is simply no accounting for it.

And the lack of an explanation for why
this is happening means we don’t have a good sense of what to do to reduce or
resolve suicide. Perhaps we ought to better fund national institutions and
publicize hotlines, so those desperate people who find themselves at bottom due
to drugs, or alcohol, or gambling, or bad choices can, in spite of it all, find
respite—a bed to sleep in, a job to pay the bills. Currently, $8.38 billion
goes to VA Mental Health services and programs, while there is $186 million
dedicated to Veteran Suicide Prevention and Outreach programs; one can only
imagine how grim things would look were this number cut, though it’s difficult
to imagine things improving substantially were the number much larger. A
scandal that unfolded last year about money
unspent implies that greater efficiency could contribute to the mental
health of veterans. But on a certain level this isn’t about money, it’s about
despair and solitude, the lack of company. The rich and professionally successful,
too, commit suicide.

Meanwhile, if one views the government with skepticism, and thinks that a
person’s tax dollars ought to go to charities instead, we can prioritize the
expansion of regional and local charities to accomplish the same task. This runs
into the same problem as expanding the VA, which is to say, the problem of
throwing money at a problem human empathy is best equipped to handle.

On that note, on a human level, we can be more available to the veterans in
our lives—not responsively, not reactively, but assertively, checking in with
them, calling, writing occasionally to see how they are doing. But this is the
dearest solution of all: anyone who has wrestled with depression themselves or
in a friend or family member understands that there simply isn’t time enough to
think positively for another human who’s gripped by despair; our own lives are
consumed with the requirements of job, and filial piety, and the duties of the
father, and mother, and husband, and wife. Living our own lives well guards us
against dark impulses, but as every new parent knows, it can be utterly
exhausting to live two lives for even an hour, let alone every waking hour.

A too-obvious fix of not going into war so casually any more, such as was
the case with Iraq and Afghanistan and could be the case in Venezuala or North
Korea, is rarely discussed with any degree of seriousness, though it ought to
be.

Adopting all four of these measures will still not solve the problem of
veterans committing suicide. They will help, and because they will help, we
ought to do them, but veterans will continue taking their own lives. We can’t
save everyone.

This leads to a more troubling thought. If there are people who cannot be
rescued by individual action—who cannot be saved by even the most
technologically advanced and intrusive state—who are be saved neither by
religion, nor by secular charities—what then? We are left with a group of
honorable people who wanted to serve their country, often during times of war,
who subsequently commit themselves to self-slaughter. A group of people who
are, in one regard, the type of sons and daughters we’d like, and on the other
hand, shameful cautionary tales.

Ancient Rome and contemporary Japan viewed suicide as, potentially, an
honorable act. There have been other non-Christian societies whose mythology or
narratives contain room for people who no longer wanted to live; paths of last
resort, obviously, but dignified exits to the next world. If we have confidence
that the life we have created here on earth is more attractive to people than
death (and that, surely, ought to be the most primitive, basic idea animating a
developed society), surely there ought to be an acceptable place for those
folks who can no longer abide here.

Look, we’d all like to help, according to our ability and bandwidth. But the
fact is, when it comes to trauma, the damage to veterans is already done. Many
combat veterans or those victimized by bullies or sexual assault were lost
years ago, and the bill, as they say, is just late coming due. Some of those
veterans could probably be saved by aggressive professional and personal
intervention, but let’s be honest: that’s not going to happen.

Instead, it’s only a matter of time before the next suicide, which will add
itself to the others that came before. And we’ll all be left sitting in our
chairs with the terrible news ringing in our ears, wondering: what happened to Jack?
That young soldier, jumping down off the front hood, his dusty armor slapping after
a long patrol, or seated by a campfire, laughing, full with the power and
confidence of their youth? What happened in the intervening years, what caused
them to make that choice, in that moment? Could I ever do that? What if…?

The morning of day three, Kelly decided to go out on a jet ski. She’d been resistant at first for all the usual reasons. But the accumulated effect of watching other vacationers roar around on the water, the insanely beautiful tropical backdrop, and listening to Dan complain about her unwillingness to try new things finally broke her. It was for her own good, this trip down to paradise. That’s what everyone said, and what she told herself. Looking out onto the water, however, she’d felt nothing. As though the blast that had ripped open her leg had taken something besides blood.

Dan smiled when she made her wishes known and said, “told you, it’ll be fun.” Then they walked down to the jetty to catch the 11am trip. Kelly wore a one-piece under mesh shorts and a yellow t-shirt, Dan wore a bathing suit and a unit t-shirt from the 82^nd. The shirt, which Kelly had bought with some encouragement from her first sergeant, featured a grinning metal skull with wings that said, “Death from Above.”

She’d met Dan at crossfit, and she’d given him the shirt after they started dating. Dan had never served, but the shirt suited him. It brought up bad memories for her, but seeing it on her man made the shirt seem less menacing, more like an affectation.

When Dan had left her at the bar last night to chat with an older gentleman and his younger wife—but mostly the younger wife—Kelly had remembered the shirt, how it hung on his shoulders. To be so hard on the outside, so sculpted, made her feel like she couldn’t trust him. He was undependable inside, soft, but, she thought, that was the point. His violations the errors of a faithful dog kept inside too long, or of a baby, helpless to avoid filling its diapers with the effluvia after a day’s feasting. He had come back to her at the bar when another guy bought her a drink. She’d made sure not to return the new guy’s attention, and Dan’s ego (light as it was) hadn’t even been bruised.

At the beach, a resort employee wearing a blue shirt with “Chris” embroidered in white thread checked the names of guests against a list he had affixed to a clipboard. He was tall and well-built, and for some reason he reminded her of an Eastern European Staff Sergeant from the maintenance platoon. Dan introduced them, shaking Chris’s hand and grabbing his elbow while looking in his eyes. “Got room for two more?” he said.

“Sure,” said Chris. “Which house do you have?”

“We’re in the ‘Prince Eugene,’ up the hill,” said Dan.

Chris scanned the list he held on his clipboard, pausing halfway down the second page. “Dan Fuchs and Kelly Browski. Know how to swim?”

“Practically born with webbed feet,” said Dan, laughing.

Kelly pointed toward the lagoon’s middle. “How deep does it get?”

Chris scratched his head. “Not too bad—maybe twenty feet around the middle? Thirty?” He looked at Dan. “Thinking about diving? It’s much better further out, on the reef.” He saw Kelly’s leg, then looked away quickly. “Wouldn’t recommend going into the water if you have any cuts or scrapes… you know. Can attract the wrong kind of attention. Anyway, you’ll want to catch the dolphins, they should be around here somewhere.”

Dan shook his head, looking down at her with an expression. “Jet skis should be plenty for us today. Maybe I’ll head out to the reef tomorrow.” The “by myself” was implied.

They dragged Kelly’s jet ski into the water, then Dan grabbed his own and pulled while she pushed, wanting to help. Chris and the other guests were already in the water. Dan brought the engine to life with a roar and joined the larger group. Kelly mounted hers gingerly, settled into a comfortable position. She ran her hand down the scar on her right leg, tracing its fresh, raw lines. Without thinking, she itched it, and blood welled up.

“Shit,” she said, wiping the red on her thigh. She debated bailing on the event, then imagined what Dan would say. She fired up the jet ski and sped out after them.

The lagoon was huge. Three hundred feet out from the shore the bottom had already vanished in the blue. Kelly supposed if it was as deep as Chris said, she didn’t want to see the bottom, see the life swarming beneath the waves, looking for a big shadow, graceful serpentine undulation. The logical antipode to her mantra as a paratrooper with the 82^nd — “Death from Below.” Ahead of her, someone shouted—Chris was on a jet ski, pointing. A group of dorsal fins broke the surface of the water. They’d spotted the dolphin pod.

She drifted to a stop, admiring the graceful animals, their subtle rhythm. They seemed so carefree and happy. Of course, life outside civilization was more complicated than a video snapshot of photogenic mammals grinning, they were just animals. For them, life was a ruthless competition for food, sex, sleep, and safety. Maybe what looked like fun to her was a chaotic mess of anxiety and barely-contained violence. She’d heard something about infanticide and murder among dolphin pods, but Christ, at least they didn’t attack humans. Who cared what savage acts they committed against each other?

She moved to join the group, then shut down the engine. Ahead of her, Dan was talking with two college-age girls. They were pretty, which, with Kelly’s injury and the secondary effects it had had on the rest of her previously balanced system, meant they were prettier than her. He was sitting up straight on his jet ski, with his chest out, watching one of them talk—the more attractive of the two. She wondered whether he’d explained his military themed shirt—whether he’d told them he didn’t want to talk about it, or told them it belonged to his girlfriend. The attractive girl laughed and pointed at the dolphins. Dan was laughing, too.

Kelly sat still for a moment, gave herself space to feel what to do. If she went over now, she’d arrive clumsily, she’d be jealous. In pulling up to Dan, she’d intrude, or worry about intruding, in that way she had of being intrusive in overcrowded social situations. Things would require an explanation, which Dan would furnish, introducing her as his girlfriend. The girls would greet her perfunctorily, and then stare. She’d feel awkward about her body, her legs, forced by bullshit society and their expectations to feel bad about her greatest source of pride: her service. Dan would make the appropriate qualifications. Kelly realized that she didn’t want to ruin everyone’s good time. She looked out at the sandbar that made the lagoon possible, and headed there instead.

Kelly had grown up in Connecticut, on a typical Long Island Sound beach. During exceptionally low tides, a sandbar connected the beach to a nearby island. This semi-permanent bridge had a little trail of hardened sand at the very middle, a crust of safety above the mud below. Her dad had warned her to stick to the sandy part, and sink up to her ankle or worse. That if she were too heavy she’d break through, and the mud was bottomless. Clams lived in the mud—normal clams, unsafe to eat from decades of chemicals spilled into the water, and razor clams, native to Connecticut. The razor clams were so named due to their resemblance to a nineteenth century barber’s straight-edge. When Kelly was eight, she had walked out to the island during summer and broken through a patch of thin sand into the mud beneath. A razor clam had cut her and she’d bled for an hour. This was one of her most vivid memories from early childhood. Panicking as her parents reacted to the sight of the cut, the red mixed with dark, rotting brown.

Nobody noticed her absence. The dolphins jumped through the water, frolicking and spinning in the hot midday sun. Kelly decided to cruise with the jet ski before succumbing to the inevitable despair of social maneuvering. She revved the engine and headed out toward the sandbar. Forced herself to enjoy the sense of mechanical power, though she knew how many ways that sword cut, forget about it, just try get a sense of the lagoon’s boundaries. Kelly bounced on the waves, hesitantly at first, then with abandon. As she got closer to the sandbar she could see the bottom. It was like the shore, not deep at all. Actually pretty safe. And the sandbar was wide. Unlike the murky water of the Atlantic northeast, with its lurking threats.

Five minutes of this left her soaked with sea-spray, and although her wounds burned and tingled, the pain reminded her of childhood, and life, and her unlived future. She remembered the simple pleasure of tearing around dirt roads on a bicycle, wet from exertion and alone, blissfully independent. Kelly let the engine idle as she drifted up to the sandbar, and slumped forward on the handlebars, watching the sea beneath her. She remembered parts of a dream from last night, and wondered if the other guys in the truck would’ve liked this place. Portmanteau was always talking about the water—from Mobile, Alabama, with a slow, deliberate drawl—he and Rafe, bullshitting about what they’d do when they got out. Get buried, that’s what they did, that was the sum of their human potential, no more youth, no vacation. Barely worth the time it took to remember their names. And here she was, floating in warm, quiet luxury. Two feet of water, maybe less. She could feel the bottom of the craft scraping against the sand.

It was horrifying, the feeling. The lightest of touches on the sand, the machine was no longer floating but almost resting on the ground. Fuck that. Kelly gunned the engine and sped into deeper water. After twenty seconds her panic subsided, and she realized that she’d moved far from the rest of the group. They were 500 meters away, now, just a series of black dots, still following the dolphin pod. She hated the jet ski now, everything about the experience made her skin crawl. She turned her craft toward the group, no longer worried about the consequences of her arrival.

As she turned, the jet ski’s engine sputtered and died. Kelly drifted to a stop near the middle of the lagoon, facing the group. No chance of capsizing, not with this ingenious contraption. She checked the gas meter—still nearly full. She tried starting the engine again. Nothing.

“You’ve gotta be fucking with me,” Kelly muttered, like she was back on deployment. “Cheap goddamn resort piece of shit jet ski…” She beat her fists on the the plastic engine cover. Nothing. The group was so far she couldn’t hear them, which meant it was doubtful whether they’d hear her even if she yelled. She stood up awkwardly and waved her arms. No reaction.

Kelly sat down again and looked around. 500 meters from shore, she’d never make that swim because she’d never leave the jet ski. Exactly why she hated doing this type of shit. Her wound was oozing blood again, dropping her life into the water like a sacrifice to the old ones beneath the waves. Grateful for the one-piece, she took off her shirt and stood up again, waved it in a circle. Maybe a lifeguard would notice or something. After a couple minutes, a commotion among the jet ski group gave Kelly hope that they’d seen her. Three riders sped out from the main group, but cut to her left—heading further out, toward the sandbar. She sat down, quivering with anger. She couldn’t wait to tell those lazy irresponsible bastards a thing or two when they got over here. Oh yeah.

Except, she wouldn’t. It wasn’t really their fault, they were just college kids. Maybe she’d hunt down the mechanics and give them a good razzing. Nothing to do but sit at the moment, she’d try again in a minute or two. Movement out of the corner of her eyes caught her attention, and she looked over the side of the jet ski for the first time since it lost power. The sun was hitting the waves and the tiny objects suspended below, sending shapes and shadows into the depths. Here, the water was deeper, darker—this wasn’t 30 feet, it must be more like 50. She blinked. A deeper shadow among the others swam in the depths, slow, unconcerned. Or maybe it was just a trick of the light. She looked again—no way to be sure. Now it moved, now it didn’t. Should she look again, confirm her worst fears, see the hammerhead or the tiger shark or the bull shark or whatever they had down here in tropical fucking heaven? A goddamn pack of sharks, a hundred of them, the big ones, twenty-footers, ready to explode up from the deep, cresting through the surface, a storm of teeth and hunger, and take her legs, everything this time, right at the torso? Dan was still too far away. He’d left her alone, just like he had at the bar last night, just like fucking Portmanteau and the rest of them had when it counted, marching off to Valhalla and leaving her adrift.

Kelly made herself a part of the jet ski, hung on to it for dear life, melded into it, gasping for breath, squeezing. The jet ski was hot, the waves, warm. She forced herself to look down. Nothing. Just the way sun hit the water at that depth. Why keep living this way, goddamnit. Why pretend that this was any better than just fucking doing it. She looked again. No shark. Come on. Beneath the unhealed wounds on her leg, wounds that would never heal, fully, a deeper hurt stung now, aching, weeping.

Carefully, deliberately, she let go of the small watercraft, and slipped in. At 500 meters it would take her fifteen minutes to swim ashore, and someone would notice way before then. Her legs throbbed like mad as she began to kick toward the beach, and she imagined the tendrils of blood flowing out behind her, searching for whatever destiny awaited.

It’s story time at the base library here at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, San Diego, home to the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (3rd MAW). A girl in a pink dress and sequined sneakers toddles after her mother into the children’s room. They are greeted by the singsong voice of the librarian, who welcomes them into the circle of other children and their parents.

The base library is spic and span. The architecture is ’70s style, with a flat roof and concrete walls. On the display shelves, new hardcovers shine in protective plastic sheathes. The walls of the library are decorated with paintings of Marines: Marines bowing their heads against a sandstorm in Iraq; Marines in an Afghan village, conversing with elders; an Afghani man fingering prayer beads.

Miramar’s Outreach Officer, Second Lieutenant Fredrick D. Walker, leads me into a conference room next to the children’s reading room. Lieutenant Walker is courteous in a way that seems old-fashioned. In one day on base, I will be called “ma’am” more than I ever have in my entire life.

Second Lieutenant Walker has arranged for me to meet with First Lieutenant David Guerin, a pilot with the Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron (HMH) 465, also known as Warhorse. Lt. Guerin flies the CH-53E, the largest and most powerful helicopter in the world. He was a colleague and good friend of twenty-seven-year-old Captain Samuel Durand Phillips, who was killed along with the entire crew when their helicopter went down in a training exercise in the desert north of Miramar on April 3. Also killed in the crash were Captain Samuel A. Schultz, 28, of Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania; Gunnery Sergeant Derik R. Holley, 33, of Dayton, Ohio; and Lance Corporal Taylor Conrad, 24, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A Naval investigation is underway. No one will speak on the specifics of the crash.

Lieutenant Guerin could be out of central casting with his high and tight, his standard green utilities (“cammies”), his dog tags snug in the laces of this boot. He looks to be in his mid-to-late twenties, not much older than my own son. It is a jarring realization: the majority of the Marines at Miramar are men (and a handful of women) in their twenties. A whole base of young people, whose daily training involves risks that I have never once faced in my fifty years.

Lieutenant Guerin does not ask why I’m here. All he knows is that I want to write a story about Captain Samuel Durand Phillips, a man I’ve never met, who grew up in the same small town in Oregon as me and graduated from the same high school my three children attended.

“I really miss Sam a lot,” Lieutenant Guerin says. “He was one of the most gentle people you could ever know.” A civilian employee tiptoes into the room to retrieve boxes. Before she closes the door behind her, I hear the children’s librarian singing in the adjacent room. Lt. Guerin grasps the black bracelet on his wrist. It is a remembrance bracelet engraved with Captain Phillips’ name and those of the three other Marines who were killed in the crash.

Lieutenant Guerin was not scheduled to fly the day Captain Phillips and his crew were killed. Instead, Guerin was back on base; he took the call that reported the CH-53E helicopter had gone down. It was his job to call in fire and rescue teams. His eyes cut away from me. He shakes his head and swallows. “I’d been to that area,” Guerin says. “That area” is the desert near the Naval Air Facility near El Centro, California, where many military training exercises take place—the “austere” conditions mimic the challenging “improvised” landings Marines may be forced to make in combat zones.

I ask Guerin if he hesitated to fly after the crash. He pauses and then says, “No.” I ask if his friend’s death has changed him. “Yes,” he replies, after a pause. “It created a desire in me to be better at my job…it added fuel to the fire.” Guerin tells me Phillips was “a good pilot…smooth on the controls.” He was a relentlessly hard worker, regularly staying late to plan flights,arriving on base early to review flight plans and double-checking every detail. He was also incredibly smart, a quick study of new syllabuses for pilot qualifications. Guerin says Phillips would have made a great instructor because he was “passionate about teaching” and “loved teaching Marines.”

In spite of what I’ve heard about the exhaustive preparations required before every flight, no matter how routine, I am curious whether Lieutenant Guerin will concede to some failure, human or mechanical. “Do you do anything differently now before going up in the air?” I ask him.

“Yes.” He pauses again. “I make sure I leave my family the right way.” He says he can’t discipline his son before he walks out the door. Every time he says goodbye, Guerin tells his family, “I love you and I’ll be home soon.”

He looks away again. “You can’t take for granted the life that you have…you have to have your ducks in order in case something happens to you.”

Like most Marine pilots, Captain Phillips attended Officer Candidate School after college. He graduated from the University of Idaho and commissioned with the Corps. After OCS and flight school, Captain Phillips chose to specialize in the CH-53E and pursued additional training specific to the aircraft. On Miramar’s base are F/A-18 fighter jets, C-130s, enormous carriers which trundle as if in slow motion through the sky; MV-22 Ospreys—a hybridized tilt-rotor aircraft with the versatility of a plane’s fixed wings and the flexibility of a helicopter, able to take off and land on a dime—and, last but not least, the CH-53E. The Super Stallion of the sky.

The hangars housing these aircraft line the southern border of Miramar. The base is much like one sees in movies: a little city unto itself, although not nearly as big as nearby Pendleton, home to 70,000 military and civilian personnel. Military Police guard the entrances to Miramar’s base, and there is a steady stream of cars coming and going. Many are civilians employed by the Department of Defense. There is a commissary for former and active military personnel and their families, retail stores known as the PX or post-exchange; medical clinics; online learning centers for Marines working toward a degree; playgrounds, a sports bar, gyms; Dunkin’ Donuts, a Taco Bell, and a Starbucks under construction. Unlike Pendleton, most Marines of the 3rd MAW and their families live off-base, but there is a small complex of barracks, which, from the outside, resemble college dorms.

Marines in varied uniforms jog on sidewalks outside the flight line, which is wrapped in concertina wire. Today, F/A-18s are parked on the flight line. President Trump stood in front of these fighter jets back in March of 2018 and addressed the troops of Miramar, promising to replace the aging fleet of Super Stallions and introduce new“weaponry that we’ve never had before or seen before.”

Outside the officer’s quarters, a flag with three stars alerts everyone that a three-star general is on base. A Marine’s rank is fundamental to every exchange. Officers are addressed by the enlisted as “sir” or “ma’am” and typically saluted. As Marines approach us, my escort, Second Lieutenant Walker, checks uniforms to identify rank and look for the “shine” of the enlisted service personnel’s stripes.

“Rah, Lance Corporal,” he says when an enlisted Marine passes by. To the more senior Executive Officer of 465, he says, “Ma’am.”

We pass through security check points and enter the building of the HMH-465. The men and one woman, the executive officer, wear green flight suits with the symbol of their squadron, Warhorse, on a badge over their right breasts. When we head out to the hangar, I am instructed not to report how many CH-53Es are associated with the 465 squadron—it’s a matter of operational security—but suffice it to say, there are more than a few.

I had watched videos of the CH-53E on YouTube, but it isn’t until I’m standing next to the Super Stallion that I realize how truly massive it is. It would be more appropriate to call it “The Beast.” It’s hard to imagine how it gets off the ground, let alone lug 32,000 pounds of cargo, fifty-five Marines, artillery, and tanks. The aircraft is one hundred feet long and weighs more than 33,000 pounds on its own. It is designed for combat assault support, which means weapons can be affixed to the rear, but its main purpose is to bring in supplies, artillery, and troops, and to get Marines out. The 3rd MAW did all of these things in 2002, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, in their support of the 1st Marine Division. Crewmembers say the ’53 is “all about the guys on the ground.”

Typically, this helicopter has a crew of four, including two pilots—one commander, one co-pilot—and two additional Marines to scout the ground during flight. The Super Stallion is so large that in spite of its sophisticated instrumentation, Marines must be positioned along the side and rear of the cabin to assist the pilots in eyeballing the terrain from open windows. The enormity and heft of the CH-53E presents a whole host of challenges when it comes to flying the aircraft, to say nothing of what it takes to land one.Every crewmember has to rely 100% on a high level of training. When I asked Lieutenant Guerin why he chose to fly this particular aircraft, he described a “crew mentality”: “you have to trust the people in the back, and the guys in the back have to trust the guys up front.” This dependence on one’s fellow Marines is not so different from other Corps jobs, for which only the most rigorous and grueling training prepares a Marine for war, instilling faith that every Marine has each other’s back. Preparing the ’53 for battle requires rehearsing different flight patterns and training for a variety of landing scenarios. The training is inherently dangerous, and yet, as Guerin notes, it “builds safety” by “mitigating risk in the future.” “If we didn’t train to do this stuff all the time, we wouldn’t be ready.”

The “Ready Room” is where I meet First Lieutenant Jason Burns, who was the schedule writer with Captain Phillips on his last flight. Schedule writers take the flight plan, designed in weekly meetings, and then review every single detail regarding the assigned crew and the aircraft itself. It is an extensive and exhaustive process, from making sure that each person onboard has the proper qualifications for that particular flight’s training exercise, to confirming that every safety feature has been reviewed at least twice. A pilot or crew member who is congested or was up all night with a newborn could be sent home at the last minute, the flight cancelled. Every single precaution is taken, every risk assessed, and yet, as Guerin quotes the Navy, “If safety was the number one priority, no plane would ever leave the ground.” Risk is part of the job, and while it is assiduously assessed and minimized, it is always, always present.

Lieutenant Burns says Phillips was a solid pilot who was fastidious about details. He was tough on himself and would beat himself up if every single aspect of a flight didn’t go perfectly according to plan. And yet, off duty, Phillips was a “light-hearted and easy-going” guy. “Everyone loved him.”

Burns was teaching Phillips to surf, and while they didn’t get much time off, Phillips was really taking to the sport. Mostly, Burns says, they just played around in the white water while Phillips got the hang of standing up on the board. Burns fingers his own black remembrance bracelet. “I had to remind him not to look back at me when he got up on his board,” Burns says, smiling. Phillips was always turning around for approval, always with a huge grin on his face.

Leaving base elicits a strange feeling. Within 1,000 meters, I am back in the civilian world, but it feels like another country. The vegetation is, of course, the same; rows of palm trees bend in the dim light of low cloud cover. Second Lieutenant Walker takes me to a Denny’s where I’ll wait for my Uber. Walker hurries around his truck to open the door for me and thanks me for my time. A few minutes later, the Uber driver pulls up. Like the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport, this driver has never set foot on base, although he has driven along the perimeter countless times over the years. Like other neighbors of Miramar’s 3rd MAW, he may look up when he hears the F/A-18’s roar or the Super Stallion lumbering off to the desert to practice landings on “unimproved” land like where Captain Phillips and his crew crashed. Civilians live side by side with the servicemen and women of the base, and yet, there is little, if any, intersection between these worlds.

Back in downtown San Diego, the news is all about the NFL’s decision to fine players who kneel during the National Anthem. Sitting down for dinner in the Gaslamp district, I look through my notes of my day on base. Behind me, a noisy table clinks glasses, and I turn around to see them throw back shots. It is happy hour, and I assume that they are colleagues glad to escape the office. They seem to be celebrating. One woman stands and dumps a handful of plastic bracelets in the middle of the table. They are rainbow colored. The other people wiggle their hands through the bracelets, while the gift giver explains why she chose them. “I got one for my son, too.” she says, explaining that there is a blessing that goes along with them: “You are precious. You are loved. You are blessed.” The guy to her left says, “Aw!” before planting a kiss on her cheek. I look out the window in time to see a woman on a scooter crossing the intersection. A giant tote bag printed with the American flag hangs from her wrist.

I am aware of my own hand circling my opposite wrist. Part of me wishes I, too, had a memorial bracelet like those worn by Lieutenant Guerin and Lieutenant Burns, but I’ve never served in the military. No one in my immediate family has served. And I never met Captain Phillips, although I’d like to think that at some point I crossed paths with him in our small town. I have friends who knew and grieve him; coaches, parents, and their grown children, who loved him and remember him as a standout athlete, the ideal teammate, and just the nicest guy. When I learned of Captain Phillip’s death, I tried unsuccessfully to get the flags in our town lowered to half-staff in his honor. I thought there should be some physical reminder of him and who he was, how he chose to live his life, how he was willing to die in service of this country. It’s why I’d like a bracelet, why I’d like everyone in our small town to wear a bracelet with Phillips’ name on it, to remember what we owe him and his crew, what we owe the Marines who at this very minute are going up in the Super Stallion.

When I go onto the 3rd MAW’s Twitter page, I see the photos of troops returning from a six-month deployment in Japan. On the tarmac, Marines in green flight suits squat with arms outstretched as their children race into them. There is a photo of two children holding a poster with small red-and-blue handprints that reads, “These are the hands that prayed for your safe return.”

And for those who do not return safely from deployment, from a war zone or a training exercise in the desert, what are, as Woodrow Wilson once asked in a cemetery in Suresnes, France, “the unspoken mandates of our dead”? What is our part to play, our due to the men and women who risk everything, who put service to their country ahead of their own families, every day? If we choose not to serve, what must we, in turn, do? Insist on improved healthcare and healthcare access for veterans and their families? Protest sending troops to wars we’ll never win? Support organizations that work with combat veterans and their families who are coping with post-traumatic stress? Is any of this enough?

Boarding the plane home, I wait behind a man in sand-colored fatigues. His backpack looks heavy. It is covered in badges naming Helmand Province; one sports the bony jeer of a skull. When the soldier turns a little in my direction, I say, “Thank you for your service.” And without missing a beat he replies, “Thank you for your support.”

While in flight, I think about the mother of the little girl in sequined sneakers back in the library on base. She must have been a wife of a Marine. I wish I had thanked her, although I don’t know what words I might have chosen to acknowledge her sacrifices, her willingness to endure the uncertainty and worry every time her husband goes up in the air. I wonder if she knows the smell of the 53’s cockpit, if she’s seen the rosy glow of hydraulic fluid on the cabin floor, the worn leather on the pilot seats, the stretchers folded up against the side of the cabin. I wonder what she feels every time her husband walks out the door, every time he hugs them goodbye.

Back home, the news continues to roil with debate over the NFL’s policy on players kneeling during the anthem. Twitter is full of thoughtful comments, some from veterans about how they fought to defend our freedom of expression and support athletes’ choices to take a knee to protest police brutality. And yet, I am left wondering if the gestures of professional athletes are insufficient. While their protests may be an important expression of their constitutional rights, they do not presage real or significant action. There are other, more outraged voices on Twitter, but even the most compelling and well-articulated arguments are merely performative, and we scroll ever on.

There is a black and white photo of Captain Phillips in the obituary that ran in our local paper. He looks different to me now. I still don’t know the color of his eyes. Lieutenant Burns told me Phillips didn’t like the cold of the Pacific and wore a wet suit when he surfed. I try to picture him, sleek in his black suit, smiling back at his buddy, the sun reflected in his eyes. I picture him now just above the cloud cover, over the terrain where the Super Stallion lumbers by, rehearsing a mission to help. I think of the bracelets, the Marines’ in metal and the civilians’ in plastic. I wonder if words are ever enough to memorialize the sacrifices of those who step up to serve.

When I was a child, and my father had just begun to be noticeably strange, my mother took me to the zoo. It was July, and hot. The lions were thin, their manes as brittle as straw. Monkeys tumbled in a canopy of ropes, pausing to pick at each other’s hair. They ignored us. The parakeets seemed lifeless, tucked into layered bark. After hours of this, our wrapped sandwiches eaten, our feet sore, my mother suggested that we leave.

“Please, can we stay?” I scuffed my thick shoes on the walkway to slow her down.

Her dress seemed too loose in the cooling wind. “The crickets are tuning up,” she said. Strands of hair dropped on her cheeks.

“Just one more thing, then,” I begged. I was thinking of the meerkats in their artificial desert, a painted sky behind them. I wanted to see them one more time. A sentry always stood at attention on its hind legs, making sure no harm came to the rest.

“The buffalo,” my mother said, touching her rounded stomach.

As we crossed a little bridge over an expanse of land, my mother gave me a nickel, and I slipped it into a metal stand that resembled a parking meter. A pair of enormous binoculars perched on the stand, the lenses opaque without the click of the coin and the tick of the meter. I strained up and felt the crick-crack of my corrective shoes, the ones my parents made me wear so that I wouldn’t walk pigeon-toed.

The lenses blurred until I moved my eyes into just the right place. Then the view through the slits became clear. There were the mighty buffalo, grazing in what appeared to be deadened grasses – what at the time I thought of as prairie, not understanding that the prairie didn’t exist anymore.

I squinted one eye, then the other, watching the buffaloes’ fluffy bent heads in the stalks. Despite the binoculars, the buffalo were distant, as unrealistic as moon craters in a telescope. The sun warming my back seemed a closer friend.

“See the buffalo?” my mother whispered. “They don’t belong here.”

I pulled away from the binoculars and blinked. My mother wiped at the sweat beneath her nose then gripped the railing. I heard the tick-tick and put my eyes back.

But I didn’t get a good look before the minute was spent and my mother held out a white-gloved hand, her forefinger smeared a light pink where it had run against her upper lip.

I twitched my face to indicate that I might cry, turning my left foot inward.

“No more nickels,” she said, glancing at my toes. “No more time.”

manhunt

will I always be poor

always a slowing of small

pittings where roots were

milkweed

meadowsweet

rue or

pink lilies on a backdrop dark, blooming

rather against than next to

themselves vibrating

against the black soil deep as a hole

in the ground and quick to wither, water

swell into a dawn dark, then day

the horizon a series of holes and oaks

the field dressed as deer

as viper

as garden

as the sun red as fish mouths in Iowa

in summer while here I keep my eye to the scope

to the fourth county over

to the fielded to the fallow now

I can scale up a wall now

I am pressing my hair against the sap of a tree I have learned now

I will not be free will I always be with Iowa where I was

exposed grass flat land grazed like a comb through my wet hair

my six years

body folded

up in the towel

of okoboji

where I learned

to fear my god

given ability

to see snakes

dark ropes

in the dark

soil the darkness from

which the honey-gold

the sweet

corn springs tall

springs bright springs

sweet

water

no, I am not

a farmer’s daughter

though my grandmother

was my grandmother

gold and black teeth she

was the child of a farmer

she ate nothing but corn she

thinks not of herself

no I am not my father’s

daughter spring-

loaded the metal somehow

always cold is this

supposed to make me

feel safe colt

number to give me peace the kind

I could

rest in if I

wanted to I wanted

to my father

points a smith

and wesson a remington

at a shape

at a man

at an outline

of a boyfriend

of a starling, of a squirrel

the only way to feel safe is to sleep

with death between your knees between your teeth

with death under

the bed as if in the yellow light of farmhouses

you’d win you’d know

what to do you’d hold

death against their heads you’d keep

death hidden in a closet in a chest

you’d keep it near you’d keep us all

alive

I learned no poisonous snakes live in Iowa no lions no sharks just men

made of leather lubricated laughter killdeer

nested in the rocks at the water

plant was I not always

looking

to be approached by a colt by

a steer, not looking to see a streak of orange move across my line

of vision not looking

to meet god in a grove,

in a field in a cave by a river

Io a white bull with clover

in my fist as defense fed

held out circled in looking out

at a pocked horizon at a land I loved only because it was wounded from whose hand I fed on meat so red it made me cramp my body seized like a fist

I swum out to the middle of the lake I played

a game I spent

my money in another place I placed

a bet my body made

of golden tickets of air heavy as water isn’t there

a place where a body is supposed to end isn’t there

someone I’m supposed to find

a soft wavering, a shimmering

a minnow, a mouth

a how and a why, a wren,

a winnowing, a face,

I could wipe, hair I could brush

I could feed it food and the food would go away

alive even when I wasn’t looking

AUTOMATA

My new job is to exchange one thing for another,
My new job is to install veils between the wealthier members
of the audience and my compatriots. My new job is to balance
a camel on the head of a pin, my new job is to make it dance,
and isn’t it the dance that connects me to the world? Aren’t I lucky
to be here at all, squashing cockroaches that rain down from the ceiling,
aren’t I lucky to support my whole family with my brain in it’s numb
skull? My new job affords me and my family a vacation at the lake two hours
north of the lake on which we live. My new job is to fill my mouth with clear
goo and call it a hot meal. My new job is working toothpaste to the end of the tube
and not leave any toothpaste behind. My new job is to become a screen, bright white,
for everyone to yell at, my job is to be a white sheet to throw tomatoes at. My new job
involves a lot of interface with the public. My new job is to make sure my hatred
doesn’t leak out of the holes in my face. My new job is better than no job.
My new job is dabbing drool off of a wall of stuffed animals. My new job is cleaning
up blood and cum and spit and shit and snot. When my new job is over (for today),
my compatriots and I go out for wine we spill
wine all over each other, we spill blood. We go home and pat
our stomachs which for today are full. We go home but do not
squeeze our hands goodbye. I am in a cab and I hate myself for it,
I pull my smock over my face so that I cannot see the numbers tick and glow,
my new job is beating its fists against my brain. I think I’m growing a new worry
stone in my body, I think my body is full of piss but I do not want to move.
I might piss in the street before I get home, get in bed
alone. How much does this cost, how much?

The following is an excerpt from Jennifer Orth-Veillon’s work-in-progress, The Storage Room. Here, she intersperses real letters from her grandfather (italicized), an American soldier who fought at the Battle of the Bulge, with her own imagined accounts of the stories behind the letters.

The Battle of the Bulge, which ended 74 years ago on January 25, 1945, was the largest and deadliest battle fought by Americans in WWII and the second-deadliest battle in American history.

All photos provided by the author. – WBT Editors

January 12, 1945
Somewhere in Belgium

My Darling,                                                 

You are probably sore at me as you read this. I’m sorry. I write as often as I can, and even then, Uncle Sam doesn’t handle the mail service over here like he does at home. I admit I laughed at the way you gave me hell in one of your letters. In fact, I read the letter to the boys.

To bring you up to date: we are fighting with the 7th Corps in the north who are using the pincer maneuver. “Pincer” is just like it sounds—a military tactic that actually “pinches,” meaning we flank the enemy on both sides and press in. We pinch them. It works beautifully. We are planning to trap some Jerries in the drive.

I hate missing holidays with you. Did I ever tell you about our Thanksgiving Day in Geronsweiler, Germany? It was Roosevelt’s best T-day yet. Jerry had an artillery observer in the town, and we hit him hard. Still, we took a pounding for the several days we were there. We were stationed in a central building that the Jerries bombed so regularly we timed our trips to the john according to their schedule.

Often, I daydream about you. Sometimes it’s so real that I can almost feel you in my arms. Dreaming of you is one of two things I do other than work. The other is dreaming about good food. Incidentally, the Christmas cookies and peanuts arrived in good shape.

The November wave of muddy battles around the Siegfried Line that carried Brillhart and the Railsplitters, the 84^th Infantry, east in December 1944 turned to ice at the Belgian border. They had to blink to keep their eyeballs from freezing, but the cold muted the smell of rotting. A few Christmas lights hung in some little town squares, softening the browns and greys tracks from tanks that stained the new-fallen snow. Frozen mud and dirty snow, brown and brown-grey stains dominated the colors of the Bulge landscape, blurring the contours of quaint villages with pointy church spirals and red clay roofs so they almost looked intact after the intense bombing.

Unfrozen mud could swallow bodies and fill holes, but against the backdrop of snow that spanned the flat fields and streaked the Ardennes, nobody could completely disappear. The cold preserved the dead in seconds, the look of horror or peace seemed almost chiseled on their faces by the precise hands of ice. The bodies reminded Brillhart of sculptures he saw in the Paris Tuileries Gardens and he caught himself studying corpses as the snow dusted their bloodied clothes. Wounds frozen in time. The snow would never stop falling, blanketing the bodies, until spring turned the statues into fertilizer, humus for revitalizing the battle-ravaged soil.

Brillhart and his men shuffle-kicked and stomped their way through the Ardennes forest moonlit snow towards a Belgian farmhouse in the distance. Translucent smoke poured from its great stone chimney. The more the soldiers pounded the ground, the less likely that Brillhart, the battalion surgeon, would have to cut frostbite away from their feet, with amputation the eventual outcome. The thermometer registered thirteen below Celsius. They had to find a warm place for the night or freeze to death by morning.

I am sorry you cried at Christmas. I felt a little low myself. I can imagine the menu and it must have been wonderful. You should see me – I look like a coal miner, judging from the slack in my pants. But don’t worry. It won’t take long to get my figure back once I start eating your cooking.

Snow! When I was a kid, I always loved the snow. It’s nearly a foot thick in the fields here. There’s less in the forests, which are beautiful but show battle scars. Belgium is a beautiful country. The Belgian people are simple and homegrown. They live quiet lives and never seem to be in a hurry. All along the way they gave us delicious apples. You want to fight to help these people. Already, they have been invaded twice by the Boches — we are here to prevent a third.

Over their thick wool uniforms and insulated helmets, Brillhart and the other Railsplitters were still wearing the long white winter underwear to camouflage themselves in the snow. During the past few days of the Bulge, wearing long underwear on the outside of their clothes became protocol. The disguise had helped them win the last yards of the town of Marche-en- Famenne, a three-day fight. The story told through the ranks was that, a few nights prior, the Railsplitters, wearing the outer layer of long, ghostly underwear, spotted two Germans cowering behind leafless trees in the winter forest lit by the full moon. Hunching over in the dark, the GIs first thought they were frightened bears. “Hände hoch!” one of the battalion sergeants had called, apparently mangling the German order with his strong Texan accent. The Krauts must have heard them coming but made no effort to run or fire. They raised their hands without protest as the Railsplitters surrounded them. Both Germans–now prisoners– had officer status. What were they doing alone in the woods in enemy territory? Rumors surmised that Krauts were tired and wanted to get caught by any ally before they had to confront the Russians again— American POW camps were said to be more humane. The two captured Germans had led the entire ghostly American battalion unnoticed away from five enemy squadrons and into the heart of a strategic Belgian village.

The rest of the Krauts didn’t see the GIs coming at them from all sides and were forced to capitulate. Brillhart tried to get the American generals who implemented the rule to honor the insignificant private from his company who came up with the idea, but his superiors refused to admit that a boy who hadn’t been to military school or even college was that smart.

White soldiers on white snow. A small town, big victory. A thousand men lost. The Bulge was far from over.

My birthday, Jan. 6, was spent in a town that I can’t name – but I had French-fried potatoes (with salt!) and fried chicken (with salt!). I also heard a Kay Kiser radio program. What a treat! Kelly – the guy I told you about before – is still a Lieutenant. I found out why he wasn’t promoted to Major: apparently, he hasn’t got the guts, brains, foresight or desire. Personally, I have no respect for Kelly, but I play along to get what I want. Then there’s the translator, Urban – we call him “Burpin Urban”—who asks to be evacuated every time he has some damned minor ailment. The whole regiment will rejoice if he gets really injured and leaves.

We get decent food from time to time, but what we really want is a bath, clean clothes, and a shave. I am glad to hear you are working on a scrapbook of our relationship. I wish I could send you something for it.

Brillhart and his men reached the farmhouse with the chimney. As he prepared to knock at the door, he realized that the orange light of the hearth would illuminate the blood and dirt stains on the white underwear covering their uniforms. They would look like murdered ghosts rather than American saviors. Brillhart instructed the men to shed the outer layer, then knocked. A toothless man with a hollow, dark-stained mouth answered. He uttered something Urban couldn’t understand and slammed the door shut. Brillhart’s stomach squeezed with hunger at the brief blast of heat and glimpse of the stove. He ordered the men to put their frozen C rations on the ground in front of them as a peace offering.

A string of obscenities rose from the men. Goddamn frog. Goddamn Belge.

Goddammit, there was booze in there. Brillhart kicked at the door with his boot.  Urban was a wiry nineteen-year-old with chronic indigestion and a Canadian mother. He tried to talk to the Belgian man when he re-opened the door, but the man shouted, waved his hands in the air, and slammed the door again. Brillhart kicked harder, shoving Urban in front of him. The Belgian opened again and gestured wildly. He held up all ten fingers, made fists, held up two more, and pointed to his crotch. Brillhart looked at Urban, his eyebrows raised. “What in the hell is he saying?”

Urban, useless, shook his head. “I can’t understand this accent, Doc. I get one word out of ten.”

The Belgian man held his hands to his chest in the shape of a woman’s breasts. Still speaking quickly, he pointed to his crotch again and thrust towards the door as if he was taking a woman from behind. Then ten fingers, fists, and two more. More thrusting.

Oh! And I’m glad you like the perfume I bought you at Guerlain. Tell Aunt Bessie she’d better stay away from it, that cow!

The further along you get with the pregnancy, the more I wonder about whether you are taking care of yourself and if you are being careful. I wish I could have seen you at Christmas. We would have had so much fun together—shopping, packing, mailing presents.

Belgium at the present is wrecked with war. I don’t know what kind of Christmas they had, but the people don’t seem to mind. They realize that there must be some destruction in liberation.

“What’s he saying, Doc, that he’s a woman?” shouted Lt. Kelly, the short redhead Irishman from Chicago. “He wants to fuck us? What the hell? Tell him, sure! We’ll make sweet love to him in exchange for a bed and some booze.”

Brillhart turned around and drew his finger across his throat, looking at Kelly and the others. He shoved Urban forward to the door again. “Ask him to speak slowly. And ask it slowly.”

“Nous comprenons rien, Monsieur. S’il vous plaît, nous comprenons rien. S’il vous plait, parlez plus lentement. We don’t understand you, Sir. Don’t speak so fast, please.” Urban held up a can of C rations and a pack of cigarettes. He knocked the can against the house’s stone wall to show that it was frozen. The man held up his palm and said slowly “Att-en-dez. Stop.”He pulled the door partly closed but left it open a crack. Brillhart moved closer to the sliver of heat coming from the house.

“Wait, he says wait,” Urban said.

The Belgian man appeared at the door again, offering Brillhart a framed photograph. Twelve somber-eyed children dressed in white stood between a younger version of the man and a plump woman in black. Her lips were pressed so tightly that Brillhart wondered if they could soften into a kiss.

“He has twelve children sir,” Urban said, “Douze enfants, c’est ca, Monsieur? Pas de place, c’est ca?” The man nodded vigorously and smiled, revealing several brown teeth lingering at the back of his mouth.

“Doc, we can’t stay here. He’s got twelve kids. No room. No food.”

“Thank him and let’s move out,” Brillhart said. All twelve were probably sick and undernourished. He had dealt with enough depressing scenes over the last days and couldn’t fathom caring for anyone else without a few hours of sleep.

Brillhart felt his men’s disappointment and reminded them to keep rubbing their hands together to keep blood flowing.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Merci, merci Monsieur. Au revoir. Bonne nuit,” Brillhart said, mangling the few French words he learned.

“Et merci. Merci à vous, nos sauveurs. Que Dieu soit avec vous jusqu’à la fin,” said the man, bowing his head and then saluting.

The door closed. The emptiness of moonlight in the snow silenced them. Their hunger deepened, but they left the C-rations for the family in front of the house. When you talk about buying diapers for Junior, I wonder about the name we should choose for him when he’s born. I’m at a loss. I have considered every single name in and out of the family, and even some girl names just in case. Belgian names like Colette, Therèse, Jeanne, but I still can’t hit it. I think about cigarettes, too. I’ve got more than a carton left, but I give so many to civilians. They need them more than I do.

Still stomping and kicking at the snow, Brillhart felt the heat at the bottom of his veins dwindling. His blood was slowing. Little knives of cold dug in. He was minutes from frostbite. Nothing could stop the necrology of frozen tissue.

When the Railsplitters first arrived in the region, he found the rolling mountains of the Ardennes comforting. They brought back pleasant memories of snow-covered hills in Kentucky after football practice when he would walk home to the wood stove and hot food. As the star of the team, he ran miles, back and forth on the practice field, crushing himself against other players and smelling dirt as he hit the ground. After practice, he stayed in the hot shower longer than the others, feeling the gentle pull of his muscles recover. He knew that he wanted to spend his whole life studying the body’s power. Back then, all he knew of war were the medals his grandfather won in 1917 from the Meuse-Argonne. His grandfather was strong and quiet although he cried at odd times.

While poor, he was a nobleman in the coal mining town. Everyone respected him. Before the Bulge, it had never crossed Brillhart’s mind that his grandfather saw things like uncoiling intestines.

But within days of the Battle, the Ardennes appeared squat and bulbous under a gray sky that faded or darkened according to the amount of smoke rising from arms fire and shelling. Only at night could Brillhart see a few stars. Now, in leading his freezing men in search of another house, Brillhart decided he wanted to live in an isolated, beautiful place like pre-war Belgium, alone with June and Jr., away from everyone, away from the cities and people. He would build a beautiful Belgian stone house from the rubble.

Since you always ask, I’ll tell you about the old farmhouse in Belgium we stayed in. It was typical of Belgian farmhouses in that the barn and house were located together, but the Belgians are very clean people. It was clear that Jerry had used the house as an aid station a few short hours before we arrived. Fresh piles of dirt indicated that a few dead Jerries were buried outside.

The men almost passed by the next farmhouse. There were no lights, and no smoke rose from the chimney, but it was quiet. Brillhart switched on his flashlight and shone it across the stone walls. Bullet marks dotted the façade, but no other sign of significant structural destruction was visible. He knocked on the door, prepared to wait, but the it swung open. The men stepped inside and swept their flashlights across the rooms.

As their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, they saw soiled gauze, empty morphine ampoules, discarded scalpels, and shards of disinfectant tubes littering the floor. Sofas, chairs, and a piano with missing keys had been pushed towards the wall and the large kitchen table had been dragged into the center of the living room. The top of the table was slick with frozen blood and icy bits of flesh.

“All clear Doc,” called Kelly from the kitchen. “Not even any dead ones lying around. Think they’re all outside already, buried and frozen, so they won’t stink us out. God, I love German efficiency.”

Though it was a hygienic disaster, the house would do for the night. Brillhart and his men decided to light a fire in the stove, eat, sleep a little.

The soldiers found enough logs stacked in the small barn adjoining the house to make fires in the kitchen stove and in the living room fireplace. Slowly, their hands and C rations thawed. A few portraits hung on the wall, but the subdued eyes and high-buttoned collars inspired little empathy from the hungry men, who were more concerned about the unpleasant taste of canned rations. The flames revealed details of their physical condition— all the fat chiseled from their cheeks, chins peppered with dirt and stubble, eyes like dull moons. They looked to Brillhart like the coal miners limping into a diner in Loyall, Kentucky after days underground. Brillhart remembered thinking that no amount of sunlight could erase the miners’ ashen pallor as they drank coffee and ate toast with pork gravy. The color was stain, not dust.

Every meal for Brillhart and the medics had become a guessing game since the labelling disintegrated in the wet snow. Tonight, they opened three cans of meat and potato hash, two meat stew, four meat and beans, and five cellophane-wrapped fudge bars. They added two instant coffees and nine pressed sugar cubes. Except for the chocolate and sugar, all had the same soft, morbid taste of over-salted metal. They had eaten the same range of things for almost two months. It calmed but never vanquished their hunger.

Kelly stubbed his cigarette out in the viscous film of meat hash left in one of the cans. “Well, that was disgusting, as usual. Anyone want to go with me to find the cellar? They’ve always got something stored away in those basements. Maybe even booze.”

Urban followed him. Brillhart stayed upstairs and smoked one of his last cigarettes.

Kelly’s trip to the basement reminded Brillhart of Christmas when he and some other Railsplitters had spent the holiday with a Belgian family in the town of Comblain La Tour. During the meal, Monsieur Colson, the father, recounted the town’s proud history. It was famous for its picturesque houses along the quais of the river Ourthe, and for its steep granite cliffs, called Le Rocher de la Vierge. After dinner, when Brillhart thought he had eaten and drunk everything the family had to offer, Monsieur Colson stood up and announced he was going to the cellar for the rest. He disappeared and then re-emerged with one arm full of dried sausages. In the other, he carried a bucket sloshing over with a thick dark red liquid. “C’est du boudin. C’est du sang. Pour le nouvel an.” He set it in the middle of the kitchen, rolled up his sleeves, and pulled out strings of sausage links. “Blood sausage. For New Year’s.

As he stared into the bucket of blood, Brillhart his eyes swirled. In the messy pail, he saw intestines spilling out of downed men. Blond curls belonging to a private he lost back at the battle at Geilenkirchen in December swirled together with the intestines. His vision blackened and he fainted, falling off of his chair to the floor. He came to as Kelly pinched his cheeks and announced to everyone that Brillhart had never been able to hold his liquor. He hoped that Kelly would come back from the basement in this deserted house with something more appetizing than blood sausage.

In the basement of the house, we found two girls— one around 18 and the other 8 – and a smaller brother who was blind and badly crippled. Jerry had locked them down there. They hadn’t eaten for four days, it was very cold, and upstairs, the parents had been shot dead. The mother and father were still in bed under the covers. We brought the kids upstairs and gave them food and hot coffee and blankets.

“Doc, you’d better get down here,” Kelly called from the top of the basement stairwell, breathless. Urban panted behind him.

The soldiers’ flashlights made a flickering kaleidoscope of yellow dots as they thundered down the stairs, then formed a bright circle around three children, two girls and a boy, propped against the far end of the basement wall. Pale and shivering, tears traced lines down their fear-pinched faces, but they didn’t move. The younger girl whimpered as the men moved closer.

Brillhart pointed to the red cross on his sleeve and then to the sleeves of all the other medics as he approached. He motioned to Urban, who said, “We’re doctors. We’re here to help you. Don’t worry” and then, “Nous sommes médecins. Nous sommes là pour vous aider. Ne vous inquiétez pas.” Despite their tears and dirty faces, he noticed the two girls were beautiful, with heart-shaped faces and thick wavy brown hair. They huddled around the boy. Brillhart elbowed Urban in the back when he fell silent. “Keep talking, Goddammit. They need to know they can trust us.”

Urban jumped and repeated “We’re Americans. We’re allies,” several times.

Finally, the girls unlocked themselves from around the boy and the young girl looked at the men with a faint smile. Nous sommes Américains.

The eldest girl began to get to her feet as if to move toward them, then fainted, her hand sliding down the wall as she hit the floor. The other two children bent over her, screaming, Germaine, Germaine! 

“Sh, shhhh. It’s ok.” Kelly moved forward and gently slid his arms under Germaine, while Brillhart took her feet. Despite the fullness of her face and lips, her body was almost emaciated. She seemed to weigh almost nothing. Together, they made their way up the stairs. Urban stayed with her as she recovered in the kitchen while Brillhart and Kelly went to get the other sister and the boy, who could barely walk.

Brillhart put more C rations on the fire and melted clean snow for drinking water. The children brought the food and water to their mouths in swift, jerky movements, and it was gone in minutes. The men searched their bags for more cans. Brillhart saw a bit of color return to the childrens’ faces and realized they were more beautiful than he thought. With a bit of regained strength, the girls looked tearfully around their devastated house.

Brillhart felt grateful when he learned the boy was blind. At least he couldn’t see the blood and dirt covering his family home, or how the lace curtains had been torn from the windows, probably used for tourniquets.

The younger girl, Colette, sprang up from the table and ran toward the stairs leading to the second floor.

“Non!” Germaine cried. She lunged forward but teetered and gripped the table for balance. “Please, stop her. She’s looking for my parents are up there. She can’t see that.”

Brillhart caught Colette and lifted her up as she kicked her legs in protest. He set her by Germaine, who enveloped her sister with her arms. Colette shuddered and buried her head in Germaine’s shoulder.

“Maman, Papa,” she sobbed.

Germaine, who had begun to cry again, dug her lips into Colette’s hair and muttered quick, soft French until she calmed. Brillhart dug in the rations and pulled out all of the pressed sugar cubes that the men used to make the terrible coffee somewhat drinkable.  

“Look,” he said, holding a cube up to Colette’s face. “It’s magic.” He stuck out his tongue and placed one of the white squares. He pulled his tongue back in, scrunched his face for a few seconds, and stuck it back out. The square had transformed into a smaller, rounded lump. He stuck his tongue back in again and repeated the process two more times. Finally, the sugar cube disappeared and his clownishness had drawn a weak giggle from Colette. He offered the box to the girls, who mimicked him. He gave one to the blind brother, Jacques. He had steadied them enough for now. He would give them the chocolate at the next outburst if necessary.

While Jacques and Colette sucked and played with the pressed sugar cubes, the older girl, Germaine, who spoke excellent English, stood in a corner out of earshot of her siblings and quietly told Brillhart the story of the last few days. The Jerries had arrived in the middle of the night, kicking open the front door, waking the whole family, but it was too late for them to hide. The children ran to the room where the parents slept, and they hugged each other in fright as the soldiers climbed the stairs. The soldiers kicked the bedroom door open, ordered the children out, and shot the parents. They made the children take them to the cellar. The Jerries were tired of their own rations too. When they found nothing, they locked the children inside. That was four days ago.

According to Germaine, the cellar had done little to muffle the sounds of battle that raged around them and of the makeshift hospital the Germans had made in their home. Shelling shook the house for hours at a time and the children were sure they would be buried alive when the walls caved in. The screams they heard came in waves, followed by silence. “Either they died, or the morphine kicked in,” Brillhart explained. Germaine had heard someone calling for his mother.

The scene was a tear jerker. Unfortunately, I’ve seen things like it several times.

What can you do? Curse Jerry and carry on. When we left, we notified civilian affairs and made sure the children had some food. And then we looked to our next job.

Brillhart made a bed out of the Army blankets next to the dwindling fire in the stove for the children, who had barely slept while locked in the cellar. Germaine sung to Jacques and Colette until they closed their eyes.

“It’s a miracle,” Germaine said. “I can’t believe they’re sleeping. Thank you.”

“You should sleep too. We’re not going anywhere right now. It’s safe.” Brillhart handed her the blanket he was going to use for his own bed. She wrapped it around her shoulders. Colette whimpered in her sleep. Germain placed her hand on her sisters head to soothe her and then closed her own eyes.

Once the children were all asleep, curled in their blankets next to the stove, Brillhart went upstairs, harboring the stupid hope that the mother and father had somehow suffered only surface wounds, and were still alive. When he found them, he understood why Kelly overlooked the scene. He was surprised to find the parents’ room neat, untouched, except for minimal bloodstains on the floor and the pungent odor of decomposition that they had all gotten used to. Under a pristine white blanket two figures, a set of shadowy lumps dappled with moonlight appeared to sleep.

Once, when his father had rare a day off from the railroad and slept the whole night at home, Brillhart woke before sunrise and tiptoed to watch his parents sleeping. They snored in soft, cacophonous bursts. His mother’s snore was deep and throaty, while his father exhaled shrill, nasal blasts. He watched them hopefully, willing his father to get up and go outside to the pond with him to catch the early-biting fish.

That morning, his mother awoke to her young son standing in the doorway of her bedroom. Instead of shooing him away, she lifted the covers, and Brillhart crawled over her into the warm space between his parents. He pressed his back into his mother and let the snoring lull him back to sleep.

When he pulled back the blankets on the bed in the Belgian farmhouse in Marche- en-Famenne, Brillhart was relieved. The gunshot wounds on their heads were dried. The blood had drained from the backs of their heads into the pillows and mattress. The Germans had made a perfect, thorough shot. Madame and Monsieur Jacques Bourguignon. A mother, a father asleep with the knowledge, Brillhart hoped, that their children had been spared.

It had only taken a few months of combat for Brillhart to understand what he now called German logic. Unlike the French, the Germans were exacting, methodical. When he checked German medical bags left on the field, he found them to be impeccable, well- stocked, with clean instruments. The tanks, the weapons, the burp guns fired precisely. The Germans spared no one, not even animals got in the way of the mission or the order.

Few traces of life sprouted back after their destructive path. The rumor was, though, that they were also tired. Americans were fresh from two decades of peace. It was their main advantage.

Brillhart couldn’t understand why the Jerries had let the children live. This bedroom looked like someone had tucked the parents in. If the parents were trying to protect the children or vice versa, some kind of struggle must have ensued. Sheets on the floor, nightstands knocked over blood and brains everywhere. Someone had taken care to clean up, to recreate a peaceful diorama. Given his take on German behavior, the scene both dumbfounded him and made perfect sense. He placed the covers back over the couple’s head, went downstairs, and ordered Kelly and Urban to take the bodies to the barn outside before the children woke up.

I read your letters over and over to make them last longer. It is darned nice of you to write so often. Mother never writes, but I guess she is busy with her sister and can’t find time. I should be in bed right now, but I wanted to write to the dearest person in my world.

A few hours later, in the kitchen, they were awake, hovering over the stove to keep warm. Jacques plunked away on a piano with a few keys missing. Colette was the only one still sleeping. Brillhart and his men talked intermittently with Germaine.

In 1914, the girls’ father had stopped trusting Germans after losing his entire family to the first World War. As soon as Hitler annexed Austria, the father dug a hole in the basement floor, barred it with a wooden plank, and covered it with dirt. Day after day, he filled it with his hunting rifles, ammunition resistance, yards of dried sausage, pork fat, dried potatoes, jars of apples, bottles of beer, and candles. He was determined to see his family survive the second coming of the Germans. That’s why, at first, the children weren’t worried when the Germans locked them in the cellar. But when they tried to get to the supplies, they found that the ground was hard and frozen. They didn’t have the strength to dig all the way through.

“Why didn’t you tell us when we were serving you that horrible army crap?” Kelly cried.

Germaine shrugged her shoulders and blushed. “It wasn’t that bad.”

In minutes, the GIs were chopping away with axes they found in the barn. Within two hours, pork fat and potatoes sizzled in a heavy pan. Apples bubbled beside them. The soldiers drank the thawed beer and gnawed on the sausages, giddy that they outsmarted the Germans with this treasure trove of food. Thanks to their father, these children would survive on the surplus through the rest of the war. Colette started to cry again and run to the stairs, but Brillhart brought her back and gave her chocolate, which she had never tasted. The novelty quieted her briefly.

For the second time, Brillhart entertained the idea that June, his wife, might give birth to a girl. If so, he would name her Germaine. Jacques felt his way to the piano and played a song resembling Yankee Doodle Dandee on the remaining keys. Blind and crippled, he seemed the least affected by the parents’ death or perhaps he was just used to other people taking care of him so he trusted the soldiers. Brillhart, Kelly, and Urban laughed as the boy sputtered the words to the song. How did he know? they asked. “Papa taught it to him and told him to play it as soon as the Americans got here,” Germaine explained.

“Well, shit,” Ramsey, a medic from Georgia said, “Your Pops had his damn head too far up north. Shove over boy, let me play you the real song.” Ramsey sat next to the boy and pounded out Dixie. Even with the missing keys, Ramsey managed to render an accurate version. After hearing it that one time, Jacques replayed it perfectly.

“He’s a goddamn Mozart,” Ramsey said.

His sisters smiled shyly “He can do it with almost any song,” Germaine said.

The GIs all sang the southern hymn of Dixie together and then returned to the food.

After more apples, potatoes, sausage, beer, and coffee, Brillhart sat down and talked to Germaine again. Germaine told them how Monsieur Bourguignon had put away money for at least one of his children to go away and study something other than farming. Since his only boy was blind and crippled, he decided Germaine would be the best educated of his two girls. The schools nearby didn’t have a spot for her, so instead, she spent six months in Amsterdam studying to become an English teacher, which explained why she hardly needed any translating from Urban. She had a second cousin in Amsterdam, who lodged her in exchange for housecleaning and goods from the farm in Marche-en-Famenne that Monsieur Bourguignon brought once a month.

The mention of the Netherlands made Brillhart remember the package nestled under his coat. He had been carrying a slightly-torn Dutch comic book that he found in another house weeks ago. He understood none of the words – he just knew it wasn’t German – but the pictures of the animal characters made him smile. He ruffled Colette’s hair and pulled it from his leather satchel, spreading the pages out on the newly-clean kitchen table. Colette seemed transfixed by the critters jumping over the pages and giggled when Brillhart snorted like one of the pig characters. When she pointed to a horse, he neighed and stuck his upper teeth out. She giggled again. Germaine leaned over the table, too, smiling at the comics and at her little sister.

Brillhart announced that he would return in a few minutes. Germaine nodded and waved. He heard Jacques still puttering away at Dixie on the piano. He couldn’t see the children’s faces when he said goodbye. Perhaps the first overwhelming stirrings of fatherhood. Germaine, Colette, and the boy almost felt like his children, as if he owned them, as if they owned him. If he could wrap them up and send them to June, he would. They would love America. He envisioned a bustling household full of the adopted French-speaking children and his own. Germaine could be the nanny and go to school. He pictured the crippled boy sitting in the sun by the pool he hoped to build one day. Water exercises would be good for atrophied legs. If he stayed with them any longer, he might stay forever. Brillhart kept walking.

When he reached the main road, he saw the line of surrendered German soldiers, many carrying litters of wounded. They filed past Brillhart as he went to the battalion station in the center of town. Kelly would have yelled obscenities at the prisoners, but Brillhart kept his head down.

That afternoon, the Railsplitters moved on to another town, another battle. A few days later, they came back through Marche-en-Famenne. Brillhart had let civil affairs know about Germaine, the two younger children, and the dead parents. Brillhart walked into the center of Marche-en-Famenne taking photos for June, though few of the buildings rising out of the icy rubble remained intact. The Town Hall with its Romanesque and Gothic facades, the Mosan church and belfry, made of red brick with ornate white trimmings, and the classical columns of what had been a bank, represented Old Europe. This was what June would want to see. This was where she dreamed that Brillhart ate and slept each night. He tried to aim the camera so that it didn’t capture the hungry townspeople or piles of broken homes. Sometimes, without taking pictures, he let the camera linger in front of his face to hide his eyes that searched everywhere for Germaine and the children.

He paused in front of a modest, partially-caved-in church and observed a small cemetery with a group of civilians gathered by tombstones that had been knocked sideways by shelling. A priest crossed his hands over the bodies of the dead before closing their makeshift caskets. Brillhart recognized, among them, Germaine’s mother and father. Next to them was a hole that Brillhart knew had taken hours to dig in the hard ground. He looked into the crowd for the children but still didn’t see them. He hoped they were drinking Red Cross hot chocolate and eating doughnuts under warm blankets.

Today, I saw townspeople burying bodies in a churchyard. Amid the rubble and ruin, a small group surrounded a priest who was quietly conducting the ceremony. Some of our boys helped to dig the graves. The parents from the farmhouse were among the bodies.

There is so much ruin. It’s hard to imagine the Belgian people regaining the quiet lives they once had. And at the same time, it’s easy to see how this destruction feeds all our hatred of the Germans. It makes us want to kill more, and take fewer prisoners, to grind every German deep into the soil. Sometimes I am afraid of how you will react when I return. I hope and pray that you’ll still know me, but that the memory of this ruin will stay vivid enough that we will never let the German or any belligerent nation get a foothold again.

We thoroughly enjoyed the cookies and the Readers Digests you sent, as well as the tuna fish, knackers, sardines, and saltines. Thank you. My darling, I must stop now. I have a big day ahead of me. I will try to write more often, but regardless of how busy I am, I’m never too busy to remember you and the things we’ve done together, to think about our plans for the future. I love you more every day. Brillhart.

I was in junior high the first time my friend was bullied. This was during the late 1990s, before we could maliciously attack someone from our phones or smart devices, when belittling someone took a personal touch, away from keyboard. I wasn’t there but the bully had hit my friend, nothing serious, no broken bones, just a little hurt pride. However, when his father found out, he got in touch with my father and together they agreed that my friend and I needed to learn how to defend ourselves. I wasn’t asked, I was told that I would learn to fight. Thus began my acquaintance with the practice of violence.

I’ve never thought of violence as being “evil.” I was taught that violence is a tool, the same way a gun or a knife is a tool. And while violence isn’t the solution to every problem, the proper application of violence can be a good thing. There are limits though, a time and a place to call it quits before violence begets violence or you find yourself on the wrong side of a jail sentence. That being said, I’ve never understood pacifism, the idea that violence serves no purpose or that civilized society has no need for violence is a joke and a poor one at that. Violence can be a good thing, a necessary thing so long as you understand its proper application. It’s a thin, hazy line at times but a line nonetheless.

After the decision was made, my first acquaintance with violence came in the form of a boxing ring. Boxing, or Pugilism to the sophisticant, is an art. There’s a finesse to it that is lacking in the more popular mixed martial arts. It’s hard to explain to someone that’s never done it but it’s like a dance, a graceful and violent series of motions, second nature to the practitioner but magic to the people watching.

It’s easy throwing a punch but throwing a punch well, that’s the trick, and it’s not all about throwing punches. The secret to being a good fighter is making the other guy miss, going blow for blow with a guy doesn’t mean you know how to fight, all it means is that you can take a beating. Sometimes that’s enough but there’s a difference between a brawler and a fighter. This is the way I was taught to fight, with style and finesse and, most importantly, with my head. But, for all the talk of magic and finesse, boxing is all about the show, it’s a sport. Two equally matched fighters in a ring with a referee and gloves isn’t the same thing as a brawl in the street. In the ring, your title may be on the line but odds are that you’re going to walk away afterwards. There is no such security in the real world, a fight in the street or a brawl in a bar could end up costing you your life, whether that means a cell or a box.

Knowing how to fight in a ring or an octagon doesn’t means you can handle yourself on the streets, where we visit violence upon each other not for sport but for real, where anything can happen and anyone can catch a beating. The man that places all his hopes in his ability to perform is a fool, especially when violence is involved. Just because you can fight, doesn’t mean you should. There are no guarantees in a fight. It doesn’t matter if you’re the greatest fighter in the world; if you go looking for a fight, you’re going to find one, one you might not be able to win.

The thing about violence is that even when it’s justified, it doesn’t mean that your problem will be solved. In life or death situations, violence can save your life. In a combat zone, violence is a daily occurrence and while you are justified in defending your life, or the life of your comrades, there are consequences. The harming of another human being is anathema to our souls. The long-term effects of war and posttraumatic stress disorder are only now being fully realized as so many of our veterans are struggling to overcome the mental and emotional scars of facing and perpetrating violence. Even a simple street fight can have long term repercussions. A fist is a little like a bullet, once it’s been fired, everything else that happens afterwards is on you, the good and the bad.

My father was, and is, an old-school kind of guy. His father, my grandfather, was a cold man, detached and distant from his children, a veteran of the Korean War and a champion fighter. My father grew up in a time when streets and neighborhood were sacred and you defended them at all costs. My father was a good fighter and good fighters earn a reputation. There’s a certain mystique when it comes to neighborhood tough guys, those guys that people cross the street to avoid, the way the room gets quiet when they walk in. It’s intoxicating, the kind of power you can cultivate with the threat of violence. But neighborhoods don’t last and when the neighborhoods went away and he was forced to participate in society, my father brought his reputation with him. And, as a teamster in Chicago during the 80’s and 90’s, a penchant for violence was a good thing.

Thus, a man who thrived on violence, or the threat of violence, and who chose to isolate himself from others raised a son to believe that violence was an easy way of getting what he wanted and that people in general were only useful if they served your needs. If they couldn’t help, then they were discarded. If they could, then they were cultivated. And, if they threatened you, you hurt them. Growing up, it got to a point where it was easier sizing a person up for a fight rather than getting to know them. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure which came first, the ability to commit violence or the ability to isolate, but it’s a symbiotic relationship. Turn yourself off to people and you start to lose interest in their well-being. Once that happens, hurting them isn’t all that difficult. Not when you’re the most important person you know.

When violence is an easy means of dealing with a person, that person’s value as a human is diminished. The amount of time you’re willing to invest in a person is directly proportional to the value you attribute to that person. Why waste the time talking to them, understanding them, empathizing with them, if it’s easier to just shut yourself off? It’s a lot harder learning to live with someone instead of just hurting them when they don’t do what you say or want. It’s a time saver too. It’s much faster to hit someone than it is to sit down and talk with them.

Devaluing a person means deciding that they are not worthy and therefore require minimal effort on my part. This is hubris, believing that I’m better by virtue of who I am and what I’ve accomplished, as if such things hold any real meaning. The funny thing about arrogance, you’re never really as good as you think you are and there is always someone better. Diminishing a person’s status to that of a “thing” is unnatural, it’s a conscious act driven by our selfishness or, if we’re being really honest, our insecurities and fears. This is what relationships are all about, sharing who we are, imperfections and all, and having that vulnerability reciprocated. I dare say that kind of rejection is more painful than a punch to the face.

It wasn’t until years after I’d joined the military that I started seeing people as being meaningful, not just “useful.” So many of my problems with relationships were a result of my belief that people were just “things,” an attitude I had chosen to pursue for so long. It sounds silly to say aloud but people have value, even the ones that you don’t like. And while I still struggle to build and maintain relationships, they are worth the investment. And not only that, what kind of life is that, plotting, manipulating, using people to your own ends? Pop culture wants to glamourize it on T.V. and in movies but like everything else pop culture produces, it’s a bunch of lies. Think about all the craven, sycophants trying to earn their way to the top. Is that how you see yourself? Is that how you want others to see you?

As long as we exist in relationships with each other, violence is a possibility. If we agree that some violence is acceptable, how do we avoid unnecessary violence? Who is our enemy? The guy that talks shit about you behind your back? So what? The guy that cut you off in traffic? So what? Your shitty neighbor down the block? Call the police if you have a problem. What good is violence in any of these situations? It’s satisfying, or it can be, hurting someone. But what does it accomplish? What does it do for you other than cause more problems? In the right situation, violence can save lives. In the wrong situation, it can ruin them. If we value people and want to avoid violence then we must be willing to humble ourselves, to quiet that nagging voice that tells us every slight or perceived insult should be answered with violence. Life cannot be spent sizing people up in preparation for violence. Man was never meant to live that way.

I’m not an expert but it takes someone acquainted with violence, comfortable with violence, to know when it’s appropriate to use it. I feel bad for people that have been sheltered from violence all their life. These people are ill prepared for the reality that violence is an inevitable part of life. I don’t think we need to revel in it but we need to be prepared for it. This isn’t a rally cry for the Second Amendment or a revitalization of the “Affliction” mixed martial arts culture. If anything, it’s an appreciation for those that accept violence as a part of life and are willing to use violence to protect others, our military, and our law enforcement.

But, even amongst our armed forces, what percentage have actually taken part in violence? And of that percentage, how many have the requisite maturity and experience to apply violence in an appropriate manner, enough to save lives but not so much as to appear savage or malicious. Ditto for our law enforcement. We want to believe that those charged with the use of necessary violence are grizzled, battle tested, level-headed men and women but the truth is that most of them are no different from they people they “protect.” An oath of service or a badge doesn’t mean you are exceptionally qualified to use violence. I’d go so far to say that the majority of controversy surrounding excessive force and wrongful deaths is not only a failure of judgment on the part of the individual involved but a lack of preparation on the part of law enforcement in general when it comes to the proper use of and application of violence in a high-risk situation. And I don’t mean to second guess anyone, I won’t play armchair officer, but we owe it to our police, and our military, to prepare them as best we can for a job only a few are willing to undertake.

I think it would be great if we lived in a selfless society dedicated to the preservation and betterment of man, where egos are non-existent and where people are valued as equals rather than treated like “things.” But that just isn’t the case. Ego is a part of who we are. We can fight against our baser instincts but inevitably we all give into selfishness. In “civilized” society, there are times when the need for violence seems so distant but I urge you not to be so naive. The need is real. It’s with an appreciation of this truth that I continue boxing, attempting to perfect the art I started so long ago. The capacity for violence is like a cushion, a safety net designed to protect me and mine from the uncertainties of life. The trick is not losing sight of the fact that there is still a cost even if justified. This is how we keep our humanity while still being acquainted with violence.

As many artists have noted, memory underpins imagination. Creating new artistic and intellectual works depends critically on the reshaping of what has gone before.

—Charles Fernyhough. Pieces of Light

At our recent MFA residency, I gave a workshop on writing about your worst experience, using a number of examples to illustrate how writers confront personal crises like madness, divorce, stillbirth, and the death of an adult child. To emphasize the role of craft in the nature of the telling, I chose two examples for each subject to illustrate possible approaches. The point I hoped to make was that there is no “natural” way to write about a traumatic event, no inevitable way of retelling. Choices and strategies can’t be avoided. Memory is only a starting point, and often not reliable. What results is, in effect, an inevitable reshaping that involves re-imagining and re-detailing.

My choices for stillbirth were passages from two memoirs, Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination and Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply. Although McCracken’s embryo had been declared dead, she still had to go through a delivery, in her retelling focusing on what other women had told her about stillbirth and on her concern that she might upset the pregnant woman outside in a waiting room. She doesn’t address her own feelings, at least not directly. Levy, on the other hand, uses a very different strategy. Hers was not a literal stillbirth. The premature baby lived briefly outside the womb. Her telling focuses on precise observation of the visual details of the child in her hands and, to a lesser degree, on her uncertainties about logistics, such as what to do about the umbilical cord.  Contrasting approaches to the same harrowing experience, both avoiding explicit rendering of their emotions.

My choice of the worst experience topic was not merely academic, which is why I used examples about madness. Just a few weeks before, Broad Streetmagazine had published my essay “Commitment,” about the trials of coping with the extreme psychosis of my first wife, Judy. Living through the experience had been a hell. But writing and revising an essay about it had been a process of seeking an opening tactic, choosing and arranging incidents as best I could recall, finding words and images—essentially absorption into the strategies of a creative process, not unlike writing a completely fabricated short story.

Vivian Gornik, in The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, distinguishes the events that are the starting point for the act of writing from the representation that results:

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

But while fiction allows the writer’s persona to exist in the background, memoir places the writer himself or herself in the foreground. Gornik calls it an “unsurrogated” persona and explains the demands on a writer of revelatory nonfiction: “The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.”

The Dilemma of Memoir

That certainly was my dilemma in writing “Commitment.” How would I provide vivid descriptions to convey what I remembered experiencing and turn them into meaningful insights? Ironically, though I was hoping to give the reader an emotional frisson, I—while composing—was compartmentalizing, concentrating on finding effective words rather than reliving the decades-old agonies. Yet reading the magazine’s proof months after completing the essay turned out to be an emotional experience, even though the events had taken place some forty years ago, and I was long remarried. But at this point I was just a reader, not the author.

This wasn’t the first essay I had written about Judy; the earlier, called “Fade Far Away,” was based on the intense presence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Nightin our lives. The relationship and the title choice of another phrase from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” had become the basis of my deliberate essay design. (When that work was selected as a “notable” in Best American Essays, I felt an unease about exploiting pain for praise.) With “Commitment,” a title I had long been contemplating before the actual writing, I worked with the ironic dichotomy of commitment to marriage vows and commitment to a mental institution. It became the basis of my strategy.

Living with the nightmare of Judy’s madness had been, by far, the worst experience of my life. Yet, for me, writing about it was inevitable, just as many other writers find themselves drawn to creating poems, essays, stories, and novels about their most distressing times. An old saw among writers is, everything is material. Even, or perhaps especially, trauma. While non-writers often can’t stop replaying the worst in their brains, writers use the page to recreate the awful, much like picking at a scab.  Some have to do it immediately, while it’s still raw, others—like me—decades later or on several occasions over the years.

During our MFA residency, for example, one colleague read the opening section of a book about her husband’s dying at age forty. Another read the beginning of a memoir about being harassed by her graduate school mentor, and her anger at university officials who, unable to deny her evidence, badgered her into silence about it.

Other colleagues in the audience had published essays about topics such as their father’s suicide and their own teenage indiscretions. Students I’ve worked with have also written about the painful deaths of spouses, about the abuse of a dead spouse’s family, about post-traumatic stress from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, about recovering from addictions. These are only the examples I’m aware of, certain many others exist.

Why Do We Do It?

Why do we dredge up emotional pain? Why do we spend so much time immersed in reliving the most terrible times of our lives, times most people strive to suppress? Why don’t we just cry and scream?

Regarding screaming, I recall what I had been told about a former faculty colleague, a clinical psychologist with a private practice. He was an adherent of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy, treating a patient who had dropped her infant from an upper story apartment window. Every visit, she came into his office and just screamed and screamed and screamed.

Although some writers may have screamed their own distress, as I once did, that’s not sufficient for individuals with a commitment to finding words for emotions. Rather than screaming, we seek the language and the craft strategies to present our greatest unhappiness. The process is not simply a matter of writing as therapy, a raw verbal outpouring, even though that might be a help to non-writers desperate for immediate psychic relief. Those writing for therapy are really just pouring feelings onto paper or screen, seeking a release rather than—like the serious writer—seeking to produce a creative work. The writer knows first and foremost that he or she is seeking methods to best convey the core of the experience, and make that core resonate with a reader.

Some writers certainly have deliberately written about worst experiences with a goal of emotional consolation or even healing from a trauma. And some may be unaware that such ends lay behind their creating. Whatever the writer’s goal—relief, healing, or just a crafted memoir—the writing itself cannot avoid revision, embellishing, and reorganizing the materials evoked though acts of memory. While any person who relives a worst experience is involved in a similar process, that person is almost always unaware of the shaping. Writers do it consciously and deliberately as they employ literary techniques to turn life into art.

Remembering as a Creative Act

When we write about our worst experiences, we are, of course, accessing memory; but memory is not a reliable tool. What we retrieve from the dark nights of our souls is some recollection of emotional anguish and some sense of the events behind that anguish. Such recollection is far from an exact replication of what actually took place.

The way we remember—as the psychologist and writer Charles Fernyhough explains in his book, Pieces of Light—belies the common notion of retrieving a literal reproduction stored whole in some mental file cabinet. Each remembering, in fact, is a recreation from the bits and pieces stored in different areas of our brain. Remembering itself is, in essence, a creative act. Fernyhough writes:

The truth is that autobiographical memories are not possessions that you either have or do not have. They are mental constructions, created in the present moment, according to the demands of the present. … Memory is more like a habit, a process of constructing something from its parts, in similar but subtly changing ways each time, whenever the occasion arises. This reconstructive nature of memory can make it unreliable.

Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist, in The Seven Sins of Memory, explains one aspect of this unreliability by noting the impossibility of separating the actual events of the past from all that has happened in one’s life since then. In effect, memory is an interaction of past happenings and ongoing inputs derived from our later happenings:

We extract key elements from our experience rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge we obtained after the experience. In other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing to them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event.

In addition to the “intrusion” of new after-the-fact material, even the roots of the original memory are not contained as a whole in some corner of our brains. Instead, they are scattered throughout a number of different cerebral areas, requiring a reassembly that in itself introduces uncertainties.Fernyhough calls them “close collaborations between the medial temporal lobe circuits.”

While Schacter addresses the “bias” that results from subsequent living, Fernyhough adds “distortion” from the workings of the brain. Fundamentally, it’s impossible for anyone to recall past events with anything like photographic accuracy and reliability (excluding the rare memory savants with hyperthymesia, the ability to recall most details of their lives.) But even a photograph from our past, while compete in itself, is seen through the eyes of our present.

While I suspect that few writers who find words to relate and contemplate their worst experience are experts in the psychology or memory and the functioning of the human brain, they know instinctively that their work will only be an approximation of what “really” happened, not unlike a movie that purports to be a retelling of historical events.  But while the screenwriters’ fabrications are conscious choices for dramatic effect, the writer no matter how intent on avoiding falsifications cannot avoid creating something different from the actual events.  Beyond matters of selection and organization, even the choice of a single word to describe an aspect of an experience brings connotations unlike those of a different word, and no “right” word exists.

Certainly, the primal-screaming mother who dropped her baby is accessing a raw, excruciating emotion. If she were forced to put what happened into language, the result would be only the shadow of a retelling, probably different each time she constructed sentences.

How Memoir Writers Remember

The novelist Jack Smith recently interviewed several memoir writers for a 2018 article in The Writer, “Is the Memoir Market Oversaturated?” Two of the writers address the reorganizations and limitations of memory.

Kate Braverman, author of Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, states:

Memoirs are not acts of journalism, either. The writer selects from the monumental possibilities, strategizes, omits, truncates, and then surprisingly expands. One examines and revises, denies and exaggerates, and in that active engagement with the page, the unexpected emerges. Memoir writing is about the illusion of truth.

Peter Selgin, author of The Inventors, emphasizes the role of imagination:

Among the memoirist’s greatest challenges is to rescue memory from imagination, and to do so with the understanding that the one can’t survive without the other. The trick in writing memoir as faithfully as possible is to be aware of the role imagination plays in shaping our memories, in making them cohere into scenes.

Both writers emphasize the central role of creative choices and the awareness that what will result is not a literal replication, but rather a shaped imaginative work based upon actual events and people.

At our MFA residency, when questioned about their essays and chapters about a worst experience, the authors all noted a detachment, a compartmentalizing, as they immersed in creative strategies to get a reader to share their distress. And they knew what they were producing was a literary approximation. Because the creation was—inevitably—separate from the actual experiences, the biases and distortions of memory were givens. The inevitable choices of vocabulary, selection, and organization made while writing produce additional alterations.

A New Version of What Happened

Fernyhough goes further in distinguishing memoir from memory. As a conscious art form, memoir is much more detailed and specific, and “vividness does not guarantee authenticity.”

Writing about our worst experiences produces remade memories, which, as Ferryhough and Schacter demonstrate, is true for all remembering, but even more so for the writer aware of consciously manipulating his or her past for literary goals. In a real sense, finding words, images, and relationships results in a new imaginative version of that worst experience.

In light of Schacter’s explanation, any future remembering of that painful event will incorporate the “fabrications” of the written piece as one more influence when trying to reconstruct what has happened since the original. As hard as I tried to capture the “real experience” in my essay “Commitment,” I couldn’t avoid reshaping and, no doubt, recreating. Any of my future attempts to remember those painful long-ago events are now inseparable from the details of my reconstruction.

As much as a writer may strive to recapture the authenticity of how it was, an accurate depiction of awful events, no matter how painful, both the nature of memory and the consequences of craft choices will result in a variation of what actually happened, an echo of experience. The result is not a falsification. Beneath all literary remakings of worst experiences lies the core of something real that shook the writer’s life. When the result is successful literature, the writer has something to say that matters to readers, perhaps not discovered until the process of recreation.

I don’t know your name, but we tried to kill each other once.

Do you remember it? It happened on November 5, 2005, on the second day of our big weeklong offensive in Husaybah, Iraq—a dense square of markets, mosques, and homes tucked into the corner where the Euphrates River meets the Syrian border. Nearly 2,000 U.S. Marines, me among them, had stormed into Husaybah before sunrise the previous morning. We had attacked across the trash-hewn desert west of town with our eyes coated with the green electric glow of our night vision goggles. We quickly smashed into the first row of homes and shoved our rifle barrels into the faces of the sleepy men who opened the doors and blew apart the locked doors of homes that had been abandoned. Children startled awake by our voices and our boots shrieked against their mothers in terror. I remember that.

Husaybah had been a violent place for us then. Plenty of our Marines had died there before we came, and our leaders wanted Husaybah mollified once and for all, and so we searched through your homes, sifted through your cupboards and closets, through your unmentionable things with the anger of a raw nerve. We looked for anything that tied the houses and people living inside them to Al Qaeda-in-Iraq forces, or ‘AQI’—just another letter set in the endless greasy sop of military acronyms.

On my second afternoon in Husaybah I stood on a roof and gazed out over the geometric madness of buildings that surrounded me. It was cloudy. Parts of the city crackled with rifle fire. You appeared around a corner of a wall that defined the small compound of a house the same way chain link fences surround our yards. I liked the walled compounds for their dominance and privacy—like fortresses. Gray metal fences are just ugly and noisy. Walls can last forever. You appeared from behind it wearing a dirty gray sweat shirt and pants, like the track suits worn by fat New Jersey mobsters. You already had the launcher on your shoulder. It was made out of white PVC pipe with a cheap wooden handgrip and a battery switch bound with electrical tape. We always laughed at them whenever we captured one. Compared to our shoulder-mounted anti-tank rockets, our wire-guided missiles, and our heat seekers, your homemade bazookas were shoddy and infantile, completely weightless against our intractable technology and sophistication. But we knew they could kill, and if we had found you before you fired it, or just simply found you carrying it, building it, handing it to someone else, or even burying it in your cousin’s backyard in a rage of benevolent rebellion against all war, we would have blown your body to pieces with high explosives that have been tested and refined and improved since the First World War. We would have scattered your atoms in a wide plume with a professional calculus learned and taught and relearned in the way of tradesmen, which is what the American military was and still is today: a profession of arms, trained to execute the final thousand meters of American foreign policy, which in this case was to kill you. We’re good at it. American troops train for battle like athletes and our officers study war like scholars. To us you are dilettantes, a junior varsity team. Many still feel this way.

Yet given all this you pivoted around a corner in a dirty sweat suit and aimed your homemade rocket launcher at my friends and me. As I sit here now I think about the resolve it must have taken to do that, to build this cheap weapon and aim it with the hope and faith against the best weapons in the world created by some of the richest nations in history. Surely you must’ve felt it when you wheeled around corner. Yet it didn’t seem to matter to you, did it? Was it God or money or hatred or maybe just boredom? You are an Arab man. An Iraqi man. A Sunni man, no doubt. Faith has driven plenty to violence. But so have debt, hunger, oppression, and just blind hatred. Did you shoot at me for those things? Can I blame you? There are many Americans, more Americans than I’m comfortable with, who stock their homes with firearms and talk as if an invasion is a real possibility, be it from some outsider or from their own government. But there is little chance of invasion for us. I am from a country that will likely wither and die by its own self-destruction.

But that wasn’t a luxury for you, was it? We were in your country uninvited. You turned from behind a corner to see a real invader. What did we look like to you? I imagine we looked like armored toadstools perched on your roofs with our black weapons held at our chests. I saw you. I saw your eyes. They were wide and filled with terror. Did our sight scare you? Your face was haggard, your hair and beard short and ragged. You looked like you were in your late twenties, perhaps older. It’s hard to say. I only saw you for a few seconds, but looking back and remembering . . . Yes, I’m certain you were maybe twenty-eight, thirty at the latest. You were older than me. I was twenty-five then. Thoughtful, but brash. I could almost hear you chanting your battle cry—Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar—over and over and over again, begging your God for victory or maybe just to spare your life, your breaths short and fast as you quickly aimed and fired. Were your palms wet? When the circuit closed on your launcher your body was surrounded with a wispy cloud. I heard the rocket motor fire. A Marine near me yelled “RPG!”

***

Surely you remember the Persian Gulf War. How could you not? I was ten years old. My stepdad was in the U.S. Air Force then. He was sent to the Emirates to fix the American fighter jets we deployed after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was in fifth grade then. As I turned and walked up a broad snowy path between a set of houses on my way home from school a cold afternoon in January, I noticed my friend Chris trudging through the deep snow toward me.

“Come on, dude. Something’s going on,” he said. “I think it’s started!”

We waded through the snow and plopped cross-legged in front of the television in his living room. We watched titillated as the special news reports showed grainy night-vision video of your anti-aircraft tracers arching toward our fighter jets high above your capital city. Whenever the screen erupted with the white flash of an exploding bomb we cheered because we knew we had killed some of you. There was nothing gory about it. We didn’t see your blood or your body parts. It was clinical and precise. Even later, when we began to see the fuzzy bomb camera footage aired on the nightly news as 1,000 pound bombs crashed into bridges and factories and aircraft revetments, we saw the thermal signatures of your people—maybe your soldiers, maybe not, but all unlucky unlike us—become engulfed in the smoke and fire of our long-learned ability to destroy the human body.

Soon your whole army fell apart in front of us. When our tanks and armored vehicles crossed the border, you surrendered to us by the thousands, trudging across the desert half-dazed with your hands above your heads, flapping coalition leaflets imploring you to surrender. When you did fight us, it was almost cartoonish. Stories came back to us from the desert, or “The Sandbox” as we called it, of the shells from our main battle tanks punching through two and three of your tanks with a single shot and of bulldozers burying your troops alive right in their trenches. Just over 1,000 of our troops were killed or wounded fighting your country. To die as an American in the Persian Gulf War quickly became the unlucky punchline of a sad joke. We were so good at killing you that within four days of launching the ground offensive we annihilated an estimated 20,000 of you like we annihilate anthills in our backyards or roaches in our cupboards.

Our whole country felt as if we had returned to the heady day’s right after World War II, when America basked in the destruction of two of the ugliest regimes in the history of the planet. We used your body to eradicate the ghosts of our mindless destruction in Vietnam. We felt as if we had returned to glory, that a curse had been broken. Our money had killed the Soviet Union. Our bombs had killed your fellow Iraqis. Our army was confirmed best in the world. We were Americans, natives from the “city upon the hill,” citizens of God’s Country. We sang Lee Greenwood songs at school recitals. Your destruction was our absolution. We felt invincible.

Americans rarely seem to make the connection, but the two wars—the one our fathers fought in and the war where you and I finally meet—are really all part of one big war, at least in a spiritual sense. Our victory over the forces of your dictator gave us carte blanche to press our moralistic notion of empire upon your people through the use of our bolstered military confidence. Because of your indomitable dictator, coupled with a strain of American Exceptionalism, we despised you all collectively. After your generals surrendered at Safwan in March of 1991 we restricted your airspace and suffocated you with the boot heel of economic sanctions. We dangled food before your face in exchange for your precious oil. Sometimes Saddam Hussein took it. Other times he did not.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 had nothing to do with your dictator, and certainly not your country, but I can’t help but think that many of your citizens saw the smoke and ash of the fallen World Trade Center, the cavity drilled into the side of the Pentagon, and the detritus of Flight 93 scattered across a field in Pennsylvania and realized with a quiet dread that your country, as proxy for your dictator, would inevitably be called to stand tall and answer for crimes real or imagined. If you didn’t, the subsequent rumblings and fist poundings from our punditry would have certainly signaled our brutal intentions. Americans wanted blood for the death of our citizens, and in many ways it was a completely justifiable desire. Our people were killed because of religious extremism, by Bronze Age clerics and zealots who failed to understand the concept of free will, and who harbored just as much sanctimonious moral superiority as the Western governments they claimed to loathe and sought to punish. You had nothing to do with it, but we came and made our demands anyway, and then we dropped more bombs.

I was a Marine by then. In late March of 2003 I watched our “Shock and Awe” air campaign smash Baghdad into rubble on CNN. I watched fire and high explosives rubble the skyscrapers of your capital with clarity of a dumb Michael Bay action flick. None of that grainy bomb camera footage that marked the opening moves in 1991. This was the modern era of the mass media spectacle. The scene felt like a cheap gratuitous facsimile of the first time, like a movie sequel that tried cover up a cheap plot with high-powered special effects.

Our leaders paraded themselves on television like conquering warlords before our troops had even crossed the border from Kuwait, counting the gold their hordes hadn’t even pillaged yet. We never discussed your plight or what you may have wanted for your own futures. You were never even considered. We just shrugged it off. We told the world we were coming to rescue you from the clutches of an evil dictator and that we would be greeted as liberators. It was only by sheer luck that the results of our hubris briefly matched your exuberate expressions of freedom when your fellow Iraqis beat on the statue of Saddam in Firdos Square with fists and the dusty soles of their shoes. But that exuberance didn’t last, did it? That same dumb hubris prompted a U.S. State Department toad named Paul Bremer to fire your entire defense industry, a move which put hundreds of thousands of trained Iraqi security personnel—men who wanted to rebuild your country, perhaps even you—right out of work and single-handedly created an insurgency (up to and including ISIS) that locked us into a quagmire for the rest of the decade. A hubris that killed and wounded so many of us and exacted a still-untold cost on you. It was the same hubris that put you and me at odds with each other.

***

And so here we are, back to the moment you closed the circuit on your homemade rocket launcher and tried to kill me. I might say you were brainwashed by psychopaths who arrived in the chaos of our occupation and who used the intellectual shackles of religion to make you a willing participant in my death. There is also the hard possibility these same psychopaths dangled a few hundred American dollars before your impoverished eyes, or maybe just pressed the hot blade of threats against the lives of your family in order to accomplish their bidding, which in this case was to kill Americans with a rocket propelled grenade.

Before I could seek cover behind the wall that surrounded the roof, your rocket exploded with a sharp crack against a building nearby. My veins were flooded with adrenaline and terror. My eyes had widened and my mouth drooped slightly. The sound reverberated across the madness of Husaybah for a number of seconds before it blended into the chatter of distant firefights. My joints felt stiff. I breathed slowly and began to unravel a knot of fear in my gut.

None of the others said much of anything. I suspect we were all ingesting just how lucky we had been. Had you raised the tube a few more inches your rocket might have carved a path right to the wall that surrounded the roof we commandeered, right to where we stood, and exploded with the same flash, spraying hot slivers of metal that might have pierced our bodies and punched frothy little holes into our livers and lungs. The sudden overpressure under our Kevlar helmets might have burst our eardrums and detuned our synapses. You might have killed us. But you were nervous and afraid, so you didn’t.

You appeared again a few seconds later. I saw you in a gap between two buildings as you ran. I knew immediately it was you who had fired the rocket because you looked back over your shoulder at us with wide eyes and a face that seemed to me as if grayed by terror. The emotions that arose in me in a millisecond I can only really describe as a crossbreed of disgust and atavistic rage, backed by the same glaze of self-righteousness that put us in your country to begin with. I was a member of the most skilled military on the face of the planet with the largest reach of any dominion since the British Empire. You were a terrorist from a broken nation. I raised my rifle.

Though it happened too fast to do so then, as I brought my rifle to my shoulder I could trace a trajectory of wanton caveman stupidity from your body to my barrel, through my rifle, and into my shoulder and beyond, all as a dark timeline of American foreign policy misadventures and the stone-crushing hubris of empire that created them. I could trace a hard red line back to the elected officials—thereby including many of us—who had read just enough glorified history to think America was somehow anointed with the right to interfere and manipulate the fates of other nations, as if your wishes, hopes, and aspirations for the future of your country seemed to be of little worth if they didn’t match our own. I can’t help but believe that to be true. We found nothing in your country. No weapons of mass destruction. No nuclear program. No terrorists but for those we ultimately brought with us, in part because of opportunistic religious thuggery, but also because of our ham-fisted American bombasticism.

For many years after 9/11, the United States, in many ways, became Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, chasing the White Whale of our national security through the “War on Terror” to all corners of the world. Like Ahab, we’re a nation with a wounded soul. A whole subset of our population refuses to allow itself to heal. Many of our people gnash their teeth with blood-thirsty indignation and rage, shaking their fists at lands they’ve never seen or even understand. Every anniversary of 9/11, we beat against our sores with old reels of doom and loss. Civic leaders, campaigning politicians, and even sitting statespersons routinely trumpet the call to arms with the fear of your hordes running through our streets with zealotry in your heart and a bomb strapped to your chest. They bang their gavels and shovel money and citizenry into the black maw of war to kill you, hoping that one more body—more than 200,000 civilian casualties in Iraq, so far—will pack that festering wound and finally bring peace. They do this in spite of the understanding that coming into your country was just a few short semantics away from being an outright war crime. But every time we lash out with drones, precision bombers, and surveillance measures the thin vindication that follows clouds a realization that every single bomb we drop, every bullet we fire, and every person we kill in the name of security only chips away at our overall safety. We will simply never be able to kill enough to bring about peace. But we’ll certainly try.

***

And so, with my rifle in my shoulder, I fired three shots.

My bullets struck out with the same thick vitriol that left my mouth when I saw you running away. I don’t remember what I said, but it was undoubtedly profane. My eyes were wide and white with controlled, but crystalline rage. The brass shell casings jingled against the concrete roof and settled. I clicked the rifle safety and let it rest against my body armor. I lit a cigarette. All that bile settled inside me and my heart rate slowed. The rage and indignation was suddenly replaced by a hollow sense of futility.

What am I doing on this roof with a rifle trying to kill you? I wondered. The thought left as quickly as it came; there was no sense in asking. But the hollowness remained and later grew, fueled with similar experiences. For many years after there was a small part of me that grew angry when I thought about you trying to kill me with a rocket propelled grenade. RPG’s are serious business, and you tried to kill me and my friends with one. Over the next few years I would think about you with the same self-righteousness that carried us to your country. Slowly, though, after I put away my rifle and left the service, the self-righteousness morphed into emotionlessness, then finally retrospection.

Regardless of my feelings, I’ve always wondered if you are still alive, and I have to recognize the odds are not in your favor. If we did not kill you before we left Iraq in 2011, then perhaps you died in Syria. Or maybe you were forced into ISIS—the monster that filled the vacuum once we finally left—and the threadbare Iraqi military cut you down, or perhaps we finished what we started and bombed you with our own airpower in our campaigning. Maybe you were killed by Kurds, or by pro-Syrian forces, or Syrian rebels, or perhaps by Russians. Or maybe you’re still out there, lost to the blinding winds of the Forever War, trapped by the flippant whimsy of our commitments.

I’ll understand if you don’t wish to hear any of this. Many things I write here are for you; some of them are for me. I cannot expect either of us to forgive the other for our intentions, nor can we reasonably ask for it. We intended to kill each other for reasons that were both out of our control.

Sometimes I daydream that perhaps the same futility that flooded me after I shot at you also filled your veins, and that you fled the war. I like to think you have a family, maybe a business, and you’re living in peace somewhere. Sometimes I wonder if there is ever a chance when you and I might walk through Husaybah and marvel at the stupidity of our insignificant little battlefield. I wonder if one day I will be able to talk with you, to explain to you how the world I lived in brought me to the world you lived in to destroy your life and finish ruining the lives of those who might have loved you. I want to explain to you what it looked like to see you in your town as I stood on its rooftops with the weight of an empire pressing me toward you. I want to show you the world we lived in when I came with my friends to kill you and others in the name of security for my people. We call it freedom and liberty, but what we really mean is security. I want to show you all the neuroses that fueled the tanks we sent rumbling across your streets and sent high explosives blasting into your home and the homes of thousands of others, neuroses that loaded the bombs onto our jets and dropped them from the clouds and turned to rubble the bones of so many of those you may have known. I want to show you how afraid of the world we had become and in many ways still are today. I want to show you the worth of all the tin gold trying to kill you has earned me, has earned us all. Unfortunately, that will have to wait; I’m still trying to tally its value.

But all these thoughts are nonsense and so I cashier them, yet I know they’ll return at bored moments while I am driving to work on a cloudy Tuesday morning. They’ll show up when I’m jogging, reading a book that I’ve grown bored with, or walking home from a bad date. But no matter how often I think of these things, whenever I think about those three bullets I shot at you and the fear and rage and blinding national stupidity that fueled them I’m always glad about one thing:

I’m glad I missed.

Anyone who knows me at all well can tell you that I don’t really have a personality, per se: what I have instead is a gigantic amalgamation of obsessions. Fandoms. Things like the life and work of Prince Rogers Nelson. Hungarian cuisine. The history of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.  The films of Peter Jackson. The Great War.

So, obviously, when word came through that those last two things were colliding, in the form of a documentary commissioned by the Imperial War Museums, I was nearly beside myself. If anyone could capture the horror and the bravery of the Great War, it’s the guy who gave us the Pellenor Fields and the Battle of Five Armies on the big screen. I counted the days until the release date. I jabbered about it to all three people I know who love WWI as much as I do. I was, to put it mildly, stoked.

Which remained my default state right up until I sat down in the theater to absorb what I truly hoped would be a modern masterpiece. The truth, as always, was rather more complicated.

The version we saw was bookended by both an introduction, and making-of featurette, from Mr Jackson himself. It is my current understanding that the greater theatrical release of the film will not include these, which is a pity, as the film loses much of its impact when one is unaware of the sheer labor of love involved in the restoration of the old footage. And, of course, consider yourselves warned that SPOILERS ABOUND, both for the film and for the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The theater was almost three-quarters full, which surprised us; the crowd was fairly diverse, but included a high proportion of fit middle-aged guys in outdoor-pursuits gear, who by their conversation seemed mostly to be veterans. We live in a university town, so the history dorks (us) were also well-represented. The former dean of the college of arts and letters was there. Enthusiasm was high.

And then we fucking sat there for thirty solid minutes. Not thirty minutes of previews, mind you, but some “edutainment” compiled by Fathom Features that consisted of an “interactive” quiz, six multiple-choice questions about the Great War–“Did the Great War take place in A: 1914-1918, B: 1861-1865, C: Never, D: Last Week” and “Was Baron Von Richtoven, aka the ‘Red Baron’, a A: toilet cleaner in Bournemouth, B: your mom, C: a famous WWI flying ace with 80 confirmed kills or D: the inventor of owls?”–designed for people who have never heard of the Great War.

But when the film finally began, and the rowdy high-schoolers three rows back finally shut up, absolutely everyone in the room was transfixed.

Because this movie is stunning.

It begins and ends with images of the war with which we are familiar, in shades of silver and black and white, complete with the sound effect of an antique projector. The voice-overs are the voices of old men, disconnected from their source, joined to past time and image only by association. Jackson’s decision to jettison traditional narration in favor of archival recordings from Great War veterans is meant to grant immediacy to the film by immersing the viewer in direct experience rather than received history.

The question that must be asked is, “Does this work?” And the answer is, yes and no. While my socialist soul champions the decision to represent the War exclusively from the perspective of the people who actually fought the damn thing, the narrative feels tailored nonetheless. Blame it perhaps on the source material, as the archival audio was taken from something like 600 hours of interviews done in the ‘50s and ‘60s by the Imperial War Museums, who clearly have their own version of the War they wish to promote. A version of the war where the sun still has not set on the British Empire, George V regards us all favorably from the wall of every post office, the tea is hot and everyone knows their place.

There are moments—a few—in the voice-overs where a note of fatalism or horror or even protest will arise. Mild moments, expressed with little fervor, which seem to be included only to evoke veracity. At the end, we get a series of voices reminding us that war is useless, pointless, a waste. A series of voices that feels tacked-on, as though we as an audience of modern sensibilities expect to hear this condemnation. Overall, throughout the film we hear the stories of Tommies who were happy to be there, who’d “go over again,” who missed it when they left, who saw it as “a job of work that had to be done.” Is this the overarching experience of the average British soldier in the war?

My reading has told me otherwise. Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That certainly seems to indicate otherwise. Siegfried Sassoon would undoubtedly curl his lovely aristocratic lip at the very notion. Is it worthwhile to hear these voices, these stories? Absolutely. Is it honest? This I cannot answer, but I have doubts.

But never mind that. You’ll forget all your criticism, all your doubt, if just for a moment, when that color footage hits the screen.

Jackson has always directed with a cinematographer’s eye, and this film is no exception. The first few shots of Tommies arriving in France, clad in khaki (a very authentic shade of khaki, as it turns out; Jackson spent weeks getting the color exactly right from uniforms in his private collection, since Peter Jackson is the world’s biggest World War I geek), baring their very British smiles for the camera: these are enough to make you forget that this footage ever existed in another form. The color used is not the bright and hyper-real shading of a modern film. The tones are very much those of a color photograph from 1914, which just serves to make the images seem more immediate and real.

The soundtrack at this point becomes a thing of pure artifice, but what artifice—Jackson’s otaku devotion to detail has never been showcased to greater effect. As revealed in the making-of featurette at the end, lip-readers were employed to pore over the footage and to reconstruct all possible dialogue. Then, by identifying uniforms or cap-badges, Jackson was able to place the regiments, and based on their origins (Royal Welch, Lancashire, &c.) actually found actors from the appropriate locales and hired them to do the voice-overs.  Further, every boot hitting the mud, every rustle of a rucksack, every clank of a helmet being thrown to the ground is there.

My jaw stayed on the floor for a long while. It is beautiful, there’s no denying that. It is a labor of love. And in true Peter Jackson style, the camaraderie of camp life, the minor inconveniences and sanitary arrangements, or rather the lack thereof, the cheerful bitching about the cheap beer and wretched cigarettes lasts only a little while, to be replaced by the screaming terror of battle and its stomach-turning consequences. Jackson has never pulled his punches when it comes to revolting images (if you’ve ever seen Dead Alive or Meet the Feebles you’ll know what I’m talking about) and this film is no exception. Popcorn went untouched when the images of trench foot, bloated corpses, maggots and rats swarm across the screen.

And yet, it is here that the film reaches its greatest artistic heights. Again and again I was reminded of the works of Otto Dix. For those who don’t know him, Dix was an enthusiastic volunteer for the German army in 1914, whose drawings from the front remain a poignant and disturbing testament to the aesthetic impact of conflict. His true fame came during Weimar Berlin, which earned him the enmity of the Nazis, who denounced him as a “degenerate artist.”

In They Shall Not Grow Old, a shot of a disemboweled cavalry horse strongly recalled Dix’s Horse Cadaver, the animal’s ruined body a testament to the service of all the animals who aided in the war effort.

Many times Jackson shows bodies dangling, untended and ignored, from barbed wire, akin to those from the War Triptych or the obviously named but no less striking Corpse on Barbed Wire.

A group of Tommies, exhausted, huddled together in their trench, are positioned almost exactly like Dix’s Resting Company, the only difference their uniforms. The parallels were too obvious to ignore; Jackson, in his years of searching through the footage provided by the War Museums, had clearly searched for and found footage that matched the works of Dix. Otto Dix, perhaps more than any other artist, truly captured the soul-killing dread and visceral, bleak reality of this war. Jackson, in his deep and thorough understanding of his subject, chose images echoic of Dix’s in order to evoke in the viewer that same sense of despair, of resignation, of trauma. This conscious homage is my favorite takeaway from Jackson’s film.

Whether conscious or not, however, Jackson’s most prominent homage, and ultimately the film’s downfall, lies in its obvious parallels to his most famous subject matter: the works of Tolkien.

J.R.R. Tolkien served in the Lancashire Fusilliers, as a signal-officer. He saw action at the Somme and lost two of his closest school friends to the War.

The narrative structure of They Shall Not Grow Old is, almost exactly, that of Lord of the Rings. A group of brave, innocent Englishmen/hobbits, inadvertently forced away from the comforts of hearth and home, reluctantly but bravely sally forth to do their duty in the face of certain destruction. Along the way, their innocence is lost. They confront unimaginable evil and emerge scarred, only to return home to a land unwelcoming, hostile, entirely changed from the one they left.

Of course, Jackson cannot be blamed for telling the truths of the War; this narrative, though romanticized and muddled, parallels the experience of many Englishmen during the War. It was certainly Tolkien’s narrative. It is the very Englishness of the narrative that presents us with the film’s biggest problem, one Andria Williams (of the Military Spouse Book Review, and a Wrath-Bearing Tree editor) also covered extensively in her review, which is that of representation.

To the casual viewer, seeing They Shall Not Grow Old leaves one with the clear impression that the entire Great War was fought by the British infantry and artillery, more or less single-handed.  The French of course are mentioned, and even seen in a few shots, but overall the collection of images on the screen is of British, Welsh, Scots and Irish troops, every face a white face. The British West Indies Reserves are never seen. The film is innocent of a single Sepoy, there are no Gurkhas, no Malays.

In the featurette at the end of the film, Jackson addresses these concerns with a literal wave of the hand and a dismissive remark about the focus of the picture and the material available to him, while the screen actually shows unused footage of black troops, giving the lie to his explanation even as he offers it. What really pissed off your humble reviewer was the sentence Jackson used to cap this segment of the featurette: “This is a film by a non-scholar, for non-scholars.”

Wow. OK. Certainly it’s not an academic film, but to suggest that giving representation only to white British troops on-screen is in some way justifiable because the film is “by a non-scholar” rubbed me the wrong way. Mr Jackson, you’re going to tell us that you, the man who owns a closetful of original WWI uniforms—the man who literally minutes before was showing off his collection of actual Great War artillery pieces—the man who admitted to owning every issue of The War Illustrated magazine—you, of all people, would offer this lame excuse?

I think the issue here is not an actual dishonesty on Jackson’s part, however. I believe that his inability to see his own biases stems from a long association with the works of Tolkien, in which the War of the Ring is fought and won by the Men of the West, the people of Gondor and Rohan. (Although as noted by other viewers of this film, even Tolkien’s coalition was more diverse than the one shown in They Shall Not Grow Old—at least the Fellowship included elves and dwarves).

The issue of Tolkien’s source material, and whether or not it is actively or casually racist, is one that encompasses far too great a scope for this review. Certainly Tolkien did not think himself a racist, and was a vocal opponent of Nazi racialist theories, even going so far as to send a series of nasty letters to a German publisher who wanted to reprint The Hobbit in the late ‘30s but only after confirming if Tolkien was “arisch”—that is, Aryan. He also hated apartheid, having been born in South Africa, and was similarly vocal in his condemnation of the practice.

Yet there are Tolkien’s own works, which reflect the unthinking cultural biases of a man born in the Victorian era who came of age in the Edwardian. The nations of the East (Rhun, Harad, &c.) are all populated by dark-skinned Men who are under the thrall of Sauron.  Tolkien’s own remarks about the appearance of Orcs (found in his letters) include a distressing description of them as like “the unlovliest of the Mongol-types,” and he explicitly stated that the gold-loving Dwarves were based on the Jewish people, for whom he nurtured a public admiration his whole life, but the association is an uncomfortable one to modern thought.

In conclusion: should you see this film? Absolutely. Should you see it with caveats and reservations? Clearly. Beautiful but flawed, They Shall Not Grow Old is a necessary film, but an incomplete one.

After the Maine Tin Min Company Prospectus, 1880

The earth has veins we can
open with our hammers.
Follow the cassiterite crystals
down where the iron dark
is picked by the swings
of men who name minerals
by the feel of them on damp
fingers, the bands of elvan
quartzite like the rough
footprints of mythical
man, or the smooth track
Of native silver, or gold
Ore floating in the salty
Rubbish of St. Just. Imagine
Fellow capitalists, what
Enterprise can find
Rose colored mica, purple
Fluor spar, tourmaline,
And a thin river of
Tin Ore imbedded among
calc spar crystals, follow
that river, I say, crack
the vein open.

To Find the Center of a Circle from a Part of the Circumference

Which is all I am really after, the path to the midpoint

and how to get there from this little arch

of my hand I’m told to span the dividers any distance

and with one foot on the circumference

describe the semi-circumferences: today pollen and blue sky,

book bound in navy cloth and draped with black

velvet. The ache in my wrist, throat and head dull

like the birdsong we stop hearing weeks ago.

I’m trying to find the center: the point I can cut from.

I pencil out two indefinite lines and lean

under this dome into the illuminated center.

Someone a very long time ago, told me to call point P.

There is comfort in such specifics, but still I feel

like all the unwound clocks that fill old buildings;

there is something I am supposed to do, but

in the fog I am unfocused, turn my head

to another arch and am led away.

—

1.

First or only?

My child is three—
wakes three times

a night
has no room

I would know. Wouldn’t I?

Piling her piss-soaked
blankets on the wood floor
I leave them to fume,

wait for the calendar or the swelling.

8.

I know
and don’t. I’m half-open
hungry, two days
from late.

I dreamt my name wrong.
I dreamt a boy laughing,
my girl pulling his

baby boots on, spelling
her own name that I
could read by water.

37.

Find                                                          a stone to fit the palm,

our last iris, photographs of daughter’s wet curls,  half-burned

and broken candles, recall when sister

believed the rainbow alive.

Collect your pebbles.

38.

I leak
dying larkspur and the strain
of mileage.

It’s a glass night,
with clean towel,
and midwives in
the basement room
where spills won’t
wet spines and this damp
brings the cool harness
of crying.

39.

We set out walking
the child grabs a stick
points at clicking marmots
shakes the trees and piñon
bleeds into her fingers
she twists it into her hair.
She is pitched
and dust rises like fire
billowing between sisters.

Michael Florez felt called to the Marines. “No greater love than dying for your brother,” the 42-year-old Oregon resident says. In 2004, Florez was deployed to Ar Ramadi, Iraq, with the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines. He was the point man, the first guy in to clear buildings of Al Qaeda, Taliban and foreign jihadists. These missions scared the hell out of him because he worried about who would be shot; he wanted that bullet if it meant saving his brothers. He’d been warned that the first deaths in combat would be Marines he didn’t know well, but that each successive death would hit closer. “It was always up close and personal for me,” Florez says. At the end of his first deployment, he came home and locked himself in his house. Every day he stared at the walls, his brain replaying the scenes of fellow Marines dying. His wife would come home to find him curled up on the couch crying. 

Fourteen years and two more deployments later, Florez says every day feels like Groundhog Day. Small things, like hearing his children cry, can trigger a flashback, putting him right back in Iraq, lifting wounded Marines into the Humvee. Today, Florez still looks every inch an active duty Marine, clean-cut and shaven. In the past month he’s lost nearly twenty-five pounds. Eating makes him sick. There’s blood in his urine, and he’s worried about a recurrence of bladder cancer (he’s been in remission for more than a year). But it’s the depression that paralyzes him. There are weeks when he doesn’t leave the house, plagued by thoughts of what he might have done to save a fellow Marine and wracked with a physical pain so intense he’s thought about ending his life. 

“You come home,” Florez says, “and you’re fighting a whole other war with PTSD.” He lost fifteen comrades in combat, half of them right in front of him. Since returning from Iraq, eight of his buddies have committed suicide, one in the past month. The numbness Florez experiences is its own kind of hurt: “I love my kids, but the numbness keeps you from the love you should be able to feel, but you can’t because the pain’s too bad.” When Florez physically lashed out a family member, his wife turned to the Central Oregon Veterans Ranch.

Central Oregon Veterans Ranch (COVR), a nineteen-acre working ranch north of the city of Bend, opened in 2015. The Ranch is home to chickens, llamas, a productive greenhouse, and the Honor Quarters, a fully accredited Adult Foster Home that provides specialized end-of-life care to veterans. It is estimated that there are around 20,000 veterans in the tri-county area of Central Oregon—as of 2018, the Ranchhas served nearly one hundred of them. Many veterans find their way to COVR through family members, including Mike Florez’s, who are desperate for help. 

The Ranch is Executive Director Alison Perry’s life’s work. In 2007, Perry, a licensed professional counselor, was working at VA clinics in Bend and Portland and beginning to despair. She saw combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan being shuffled through a system that pushed pills and sent them home to families who felt helpless. Many of these veterans were abusing drugs and alcohol; they talked about suicide. In the meantime, Perry’s own brother, a pilot in the Army, was in Iraq, and she worried about him every day. Caring for veterans was a personal and urgent mission, and she felt like she was failing them. She remembers saying offhandedly to a colleague in Portland, “I wish we had a sheep ranch out east where we could send these guys when they got home…where they could work the land, sleep under the stars, and be in a community of other vets.”

During this time, Perry was also counseling combat veterans of Vietnam and Korea and noticing a common theme in their conversations about dying. Time and time again, older veterans spoke to her about their wish to die alone, away from family and friends. These men were afraid of losing autonomy and becoming a burden to their families. Perry’s vision of a refuge and place of healing began to take shape. How could she provide a safe environment for veterans to commune and heal, and, ultimately, to die?

Perry, 46, is an energetic woman whose reverence respect and concern for veterans is palpable. When she refers to the veterans at the Ranch as “my guys,” she touches her heart. In developing the unique model of COVR, Perry considered two of the biggest risk factors for suicide: the lack of a sense of belonging, and feeling like a burden. If the property was going to facilitate healing and nurture a sense of self-worth, it had to be more than just a gathering place for veterans; there had to be opportunities for meaningful work and purpose, and ways for veterans to develop a new sense of identity and self-worth. Since opening the Ranch, Perry has witnessed firsthand the “regenerative energy” of caring for animals and working the land.

The Honor Quarters look out to the snow-capped peaks of the Cascade Range. In the entry way, a sign reads, “Heroes Don’t Wear Capes. They Wear Dog Tags.” The Quarters feel like an inviting family home in the modern farmhouse style. A couch and chairs are drawn in close around the fireplace, which is covered in a distressed wood rendering of the American flag. The dining table is decorated with military challenge coins displaying the seals of different units in the Armed Forces. Each bedroom bears cozy, personal touches, like quilts donated by the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and a throw pillow with the word “Dream.” The Ranch is still awaiting grants and additional funding before it can house full-time residents, and as Perry leads me through the empty bedrooms, she expresses both grief and frustration that there are veterans who would benefit from being here right now. 

Ed Ford, a veteran of Desert Storm and Iraq, is a familiar face at the Ranch, and one of many veterans who are indispensable to COVR, according to Perry. Ford comes out at least twice a week to cut lettuce in the greenhouse or dig out irrigation ditches. He speaks with a strong Boston accent seldom heard in this small town in the high Oregon desert. At 53, he’s still a burly guy. He wears a tee shirt from a local multi-sport racing event. A tattoo of the Grim Reaper shadows his left bicep. Like all veterans at the Ranch, he is exceedingly courteous. Ford served twenty years in the Marines—he retired in 2004 and then spent the next eight years working for a private contractor doing security detail in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, he was the Director of Operations when the lead vehicle in a convoy returning to Kabul was destroyed by an IED. Five men were killed, among them Ford’s close friend, Ness. “Looking at him there on the slab, confirming his remains, I knew it could be me next.” Ford finished the job and got out.

These days, Ford tries to stay busy. He holds down two jobs but gets out to the Ranch every chance he gets. Working on the property provides“a good workout” and “burns out a day.” He says it is a relief to be around “like minded individuals” who understand what he’s gone through: “No one’s gonna judge you.” And he knows if he needs to talk, the veterans at the Ranch will be there.

Hanging out with the guys at the Ranch is one of the only things that brings Mike Florez some relief. The first time he went out to COVR, he was introduced to Vietnam vets and immediately recognized the look in their eyes: “the thousand-yard stare…they’d been suffering in silence too. It never leaves you.” Florez says it struck him that the older veterans had been struggling for more than 40 years, but they were still there, getting out of the house, and coming to work on the Ranch. 

“Maybe they can show me something that helps,” Florez says, smiling for the first time. “And maybe I can help the younger fighters getting out. They have no idea what they’re coming home to.” 

Contact the Ranch at [email protected] or COVRanch.org

I went home to Jersey only once since the enlistment. I had to see my Ma. Back in the summer of 2011 I finished Basic and Advanced Individual Training for Cav Scouts and thought I’d officially become a real patriot now. The son of Filipino immigrants transformed into a proud, government-paid U.S. Soldier. A real Soldier, though, I was not. Drill sergeant said that me and the rest of my squad back at A.I.T wouldn’t experience anything too bad in Iraq or Afghanistan by the time we got in it. The War was almost up. When we deployed overseas, it would be like a vacation to Thailand, too easy. “Y’all are the lucky ones,” she said. “You’ll never see anyone die violently in your lives. You can thank Obama for that.” Joke’s on her, though. By the time I was thirteen, I’d already seen a few dead people in my life. My Pops for example. I don’t need to speak on that, though.

I showed up to Newark airport looking like a civilian, not in my ACU’s or my shiny class A’s like the Budweiser commercials have you believe we all come home looking like. Only pogues wear their uniform at the airport. Nah, I wore a grey fitted tee that felt snug and showed off my brown, ripped arms, and some boot cut jeans I picked up at the Fort Benning PX that were too baggy. It was like I was stuck in the early 2000s. Still, I had this image that Ma was going to be real proud of this new look on me. What I expected was love and admiration for the work I accomplished, the money I made, and the simple truth that I did it all on my own. Grown man now, no Pops needed, no bullshit. But when she saw me at the pickup gate with my assault pack and my Class A’s in a garment bag, she stayed in her ’93 ruby-colored Corolla as if she were a goddamn cab.

Woman who popped me out almost twenty-one years ago wouldn’t even get out of her car. She unlocked the passenger door to let me in and only glanced at me once before she drove off. Ma was about five inches shorter than me, a light-skinned woman with black hair that stopped at the back of her neck. She always wore light turquoise blouses, even when it was shy of being cold as hell. In the winter she’d switch between three turquoise hoodies all the time and never anything else, even if the heat was on blast. Two cars in front of us, this college-aged Latino boy was coming out the gate with his mother, girlfriend, and whole extended family in tow like a Pharaoh had just arrived. I wondered about that dude for half of the ride until Ma spoke up.

“Have you eaten anything, Jason?” First thing she said to me.

“Pretzels–”

“What?”

“I had pretzels on the plane. They gave me that and a Sprite.”

“Sugar they put in those sodas will kill you. Do you want to have your heart burst so young like your father?”

I had no answer for that. The main thing on my mind at the time was this: Big Jason Zobel was back in town, looking the part of a Cav Scout. There was a time when I did the whole college thing for a stint—even tried ROTC once—but enlisting turned out to be the smartest thing I ever did. When I completed Basic I went on Facebook and posted my graduation photo. My Facebook Likes lit up (104 to be exact) from a mix of people I never talked to before: high school people, Ma’s side of the family, and even this one girl, Rebecca, who I crushed on all of my junior year but who never gave me a second glance in the hallways of Saint Barnaby High. Rebecca didn’t just like my pic–she commented. She did more than just say, Congrats! She added: “You look so handsome, Jason.” You best believe I saw that shit and sent her a message. I asked if she wanted to chill at Flannigan’s Pub the day I got back to Jersey. Rebecca messaged back, “sure, let’s hang,” and yo, who am I to turn her down?

“You have to eat, Jason,” Ma said. “I’ll cook adobo for you at home.”

I tried to turn the radio on, but she told me not to touch the dial or the air con. She claimed it would kill the battery. I tried to explain that that wasn’t how cars worked.

“Those crooked mechanics changed my oil, and now half of the things don’t work,” she said.

“This is an eighteen-year-old car, Ma. That’s what happens when things get old.”

Ma immigrated to the Land of The Free in the middle of the Philippine dictatorship: President Marcos, military crackdowns on dissidents, drug violence in Manila—all kinds of shit. When I was about seven, she told me about a dude who owed this other dude a bunch of pesos and was straight up shot on the street. Not to say my family’s blood country is Apocalypse Right-The-Fuck-Now but I’d trade Jersey smog over getting gunned down for bad debt. I’m fifty grand in the hole since I dropped out of undergrad and I ain’t paying shit because Uncle Sam said he’d wash it all away if I went off to War in some place he felt like sending me to. Some men have the option to get their slates cleaned after pushing enough paperwork; others have the option to run away from it and never look back. I chose to give myself up to a cause—if you could call it that—and if I get lucky I’ll never even deploy. If I did, I’d deserve what I signed up for. Right?

When we got home, Ma ordered me to pick up groceries since there were no chicken thighs and vinegar in the apartment for the adobo she promised me. I would’ve said sure and gone off, but I got distracted by the horde of boxes stacked throughout the living room. They stretched from the front door all the way to her shrine of the Virgin Mary facing the parking lot. It was a warehouse. One side near the living room couch was stacked with cardboard boxes labeled by QVC, Amazon, and a bunch of stores I’ve never even heard of before. Cases loaded with questionably-made jewelry cushioned by styrofoam packing peanuts; old hardcovers from libraries across the country that rotted at the spine; vinyl discs from bygone musicians I didn’t even know. A brown maze of receiving and no shipping.

Before Benning, Ma had checked out a bunch of books from the library on entrepreneurship and reselling crap on Amazon to turn a profit. She got really into it, first time I’d seen her happy in years. I didn’t stop her. Her ‘business’ had gone on for so long, I almost felt guilty whenever she told me to just wait until “the money comes in.” But we’re both still waiting.

“Where did you get all of this stuff?” I said.

It had been a little over six months since I drove a civilian car, so instead of going to the Wal-Mart five minutes down the road, I plotted for the Target in Lawrenceville, a good half hour away. Some alone time was in order. First, I went to the Wawa for gas, a hoagie, tall can of Monster, and a pack of Marlboro Reds; wouldn’t be a trip home without the essentials. Pops used to smoke a pack of Reds a day, they turned his heart black. Course he never knew about it until it was too late to quit. Unlike some fathers who change and give it up the day their child is born. I figure if Pops could live until the end of his days with tobacco and bad diets, why shouldn’t I?

All him and Ma used to talk about was me being independent and successful one day because they were hard-working immigrants, but what did that mean? When I dropped out of college and told Ma I wanted to enlist, she pretended like she didn’t hear. Instead she avoided me by praying to Momma Mary’s statue plus her whole holy gang. Sometimes she’d leave me for hours at a time: lost in prayer or driving to different churches throughout the county as she never stayed at one parish for too long. I’m amazed I got through high school without asking for her help—like SAT prep, or which college I should go to, or how to interview for a job. That kind of small shit that adds up to big shit after a while. Sure, physically she was there, and she signed checks and authorized payments on bills (sometimes with my money), but on life advice or what I should be doing—she was a ghost.

As I drove, I tuned the radio until I landed on a public station. Two British women were in the middle of a discussion about troop drawdowns in Iraq and what that meant for Afghanistan. I tuned it up to a sound that was slightly short of max. They spoke in gentle voices about the history of The War on Terror. They sounded as if they were reviewing a television show, and not their topic: the wedding massacre in Mukaradeeb by coalition forces. One of them asked, What happens to our children during a time of War? out of nowhere. The other lady paused for a bit and that’s when my fingers turned the knob left, right, and back again before I tuned it off. I struggled to pull one of the Reds out of the box, but I yanked it out and smoked it until it was a brown stub.

—

When I got back with fifteen or so bags of groceries wrapped around my fingers, Ma was still on her laptop. As I stocked the groceries, she called me out.

“What took you so long? You’re putting miles on my car.” She clicked away without looking up. “Took your uniform out. So dusty! I cleaned it up a bit.”

My blue Army Service Uniform was unpacked, hung up on the frame of her bedroom. She wanted me to explain it all to her. Last time I’d worn it was for the AIT graduation party.

Ma stood by me and touched the uniform’s lapel. I explained what every trinket stood for: the name tape, the rank, the flimsy ribbons I sort of earned just for being a living soldier. Ma’s head shook once. Twice, maybe? There was a semblance of recognition I needed—balance, I guess. Part of her eyes got really big then super small, staring at the cross and silver on my upper left chest. When I told her it was a marksmanship badge, meaning I was a good with a rifle—the badge that I’m proud of the most, being a small town Jersey boy with no history of handling a gun, let alone an assault rifle—there was no wow or pause to congratulate me. She asked: How did I pay for this (out of my government stipend) and when do I wear it (things graduation, weddings, or military funerals.) Ma wasn’t too pleased with that last statement. She went straight to bed. I put the ASU back and took her car keys.

“I’m going out, Ma,” I called.

“What did you say?”

“I’m going out. See what’s changed around town for a bit.”

“Do not destroy my car.”

I arrived at Flannigan’s off 295 in Ewing shortly after 1800. By the time I got there, happy hour had started, an hour before Rebecca would show up.

Flannigan’s was a remnant of a New Jersey bar that once was—a replica of what could’ve been a local’s hub straight from a television sitcom, but the idea was scrapped after years of just trying to get by. Bartender didn’t even look at me when I sat in a corner section, far from the Rolling Rock lights and the empty crimson red booths cushions that sunk and tore where your ass was supposed to be. Last time I came around, I was just shy of finishing off high school at eighteen. They didn’t have a guard at the front checking ID’s, it was up to the bartender, but everyone in school knew that no one checked; it made ‘em more money that way. Now the staff changed, the only person still around was one of the regulars: a crusty-looking bald dude with blue eyes and dry skin. Didn’t recognize me though. I ordered a High Life on draft and finished half of it before five minutes passed. The bar’s floor hatch opened from below, and a white boy about my age with a short blonde crew cut emerged. He wore a fitted black tee with the pub’s logo on the front and back.

“Kowalski, can you go back and bring up two more Miller kegs,” the bartender said as he changed the channels from ESPN to Fox News, “they’re tapped out.”

The barback didn’t say a word as he marched back down. I tried to listen to his voice to make sure it was him; but when he came back around to face the door, we stared one another down. Ben Kowalski was a junior when I was a freshman and he used to harass me and other kids in school for the fun of it. We were on the wrestling team together but never got along as I was the most out of shape in the group, chugging behind while he led the team in sprints, suicides, and up-downs. Outside of the sport, he’d pick me out in the cafeteria and chide me, asking if I needed any food today or he’d say something to his group in the hallways whenever I’d pass by, something that made them laugh when my back was turned. It went on for a few months until he got a DUI one semester and he couldn’t act a fool anymore, he’d become one.

At the bar we scanned each other for signs of life’s wear and tear. The Marine was three years older than me, but looked twenty more.

“No shit,” Ben said as he leaned against the bar. “Hey sir, I thought you were trying to be an LT? Least that’s what Facebook said.”

“And I thought you were in jail for selling pills,” I said.

“Murray’s dad helped me out on that one. The Corps a hand in it too.”

“Good for you.”

The two of us slapped hands and hugged, like all that past didn’t make a difference. Ben had developed into a sturdy, wood-colored deck of a man, polished with pink along the edges you can expect—the neck, the ears, and the side of arms. Once he got that DUI, he spent his senior year brawling with people over his ex-fiancé and doing pills with a couple of other oxygen thieves who were either in AA, in jail, or on house arrest now. Sometime after he signed up for the Corps and deployed a few months later.

Ben was getting off work in a few, so I told him I’d wait around. Rebecca was late anyway, I figured she was stuck in traffic or something. I thought about texting her or sending her a Snap, but I didn’t. On the TV, a Fox News reporter in Manhattan said that a former Marine fractured his skull at a California Occupy Wall Street Protest and when I finished my third High Life, the bartender shut it off and called them all a bunch of communists who got what they deserved.

It was Ben’s war anniversary, and also around the time he got out of the Corps, so he was thrilled to tell someone about it. After four years and two deployments on him, he got out so he could work a second shift job at Flannigan’s and third shift at the Buffalo Wild Wings on Route 1, slinging boneless fried chicken and watery beer.

“What about your G.I. bill?”

“What about it? Who needs college?” Ben said.

In the Marines, his role was in signal operations between the various services. He claimed to be a master of the phonetic alphabet, and when I called bullshit, he bought three shots of whiskey and drank them in a row—waited five minutes for it to settle—and proceed to utter each letter backward and forwards, twice. It was like putting together Legos for him.

I was so impressed I offered to pay for the shots, but he kept saying no, no. “It’s OK, brother,” Ben said. “Too fucking easy. It feels like tricks like that are the only thing I’m good at anymore.”

I bought us a round of Miller Lights and he talked about Afghanistan, his last deployment. “We dropped so many rounds on the enemy, but I never got to see any of it up close. Pissed me off. They’d relay back to command how many targets they supposedly took out, or the LT’s on the ground would radio back if they could engage a fucker, and I was pretty much the link between the green light and the action and—” Ben stopped to take out a Marlboro Red and offered me one too. “It was all indirect, never up front, you couldn’t see them. I know I got ’em because I’d hear the report on the comms or watch the video a few days later. Every shot hit home. One minute a dude is running for his life in a poppy field and then out of nowhere…his remains are painted all over the flowers. Yeah. Yeah. It was fun. Hey man that’s sick you went enlisted man, you’ll fucking love it and then hate it a few days later. What did you sign up for in the Army?”

I told him about the cavalry.

“You went Cav? Cav? Why the fuck would you sign up to be a bullet sponge, homeboy? You should re-class and go M.I. They got the hottest chicks in the Army. Bar none.”

I offered to drive Ben home but he said, “I’m Good to Fucking Go.”

He got in his green Jeep and swerved out of the parking lot while I waited past twenty-three hundred for Rebecca to show up, except she didn’t. She didn’t text or nothing. About an hour in, ex classmates from high school came into the pub and passed me by—they looked at me, squinted, and walked away. Few people remembered me, can’t blame ‘em. I only had about two hundred or so friends on Facebook, perhaps eighty percent or more of them I didn’t even talk to. It could’ve also been the beer and Ben’s shots that must’ve given me some kind of funk for people to keep their distance, but by midnight the buzz went away, and I started sipping on another light beer minding my own until this brunette approached me to say hi and she called me Eduardo, and when I said I wasn’t him, she apologized, turned, and went to her friends by the pool tables. I finished another pint and drove to Ma’s with the windows down. The night’s chill pressed against my face and tickled my scalp. A Statey followed my ass on Route I-195 from Trenton to Robbinsville until it zoomed around me to pull over a speeding Camaro. An ambulance roared by in the other direction. Where it went, God knows.

I got home a quarter past one. Five thick red candles flickered along the apartment’s window sill. The Venetian blinds swung in a lazy, steady motion, guided by the wind. I unlocked Ma’s the front door and listened to the soft murmurs of prayer in a mix of Tagalog and English. She was in a nightgown, her knees pressed against the carpet, praying to the Virgin statue; tiny candles lit around Mary’s ceramic feet like beggar children. Her eyes remained closed as her index fingers clutched the red rosary beads, her lips lost in the movement of The Lord’s Prayer. She didn’t stop or look over until I locked the door.

“You took my car without permission,” she said.

“You said I could take it.”

“No. I asked where you were going,” she took a deep breath and turned back to the statue. “Come here. Pray with me, Jason.”

My walk must’ve been awkward, gaited even, but I got on my knees next to her. It must’ve been the smell of candles that had me all fucked up still. It had been a while since I’d done this. I tried to recall how to pray and what to pray about; Hail Mary, or Our Father, or The Apostle’s Creed. They all sound the same. Ma tapped my closed fist. “Pray,” she said.

Prayer is an eerie and intimate feeling with another person next to you. When Pops was still around, we went to Saint Barn’s as a whole family. We knelt in the rows at the front, not too far off from big Jesus himself looking down upon us. We recited the rosary, bead for bead. When it was done, Ma went up to the rows of candles and lit one up for her sister, another for her home in Manila, and another for Pops. Come up, Ma said to me, and I lit one up for my future, whatever that looked like. Another for Ma. Another for Pops. The light glowed in front of me as if it were a power that only I could hold; a thing that I could control.

After extinguishing the candles, I helped her to the bedroom. Her body felt grainy against my shoulders, light in weight but uneven and hard. I laid her down upon the mattress, stacking the pile of self-help magazines and business textbooks on her bed to the floor. As I tucked her in, she grabbed my wrist.

“When are you leaving me, Jason?”

“Soon. Back to Texas. Army life. Afterwards, maybe I’ll deploy. I don’t know.”

She rubbed my wrist. “You’ve always had dry skin problems,” she said, “you need to put on some lotion. My boy. God, you’re my only boy. My only boy is going away.” Her hand flowed down onto the bed in a slow, fluid, motion like a fat droplet of Georgia rain water off an up-armored Humvee’s roof. I closed her bedroom door with my body upright, my neck tight and my eyes salty with sweat from the whiskey or the candles or I don’t know. In the darkness of her warehouse, I sat on the couch and wrapped my left hand around the straps of my assault pack and tapped my fingernails against my knee with the other.

my family lived there before it was Maine
before this was a even a country

they still live there so we visit
we fly in and out of the Jetport

we place our shoes in a tray
empty our pockets on the way home out west

the guy asked which one of us was Grace
I pointed to the infant perched on my arm

she was selected for
enhanced security screening

it’s possible that happened in the same tunnel of air
the hijackers passed through

the imaginary tube
the human-shaped ribbon through time

the permanent trace of their movement through space
I could see it all at once

we have repeatedly walked in
the steps of those men

the hotel manager where they stayed
had a nervous breakdown

I flew over the Pentagon and Manhattan
one year afterward

other deployments far away
that all blend together

we drove by that hotel again
as we left Maine this summer

we take off our shoes
in a new part of the terminal

and our departure gate is always next
to the old closed security line

little kids run around under a big toy airplane
that hangs over that spot now

a child-sized control tower and terminal building
instead of x-ray machines

we wait to go home
and I always look over

at the playground
in the path of destruction

Too often your mind wanders back to those places where God has turned his face away. For example: the prison your platoon guarded in Baghdad in the early months of the war. Displaced Iraqi families were making new homes under the comforting shadows of your machine guns and you kicked soccer balls around the dusty yard with delighted Arab children like you would have had they been your own nieces and nephews.

But they were not your nieces and nephews, and at the end of the day they would sleep in jail cells stained and streaked with the blood of their countrymen, tortured and executed by now-deposed Saddam Hussein and his two crazy sons. When you walk down the narrow hallways, peering through iron cages, you marvel at the claw marks in the walls, made by human claws, and at the shoestrings and bootlaces and belts, broken and frayed, tied to the window grates where the doomed had tried to hang themselves, where desperate people would now be grateful for the shelter.

As you lounge on the roof of the prison, baking within the overwatch position on the roof—which is just a makeshift tent rigged from ponchos encased in sandbags with cheap folding camping chairs you’ve purchased at the PX back in Kuwait—smoking shisha from a hookah in the heat of the afternoon sun, you begin to better understand why you are there.

Marwan, the Iraqi kid from across the way who’s been acting as an unofficial translator, tells you more of what you’ve heard on CNN and Fox News and read in the New York Times and Stars and Stripes. The torture and the death. The rape and pillaging. The opulent wealth and endless greed.

One late afternoon, after you’ve been in place for a few days and the locals start wandering over to barter, or look on curiously, a couple of girls come to visit. They look to be in their late teens and they don’t have their heads covered. They come asking for cigarettes, or Pepsi, or something of which you wouldn’t have thought that’s the thing they’d be looking for after having been invaded just a few weeks earlier, but they do and they stick around to chat in their limited English. One is blonde, probably dyed, and they are unafraid to talk to American soldiers, they ignore your weapons and body armor, and they ask things that every girl would ask a soldier, about your wife or girlfriend and if you have children, that kind of thing.

Marwan has seen this before. Maybe with the Marines in the weeks prior. “Turkish,” he says, and makes a face. “Prostitutes, I think.” They invite you for tea in their apartment, on the tenth floor across from the prison. That’s high up. You have an image of yourself spiraling face first to meet your death from blunt cardiac trauma while Turkish whores rifle through your wallet, your squad leader gingerly rolling over your smashed head with a gloved hand and wondering where your BDU pants are.  What his after-action report would sound like. You think that this is not a good idea.

“Come on, man,” says the PFC most enamored with the girls. “We’ll go and come back before anyone knows.” The girls follow the debate with hopeful expressions. For tea, they insist. Yeah, right.

You do think about it. The logistics of it. One up, one down. Cover me while I cover you, that kind of thing. What the hell, right? You could all be dead by morning. You don’t even know what you’re doing here besides babysitting an empty prison rapidly filling up with displaced Iraqis.

But the Turkish girls go home, much to the disappointment of the PFC.

The shift is over, but because there is nothing else to do but sleep, this is where you stay. The next team takes up positions in another spot, eating the good parts of their MREs and tossing the remainder to the kids below. You smoke hookah until the sun goes down, Marwan heads back to his apartment, and eventually you drift in and out of a fitful sleep on a poncho liner underneath the stars for a couple hours before waking up to drink water and rinse the dust off your face and out of your mouth and eyes again. Some of the guys are sleeping in the trucks still, but you and your team will sleep on the roof because it’s both easier and minimally more comfortable, at least at night when it’s about thirty degrees cooler.

This is a strange place for a prison, you decide: behind a government complex and smack in the middle of a residential street. You suppose Saddam Hussein had them everywhere, so probably people just forgot they were there. Until the invasion when he gave the order to empty the prisons and release all the prisoners, and the inevitable chaos that followed such a directive when criminals, psychopaths, dissidents, and whoever else were now back out in the street. You wonder what condition these prisoners were in. Did they just stagger out, the ones that could, blink into the sunlight and fall back down onto their knees into the sand in despair? Did they dash from their cells and out the prison gate into the apartment complexes and beg passersby for a bite to eat, some money for a taxi, or a cellphone to call their loved ones? Did they just run outside and murder the cellmate they hated, or track down the guy sleeping with their wife and kill him amidst the chaos of the American invasion or join in on the citywide looting sprees with their countrymen? You wonder these things for a while, smoking cigarettes on occasion to pass the time.

You stare at the now vacant Ministry of Information building, hulking, towering above the prison yard. What kind of government information ministry has an onsite prison? You think it would be like if the Voice of America office in Washington D.C. had its own prison behind it for anyone accused of crimes against it. Voice of America dissenters all locked up and forced to listen to Armed Forces Radio deejays and shitty Brittany Spears pop music on a loop twenty-four hours a day. The horrors, you think. What if, though? What a weird fucking place, you answer your own question. That’s the only answer.

You think about “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam Hussein’s comically misinformed Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who spent the last days of the war broadcasting that the American infidels were committing suicide outside the city gates while American tanks rolled down Baghdad’s streets. What’d Bob do in his off time? Stroll casually through the backyard prison kicking at the cell doors of prisoners and late-for-work newscasters, calling them imperialist dogs and commies and stopping occasionally to administer the usual electric shock or to rip off a fingernail or two? Where’s old Bob now? Where is that crazy fucker?

What’s Baghdad Bob going to do with himself now that there’s no war to rattle on about? You picture him hosting Iraqi Jeopardy in his retirement, some sultry Iraqi swimsuit model flipping clues on the game board. “Weapons of Mass Destruction for $200,” he announces to the audience, his signature black beret still plastered to his head.

You wonder if Baghdad Bob had a fancy office, all gold and gaudy and plastic-treed, with ornate massive chairs like at Uday’s palace where the platoon first was camped out. You think maybe you’d like to go look for that office, kick your boots up on his desk, take a picture with his favorite beret on or something. Maybe tomorrow.

“Where you wanna go?” asked your buddy Jay from home, another sergeant who’s come up the ranks just a couple years before you.

“I’m just going to go to see what kind of cool shit’s left behind that the Marines didn’t get,” you tell him. “You know, like flags and uniforms and bayonets and shit. Stuff to send home.”

“Yeah, let’s do it then.”

And so the two of you go in the morning. You stack your rifles in the overwatch lean-to—bringing pistols only; you want to be light and unencumbered–and tell the specialist on watch you’ll be back in a bit.

This is how soldiers die, you decide. Boredom, the age-old killer. Boredom and curiosity and kleptomania combined. You’re still going to go in, though.

When you step inside the exterior door to what must have been the basement loading dock, all you first see is what looks to be an abandoned storage room, desks and furniture tipped over, papers scattered everywhere, nothing too exciting. Because it is dark and there are few windows on this floor, the two of you alternate using your high-powered Surefire flashlights as you sweep the corners of the room, peering into the shadows, stepping gingerly over spilled boxes of binders, files, gas masks, breathing canisters for gasmasks, and piles of other stuff you can’t quite make out.

“This is pretty fucking stupid, man,” you whisper to Jay who grins and whispers back, “So, fucking go back out, then,” nodding in the direction you just came. But you don’t. And you know neither of you will. The two of you are going to the top of this thing, and you both know it, stupid or not. And so, you sweep left to right, right to left, Surefire flashlights in your left hands and Beretta 9mm pistols in your right, wrists and backs of your hands together in the traditional police “ice pick” grip, and the two of you move slowly shoulder to shoulder, back to back, toe to heel, trying not to make a sound.

There are definitely people still in there, though. Or close by. You can hear other voices somewhere else around the building, muffled, but human nonetheless. Considering the population of displaced persons now living in the prison cells next store, you wonder if there are displaced persons doing the same thing you are, looking for cool shit to steal, or maybe food.

Yeah, you think if they’re displaced persons, then they’re probably looking for things they can live off of, food and water, things to sell maybe.

Unless they’re Fedayeen hiding out still, or wounded Ba’ath Party Ministry officials biding their time, waiting for the right moment to escape. You feel the hair tingle on the back of your neck and the muscles in your forearms tighten and the flexor tendon connecting that muscle to your trigger finger twitch. If someone comes around that corner screaming “Allāhu akbar!” you’ll be prepared to double-tap that motherfucker and hope for the best. You flick the safety off the Beretta and look at that little reassuring orange dot that says it’s ready to do its job, and you hope that this is one of the days when it doesn’t jam.

Jay does the same and you say “Shhh…” with your pistol barrel to your lips instead of an index finger, but it comes out as more of a nervous “Shhh…” giggle and he suppresses his own nervous laugh.

“We’re fucking assholes,” you say under your breath.

“Yeah we are,” he smirks.

It occurs to you briefly that any one of the boxes or drawers or corrugated metal filing cabinets that you’ve just kicked open might have exploded in your faces, and you might be nothing more than a pink mist clinging to the thick morning air right now if you kicked the wrong box, and then you see it and any thoughts of tactical awareness evaporate the second you glimpse that red, white, green, and black fabric wedged between the box of photographs and flipped over desks.

You will have no thought whatsoever that those photos of men women and children are most likely of prisoners who have been tortured or killed while you’re hurriedly pushing aside the only evidence of their existence with the hopes that you will get your greedy little dirty mitts on the discarded colors that represent their homeland.

But you don’t give a shit about that. You want your souvenir. You kick that box of Iraqi humanity right the fuck out of your way, and you pull that Iraq flag out from under all that shit and hold it up. “Jackpot. Look at this thing,” you say and it’s intact other than the line of successive holes singed around the edges where it appears that a Marine or some other fucker went full auto with a small caliber rifle.

“Damn, son,” Jay shakes his head, “Fucking jackpot.”

“Don’t worry, man,” you say, “We’ll get another one.” And so, the two of you clear all twelve floors left to right, right to left, ceiling to floor, floor to ceiling—looking not for enemy fighters, or hidden caches of weapons and evidence of the Saddam Hussein’s regime of tyranny, but because you are looking for garbage quality mementos like flags and unit insignia and bayonets that the Republican Guard has discarded to send home to your colleagues in suburban Connecticut.

When you get to the top, the sun is blinding, the blue skies are clear, there are only a few burning buildings in the distance, and the effect is surreal. You have a butt pack fall of Iraqi flags, Republican guard insignia, and other Iraq military paraphernalia in your U.S. Navy-issued Kevlar vest under your Connecticut National Guard-issued flack vest and you’re not dead.

It’s a beautiful day in Baghdad, you think. “Good morning Baghdad!” you scream into the wind doing your best Robin Williams in Vietnam impression. Jay laughs and points to an abandoned anti-aircraft gun emplacement at one of the corners of the rooftop, and the two of you gleefully climb into the gunners’ seats completely forgetting to check the thing for booby traps. You get up to set the timer on the camera that you brought with you and the two of you take celebratory photos sitting in Baghdad Bob’s anti-aircraft gun on the top of his wrecked and looted and bombed-out office building. Just a couple of buck sergeants hanging out on the roof like fucking tourists.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, man,” Jay says, and so the two of you descend the twelve stories in a much less guarded fashion than you climbed it.

Years later when you are home again and you have dragged that same Iraqi military shit around since that day in the Ministry of Information building well over a decade ago, you will wonder why you still have it. Why you still schlep it from place to place, apartment to apartment, state to state, and country to country so many years later. You will want to know what it means, what value it has, this box of war tokens still smelling of smoke and dust and fear and stupidity a decade and a half later.

But you won’t know why you hold onto it, of all things. The footlocker that holds those things that you took so long ago is the only thing that you would never part with of all your earthly possessions. You think that these are the things that should be buried with you when you finally go. That this should be the rule: whatever remains of any war ought to be buried with whoever has been a part of it. That maybe this is your final penance, to be buried with your stolen Iraq War paraphernalia. Your dinars and your insignia and your bayonets and your flags. Bury it with you, and you with it; and bury the war, and forget you and it and your part in stealing it. Forget your part in a dirty war.

We came home

And had nothing to do and nowhere to go and too much freedom and money and space and women and cars and booze.

No more mission

Like a marathon runner collapsed at the end of a race and across the finish line and not really sure how to stop running or what to do next.

We missed each other

These other humans didn’t get it and had never been in that place where it was not fun but we had fun anyway because we had the love of combat brothers

We were bored

Because no matter what, nothing we would do in a week back home was even close to being the team with unlimited government funding using state of the art weapon technology

And none of us yearn for combat

But we do wish we could go back to a time where our actions mattered and our friends were nearby and we all had a great goddamn adventure ahead of us.

And now we know

That “in our youth our hearts were touched with fire” and that everything that comes next will probably suck in comparison because life needs us to be paying cable bills and walking dogs

And it’s hard

To find meaning in things of little consequence when we learned so early on that the world is big and scary and violent and can be filled with acts of valor and sacrifice and hate and love.

So our only option

Is to live such a great and full life of found meaning in meaningless tasks as to make the sacrifices of those who didn’t come home and don’t get to walk the dog all worth it.

So we try

To draw as much life out of life and to execute a new mission of a great and purposeful existence

Because not all of us can

Because some didn’t make it back.

Tracer

There is one round among many
Painted with that iridescent color of night time illumination
Designed to mark the path
Of bullets flight in jet black fear fueled midnight battles

Zips towards the enemy
A laser of lead and anger

Ricochet path betrayed by a bright glow

The rule is

That for every one you see

There are many more you don’t

Just like the veterans suffering back home years later
We can see one every so often
Glowing in pain

Tracing the path of alcohol fueled rage and family splits and no jobs and hard times fitting in

But we all know
For the one we see
There are lots more

Descent

On the escalator at the airport

I saw a young man headed down as I was moving up

He wore that same familiar ripstop nylon rucksack that I knew all too well

It had patches from his units and friends and adventures

It had the same contents as mine

He carried in it lots of sadness for the friends he had lost

And guilt that he had made it back

And fear for what to do next

And memories of things he should not have done

And dreams of little girls dying

And lessons about leadership

And instincts to make his bed

And tears from current day family strife

And resumes to find new jobs

And drinks for when times get hard

And pills from the doctors

But it wasn’t his rucksack that made me know he was a combat veteran

It was the knowing dead look in his eyes that gazed right past me and through me at the same time in that one brief moment where our missions intersected.

Every fall I read the first stanza of the Iliad out loud to my students: “Sing, Goddess, the Anger of Peleus’ son Achilles / and its devastation…” (Iliad I:1-2)[1]. I ask them what the poem is about and eventually someone states the obvious: Achilles’ anger. Then I ask how the poem ends. Someone says with a horse. He’s wrong. In fact, most the memorable cultural highlights from the Trojan war—the abduction of Helen, the Trojan Horse, the Death of Achilles—never show up in the Iliad. Even more discouraging, no glorious gains. King Arthur gets Camelot, Beowulf saves Heorot hall, Aeneas gets Rome. What does Achilles get? He gets angry, mourns his dead friend, and then brutally kills a lot of Trojans. As far as a war story goes, the Iliad is a killjoy.

What makes the Iliad a great war epic then? Why is it folklore that Alexander the Great, one of the greatest military conquerors of the Western world, slept with the Iliad (in scroll form, mind you) under his pillow so that he might fight as the reincarnation of Achilles? Why is Achilles remembered as the great warrior who won glory at Troy? To me, the gainless brutality and relentless sorrow written about in the Iliad doesn’t reaffirm the glory gained in war but squashes it. And this is, as far as I can tell, what we get from the first great war epic: the demystification of the glories of war and the tragic delusion of Force.

In her famous essay The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force, Simone Weil says the true hero of the Iliad is Force. By Force she means, “It is the x that turns anybody who is subject to it, into a thing…Somebody was here, now nobody is here at all.” The Force on display in the Iliad is not the mechanized and industrialized warfare we know. Instead, it is spears and swords ripping and puncturing flesh, vividly. Here is an example:

“Hippolochos sprang away, but Agamemnon killed him dismounted,
cutting away his arms with a sword-stroke, free of the shoulder,
and sent him spinning, like a log, down the battle.” (Iliad XI: 145-147)

The Iliad is chalk full of gruesome descriptions of bronze cutting limbs and shattering bone. This stuff may just be an example of something like a Tarantino e.g., Kill Bill or Django fascination with graphic human carnage. Or a Mel Gibson war movie interested in giving the most brutal war examples on record. Gahw! Look at all that blood! In some ways, I think Homer is interested in the gruesome spectacle of Bronze Age combat. But, unlike Tarantino and Gibson, Homeric death scenes are especially visceral for the audience because the warrior getting gutted is a man with a name, a lineage, and a history. He’s not just an anonymous human body—or whole group of bodies—exhibited to bleed and die. There are no anonymous deaths in the Iliad. Every death is particular. Although the individual warriors may reduce each other to objects, Homer refuses. Here he tells of a pair of brothers, one of whom will shortly die:

“There was a man of the Trojans, Dares, blameless and bountiful,
a priest consecrated to Hephaistos, and he had two sons,
Phegus and Idaios, well skilled both in fighting.
These two breaking from the ranks of the others charged against Diomedes”

(Iliad V: 9-12)

These young men enter under the contract of Force, and Phegus dies in the dust only a few lines after we learn who he is. Someone has become nothing. Although the Force of combat destroys young men, Homer resists the Force by reminding us of a man’s identity before he is slain. Still, Force in war takes individuals and turns them into dust. There is only death, and this is most clearly seen in the waring rage of Achilles, the incarnation of war.

Achilles is the ultimate weapon. As one of my students said, he is like a nuclear weapon released on the Trojans. He kills without pity or discrimination. Here is Homer’s description:

“As inhuman fire sweeps on in fury through the deep angles
of a drywood mountain and sets ablaze the depth of the timber
and the blustering wind lashes the flame along, so Achilles
swept everywhere with his spear like something more than a mortal
harrying them as they died, and the black earth ran blood.” (XX: 490-494)

As you read about Achilles’ exploits, you can hear Oppenheimer saying, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” As an incarnation of war, Achilles demands ultimate, sweeping annihilation. Three chapters of killing culminate in the death of Hector, the prince and protector of Troy. Achilles attaches Hector’s limp body to the back of his chariot and drags the body around the walls of Troy for his family to witness.

“A cloud of dust rose where Hektor was dragged, his dark hair was falling
about him, and all that head that was once so handsome was tumbled
in the dust; since by this time Zeus had given him over
to his enemies, to be defiled in the land of his fathers.
So all his head was dragged in the dust; and now his mother
tore out her hair…and his father beloved groaned pitifully.” (XXII 401-407)

This iconic disgracing of Hektor’s body intentionally furthers the sorrow of Hector’s surviving family members. It does little for Achilles. After all the Force Achilles brings against the Trojans, he is still angry. This destruction has brought him no respite, and he cannot fill the void in his heart that was caused by the death of his friend, Patroklos. As Weil writes: “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims: the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.” Achilles subjugates a slew of Trojans to the equation of Force, and in doing so he loses all sense of pity for other human beings. Ironically, pity turns out to be the one thing Homer thinks can lessen a small portion of Achilles’ suffering.

This is the truth that Achilles swallows at the end of the poem. Force only brings more sorrow, and this does nothing to quell his own sorrow. Force exacerbates sorrow and can never end it. The Iliad is not an anti-war story as we might conceive it with a clear moral lesson about the sorrows of war. I don’t think Homer thought he could end war, just like he couldn’t stop floods or forest fires. But, by putting violence and sorrow on display in the way Homer does, he saps war of its glorious claim and forces the reader of the poem to witness a mother and father in despair.

Life in war is suffering, Achilles tells Priam at the end of the poem. Weil, in a terrible historical predicament herself (born Jewish and living in Nazi occupied France) also echoes Achilles’ sad realization. “Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes. The strong are never absolutely strong and the weak are never absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they belong to the same species.” Perhaps humans can’t end violence, but they can transcend the dictates of Force and be godlike in lessening this sorrow. This is the change Achilles bears witness to at the end of the poem. When Priam enters Achilles’ tent to ask for Hector’s body back, Priam grabs Achilles’ knees and begins his plea:

“‘Achilles like the gods, remember your father, one who
is of years like mine, and on the door-sill of sorrowful old age…’ (XXIV: 486-7)

Confronted by Priam, Achilles then sees his own lonely father in Priam’s face, and returns the body of Hector to the Trojans. Achilles forgives his enemy and discovers pity.

The more I read the Iliad, the more I am convinced that the poem does not glorify war in any meaningful way. Instead, the poem exposes us to gratuitous pain, destruction, and suffering. The poem is not epically cool; it is epically sad. In this, the Iliad sets a precedent by telling a war story with all the gore but no glory. It points out the sadness and vanity of the endeavor. This precedent of overwhelming sadness continues in many of the other great war novels of Western literature. Books like Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Things They Carried are common in our high schools and challenge the idea of glory in war. Glory and military virtue are not the main subject of many of the war novels we, as a culture (or at least high school teachers), consider great. Is a great war novel primarily an anti-war book then? Not necessarily. For me, what makes the Iliad a war-epic is that it can help us rediscover, or even reimagine, a part of our humanity. This is what we see in Achilles at the end of the poem.

Achilles learns through his own sadness how to become a human that extends pity even to his enemy. In doing so, he rejects his god-given power that subjugates those weaker than him to Force. I see this as heroic. Achilles shows moral imagination by going beyond the glory of his warrior culture, relieving the sorrows of war, rather than exacerbating them. By the end, Achilles understands the limits of Force and moves beyond those limits by practicing an empathetic kindness toward his enemy, Priam. Achilles only understands the limits and delusions of Force by living them out. Perhaps only a powerful man like Achilles can show us this because he has the full control of Force at his fingertips. In the end, Homer has Achilles use his power to heal a wound he created, and in doing so, he shows us what is meaningful about being part of the human species.

[1] All quotes are from Lattimore’s translation of The Iliad

Here are some facts about

The Great War. It started in 1913.

We know that from books.

and the scarred nobles

grandma met in the deli

off 23rd and 8th,

Ich hätte gerne eine Bratwurst

they’d say, eyes scared red.

It was my fault; I must admit,

quanta exist in different places and

in different times;

some have been in my brain,

and also in Hitler’s old brain

the war’s most famous vet.

Not quite Afghanistan; still, his war

and my war was the same,

A vicious trick,

Russian saboteur

made disasters, it’s true,

walk with me here:

the Soviets invade in 1979.

Great Britain joins France

as the Marne collapses,

a wet snowdrift, over-heavy

in 1914. Add the numbers.

We surround ourselves with stories,

these fluid lines always converge.

Remember that line, the human

marching through town, shrive-faced,

boots laced tight, cap perched on his

kiss-me forehead, rifle shouldered,

we’re gonna beat the Hun—

there’s another line, now, 451AD,

Attila plundering across the plain,

stopped by whom? The Roman? No—

Aetius heads a motley crew of Frank

and Gaul, Suebi, Goth and Visigoth,

and Saxon! Yes, the Germans saved

the West from Hunnic rule!

Until—it always comes around to this,

that boy marched home again

some years after the great siege,

at Verdun, Ypres, or Somme;

really it doesn’t matter.

Siege used to mean sit, but he won’t;

not without his boots and cap,

all that chipper stuff gone,

he’s been unseated, the siege lifted

his mien took on a leaner slant,

suspicious eyes for prying words

could not prepare a waiting world

for what came next.

Plenty! Champagne avec vous

on all the quays and ways

of Venice, Paris, Bruges;

Sur la table, Monsieur?

If you weren’t there, you can’t know,

and he wasn’t. All there.

***

When will war weary of me. Woeful wight,

wailing across the width of destiny,

I sprawl comfortless in a rancid hole,

a thick cloth great-coat stiff with sweat and grist

my second skin, then, for a skull, some tin

riddle: helmet, brain-pan, will you sit still?

The unfrozen mud’s alive, the stench, strong,

rat I’d say, someone’s let them in. Writhing,

muse for a Rosenberg, a whole den’s worth:

and that’s a good day, without bullets, bombs,

or the whistling artillery storm—

the rain of steel shrapnel, cutting like wind

across Europe’s newly irreligious plain—

flesh, it seems, has a its breaking point, splits wide

the human spirit spills, squandered, betrayed

amid the great gulf between my chilled hand

and the quiet, marble hand of German kin;

or British, or French—what odd clay. The flesh

grieves, parted by that vast, pitted waste,

unshrivened the filthy flesh yearns to be

whole again; compartmented, sufficient,

Unified. one man, one nation—one God.

***

A great civilizing wind stirs on the plains.

Leaves cast off the towns, like trees,

the Supple young men march in step

all balled fists, full of boasting oaths

they stride, ennobled by a promise

of liberation, plunder, and rape.

The best of the land! This lot’s the best!

But someone’s pulled a cruel prank.

At the front, the sergeant calls time

with a note pinned to his back. It reads:

“Take my wife, she’s free.”

Below, a crude sketch.

***

On a computer or smartphone,

an educated citizen

has just checked the market. It’s up,

cause for optimism, and sun,

and a feast fit for all the hounds

who prowl our sordid memory,

just looking for some sad excuse

to get me back out in the fury

.

During this ongoing centenary of the First World War, I became more interested in the details of the Italian front in that war, a campaign not generally well-known to Anglophones like me. It did not take me long to realize that I was also quite ignorant, historically speaking, of their opponent—the Austrian-Hungarian empire. A friend recommended Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities as a very philosophical novel that I would appreciate. From there I discovered Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March and other novels, and Stefan Zweig’s varied fiction and his memoir, The World of Yesterday.

All three writers, Musil (1880-1942), Zweig (1881-1942), and Roth (1894-1939), share many similarities. The first thing is that they were all exact contemporaries. They were all born and came of age at the height of fin de siècle Viennese culture. They were all outsiders in that society to some extent. Zweig and Roth were both secular Jews, and Musil’s wife was Jewish. All three had books burned, and were ultimately destroyed themselves by the Nazis. Like almost everyone, they were affected by the First World War, and dedicated most of their authorial attention to describing Austrian society before and after the war. All three were preoccupied by suicide, a prevelant theme in Viennese culture then. They were dedicated to literature and the arts, and despite different styles, I believe them to be among the greatest writers of the first half of the century in any language.

When I realized that Musil’s magnum opus The Man Without Qualities was over 1000 pages, I decided to approach him via a more accessible route. His early novel The Confusions of Young Törless is also critically acclaimed, and I immediately understood why. Published in 1906, Törless is a Bildungsroman about young boys in an all-male military boarding school, mirroring Musil’s own early experience. It is both disturbing and fascinating how Musil probes the psychology and motivations of the three main characters in forming a sort of triumvirate of power over the other boys in the class. This early novel also vaguely foreshadows the latent cruelty and bigotry combined with Germanic militarism that would devolve into the future Nazi state.

The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) was Musil’s ongoing project from the early 1920s until his death in 1942. It is very openly a “novel of ideas,” somewhere between The Brothers Karamozov and The Magic Mountain. It is easily one of the greatest works of high Modernist fiction, somewhere between Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. Though unfinished, its three volumes run to over 1700 pages in some editions, and around 1100 for the English translation. The unusual title refers to the protagonist Ulrich, a young mathematician who is searching for something like a meaning and morality to combat his seeming indifference to life and his place in bourgeois society. There are several other unforgettable main characters: especially Diotima, a cultural muse for Viennese society who held philosophical salons, and her would-be lover Arnheim, a wealthy Prussian businessman who also writes popular books of essays and rivals Ulrich’s intelligence. A character named Moosbrugger, a hulking laborer who murders a prostitute, provides an ongoing digression and topic of moral and legal interest for Ulrich. 

As Musil had already demonstrated in an earlier volume of tales called Five Women, he had a particular talent for creating rich and interesting female characters, especially compared to other male writers from his time. In addition to Diotima, there is Clarisse, a more intellectual Holly Golightly-type, Bonadea, Ulrich’s bored housewife lover, and Agathe, his mysterious sister that appears only in the last part of the novel.

It seems like Musil’s ambition and his intellect were almost too much to be contained in this single sweeping novel. As a novelist, he seems too big for his time. The Man Without Qualities, written in the 1930s during the slow buildup to a bigger war, is set in the period just before the First World War. The main plot deals with the so-called Parallel Campaign, a military-like campaign to plan and execute a national celebration for the 70th year (!) of Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign which would occur in 1918 (the reader knows this never occurred, as he died in the middle of the war). There were never any specific proposals drawn up, but it was to be a earth-shaking event of cultural and political importance that would remind the world of the centrality of the Austrian nation. It would also, by definition, compete against and surpass the simultaneous Prussian celebration of Kaiser Wilhelm’s 30th year of rule. Ulrich was named as the secretary to the Parallel Campaign’s director, and all the meetings were held in Diotima’s salon. The fact that this event was founded in such a cultural and philosophical milieu is at odds with the real history of the upcoming war that Musil, and the reader, are all too aware of. The best way to describe The Man Without Qualities would be combining a satire of Austrian pre-war society with lyrical philosophical musings.

The novel itself is modernist in the sense that it is ironically self-aware and metafictional. It has chapter titles like Chapter One: “From which, remarkably enough, nothing develops.” While the strength of the characters and the ideas are enough to propel the narrative for quite a while, it is true that the main plot increasingly feels bogged down by inertia as the pages multiply. At the same time, this fact itself, even considering that the book remained unfinished at Musil’s death, feels almost intended. One gets the sense that this novel contains Musil’s expression of despair over the First World War and all that was lost as well as a sense of the coming disaster of the next war. It feels as if this novel is Musil’s alternate reality for an Austria and Europe that never fell into destructive war, while also satirizing the petty faults of the society that vanished in that war to be replaced by greater crimes and less humanity.

The last part of the novel is also the most inchoate and dreamlike, wherein Ulrich rediscovers his alienated younger sister in their family house away from Vienna. The pair regress into some sort of fantasy world while most of the plot and the world around them seems to gradually disappear. Even with its faults and difficulties, The Man Without Qualities is and will remain a book for serious readers and thinkers for all time.

Joseph Roth’s masterpiece is the 1932 novel Radetsky March, which follows the gradual decline of the Austrian Empire from 1859 until World War One. If Musil’s work is comparable to modernist writers like Proust, Roth’s novel is nothing less than a shorter and more ironic version of War and Peace. It follows three generations of the von Trotta family from the disastrous Battle of Solferino, which forced Austria to give up much of its Italian territory, to the middle of the Great War. It follows various characters, from servants to the Emperor himself, who is depicted with an empty brain and a constantly dripping nose. At the aforementioned battle, the founder of the von Trotta “dynasty” was a Slovenian lieutenant who stepped in front of an Italian bullet destined to kill the the young Franz Joseph. He survived and was ennobled by the grateful emperor, who thereafter followed his savior’s career closely. The event became enshrined in legend and magnified in children’s schoolbooks, so that the elder von Trotta became the famous “Hero of Solferino.” This hero was so uncomfortable that he prohibited his own son from entering the military, and eventually called upon the Emperor himself to denounce the embellished version of the event.

The Battle of Solferino, though little known today, was one of the biggest and most important battles in Europe in the century between Napoleon and WWI. It was the last battle in history where the armies were all under the command of their respective monarchs (Napoleon III, Vittorio Emmanuele II, and Franz Joseph). It was so bloody that it led directly to the founding of the Red Cross and the establishment of the Geneva Conventions for armed conflicts. It was a disaster for Austria, which was forced to give up its richest Italian province, Lombardy. It was the first big loss for Austria in a series of setbacks that continued unabated until the Empire was disbanded following WWI, just after the end of Franz Joseph’s 66-year reign. The symbolism of starting the novel with the Battle of Solferino is thus appropriate foreshadowing of the bigger tragedies to come, written as it was a over a decade after WWI of hardship and poverty for the new rump state of Austria. 

The opening lines of the novel set a powerful and elegiac tone for the lost past and lost future of Austria and Europe, as seen from the early thirties: 

“BACK THEN, BEFORE the Great War, when the incidents reported on these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a person lived or died. If a life was snuffed out from the host of the living, another life did not instantly replace it and make people forget the deceased. Instead, a gap remained where he had been, and both the near and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they saw this gap. If a fire devoured a house in a row of houses in a street, the charred site remained empty for a long time. For the bricklayers worked slowly and leisurely, and when the closest neighbors as well as casual passersby looked at the empty lot, they remembered the shape and the walls of the vanished house. That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”

Roth wrote a sequel to Radetsky March called The Emperor’s Tomb in 1938, the year before his death. It is curiously different in tone and style from the earlier novel; the high realism and irony is replaced with a more comical cynicism and looser narrative structure. It follows a character from another branch of the von Trotta family, and a Polish character related to a wealthy count in the earlier novel; otherwise there is no internal reference or connection between the two novels. The Emperor’s Tomb is set in Vienna after the end of the war, where inflation, depression, and growing extremism now reign in place of the defunct emperor.

Roth’s first novel was 1924’s Hotel Savoy, set in the real and still existing namesake hotel in Łódź, Poland. The hotel serves as a way point and meeting place for soldiers making their way home from the eastern front after the war, along with a variety of other richly drawn character types. It is an almost journalistic account of the broken dreams but still abundant hope people had after the recent war. Here is a taste of the type of muscular melancholic prose Roth employs in this early novel: 

“Things were going badly with these people. They prepared their own destiny and yet believed that it came from God. They were prisoners of tradition, their hearts hung by a thousand threads and the threads were spun by their own hands. Along all the ways of their lives stood the thou shalt not of their god, their police, their kings, their position. In this direction they could go no further, and in that place they could stay no longer. And so, after a couple of decades during which they had struggled, made mistakes and not known which way to turn, they died in their beds and bequeathed their wretchedness to their descendants.”

Roth cranked out many short novels very quickly in order to make a living during his unhappy years of exile and alcoholism. None of these reach the greatness of Radetsky March, but the best of them is, I think, Job. It is a sort of morality tale of the Galician Shtetl Jewish community that Roth grew up, in which a desperately poor family reclaims a lost son in America. He deals with his Jewish roots in other books such as Leviathan, The Silent Prophet, and The Wandering Jews. The Antichrist is a sort of novelistic cri de coeur against the wave of violence and anti-Semitism in his native land, where his books went up in flames. He drank himself to death in Paris the year after the Anschluss, and a few months before the beginning of the new war he had long seen coming.

Stefan Zweig was a prolific writer and cultural figure in the three decades leading up to his death in 1942. His books were popular and best-selling throughout the 1920s and early 30s not only in the German world, but in Europe and the Americas. He grew up in a wealthy, non-religious Jewish family in Vienna. He wanted to be a writer since childhood, and published continuously in a variety of genres from age 19 to his death at 60. His fiction mostly consists of short stories and novellas, and only two full-length novels (one of which, The Post-Office Girl, was unfinished and published posthumously). He also wrote popular biographical and historical works, many of which celebrate his literary idols and influences, such as Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Rolland, Verlaine, and Nietzsche. Others include figures such as Marie Antoinette, Mary Stuart, Erasmus, and Magellan. He also wrote a few plays, plenty of journalistic articles, and a well-known autobiography, The World of Yesterday.

Zweig was a good friend and admirer of Freud, and that influence shows up constantly in his work. His fiction, but also his biography, is very focused on the psychological motivations of the characters. In a great number of his stories and novellas, the main events turn upon the obsessive and sometimes destructive personal and sexual relationships between characters. This was something not commonly found in literature of the time; Zweig, like Musil, was thus on the cutting edge of psychological writing of the 20th century. His works are the most accessible and entertaining of the three writers I have discussed. His style was fast-paced and full of surprise developments. His novel Beward of Pity, for example, is a real page-turner. Most of Zweig’s work is so short because his editing style was to cut as much as possible until only what he considered essential to moving the story forward remained (something that could have served Musil well). In addition, his stories are particularly rich in complicated frame narratives in the form of second-hand narrators, discovered letters, etc., which is an old literary technique that is difficult to pull off convincingly and often outgrows its welcome; nevertheless, Zweig somehow seems to enrich his fiction each time he uses this technique.

One of Zweig’s best stories, in my opinion, is “Mendel the Bibliophile”. It tells of an old Jewish book merchant who sits in the same cafe all day everyday and has a flawless encyclopedic memory of every page of every edition of every book, or at least every book that has moved through Vienna or Central Europe. He is taken away to a concentration camp when WWI starts, and when he returns years later, everything is changed and hostile. It is a rich and sad tale that, like much of Zweig’s work, is evocative of the rich cultural and intellectual life of pre-war Vienna, and laments the destruction of that world by the war. The title and theme of the book also prefigure later stories by Jorge Luis Borges, who had no doubt read Zweig (who was one of the main delegates at the 1936 PEN conference in Borges’ home of Buenos Aires).

Another of my favorites is the 1941 novella Chess Story, the last fictional work Zweig finished and published before his death. It tells of two incredible and highly unconventional chess masters who meet on a transatlantic ocean liner en route to South America. It is revealed that one of the men was imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Nazi regime, but was eventually able to steal a small book from a guard’s coat that turned out to be a chess manual. Like most of Zweig’s work, it is insightful and sensitive to the vicissitudes of human suffering and success. In his novel Beware of Pity, the narrator says something which I think applies to the author himself: “Once you have gained some understanding of human nature, further understanding of it seems to grow mysteriously, and when you are able to feel genuine sympathy for a single form of earthly suffering, the magic of that lesson enables you to understand all others, however strange and apparently absurd they may be.”

Zweig is well-known also for his memoirs The World of Yesterday. The writer, typically focused on minor transformative episodes in his character’s lives rather than big political issues, revealed the depth of pain he felt by the senseless violence of the First World War which shattered the Viennese culture he knew and loved as well as his vision of a unified, cosmopolitan, peaceful pan-European culture. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in learning more about pre- and post-war Austrian society, but it is also one of the most distinctive memoirs I have read in general. After he sent it to his publisher, Stefan Zweig and his wife killed themselves in their new home in Brazil, in despair of the seemingly unstoppable Nazi advance and what it would bring.

All three of these writers were, as I have said, hugely important writers in Austrian culture, but were also enemies of the culture and society that developed between the two wars. In addition to the millions slaughtered in vain in that infinite human folly known as World War One, these three writers were among the tens of millions who were gradually broken by the suffering brought about due to the first war and leading up to the next war. Although Austrians, and, from the Allied perspective, on the “enemy” side, these three writers, like all artists, transcended their national birthright by means of the universal and timeless art they produced. I have profited and enjoying reading all of them much more than any mere history of the wars they abhorred.

Extra author postscript: Gregor von Rezzori, born in 1914 and therefore of a different generation entirely, wrote some books which provide an fascinating commentary on and supplement to the works I have mentioned above. His provocatively titled Memoirs of an Anti-Semite is not actually his memoirs but a novel, even if closely based on the circumstances of the author’s life. It recounts various minor episodes showing the paradoxes and inconsistencies within the antisemitic family and society the main character was raised in. His actual memoirs, The Snows of Yesteryear, is reminiscent in tone and title to Zweig’s memoirs. He tells of his life growing up in an old Austrian noble family that found itself outcast and culturally stateless in the eastern mountains of a newly independent Romania. The prose is rich and evocative of the same lost world recounted by Zweig, but it also reminds me of the Central European milieu Patrick Fermor encountered and described in A Time of Gifts. Rezzori spent the entirety of World War Two living as a civilian in Germany; though he was a military-aged male, his Romanian citizenship prevented him from being sent to the front, luckily for him and for us. He is well-worth reading for those looking for more writers from the extinct land of the Habsburg emperors, like Musil, Roth, and Zweig.

Jean, not Jean

by Matthew J. Hefti

When I look in the mirror, I think I look stupid. Otherwise, I don’t even think of how I look. But when I do look in the mirror, it’s like I can’t look away. Also when I do, I pick a lot. Today is especially bad.

My mom said once that it’s anxiety from stress.

My dad said, he’s thirteen. What’s he got to be stressed about?

I’m pretty torqued on the way to school. I don’t really know why. I think it’s because I missed the bus. I missed the bus because I couldn’t stop picking at myself, and I think it’s because I can feel everything—like how tight my socks are and how my feet are already a little moist and my socks aren’t doing anything about it, and my shirt’s a little tight in the armpits and it’s pulling at my armpit hairs, and one of the hairs in my eyebrows is curled or something and it’s really annoying me, and I think maybe I have a hair growing in my ear. I’m not sure.

My mom asks what she can do to put me in a better mood.

I tell her that she doesn’t have to do anything.

She says my happiness is important.

It’s important to you, I tell her.

Jean isn’t at school today. He’s probably my best friend. He had an allergic reaction yesterday. He’s allergic to pretty much everything.

Mr. Rogers is subbing again because Mrs. Neumann is sick. Mr. Rogers hates when we call him that and tells us to call him anything but that. We called him all kinds of things for a while, like Mr. Fluffy Head and Poo Poo Bear, but it got boring because he really meant what he said about being able to call him anything. He didn’t care.

You wouldn’t guess it by his name, but Mr. Rogers is this tough looking dude that used to be in the military. He still has a flat top.

Mr. Rogers calls Jean’s name three times, pausing for infinity each time as if it’s not completely obvious there’s an empty desk and no one is responding. But he says it like Jean, like something you wear or like he’s a girl, but his name is Jean, like Victor Hugo’s hero. It rhymes with Shawn. You’d think he’d know that by now.

I’ve never read anything by Victor Hugo, but that’s what Jean’s mother always says when someone says it wrong: It’s Jean, she says. Like the greatest hero in western literature, drawn in full by Victor Hugo. Except she says litra-ture. And then if people say, who’s that, she won’t answer. She just snorts a little like they’re stupid.

I asked his mom once if I could see the picture of the Jean in the book. She said, What do you mean? I said, the one drawn by Victor Hugo. She snorted. I guess she thinks I’m stupid.

Jean told me that his mom named him that because the Jean in the book is like a kind of Christ.

I asked him what that was supposed to mean since there’s only one God.

He said, he’s not Christ. He’s a type of Christ.

I said, you can’t be a type of something if there’s only one of that thing.

He said he asked his dad about it once and his dad said that the only thing he’s the hero of is the miserable ones.

Who? I said. Jean or Christ?

Jean shrugged. Both I guess.

I used to call him Jean too. Even though it’s Jean, not Jean. Everyone did. He’s small and kind of nerdy looking. Plus he’s sick a lot, and saying Jean made us feel stuck up. But now most of us have gotten used to it. It’s just his name.

I didn’t call him Jean because he was nerdy. I called him that because he was my arch nemesis. He stole my job as milk monitor last year, when we were in sixth grade. Each of us had a class duty, and I had the best one.

It wasn’t the best because counting the orders and getting the milks at lunch was so great or anything. But the milk monitor for the fifth and sixth grade classroom had to go with the milk monitor for the seventh and eighth grade classroom. And Heather Saint James was the milk monitor for the seventh and eighth graders. Heather Saint James didn’t have the prettiest face—that was Jennifer Gohrman—but she did have the biggest boobs in the school.

The way it worked was, the older kid would bring the milk crate and wait by our door. That was like the signal to Mrs. Neumann that she needed to wrap it up. Then she’d say, raise your hand if you want chocolate. Then, raise your hand if you want white. You’d count the hands and then go to the gym closet with the older kid to get the milks, and then you’d bring them back.

Heather Saint James would put the milk crate on the ground to slide open the big fridge door to get the milks and put them into the crate.

I could see right down her shirt where those big heavy things were hanging. While she waited for me to stammer the count for our class, she would stay bent over like that with her hand on the bottom shelf. Like she didn’t even realize they were there.

To get to the gym closet, you had to walk through the whole school and then finally the principal’s office. You could go through the gym instead of the principal’s office, but we weren’t allowed to go that way.

When I was in fifth grade and David Pfeiffer was the milk monitor, I thought they made them go through the office because they were afraid the milk monitors would start playing in the gym on the way there. That was before Jean even went to our school.

But then when I got older, I realized that didn’t make any sense because all the balls and toys and stuff were stored in the gym closet, which is where you had to go to get the milks anyway.

After I had spent some time as the milk monitor myself, I realized they made you go through the principal’s office because they were probably afraid that if you went through the gym, you’d probably goof off in other ways. I never did though.

Jean says I chickened out and had plenty of chances, but that’s not what happened. What happened is that he stole my job.

One day while I was doing the sweater stare—it was fall by then—I had forgotten the count when Heather Saint James asked me the numbers. I thought fast and gave her two numbers that added up to eleven. That’s how many students we had in our class after all.

But Jean doesn’t drink milk. He’s allergic. According to his mom, deathly allergic. So the real number was supposed to add up to ten.

I should have guessed that anyway because that’s how many kids had been in my class my whole life until Jean showed up. But I remembered the new kid made us eleven.

It wasn’t the first time I had gotten the numbers wrong. It wasn’t even the first time I made the mistake of bringing back eleven milks. But the first time I did it doesn’t count. I just did it that time because I thought that Mrs. Neumann would let me have the extra chocolate instead of taking it back.

She didn’t like that.

I told her I couldn’t take it back because Heather Saint James already went back to her classroom.

She told me that she was sure I would find my way. She was always saying that, even when it didn’t make sense in context.

The time I forgot the numbers on accident, she asked why I brought back the wrong number of chocolate milks again.

I told her it was because I forgot Jean was allergic to milk.

She said, you know who won’t forget that Jean is allergic to milk?

No, I told her.

Jean. That’s who.

So she made Jean the milk monitor.

When I told my dad what happened, he laughed and said, Well, there’s dramatic irony for you.

I was pretty mean to Jean for a while. Then one day he asked why I cared about being milk monitor so much, and I told him it was obvious.

He said it wasn’t obvious to him.

I mentioned Heather Saint James.

He said, that’s it? Then he claimed he didn’t care about that because he could look at all the boobs he wanted because they had the internet at home. I think he just wanted me to like him.

He offered to stick his finger in one of the milk cartons so I could get the job back. I think he wanted to be liked so badly that he would have really done it, but I told him not to because they might give the job to anyone. And if someone else got the job, he’d just be risking his life for nothing.

It made me feel bad that he was so obsessed with being liked that he would risk his life to get a friend and also give up the chance to sneak peeks down the shirt of Heather Saint James.

So I said sorry for being so mean and that I wouldn’t view him as my arch nemesis anymore.

After me and Jean became friends, I asked him why he came to our school.

Jean said the public school told him he missed too many days. He didn’t want to be stuck in fifth grade.

So I asked him why he could be in sixth grade in our school when everyone said it was harder than the public school.

He said the state couldn’t tell our school what to do. Then he said our school was just as easy as public school. But going to any school is a waste of time, he said.

He had a point there.

When I asked him why he didn’t just get home schooled, he said his mom told him that all home school kids are weird.

He had a point there too.

But why our school? I asked. You’re not even Christian.

Yes I am, he said.

But you don’t go to our church, I pointed out.

Are you stupid or just brainwashed? he asked.

I told him he could use some milk of human kindness.

We both had a good laugh at that one.

It was milk that gave Jean the reaction yesterday, but it could have been anything considering practically half the normal foods in the world are like phosgene or mustard gas to him. I learned about phosgene and mustard gas yesterday in history class, not from Mr. Rogers, but from Jean.

When history class started, Mr. Rogers asked what we were learning about from Mrs. Neumann.

Jean told him World War One.

Tabby Gardner raised her hand and said, why do we always have to learn about wars in history class?

Mr. Rogers told her it was because wars were like the epicenter of an earthquake in a country’s timeline with seismic waves moving out in every direction. If you wanted to, he said, you could pick any given war and study the whole country’s history just by studying that war. You could ask yourself what led to the war and then what were the consequences of the war. By asking what led to the war, you could go as far back into history as you wanted. By asking what the consequences of the war were, you could study all the history from the war until the present and then as far into the future as infinity if you wanted.

Tabby Gardner told him we’d already been studying World War One for infinity.

I have to admit, I was pretty bored myself.

Well, Mr. Rogers said, if a war is like an earthquake in a country’s timeline, then wouldn’t a World War be like an earthquake in the entire world’s timeline? So doesn’t it make sense to spend time studying it?

Okay, Tabby Gardner said, but we already know everything about it.

Then tell me what you know about the war, Mr. Rogers said.

Jean raised his hand, like always.

Mr. Rogers said, I want to hear from Tabby. But then she didn’t say anything for a long time, and Mr. Rogers called on Jean, like always.

Did you know, Jean said, that in World War One, they used phosgene and mustard gasses? Also, did you know that the Germans would hit troops with gasses that could get through the gas masks? It would hurt their eyes and nose and stuff so bad that they would take off their masks, even though that could kill them. Then after taking off their masks, they’d inhale the phosgene and mustard and stuff like that. Their lungs would start to blister and their eyes would bleed or they’d start coughing so bad they could puke up their stomachs and all sorts of stuff.

Tabby Gardner raised her hand.

Mr. Rogers called on her.

Real prissy she said, can we please not talk about blistered lungs and puked up stomachs?

You could tell Mr. Rogers was thinking about it because he didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he said, so like I was saying before about the earthquakes, I actually know a guy who got messed up really bad—big red oozing blisters all over his body—after he put a mustard round in his truck thinking it was a regular old projo.

Then he told us all about IEDs made with chlorine tanks, stock piles of mustard rounds, troops that got gassed that couldn’t get benefits once they got home, and how the whole reason we were there was because some General convinced the UN that there were WMDs there.

Jean ate it up. He loved that kind of stuff.

But what happened with the milk yesterday was, after history class we had lunch. I was reading the joke on my milk carton, and I said, I don’t get it.

The jokes were like numbered in a series. Everyone with a number five, for example, would have the same stupid joke. An example would be, Why was the cow jumping up and down? Because it wanted a milkshake. But that wasn’t the actual joke yesterday.

Mr. Rogers was at his desk eating his lunch and drinking his milks—he always ordered two chocolates. He asked me what number I had.

Twelve, I told him.

Me too, he said. It’s a pun.

But I don’t get it, I told him.

He said, you know back when I was in school, milk cartons didn’t have jokes. They had pictures of missing kids.

But these have jokes, and I don’t get this one.

Instead of jokes, we’d have to look at pictures of these kids who were abducted, he said.

Jean asked what the joke was.

Mr. Rogers said, it’s not a joke. It’s a pun.

Then Jean said, well then read me the pun.

Mr. Rogers said, you wouldn’t get a pun like this if I told it to you. You have to read it.

I can’t read it myself, Jean said. I’m allergic to milk.

When I was a kid, Mr. Rogers said, we didn’t have all these allergies either. All this helicopter parenting. Kids are too sheltered these days. Protected from everything so they can’t handle anything.

I think Jean didn’t want to look weak in front of Mr. Rogers. He grabbed my milk carton to look at it for himself. And I guess a little spilled on him or something because it wasn’t long before he started turning red and wheezing and everything.

It’s a good thing Mr. Rogers was subbing that day, because Mrs. Neumann probably would have freaked out. She’s the nervous type, but Mr. Rogers has all that war training.

Mr. Rogers acted all calm like it was no big deal. He asked Jean if he had an EpiPen and where it was. It was in his desk, so Mr. Rogers grabbed it in no time and gave him the shot. Then he pointed at someone and said, you, go down the hall and have the secretary call 911. Then he pointed at me and said, you, go in the top pocket of my backpack by the right side of my desk. There’s an EpiPen in there. Bring it to me.

In pretty much no time, the ambulance had come to take Jean to the hospital.

Mr. Rogers said it was just a precaution.

Jean loves Mr. Rogers. Every time he subs, Jean spends all recess talking to him, and Mr. Rogers doesn’t seem to mind.

But today at morning recess, Mr. Rogers just stands at the corner of the soccer field with his hands in his pockets. He swings his foot back and forth like he’s kicking apart an ant hill or something, but he does it the whole time. He never looks up at the kids to make sure we’re not fighting or anything.

Mr. Rogers looks pretty lonely without Jean there. But before recess is over, the principal comes out and says something to him. Mr. Rogers doesn’t say anything back. He just goes inside early and the principal follows after him.

I asked Jean once why he wanted to waste all his recess time talking to the teacher about boring stuff like history.

He said we had to study history because those who don’t study history will be doomed to repeat it.

Sounds like the opposite would make more sense. If you don’t know about it, it would be pretty random to repeat it, which makes repeating it seem pretty unlikely.

I told him so, and he said we should ask Mr. Rogers what he thought.

I told Jean I’d just take his word for it.

But I guess Mr. Rogers is pretty lousy at the whole not repeating history thing. What I mean by that is, Mr. Rogers isn’t in the classroom when we get back inside from recess. While we’re all just waiting around, I hear Paisley Schmitt say they fired him because he was talking about bleeding eyeballs and coughed up stomachs during history class yesterday.

That makes sense coming from her.

I say that because the first time Mr. Rogers subbed for us, he told us not to ask if he killed anyone unless we wanted him to kill us. Then the principal made him apologize to the whole class after Paisley Schmidt narced on him to her mom.

And it’s doubly believable because Mrs. Neumann shows back up, even though she still looks sick and sounds like she’s going to cough up her stomach.

I don’t think Mr. Rogers is as great as Jean does, but I think he’s okay. He says bad words sometimes when he’s telling stories, and you don’t often get to hear a teacher say swear words. It’s easy to distract him and his stories are pretty good. Better than Mrs. Neumann’s anyway.

But that’s kind of just how he is. He’ll talk to you like you’re on the same level.

Like when he started his apology speech after Paisley Schmitt narced on him. He said, apparently, you’re not supposed to talk about killing with middle schoolers. You could tell he thought the whole thing was stupid by the way he said apparently.

Me and Jean had a good laugh at that too.

Zone Rouge

(for the centennial)

1.
When the land was.

2.
Full of bodies dead. And twisted.

3.
When the fighting was.

4.
Sustained.

5.
With bodies. Dead. Twisted on a riverbank.

6.
Wrist bent. Hand hovers. Over water.

7.
Dead bodies with fingers. Like feathers.

8.
Stretched feathers or the calamus.

9.
Attaching to bird skin.

10.
These are bodies. Bodies of war.

11.
Dead with. Feathered fingers.

12.
Wing of a bird.

13.
300 days of shelling.

14.
The shells were 240 mm. Full of shrapnel.

15.
Mustard gas.

16.
Hitting men and hitting ground.

17.
Making holes. Upon impact.

18.
Shrapnel bursting.

19.
Bloom and rip.

20.
Ripping through dirt and faces.

21.
Ripped skin. Ripping off tissue.

22.
A nose.

23.
Hole in the center of an ear.

24.
Exposing canal and bone.

25.
Missing teeth. One lower jaw is.

26.
Gone. A set of lips.

27.
The chunk of a chin.

28.
And the shells. Shells from Verdun.

29.
Are still there.

30.
Unexploded ordnance. Sunk.

31.
Into dirt pockets. Like seeds.

32.
This blooming. Metal war.

33.
Shrapnel that looks like rocks or.

34.
Smooth egg of a bird.

35.
Soil made of mud and men and metal.

36.
How. Metal leaches and clings.

37.
This soil of war.

38.
Chlorine and lead and mercury and arsenic.

39.
Where every tree and every plant and every animal.

40.
Each blade of grass.

41.
Where 99% of everything died.

42.
Ground stripped raw.

43.
Stripped earth tissue or how this is.

44.
What war also.

45.
Also does.

46.
Damage to properties: 100% 

47.
Damage to agriculture: 100%

48.
Impossible to clean.

49.
Human life impossible.

50.
The government declared it uninhabitable. 

51.
A no-go zone.

52.
Broken skeletons of villages.

53.
And the craters that bombs make.

54.
Deep and round holes.

55.
How the bomb craters filled with water.

56.
Making. War ponds.

57.
This is a place.

58.
Where almost everything died.

59.
But the land.

60.
The land was still alive.

61.
Grass stretching again and.

62.
Grafting itself over the bone.

63.
Bone of what happened.

64.
Stretching over trenches and scars.

65.
Like new skin.

66.
And plants and trees and vines.

67.
Rodents and snails and voles and mice.

68.
Deer. Wildcats with metal stomachs.

69.
Still living I say. To my husband.

70.
Who went to war.

71.
War that he did not want.

72.
Afghanistan.

73.
How he came home with hands and feet.

74.
Covered in blisters. Lesions the doctor said.

75.
Skin burning. Waking up to him crouched.

76.
On the floor and scratching. Saying I don’t know.

77.
And I know.

78.
That this is how war is.

79.
Or later. I will lay in the darkness.

80.
And think about burn pits in Iraq.

81.
Black smoke and jet fuel and fumes.

82.
About Vietnam sprayed. The bare mudflats after.

83.
Defoliation of trees. And birds. Missing mangroves.

84.
How dioxin poisons wind. Sleeps. In a river or sediment.

85.
The fatty tissue of a fish. Atomic blasts in Hiroshima and.

86.
Nagasaki. The incineration of bodies and land.

87.
Tearing skin off people. Tearing trees out of ground.

88.
Tearing everything.

89.
Away.

90.
How black rain fell. Radioactive bomb debris.

91.
Into mouths. Of people and rivers.

92.
How radiation lives. In grass and soil. The intestine of a cow.

93.
About the GWOT. Blood soaked years and streets and.

94.
How many miles of land. Where we left bombs.

95.
Unexploded or forever.

96.
I will think about Zone Rouge.

97.
Trenches like scars.

98.
My husband gardening. The tendons in his arms.

99.
Moving like trees.

100.
Or how war never goes away.

                                                                Amalie Flynn

                                                                October 2018

Andria Wiliams: Jennifer, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with Wrath-Bearing Tree.

We are all huge fans of the WWrite blog, which features posts from writers investigating a variety of aspects of the events and legacy of the First World War. Since 2016, you’ve had close to 100 contributions on topics such as the portrayal and care of wounded veterans and their rehabilitation; German battlefield cemeteries; writer-soldiers of the War; and more. It’s truly a feat and, taken as a whole, a remarkably intelligent way to explore the effects of WWI on art, literature, citizens, and the public imagination.

How did you get the idea to start the WWrite blog, and how did you go about it?

Jennifer Orth-Veillon: Over a glass of Beaujolais wine. Seriously. In 2015, for family medical reasons, I packed up my life in the US and moved with my French husband and small daughter to a small village, Cogny, in the wine-making region of the Beaujolais, located in southeastern France not far from Lyon. Prior to the move, I held a 3-year-long postdoctoral fellowship in communication and literature at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta where I initiated the first student veteran writing group.

During these three years, I also taught a class on war literature and veteran memoirs. The students began by studying the literature of WWI as it was  one of the first major conflicts that happened on foreign soil. For the returning soldiers, this meant an even greater gap to forge between the civilian community and their war experience. WWI also marked a break with traditional war narratives. Before WWI, these acceptable narratives communicated a sense of patriotism, triumph, and noble sacrifice. The strong soldier fought bravely and didn’t complain. The weak soldier was a coward and a criminal. While patriotism, triumph, and heroic sacrifice are certainly important aspects of the combat experience, they do not paint a complete portrait of the long-lasting effects of war on soldiers, on families, and on the community. It could be said that WWI writing, for the first time in history, was responsible for exposing the severity, variety, and complexity of war wounds to the public.  Hemingway’s sparse prose and Wilfred Owen’s grotesque images and irony did something revolutionary.

And why did it take WWI to do this? It inevitably had to do with the unprecedented elements this war introduced to an unsuspecting world—the unbreakable nationalistic alliances formed by powerful empires, the misery of inch-by-inch trench warfare, masses of soldiers suffering deep psychological damage (“shell shock”), new weapon technology that disfigured the human body beyond recognition and razed entire cities in seconds, entire populations wiped out not only by war, but also by the Spanish flu epidemic that swept the continents. In combat, Russia, France, the British Empire, Germany, and Austria lost close to a million soldiers each and their wounded nearly doubled that number. America officially entered only in 1917 but lost around 53,000 soldiers in combat during just seven months in 1918. The Vietnam War serves as an interesting point of comparison—this conflict lasted fourteen years and the combat dead totaled around 47,000. In addition, WWI-era’s Spanish flu epidemic cost Americans another lost 63,000 lives by Armistice.

My class at Georgia Tech also read memoirs and war literature through the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, including works by Seth Brady Tucker, Kayla Williams, Brian Castner, and Brian Turner. I was fortunate that these authors were so accessible – Seth Brady Tucker and Brian Castner both had Skype sessions with my class, which was fantastic! And, after we finished the reading, the class, for their final project, had to write a multimedia memoir on a veteran from Georgia Tech or from the Atlanta community. When the students asked Tucker and Castner about their writing influences, both immediately mentioned the writing of WWI for many of the reasons I discussed above. Seth Brady Tucker went as far to say that, while studying Wilfred Owen in an Iraqi foxhole, he learned to both read and write poetry (Incidentally, his post for WWrite is entitled “Discovering WWI Poetry in an Iraqi Foxhole”). In addition, many of the contemporary veterans who became subjects for my students’ memoirs cited WWI literature in their interviews.

I left the US, but I knew I couldn’t leave my work there entirely behind. I know that living in a golden-stone medieval village in the middle of French vineyards sound like a dream to any American, but the reality was that moving to France was professionally and personally a new start for me. And I wasn’t in Paris. It’s one thing for people living in this beautiful, rural region to encounter tourists. It’s altogether another matter if someone from the outside wants to come in and be part of the community. The Beaujolais is full of families who have lived there for generations and finding ways to integrate was an isolating challenge. Yet I did find traces of my previous life. I would spend many days driving from village to village looking for work and writer/artistic communities. I didn’t find either. However, each village’s, each town’s center features a monument to the WWI dead.

What I learned was that, even if the monument was small, the place’s loss was enormous. I would often get out of my car and count the number of dead and then go to the village municipality to see what the population count was in 1914-1918.  One village lost 9% of its population. Another lost almost all of its young men. November 11^th isn’t Veteran’s Day but Armistice Day – a national holiday for commemorating WWI only.

Once, after a car accident, I had to go to the police station to finish filing the report. While waiting, someone called to report they had found an unexploded WWI shell while digging a pool in their back yard. After the police officer said he would send someone over and hung up, he looked at me and said “happens all the time.” It’s worth mentioning that no WWI battle took place in the Beaujolais region. This anecdote illustrates how central the Great War is in the French memory and imagination.

Which is why what I discovered over my glass of Beaujolais was so startling. I was in the town of Vaux-en-Beaujolais, otherwise known as Clochemerle, the setting for a famous French satirical film written by Gabriel Chevallier. Each village in the Beaujolais makes its own wine and has a central wine bar/cellar for tasting it.

I was chatting with the barman pouring me the wine about possible translation work for the town’s tourist brochure when he asked me about my work in the US. I started to tell him about the veteran class [at Georgia Tech], thinking that it would have no relevance to his world and that he would listen because he felt sorry for my loneliness. However, he went to the door of the bar and asked me to follow him. Glass in hand, we went next door, which turned out to be a Gabriel Chevallier museum.

A part of the small museum was dedicated to the famous Clochemerle, but a larger section featured Chevallier’s WWI experience and his novel, La Peur, translated as Fear. As I learned through the collections of drawing Chevallier did during the war and the pages from the manuscript, Fear was nothing like the satirical Clochemerle. It has nothing to do with winemaking, socioeconomic class, or religion; it was a book that spared nothing as it described the ghastly details of the ways men were killed and maimed during Trench warfare. It was published in 1930, but like many works of art that criticized the Great War in France and elsewhere, it was censored. Today, Fear represents all that we know well about WWI found in books like All Quiet on the Western Front and Guns of Steel- it was a senseless, barbaric massacre.

As it was the only thing that resembled my literary work in the US, I visited the village, the museum, and the bar several times after that. No one was ever looking at Gabriel Chevallier and that’s when I realized that, in the middle of a huge national narrative about WWI, holes existed and were ignored. Amidst the monuments, the parades, and the days off, a real discussion of the Great War and the damage it did to France was missing. Everyone knows about the monuments. No one knows that Gabriel Chevallier wrote anything other than Clochemerle.

This was the theme I found in so much of the war literature I studied with my classes. Veterans from every past or present war we studied – the celebrated icons of war– felt neglected by the public narrative. This did not stop with WWI. In fact, these same veterans, including contemporary ones like Tucker and Castner, had even expressed that this phenomenon was first brought to our attention by WWI writers like Owen and Hemingway. I realized that today’s war writers owed something like a debt to WWI writing and, with the imminent Centennial, I wanted to explore that idea. I contact the United States World War One Centennial Commission with my ideas. At the time, they had no substantive information about WWI literature although I found such sites elsewhere. Looking not just at WWI literature, but at how WWI can continue to shape literature, writing, and thought today seemed original. They accepted my proposal and I started work in April of 2016. The first blog post went in January 2017. And it’s been going ever since.

AW: Where did your personal interest in WWI begin?

JOV: WWI has always been both a personal and professional interest for me. I realized WWI had more importance than the few pages about alliances in my history textbook when I started working on my first novel, which is based on a lifelong friendship between my grandfather, a WWII battalion surgeon, and a concentration camp prisoner he liberated, a Dutch artist. I read the 1,000+ letters my grandparents wrote each while he was gone and one struck me as very important. It was a letter from August 1945, a few months after VE day in Europe. With his war over, he finally had the space to digest the horrible scenes from combat and he had terrible crying spells and nightmares. That’s when he told my grandmother that he finally understood why one of his close relatives, who had served in WWI, was always “crying at nothing.” Before that, he had considered this relative weak and unmanly.  I knew that to understand WWII, I need to better understand WWI. That’s why I jumped at the chance to be TA for a study abroad summer class on WWI and literature taught by James Madison University English professor Mark Facknitz, my former mentor. I was living in Paris at the time working on a Master’s Degree at the French University on WWII and Holocaust literature. Concentrated on Paris and the Nazi Occupation, I had never explored WWI in a deep way. With Mark and about 15 students and other TAs, we traveled in vans across the WWI battlefields and memorials in France, Belgium, and England. We read literature and essays and then applied the ideas about cultural memory and war narratives to the different public memory sites – the American cemetery at Belleauwood, the French ossuary at Douaumont in Verdun, Kathe Kollowtiz’s famous statue “The Grieving Parents” in a German cemetery in Flanders. I did this for two summers and came to realize that WWI was present everywhere. It’s end was one of the reasons for the turmoil in the Middle East today, it advanced feminist movements,  shed new light on racial issues, and shaped many US federal programs today. I believe that to grasp any geopolitical issue today, you have to dial back to WWI to fully understand it.

AW: I know that no one can pick favorites, but I’m curious which contributions or posts surprised you the most, gave you new information or made you see something from a wholly new angle.

JOV: That’s like asking which child you love most! I have valued, loved, and learned so much from every single blog post and its author.  That’s what’s so great about the blog –  not only the variety of different kinds of posts, but the incredible quality of the writing. I have never been disappointed by a post and each time I get a new one, I feel so lucky to have discovered this author and their work. I guess that before the blog, I felt like a fair amount of knowledge about trench warfare, the events of combat, the major battles, the perils of nationalism, the poetry, the literature, the culture of commemoration. However, I knew much less about the role women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants played. And, sadly, I came to learn how much they had been forgotten. Chag Lowry’s post on his graphic novel about Native Americans, Soldiers Unknown, Tracy Crow’s post about female Marine Sergeant Leila Lebrand, Peter Molin on Aline Kilmer, Joyce Kilmer’s wife, Keith Gandal on the treatment of African Americans after the war, and Lorie Vanchena’s post about German immigrant poetry provide a few examples. I also have a new perspective about WWI in other countries, even in enemy countries through Ruth Edgett’s short story about Canada, “Hill 145,” , Andria Williams’ (your!) post on the British “Black Poppies”, Michael Carson on Victor Shklovsky and the Russian Revolution, Mark Facknitz on German POWs in Japan, and Benjamin Busch’s post about finding a British WWI cemetery in Iraq. From an ideological perspective, I was struck by Elliot Ackerman’s post on Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel. Through Junger, Ackerman argues that we live in society that pushes us to thrive on violence rather than mourn war and hate death. But again, these just come to mind at the moment. If I had space and time, I would list every post as one of my favorites. Every post has given me new information and angles.

AW: What has been the biggest challenge in curating the WWrite blog?

JOV: I’ve had two major challenges. The first is the technical side of the blog and issues of design. I’m not a coding expert and I have to make everything fit the platform requirements of the WWICC site. I think it is much more sophisticated than I am. Formatting takes an incredibly long time. I’ve spent an hour on getting a picture inserted, margins adjusted, etc. But, I think this is an issue that many artists have to confront today. The digital medium is necessary but requires extra training and patience. The second is convincing writers that they are, in fact, influenced by WWI even if they don’t think they are. Sometimes I’ll contact a writer and, even if they are interested by the project, they say no because they don’t know anything about WWI. I beg to differ! Everyone is touched by this war in some way. It just takes a little digging. For example, I met and actor/writer in Atlanta named Darryl Dillard. We talked about the project and he basically said, good luck! But later he came back to me because he realized that African American WWI soldiers faced horrible racism, similar to what they faced on stage at the time.

AW: Woodrow Wilson famously (after H.G. Wells) called WWI “the war to end all wars.” How do you find the study of this war significant in our modern approach to conflict? Are there any particular lessons you think humanity stands to learn, or does WWI paint only a bleak picture in terms of the way history repeats itself?

JOV: I don’t know if history is repeating itself or it’s just the present asserting itself against things that haven’t changed but should have throughout history – like nationalism, economic inequality, class inequality, gender oppression, emasculation, misogyny, racial oppression, using technology to kill masses of people – these things at the heart of WWI’s tragedy haven’t gone away. They are still present and still cause harm. So, yes, it’s a very bleak picture.

However, I do believe that’s it’s not irreparable as long as we can take action by engaging in a fight to make these issues better. Remembering and commemorating war is not enough. As the French say, we need engagement.

AW: What is your favorite piece of art or literature to have come out of World War One?

JOV: Once again, picking favorites is hard. I think the work that has stood out for me most  recently is Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, which was, of course, censored because it was considered too ghastly and graphic.  As a nurse, she wrote this surreal memoir about the war during a period when most war memoirs were written as conventional autobiographies.

Using images and other aesthetic strategies, she seems to show that conventional language wasn’t enough to capture WWI combat. Conventional autobiography cannot push the limits of human experience the way war can. I admire her battle to challenge us with language, to show that there are parts of war that are unimaginable, that don’t fit into proper punctuation or sentence structure. The work is indeed ghastly, but it is so much more that I come up against my own limits of expression when I try to describe it to anyone. And, it’s in that incapacity to describe that I know her writing comes from where no one can go and survive intact – no man’s land, the space between the trenches. She uses language to take on that space. It’s a battle.

WWrite Blog contributions by Wrath-Bearing Tree editors:

Adrian Bonenberger: Brest-Litovsk: Eastern Europe’s Forgotten Father

Michael Carson, “The October Revolution, Russian Occupation of Persia: WWI Soldier Viktor Shklovsky’s Sentimental Memoirs”

Rachel Kambury, “War Without Allegory: WWI, Tolkien, and The Lord of the Rings”

Andria Williams, “Black Poppies: Writing About Britain’s Black Servicemen”

I’m so tired of re-writing this article.

The drafts kept piling up and piling up and piling up, one after the other. I’d think I was done, and then—here comes the goddamn news again.

Shock. Anger. Horror.
And again.
And again.
And again, but way worse this time.

I’m beginning to feel like a character in a Borges story, or a Lev Grossman novel. A chronicler fated to write the same story over and over again, only to find that he has to begin it all over, once more, as soon as he reaches the end.

Because the atrocities just will not stop.

As of this writing, bombs are still traveling through the mail to “the enemy of the people,” the media. You know, like the headquarters of CNN. Those are words, you may recall, said by the sitting President of the United States. You probably forgot that quote, given the torrent of appalling things he says daily. This most recent bomb came on the heels of many other potentially deadly packages sent to the leaders of the Democratic Party, including two former Presidents.

As of this writing, two black grandparents are dead in my home state of Kentucky, shot down in the produce section of a Kroger by an avowed white supremacist who was heard telling another person of his race, “whites don’t kill whites.” The shooter was a white supremacist who had attempted to gain access to an African-American church just minutes before shooting up the grocery store.

As of this writing, a synagogue in Pittsburgh has lost eleven of its congregation. They were shot, by a Nazi, in the United States of America, in the year 2018.

The worst thing is: by now you’re almost OK with it.

Stop. I don’t mean you condone it. I don’t even mean you accept it. But I do mean that you’re becoming, more and more each day, used to it.

The nature of fascist violence, fascist politics, fascist ideology, is not insidious. It is not subtle. It is not clever.

Fascism is brassy. Loud. Bombastic.

Overwhelming.

Eventually, you start to tune it out. Whether from compassion fatigue or a sincere desire to protect your own mental health or just sheer exhaustion, you start to push it aside. Ignore it. Convince yourself that someone else is doing something about it, just so you can focus on the important stuff like getting dinner ready or taking out the garbage or your kid’s grades.

Which is, unfortunately, exactly what fascists want.

They are counting on you to be overwhelmed. They are counting on you to change the channel. They are counting on you to see so much hateful rhetoric, so much ethnic violence, so much anti-LGBT+ legislation that you just can’t anymore.

And so this, gentle reader, is where we are. We have actual Nazis marching the streets. We have a government that refuses to do anything about it, that is known to cultivate them for votes and political support, that only makes the most terse and backhanded of statements “condemning” them.

We have a Supreme Court likely to deliver the death knell to the last vestiges of a woman’s right to choose, in the United States of America.

We have an executive branch making determined and deliberate assaults on LGBT+ rights on a scale literally never before seen. The rabble-rousing polemics of the George W. Bush administration, the casual hatred of Reagan: these are nothing compared to the systemic offenses committed by Trump, Pence and their evangelical cronies. The transgender military ban, the attacks on title IX, the effort to ban the same-sex spouses of diplomats from entering the USA—all a product of Trump’s America.

See? You’re tired already. You’ve heard it all, or if you haven’t, you’re not surprised.

There are worse things than being tired, though.

Actively encouraging this stuff, for example. Those people, though—the ones who still support Trump, the ones who think his plan to end birthright citizenship (and with it the Fourteenth Amendment) is a great idea, the ones who believed the Democrats actually mailed bombs to themselves—those people are lost to any rational appeal. We can’t count on them anymore. They’ve been given the opportunity to regret their decision, to show some basic decency, and they’re not going to do it.

And yet, we have among us those who are, to my mind, even worse than the Trumpites. That would be the legions of people standing around wringing their hands and wondering aloud why we can’t all get along. The people yelling about “the discourse.” The people who inevitably seem to lecture the left on something called “civility” while utterly ignoring the actual fascists marching in the streets.

These would be that lofty political class known as “the moderates.” I say “lofty” because every single last one of them will tell you, at some length, about their moral superiority to “extremists.” They “don’t vote party, they vote for candidates.” They “refuse to condemn someone over something as trivial as politics.” They “remember when there was a spirit of bipartisanship in this country.” And what’s more, they will tell you in no uncertain terms why you’re what’s wrong with this nation, and how it doesn’t help to call Nazis what they are, and…I’m making myself sick writing this.

I just don’t understand. Twenty or thirty years ago, maybe, I could see that sort of thinking. Back when the GOP wasn’t entirely composed of homophobes and plutocrats. Back when the Democratic Party still nurtured a few nasty Dixiecrat types. Back when neither party much cared about LGBT rights. Back when the GOP still believed in the social safety net. But now?

Now, in this day and age, you’re telling me “you vote candidate over party” when the party platform of the GOP is explicitly anti-LGBT? You’re telling me that you’re sometimes OK with taking away a woman’s right to choose? You’re telling me that you’re sometimes OK with dismantling the entirety of the New Deal and the Great Society? You’re telling me that you’re sometimes OK with a brutal and xenophobic, to say nothing of racist, immigration policy?

You’re sometimes OK with the guy who was endorsed by Nazis?

Fuck that. And fuck the calls for “civility” from these very same, amoral people. These people will tie themselves in knots over Mitch McConnell getting his dinner interrupted, but then blithely ignore the fact that he is actively seeking to remove health care from millions upon millions of aged and poor people. They get upset when people shout at Sarah Sanders, but ignore the fact that she lies for, and repeats the lies of, a man who is actively placing children in cages because their parents had the audacity to seek asylum in the United States of America.

When they say “civility” they don’t even know what they mean by it. They think they’re calling for politeness. They think they’re calling for decorum. But you cannot be polite to someone who is actively seeking to disenfranchise, dehumanize or otherwise harm you through the apparatus of the state. You cannot afford common social graces to people who, through their hateful rhetoric, inspire acts of terror against marginalized groups. You cannot extend greater consideration for those who would oppress you than they would extend to you.

Because to do so is to cede power. To do so is to say, “You are deserving of better treatment than I am.” To do so is to prop up the very power structures that are currently aimed at us like weapons, to be complicit in our own ruin.

Martin Luther King did not sit down with the leaders of the KKK. Gandhi did not concede that the British Raj “had some ideas worth considering”. And Marsha P. Johnson was not worried about respect, or civility, or decorum when she threw the first brick at the NYPD during the Stonewall riots. She was worried about her survival. Her right to exist. Her right to be a fully recognized human being.

So no, I won’t be civil to these fascists. Not now. Not ever. And you shouldn’t either.

More than one hundred years ago, nine thousand acres of fruit trees and farm land in Maryland were converted to one of 16 cantonments established in preparation for America’s entry into WWI. Laws establishing Camp Meade were signed in April of 1917. By September of that same year, the first recruits arrived, moving into wood barracks so hastily erected the men walked through clouds of sawdust as they entered.

Throughout its 100 years, Fort Meade was the home to a great many firsts, many of which were a direct result of WWI. Troops at Camp Meade were the first to receive new Browning automatic rifles, including the M1917 Browning .30 caliber machine gun.

The first women in uniform, known as the “Hello Girls,” operated telephone trunk lines at Camp Meade which connected the states to the battlefields in France. Some of the women deployed with the troops and worked from bunkers near the front lines.

After the war, having realized that poor food and sanitation can greatly impact a soldier’s ability to fight, the first school for military cooks and bakers would be established at Camp Meade.

Also after the war, U.S. tank crews trained and equipped in France, would return to Camp Meade to establish the first Tank Crops. Among them were seasoned tank operators who had engaged in the deadliest WWI battle, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Under the command of Lt. Col. George Patton, 165 French Renault FT tanks from the 304^th Tank Brigade, attacked fortified German positions along a 20-mile front. As leaders in the first Tank Corps, Patton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower would write the book on battlefield tank tactics, and they would practice those tactics at Camp Meade.

Today, Fort Meade is home to the nation’s newest combatant command –U.S. Cyber Command, where 24/7 service members of all branches engage in conflict and competition in the firth dimension of warfare.

Despite all of these Fort Meade firsts, there had never been a definitive book written about the installation’s history, until now.

Fort George G. Meade, The First 100 Years is a more than 300 page book, a majority of which concentrates on WWI and the rapid construction, first arrivals, training and deployment of hundreds of thousands of men and women from Camp Meade. The pages are filled with historic photography, poetry, letters, essays and personal memories of people connected to the installation. The following is just one of more than 100 essays that trace the installations role in conflicts from the trenches of France, to the terror threats of Iraq and Afghanistan and into the current conflict platform, cyberspace.

Paving the way for the Interstate

Excerpt from Fort George G. Meade: The First 100 Years

By all measure, the most notable person to have served at Fort Meade so far in its 100 year history is Dwight D. Eisenhower who came to Meade as a young officer of the first Tank Corps and went on to be President of the United States.

While stationed at Meade, Eisenhower was sent on a mission which later would inspire him to literally change the landscape of America.

In notes he wrote describing the mission, Eisenhower said, “I was detailed for duty as an observer on Trans-Continental Motor Truck Trip on the day that the train left its initial point, being impossible to join the train before the evening of that date, nothing is known by me of the preliminary arrangements and plans for the trip, nor of the start from Washington.”

What follows is a sober recounting of what was the first attempt to move 81 vehicles, including trucks; heavy and light; cars, motorcycles, ambulances, tractors and trailers from Washington D.C., to their final destination in San Francisco, more than 3,251 miles away. According to the final report of the endeavor, making the trip were 24 expeditionary officers, 258 enlisted men and 15 War Department staff observation officers. Due to his late addition, it would seem Eisenhower’s orders were to serve as part of the War Department staff.

The convoy began on July 7, in Washington D.C., and spent the first overnight stop on of the trip in Fredrick, Maryland, a drive that, on a good day, might take just more than an hour today. In 1919, it took the convoy an entire day. A slow start to what turned out to be a herculean task.

Eisenhower joined the convoy in Fredrick and remained with it throughout the 62 days it took to complete the trip facing untold challenges along the route.

While many roads in the Eastern and Western states could handle vehicle traffic to a degree, the roads in the middle of the country were often impassable dirt roads, mountain trails and alkali flats. The insufficient roads were littered with bridges incapable of supporting the heavy trucks and equipment or overpasses with clearance too low to allow the convoy to pass through.

The roads were only part of the problem. The vehicles were capable of vastly differing speeds making it difficult to keep them in a convoy formation and frequent stops due to breakdowns harassed the drivers. All along the way, Eisenhower assessed the performance of each vehicle and made recommendations for how they should or shouldn’t be deployed in the future. “Motorcycles had much trouble after getting in the sandy districts. Except for scouting purposes, it is believed a small Ford Roadster would be better suited to convoy work than motorcycle and side car.”

Living and work conditions throughout the trip were described as “hardship,” with constant sanitation problems, and difficulties in finding food, shelter and even suitable drinking water. Extreme rain and wind storms, punishing heat and persistent challenges due to terrain resulted in an average travel speed of six miles on hour or just under 60 miles a day.

The convoy experienced 230 vehicle accidents. The official report of the convoy recounted, “The most arduous and heroic effort in rescuing the entire convoy from impending disaster on the quicksands of the Salt Lake Desert in Utah and the Fallow Sink Region in Nevada. In these emergencies, the entire personnel, regardless of rank, engaged in rescue and salvage operations.”

Prior to this convoy, the longest military vehicle march recorded went 900 miles. It is reported that, over the thousands of miles the Trans-Continental Motor Truck Trip traveled, “thru various casualties en route,” 21 men lost their lives.

The experience of the trip traveling along the Lincoln Highway became something that stuck with Eisenhower throughout his life. After WWII and his experience driving on Hitler’s Autobahn, the importance of a functioning highway system and the role it might play in the defense of the nation hit home. Once he became president, Eisenhower made developing an interstate highway system one of the major goals of his administration.

100 Years of Fort George G. Meade is available in PDF format on the Fort Meade website at www.ftmeade.army.mil. A hardcover version is available at Amazon.com.

M.L. Doyle has served in the US Army at home and abroad for more than three decades as both a soldier and civilian. She calls on those experiences in her award-winning Master Sergeant Harper mystery series, her Desert Goddess urban fantasy series, erotic romance and coauthored memoirs which all feature women who wear combat boots. M.L. Doyle serves as an editor for The Wrath-Bearingtree.com

It is generally considered good practice not to “feed the trolls”— that is, not to engage in commentary with strangers on the internet who thrive on aggressive verbal hate and cruelty. But when the president himself is little more than a troll and the entire right-wing media apparatus increasingly relies on weaponized trolling (as well as the overwhelming spread of misinformation) as a primary means of producing propaganda, it becomes necessary to occasionally step up and defend ideas and history from the perversion of alternate realities. 

That brings us to the inspiration for this piece: a recent article in the right-wing website The Federalist titled “Read a Pile of Top Nazis Talking about How they Love Leftist Marxism” by Paul Jossey. The subtitle is “From the moment they enter the political fray, young right-wingers are told, ‘You own the Nazis.’ Much of the historical record says exactly the opposite.” The article begins with this in-your-face provocation: “The Nazis were leftists.” I hope that most of our readers will instantly recognize the absurdity of the article from those few lines, but it warrants examining in closer detail to understand exactly what the author is trying to do and why.

First of all, what is The Federalist? It is clearly a right-wing website whose main driving force is to oppose gay marriage and whose main contributors are connected to those ubiquitous right-wing plutocrats, The Koch Brothers. The website itself strangely provides no information or mission statement in the form of an “About” page, but they do use this uncredited line as a footer: “Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray,”a quote that apparently comes from a 1918 speech by Calvin Coolidge, of all people. The Nazi article in question is categorized as “History,” and the author’s past publications all seem to be revolve around fake free speech grievances. 

The introduction concludes by stating “But evidence Adolf Hitler’s gang were men of the left, while debatable, is compelling.” It is interesting to note that the author does not go so far as to apologize directly for the Nazis, or to explain why they “weren’t really so bad.” Let’s stop for a moment and at least recognize and praise this author for not supporting or praising the Nazis. The fact that this has to be emphasized says something revealing about the toxic state of political discourse in this country.

Everything else the author does in his article, however, is part of a cynical ploy to rewrite history by cherry-picking isolated facts and fitting them into a false context. The author claims that his thesis, that the Nazis were actually Leftists, is debatable, but compelling. It is actually neither. No actual historian or political scientist maintains has gone on the record to claim that Nazis were Leftists. Accordingly, there is no citation given of any such person in the article because they don’t exist. This means that the author’s thesis is not actually debatable. It is settled history. I am not personally an academic specialist in the Nazi party, but I am an amateur historian with two history degrees who has read and thought much about World War Two over the course of my life. A very quick bit of research has led me to conclude with a high degree of certainty that there is basically universal consensus by scholars that the Nazis occupied territory on the far-right of the political spectrum. The few skeptics to the “far-right-wing Nazi consensus” seem to place more emphasis on the sui generis nature of the Nazi political beast by charaterizing it as neither right nor left, but a unique populist syncretic movement. Even such a rare opinion does not go so far as to characterize the Nazis as unequivocal members of “the Left”. That is because it is by definition an absurd and offensive statement. That is like saying that Nazis were secretly communists because of a short-lived and cynical peace treaty with Josef Stalin (Actually, the author does make that ridiculous point in the article). There is no new history to be written on the main, big picture history of World War Two and the Nazi party. There is no hitherto secret knowledge or conspiracy that the author has just revealed despite decades of settled history determining what everyone knew at the time and until now: the Nazis were a far-right party—as far right as a party could conceivably be on the political spectrum. Everything else in the article is merely lies and propaganda (which are usually the same thing) to further his own right-wing views.

It is not hard to imagine why one wouldn’t want to share ideological real estate with the Nazis, and once again I do in fact applaud the author for not wanting to admit such. The fact remains though, that they were a hyper-right-wing party, and he is an ideologue in the far-right-wing American conservative movement. That is why he attempts to portray the Nazis as a Leftist party—to make himself and his likeminded peers feel better about themselves while simultaneously making the other guys look bad. He might as well just wave his arms and shout at the top of his lungs “I’m not a Nazi! You’re the Nazi!” This playground tactic is actually a well-known and useful tool of propaganda called “transference” or “projection.” It is one of the many techniques of propaganda I mentioned in my article of the same name (The Techniques of Propaganda). The current president famously does it nearly everytime he speaks, most famously in a debate with Hillary Clinton when he screamed “No Puppet! No Puppet! You’re the puppet!” The fact that he is, in fact, a puppet is secondary to the strategy of constantly maintaining a consistently aggressive and mendacious stance towards political foes in an attempt to smear them with your own crimes and faults. This is also a type of “whataboutism” which has long been used by Trump’s mentor, Putin. It’s like saying “Yeah, the Nazis were bad, but what about Stalin and Mao?! (or Native American genocide or slavery?!)” It shouldn’t be too hard to understand that such statements are intentionally intellectually dishonest distractions from the point, but the fact remains that for a lot of people, especially ones primed to follow right-wing talking points and emotionally based arguments, such propaganda is often quite effective.

The second paragraph of the article continues by citing the infamous right-wing polemicist and fake historian Dinesh D’Souza as one of the sources of recent alternative histories. The author then claims that “the vitriol and lack of candor [such “alternative histories] produces from supposedly fact-driven academics and media is disturbing, if unsurprising. They stifle dissent on touchy subjects to maintain their narrative and enforce cultural hegemony.” Lots of big words and academic-sounding language here, all in an effort to say “why do experts call us out when we make shit up?” D’Souza is a convicted felon, provocateur, and far-right hack who is popular with theocratic crowds for writing a ton of “history” books that completely make shit up and basically blame “liberals” for everything from slavery to 9/11. The fact that D’Souza is the only person cited in the article regarding such “alternative histories” is telling. He even appears to have written a trashy “history” book in 2017 called The Big Lie claiming contrary to all evidence that Hitler and his coterie were “secret leftists,” a dog-eared copy of which is no doubt on the author’s shelf. For real historians, fact-checking D’Souza is like playing Super Mario Brothers with the cheat codes on, and luckily for us there is a tireless history professor named Kevin Kruse who has taken up this challenge.

The author continues by saying that “alternative views of the Third Reich exist and were written by the finest minds of their time,” and claims that such opinions “perhaps carry more weight because they are unburdened by the aftermath of the uniquely heinous Nazi crimes.” Once again, props to the author for having the courage to admit that Nazi crimes were heinous, something becoming more difficult by the day for many of his fellow travelers. Even the president, famously even-minded and hesitant to draw hasty conclusions, wouldn’t want to go so far because there were probably many “good people” on the Nazi side. Anyway, the only “finest mind” that the author cites in the entire article is a certain Austrian economist, F.A. Hayek. Hayek does have the benefit of having actually rejected and fled the Nazi regime in real-time, which not every German-speaking intellectual could claim (looking at you, Martin Heidegger). He was also a life-long friend of liberal philosopher Karl Popper despite their many political differences, which reflects well on Hayek in my book (Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies was written in 1944, the same year as Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was published. Here is my article on Popper explaining why I find him more convincing than Hayek). He has also been basically the main, and the only, inspiration for that always dubious and now-extinct animal known as the “reasonable, principled right-wing intellectual.” 

If we are to be generous and fair to Hayek, we must admit that he was apparently a relatively honorable person with some nuanced and well-considered positions on politics and economics. For the purposes of right-wing politicians, it has long been enough to cite him as the simplified intellectual basis for their dogma that free markets must always be unfettered and wealth must never be distributed by the government (by which they mean of course that it should never be distributed downwards; they have always been happy to distribute it upwards). This was the dogma of the Thatcher-Reagan axis, but it could have just as easily been Ayn Rand rather than Hayek providing the “philosophy.” In any case, the author here has used a few throwaway, out-of-context phrases from early Hayek to make his entire case that the Nazis were leftists. In addition, Hayek loved dictators and somehow made the case that authoritarianism (which he supported!) was different than totalitarianism (which he was against). He personally supported and sometimes collaborated and befriended right-wing dictators and war criminals like Pinochet (he claimed that Allende was totalitarian!) and Salazar (maybe let’s reconsider that thing I said about his being “honorable”). So that is a summary of the most intellectually important right-wing thinker of the century.

The official name of the Nazis was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. They didn’t like to be called Nazis. If you look carefully, you will even find the word “Socialist” (not to mention “Workers”) in the name of party. This must mean they were Socialist, and, tout court, Leftist. Case closed. I guess all this actually proves is that political parties choose names that do not always signify their actual ideology. This is more common outside of America, with the Polish Law and Justice party, the Brazilian Social Liberal Party, the French Socialist party, and the Australian Liberal party coming immediately to mind (not to mention the Russian United Russia party). The author goes on to give example after cherry-picked example of actual Nazis making quotes that make them appear friendly to what we think of as Socialism, or of denigrating the “western capitalists” of the time. He says, for example, “Hayek describes Nazism as a ‘genuine socialist movement’ and thus left-wing by modern American standards.” That’s a pretty big red herring, oversimplification, and non sequitur all in one short phrase (three techniques of propaganda! Go read my previous essay and learn them all by name). He goes on to say, “British elites regarded Nazism as a virulent capitalist reaction against enlightened socialism–a view that persists today.” Yeah, it persists because it’s the historical truth. By the way, that’s actually being far too gentle with Nazism—calling it a “virulent capitalist reaction” is probably the most unsuperlative thing you could truthfully say about it—and “British elites” (many of whom actually supported Hitler up to and, in some cases, during the war).

As the article continues, the author gives some ad hoc definitions of “right” and “left”, and their sloppiness illuminates the ways he probably thinks his is a logically sound argument. He says the “right” consists of “free-market capitalists, who think the individual is the primary political unit, believes in property rights, and are generally distrustful of government by unaccountable agencies and government solutions to social problems. They view family and civil institutions, such as church, as needed checks on state power.” He says the “left” consists of people who “distrust the excesses and inequality capitalism produces. They give primacy to group rights and identity. They believe factors like race, ethnicity, and sex compose the primary political unit. They don’t believe in strong property rights…They believe the free market has failed to solve issues like campaign finance, income inequality, minimum wage, access to health care, and righting past injustices. These people talk about ‘democracy’—the method of collective decisions.” He then claims that these definitions prove somehow that the Nazis were Leftists.

The only thing he didn’t say about the “left” is that they have a penchant for human sacrifice and cannibalism. If you think there is something just a bit made up, just a bit Fox-Newsy about his definitions, you are not wrong. Obviously it is not easy to portray all the nuance of the variagated “right-left” political spectrum with such facile definitions, especially considering the disconnect between economic and cultural perspectives. There is a convincing case to be made that from the “right” perspective, everything that they think is wrong with the world is de facto part of the “left.” If you define everything not you as bad, and everything bad as “left,” Nazis will by necessity become leftists. Much of today’s “right” also thinks of the “left” exclusively in terms of identity, as opposed to other political ideology. Thus, anything in history that used identity in bad, or deviant ways was therefore part of a leftist plot or conspiracy. It would be easier to list the key words and ideas generally associated with each camp. In political science, it is generally accepted that the “left” tends to emphasize ideas like freedom (!), equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform, and internationalism, while the “right” tends to emphasize ideas like authority (!), hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction, and nationalism. Any disputes here? I didn’t think so.

You might have noticed those key words of freedom, and authority. Despite the American right-wing appropriation of the word, they misunderstand and detest real freedom and always tend towards authority over liberty. Usually what they mean when they talk about freedom is that they support the freedom to think and act just like they do, which is obviously no kind of freedom at all. The centrality of sexual and religious politics in American right-wing ideology is enough to illustrate their primacy of authority over freedom. Some theorists maintain that there is a natural authoritarianism and oppression of the lower orders in conservatism in general; Corey Robin in The Reactionary Mind says that “Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom.” Authority is the main hallmark of not only authoritarian (obviously) and totalitarian systems, but also conservatism writ large. Jeffrey Herf in his book Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, argues that the Nazis mixed enthusiam for technology with a total rejection of Enlightenment values as a radical alternative to liberal and socialist visions of modernity. Umberto Eco’s tour de force essay “Ur-Fascism” gives 14 characteristics of Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” that can be found in all forms of fascism. Nowhere in this exhaustive list can you find anything remotely “leftist.” Basically, the Nazi regime was reptilian, terroristic, totalitarian, and extremely right-wing.

For those who shout “What about Stalin?!”, the answer is that the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, was also a right-wing terroristic totalitarian regime, despite the supposed “leftism” of Communist ideology that could be traced back to said Enlightenment values. The Soviet Union was never really Communist in anything but name, but from the beginning governed as just another kleptocratic oligarachy much more authoritarian than any Tsar ever dreamed of. Vladimir Nabokov, in his memoirs, calls the Bolsheviks (who assassinated his father, by the way) “fascists.” So the answer is that the Nazis weren’t “leftist,” but that the Soviet Union was actually “rightist.” You might ask if I’m being serious here or just engaging in my own propagandistic sophistry, a la the author of that hideous article. Reader, do you own research and make up your own mind. Don’t believe anything you read on the internet. Especially on websites like The Federalist. Read history.