When Paul, a nuclear operator, had arrived in Greenland, the reactor at Camp Century was still not fully assembled, so he and a dozen other men were being held temporarily at another camp a hundred miles south. Everything he could see on the edge of the polar ice cap was white and brown like some kind of visual trick: dirt, and snow, and snowy dirt, and snowy air, and sometimes blowing dirt. The snow and dirt were constantly changing places.
He was in the mess hall when Master Sergeant Whitmore appeared at his elbow. Paul hopped to his feet, and Whitmore asked, with no preamble, “You ever drive a D8 Cat?” Whitmore had buggy, vein-scraggled blue eyes that seemed to intensify anything he said, giving any question he asked an oddly moral implication.
Paul hesitated. “Not yet.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to fill in,” Whitmore said. “It’s just like driving a tractor, except it’s a giant one. You’ve driven a tractor, right?”
Paul had not.
Whitmore forged on. “You’ll be towing a fuel canister. All you got to do is stay behind me and follow the bamboo markers. Do not fall asleep and drive into a crevasse. We drive six hours on, six hours off. It’ll take about a week.”
Paul was relieved enough to simply get on the road, so he nodded, and when Whitmore left, his friend Mayberry appeared beside him.
“King of the road!” Mayberry said, grinning at Paul. Mayberry was the camp geologist, and this was his fifth tour in Greenland. Tall and thin, with a scientist’s buzzing mind, he worked in an underground lab below the base, surrounded by rows of ice samples stored in what looked like oversized poster tubes. Because he spent his working hours alone, he seemed perpetually delighted to encounter other people. He said that Camp Century was a dream compared to his first base in Greenland, which had been called Fistclench.
“How bad will it be?” Paul asked.
But Mayberry was watching Whitmore, who stood across the room talking to the camp cook. Cookie, as they called him, had been in Greenland for who knew how long. He was as thin as a Confederate zealot, and while the men ate he stood smoking in his stained apron, watching them as if it gave him either grim pleasure or unabated pain.
“Good!” Mayberry said. “We get to bring Cookie.”
“Should make for great conversation,” said Paul.
“Oh, he talks,” Mayberry promised. “You’ll see.”
The Polecat was idling next to several others just outside the camp’s garage. They rumbled in concert, swathed in plumes of steam and exhaust. Paul identified his by the orange fuel canister attached to the rear and mounted on skis. The Polecats were Swiss innovations, specially adapted vehicles with huge track frames – Paul guessed twenty feet – and wide track pads that could traverse uneven ice without tipping or breaking through.
There would be three other Polecats like his, carrying various types of freight in the middle of the caravan. Whitmore’s D9 led the line, with a blade attached, to help clear a path. Then there was the Command Train, a huge tractor that pulled the cook shack, radio shack, and three refurbished old boxcars on skis called wanigans, where the soldiers relaxed or slept. Finally, there was the last boxcar on the whole train: the latrine, that foul caboose, following them like a bad thought. What an absurdly human predicament, Paul thought, having to cross the polar ice cap lugging literal shit behind you.
Whitmore strode up and slapped Paul on the back. “Good luck,” he said. “Don’t drive into a crevasse.” This was becoming a common theme with the master sergeant, and Paul was beginning to suspect he wasn’t kidding. To Mayberry, Whitmore said, “Quit smoking by the fuel rig. Here’re your keys.”
Everyone climbed into their tractors. Slowly, Whitmore pulled his D9 out into the lead. At this rate, Paul thought, we will never get anywhere. Then he pulled his own tractor in line and found it moved even slower than the boss’s.
It seemed unbelievable they’d travel at this snail’s pace for an entire week. Paul tried not to think about it. He wondered when he would break down and allow himself a cigarette. He wondered what his wife, Nat, back in Idaho was doing. He thought quite a lot about what they would do if they were together. Meanwhile he squinted to keep track of the pointed tops of the bamboo poles they followed, many almost buried beneath the moving glacier. Sometimes the poles would be so hard to see that an impossibly-bundled man would have to walk ahead, locate them, and then wave in the direction the trucks should go. Paul’s Army career had started in petroleum supply, and stunts like this were one reason he’d left that field. Lugging massive canisters and a shitter across the ice felt like some Neanderthal gig, the work of people without bright ideas.
photo by Ray Hansen
Between their shifts, the drivers sat in the rocking but well-heated wanigan, paging through month-old newspapers someone had brought from Fort Andrews. There they were joined by Cookie, who had never stopped smoking, his legs crossed and one foot jittering up and down. Cookie would wait until the men around him began to engage in any kind of interesting conversation—about sports back home, their previous tours of duty, anything—and then he’d suddenly interject his own litany of complaints against the Army and life in general, as if that had been the topic of discussion in the first place. “I wasn’t meant to be here,” he’d say, sucking on one cheek, his small eyes blazing. “I’m from Mississippi. No way was I meant to be here.” He alternated this thought with its close cousin, “I wasn’t meant to be in the Army” (he had initially attempted to get into the Navy) and also, “I was never meant to be a cook” (he had hoped to be a machinist, but failed some critical aptitude test). Cookie and his quibble with destiny had rapidly become tiresome, and it was impossible for the other men not to occasionally respond with wiseacre remarks.
“I was meant to be here,” Mayberry said as he flipped the pages of the classifieds. It was the only section everyone had not yet read multiple times. “This, here, is the point in life I was born for.” The wanigan gave a lurch and someone in a bunk cursed.
Cookie ignored him and continued, “I was a runner in high school. I ran cross-country. I wasn’t meant to stand in one place, flippin’ burgers.”
Mayberry was reading the classifieds aloud. “Here’s an ad for a home dental care system. It says, ‘Polish Your Teeth on Your Own Time.’”
“That’s what I’ve always wanted to do with my own time,” said Benson from a folding chair across the room.
“We could let Cookie drill our cavities,” said Mayberry. “Maybe he was meant for that.”
“I had three ladies back in Mississippi,” said Cookie. “Three of ‘em, who loved me. They cooked for me.”
“Hmm,” said Mayberry, in a placating way.
“I had five women,” said Benson. “They polished my teeth for me.”
Cookie snapped to attention. “You did not,” he said. “That’s stupid.” Then he lapsed back into thought.
The wanigan hit a deep groove, and the men steadied themselves. “Jesus,” said Benson. “And people think they get seasick in the Navy.”
“I was meant to be in the Navy!” Cookie said, with sudden interest. Then he stood from his chair and looked at the boxcar door with a focused expression, his hands on his hips, knobby elbows sticking out from white shirtsleeves. “Forget this shit,” he said. “I’m going home.”
Mayberry rattled his newspaper so it wouldn’t slump. “Great,” he said, without looking up. “Tell your three ladies we said hi.”
“Forget you,” said Cookie, very loudly, leaning over Mayberry who looked over the top of the paper in surprise. “Forget you, all you stupid food-eaters, who just sit around eating my food. Complainin’ and complainin’. I am a man! I was not meant for this shit job!” He stepped back and glanced around with flashing eyes, muttering, “Maybe you should cook for your damn selves is what.”
“Geez, I’m sorry,” Mayberry began, but Cookie strode to the boxcar door, unlatched it, and heaved it open. The air that entered the room felt as cold as rubbing alcohol.
“Whoa,” said Mayberry, getting to his feet also. And then the cook, in only his short-sleeved white uniform, jumped right out.
For a moment everyone stood and the room was silent. Paul looked around, as if this had just been some optical illusion, and Cookie would actually be sitting back in his chair where he’d been a moment before. But the chair was empty. The wanigan door creaked slowly toward closing.
“Holy shit,” Mayberry cried, and he and Paul scrambled. They reached the door at the same time and yanked it open. Mayberry leaped out first, and Paul followed. The force of the cold nearly spun him around, and it took him a second to gather his wits and begin running. He heard Benson hit the ground a few beats behind him. Cookie had taken off across the ice, surprisingly fast, heading for the white horizon.
“He’s a runner,” called Mayberry as they sprinted after the cook. “He ran cross-country.”
“He’s gonna die,” Paul cried. Any second he expected Cookie to slip from sight into the narrow cradle of an unseen crevasse.
The ice was hard and slick, and their feet slipped every few steps. Cookie, on the other hand, appeared to have magic shoes. He was loping ahead at a steady pace, his body a slim, efficient machine.
“Go back, Benson,” Mayberry said over his shoulder.
Paul could hear Benson’s heavy breath like a zipper being yanked up and down. “Someone will radio the boss,” he shouted encouragingly.
“That someone should be you!” Mayberry said.
This is ridiculous, Paul thought. He knew he had to give the chase all he could. He focused on pumping his arms and legs as fast as possible. He narrowed his vision on Cookie and raced all-out, his lungs burning with an intense pain.
photo by Ray Hansen
Cookie might have actually gotten away, run off to the top of the world, if he hadn’t hit a ripple on the ice and stumbled. He caught himself and straightened, limping slightly, and Paul, feeling delirious and oxygen-deprived, gave his last burst of speed. The gap between himself and the cook narrowed. Paul took several long strides and flung himself against the cook’s lower back, pulling the two of them down onto the ice with a painful slap.
The second Cookie hit the ice he began yowling. He fought like a wildcat. He kneed Paul in the gut and smashed the flat of his hand against Paul’s nose. Paul realized that his only advantage was his greater size, so he fell forward onto Cookie and clung to the wiry man for dear life. It was like wrestling a greased snake. All he could see was Cookie’s white-shirted abdomen, into which his face was pressed, the muscles twisting and bucking against his cheek. He gritted his teeth and waited desperately for Mayberry to reach them.
A moment later Mayberry sprinted up and fell on top of them both, and from a distance it must have looked like some ecstatic reunion, or the winning touchdown in a football game. “Sit on his arms,” Mayberry grunted, and Paul, dazedly obedient, tried to find one to sit on. He crawled up Cookie’s body and fought to pin down the cook’s skinny, flopping limb, which jumped over and over again just out of Paul’s reach like a fish on land. Finally, Paul pegged the arm and sat on it, and Mayberry sat on the other, and then there they were, gasping for breath, the cook writhing and screaming on his back beneath them.
Benson finally jogged up, looking ill, and in the distance they could see Whitmore’s D9 turn slowly, slowly, to come and get them. This seemed absurd; they could walk faster than it drove.
“I’m sorry, Cookie,” Mayberry was saying. “We’ll show you we care. We’ll bake you a cake.”
“We need to stand up,” Paul said. “We’ll freeze.” He was concerned about Cookie’s bare elbows on the ice.
They waited for Benson to catch his breath, and then they all grabbed onto an available part of the cook and lifted him to his feet. Cookie screamed; Paul winced to see the two lines of blood on the ice where his arms had begun to freeze to the ground. “Sorry,” Paul said to the cook, and “Start walking,” to the others. With mincing, difficult steps they made their way toward the line of tractors.
Sergeant Whitmore leaped down from his idling vehicle, waving his arms and shouting, “What the hay, Cookie?” for he was a man who did not curse. “What did you think you were doing?” Cookie stared at him defiantly, and Whitmore made a sound of disgust. “Tie him up,” he said, “tie him to a bunk til we get to Century. We’ll decide what to do with him there.”
On the count of three, Paul, Mayberry, and Benson heaved the slender cook up into the wanigan and over to a bunk. Whitmore fetched a coil of rope. “Don’t you tie me,” Cookie began to shout, “don’t you dare tie me!,” but they did anyway, binding him to the bunk in a seated position with his arms behind his back. From there, he yelled half-sensible platitudes at them for hours. “You can’t keep a man where he don’t want to be,” he said, and “This is my life, not yours, you rat bastards,” and, cryptically, “You’re just like all them, you know what.” He hollered until he wore himself out, and then he stared at them despondently from where he sat.
That night, after a dinner of cream of wheat and tinned milk, Paul tried to sleep, but every time he opened his eyes he could see Cookie’s own, glittering back at him. Paul rolled onto his side to face the wall. Cookie’s gaze crawled up his back. He yanked his wool blanket to his shoulders. “Cut it out, Cookie,” he said.
Cookie’s voice came across the room, plaintive, almost mewling. “I ain’t doing nothin’,” he said. “I’m just sittin’ here like a good boy.” A moment later he hissed, “Come on, untie me. I won’t go nowhere. I’ll sit just like this.”
“Can’t do that,” Paul muttered.
Cookie’s voice was hoarse. “My Leroy’s itchin’.”
“Sorry.”
“Untie me, please,” Cookie begged. “Come on now, you’re the only nice one of them in here. You’re the nice guy. The best one.” A minute later he said, “Never mind, you’re the worst one. You a priss is what you is. You prissy!”
Paul had never been called this before and felt actually startled.
“A man’s body is his own,” Cookie said. “It’s the only thing he really got. You know, someday the rules are gonna be here for you when you don’t want them, either.”
Paul screwed shut his eyes. The wanigan lurched and groaned, and a coffee cup slid off a table, hit the ground with a thud, and rolled hollowly across the floor. Outside, the pitch of the wind rose and fell, a sound both strange and familiar: a waning alarm, distant machinery, blood roaring in the ear.
“Almost” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Go toss them a nuke.
5.
If war is still hell, at least my bounding mech suit is air-conditioned.
“An American pineapple, of the kind the Axis finds hard to digest, is ready to leave the hand of an infantryman in training at Fort Belvoir, Va, 1944. American soldiers make good grenade throwers.”
This is just to Say All Again After …
after William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say”
I have expended the “pineapples” that were in the ammo box
and which you were probably saving for final protective fires
Forgive me they were explosive so frag and so bold
Most Likely / Most Dangerous Enemy Courses of Action
what most
threatens my children
social media /
unending war
the rat race /
the daily grind
half-baked policies /
global warming
a lack of hope /
a lack of justice
my constant distraction / my constant distraction
the stand
if you can’t stand injustice
take a knee
if you pray for others
take a knee
if you believe in freedom, not fabric
let others see
you practice
what you preach
New Nonfiction from Kiley Bense: Tell Me About My Boy
Here’s an empty grave, where a body that had been a boy became bones beneath a wooden cross. They buried him with one set of dog tags hanging against his bloodied chest.
He bled in a field hospital bed not far from here, shrapnel buried in his skin. Is that what killed him—hot metal melting flesh, an unseen severing? Or was his body tossed limply from a jeep seat as it crossed the desert, the crush of cargo snapping ribs, a crackle of tinder at dusk? “Morale is very high,” the morning reports said, on the day the boy disappeared into the horizon. The next day he’d be dreaming under several feet of sand. They couldn’t have known. They couldn’t have. They couldn’t.
When he died, the boy was twenty-three and dark-haired, all shoulder and grin: my grandmother’s little brother. It’s one thing to consider his photograph on a mantelpiece, a charming kid wearing a tilted cap; another to imagine him becoming broken, hollows purpling beneath his eyes and a bloody bandage wrapped around one thumb where a cactus thorn was entombed in the soft pad of his finger. One thing to read “artillery fire” on a typewritten government medical form (death requires paperwork); another to watch a German gun spitting shells, coughing up sounds that rattle across time and sky. How fragile is a human body in the path of such certainty.
Here is that body: one-hundred-sixty-two-pounds, down from one-hundred-and-seventy since he’d filled out his draft card in an office in Philadelphia one year before. Seventy-five inches tall. Gray-blue eyes, like his father’s. Freckles across the top of his nose blotted out by five months of sunburn and grime. One thumb now scarred. One uniform crusted with sweat, salt, blood and smoke, one rosary and an American flag stuffed in the pockets. Feet stiff, callused and blistered. Lean jaw and face, angles cut sharper by sleeplessness and fear. Shrapnel lacerations unfurled like tattered red-black lace over his left arm and chest. This is the body they buried in Tebessa with a gunshot salute and a chaplain’s murmured blessing.
Bury him at Gettysburg, his father said, when the government wanted to know where to leave his son’s bones for good. There’s no room in Gettysburg, came the reply, that meadow’s already crammed with dead American boys. Choose another tomb.
Here is a letter about nothing: “Dear Sir,” it begins. “Will you kindly change my address on your records? My son, Private Richard H. Halvey, 331356641, Headquarters Co. 18th Infantry, 1st Division, was killed in action in North Africa, March 21st, 1943, and I am anxious to have your records correct so that I may receive future correspondence regarding the returning of his body. Thanking you for your attention, I am, Very truly yours.” Signed, Brendan H. Halvey, my great-grandfather. Here is pain, laid out on one creased sheet of paper.
He bled for us. But he will not rise. Here in Algeria the air is still, the night is silent. There is no weeping. The only cross at his grave was the slatted thing they stuck in the dirt above his head, one set of dog tags looped around its arms. He hated those dog tags. The cord bit at his neck, a reminder that the Army was trying, every day, to convert him from a person into a number. It took all of one day for him to die. Then he was inked into a serial code in some forgotten notebook. 331356641. 331356641. 331356641. Repeated till it stays.
Across the ocean from the skeleton his son had become, his father wondered where to bury what was left. Here is what the government said: We can’t tell you much about your boy, other than that he isn’t coming back. They took his blood and his body, and all that’s left is bone.
Maybe Brendan asked for Gettysburg because the government was bold enough to parrot Lincoln in the pamphlet it mailed to stricken fathers. “Tell Me About My Boy,” the pamphlet was titled, though really it told nothing. The dead were valiant and heroic, said the pamphlet, they “gave the last full measure of devotion.” There was no mention of Lincoln’s next line: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
Arlington, Brendan decided, finally, in 1947. So they shipped Dick Halvey’s body (which was jumbled bones and dog tags) to Virginia, where the Army shrouded him in stripes and etched a cross on marble above his name. Not blood-soaked Gettysburg but Arlington, everything green and white except the roses laid on headstones. Here, across the river from the capital, we buried our boys in neat rows. “Our boys,” they said back then, pleading with o-mouths at news reels for a glimmer of truth. Our boys aren’t coming back the same.
Note: Tebessa, Algeria was the site of a temporary American cemetery during World War II. Starting in 1947, soldiers’ remains were moved from Tebessa either to the American cemetery in Tunisia or brought back to the United States, according to the family’s wishes.
New Fiction from Patrick Hicks: Into the Tunnel
Editor’s Note: “Into the Tunnel” is the first chapter of Patrick Hicks’s new novel, ECLIPSE.
“The rocket will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.”
—Wernher von Braun
He was tired and cold when they arrived from Auschwitz. The moon hung above him, battered and beaten, as he trudged down a long concrete road with thousands of other men. The train that had carried him across Germany huffed in the night. A whistle pierced the frosty air—it was a single note, strangled into silence. The huffing engine took on water and he licked his dry lips. He tried to swallow. Searchlights paced the dark as dogs strained against their leashes, their front paws wheeling the air. Guards stood along the road and yelled at the prisoners to move faster, faster. Behind him, bodies were tossed out of the railcars. They hit the pebbly ground in sickening thuds. Stones skittered away.
Eli Hessel glanced at the moon. It looked like it had been pistol whipped, wounded.
“Move it, you pieces of shit!”
Another voice chimed in. “March in unison! Your left . . . left . . . left.”
He had no idea where he was or where he was going. The shadowy bulk of a hill was on his right and, in the moonlight, he could see that a haze of pine trees lined its ridge. To his left were strange metal cylinders with nozzles on them. They were stacked on flatbed rail cars.
The men kept moving, trudging, schlepping. Their wooden clogs clacked against the concrete road. Dogs continued to snap and bark. There was the smell of wet fur. And there was something else too, a smell he couldn’t quite place at first. It was a mixture of oil and creosote. There was also—he breathed deeply—there was also the smell of decaying bodies. It was the stink of rotting meat and grapefruit. That’s what a corpse smelled like. During the past few months he had plenty of time to familiarize himself with it.
But where was he?
The journey from Auschwitz had been hard. They’d been stuffed into wooden cattle cars and, as they rocked and clattered over hundreds of miles of tracks, these men, who had been crammed in cheek by jowl, had to relieve themselves where they stood. The weakest slipped to the floor. Many of them never got up again.
Eli stumbled. He was woozy. His lips were chapped and his tongue was leathery. It hurt to swallow. He couldn’t make spit. On his lower back, at that place where the spine meets the pelvic girdle, he had a perfect bruise. A hobnail boot had kicked him into the cattle car a few days ago when he left Auschwitz, and although he couldn’t see it, he knew it must look like a horseshoe with studded dots. Whenever he twisted his waist, a sharp firework of pain sizzled up his spine. He worried that his vertebra was shattered but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to walk faster. He hobbled. He tried to stay at the front of the line because prisoners were being beaten with metal rods behind him. The road beneath his clogs was splashed with oil. Or maybe it was blood? It was hard to tell at night.
“In unison, you pieces of shit! Left . . . left . . . left.”
He ignored the nipping pain in his stomach and watched his feet move on their own. The blue and white stripes of his trouser legs swung in and out of view beneath him. He wondered if they were being taken to a gas chamber. He’d seen it happen at Auschwitz many times before. He’d seen whole families walk down a gravel path to a gas chamber and he’d seen the black tar of their bodies rumble up from a crematorium at night. Flames shot out from the chimney and the whole sky above Auschwitz was stained a dull orange. The heat from thousands of bodies made the moon shimmer.
He focused on his swinging legs and didn’t think about his mother or father, his younger brother, or his grandparents. They were gone. They’d been turned into ash long ago. And yet, against all odds, he was somehow still alive.
“Faster, you sons of bitches!” a guard yelled. “We don’t have all night.”
Maybe he could run away? Maybe he could slip into the night?
Barbed wire was on either side of him—he could see that—and there was the shadow of a wooden guard tower illuminated beneath a searchlight up ahead. No doubt the fence was electrified. To run would mean—what, exactly? All of Germany was a concentration camp.
“Move it you useless eaters, you pieces of SHIT!”
The guard was from Berlin. Eli could tell from his accent. How could he be so angry, so full of venom? And while he was thinking about this, something surprising and alarming appeared up ahead.
The rail tracks curved into a mountain. There was a tunnel. A huge one. Two massive sodium lights sparkled overhead like twin stars and they cast long shadows on the ground. A cloud of moths jittered in the lights and, for a long moment, he wondered what they might taste like. Dusty, he thought.
When it became obvious they were going into the tunnel, Eli looked around in wild terror for a chimney or a vent. Were gas chambers in there? Underground? His muscles tensed and he almost stopped walking. He had to force his legs to keep on moving even though he was shakingly afraid of what he would find up ahead.
Calm down, he told himself. It didn’t make sense to ship them halfway across Germany only to kill them. The Nazis could have done that at Auschwitz.
“It’s okay,” he whispered to himself. “Yes, all is well.”
But the claws of fear continued to scratch at the inside of his skull. His asshole tightened and his eyes darted to the left and right. If this was a work camp, where were the other prisoners?
The moon was swallowed by a cloud and this made the dark beyond the searchlights absolute. The moon had been snuffed out, choked. Two enormous iron gates on either side of the tunnel were wide open, and camouflage netting was strung above the entrance like an awning. A white wooden sign was suspended from the ceiling and someone had taken the time to get the calligraphy just right.
Alles für den Krieg Alles für den Sieg
Eli looked around. It was understood by everyone that German was the only language that mattered in the Reich. If a prisoner was confused or didn’t understand something that was shouted at him, well then, he would learn soon enough.
When they entered the tunnel, a sudden dampness fell over his skin. It felt like a heavy wet cloak had been placed over his shoulders. He began to shiver. And somewhere up ahead, metal banged against metal—it was deep and rhythmic—double-syllabled—bah-wung—bah-wung—bah-wung. There was also the low hum of a generator to his right. Floodlights cast grotesque shadows on the wall. He looked around and realized that everything he could see must have been hewn out of the rock by hand. The floor. The walls. The curved ceiling. How many prisoners had died making this place, this cave?
Modern-day view of the tunnels where the V-2s were made. Photo by Patrick Hicks.
They passed a cluster of SS guards who stood around laughing at some joke. They smoked and paid no attention to the column of prisoners that shuffled past them. Bright balls of orange glowed at the ends of their cigarettes. They pushed each other playfully and talked about roasting a wild boar. For a moment, Eli allowed himself to imagine what it might taste like. The fibrous meat, the juices, the sucking of the marrow from bone.
“Keep moving!” someone shouted from the rear. Surprisingly, it was a French accent.
Steel pipes were bolted to the walls and he wondered what they were for. When he looked up at the high rounded ceiling he felt claustrophobia run though his chest like spiders. For several long moments he had to fight a wild urge to run. What if the ceiling collapsed? How many thousands of tons of rock were above him? Eli looked for support beams but couldn’t see any. The air around him was thick and oppressive and cold. It crowded his lungs. His nose was chilly.
He focused on his wooden clogs. They were badly stained from the mud of Auschwitz and he counted his steps as a way to control his fear.
One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .
All is well, he told himself. Yes, all is well.
When he looked up, he saw a winch and two dangling chains. The rhythmic banging got louder. Bah-WUNG. Bah-WUNG. Bah-WUNG. There were hundreds of prisoners working in the tunnel up ahead. They were dressed in blue and white striped uniforms like him. The light was weak and this made the underground world feel sunken and submerged. What were they doing? Mining for gold?
As he got closer, he realized they were hunched over tables and assembling something that looked like gearboxes. Others worked on metal tanks. Down a side tunnel, a group of prisoners carried a huge nozzle. It was the size of a church bell.
“Drop it and you get twenty lashes!” a voice roared.
It was a kapo. This man was given extra food if he agreed to do the dirty work of the Nazis. In exchange for beating his fellow prisoners, he was given a good night of sleep and a full belly. The nozzle suddenly teetered sideways, the metal cone slipped against the wall, and when it bounced onto the ground—sending out a low ringing sound—the kapo immediately began hammering a prisoner with a stick. The blows rained down. Bloody stains formed on the man’s back.
“Be gentle with that!” the kapo shouted. “Gentle! Gentle! Gentle!”
An SS officer watched all of this with bored curiosity. Cigarette smoke vented from his nose. Eli studied this man’s clean face, his manicured hands, and he couldn’t help but notice the high polish of the man’s jackboots. They twinkled in a perfection of night. Eli turned away when the guard looked at the parade of arriving prisoners. He knew better than to look the SS in the eye. Surely the rules of Auschwitz must apply in this place too.
“Fresh rags,” the SS guard yelled out. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Welcome!”
As they marched deeper into the tunnel, Eli saw that many of the prisoners didn’t have shoes. Their feet were bloody and caked with grime. He also became aware of the overpowering smells around him: diesel, the sulfurous burn of arc welding, and there was something else too. He recognized it from that factory at Auschwitz. His teeth tasted of iron. There were pools of water on the floor and he wondered if he could bend down and cup some into his hands. A kapo, however, was marching next to him. The man twirled a metal rod.
All around him were the scrapping of spades against wet rubble. The floodlights of the tunnel gave way to carbide lamps. Soon everything flickered and it was hard to see. He stumbled over a thick cable and nearly fell. Others were having trouble too.
When they rounded a corner, he decided to chance it. Eli bent down for a handful of water. It was beautiful and wet and primal against his skin, but when it passed over the dry seal of his lips he spit it out. It tasted of urine.
A moment later, they came to a halt.
The sound of hundreds of clogs coming to a stop filled up the tunnel. It was like horses clattering to a standstill.
At first, Eli couldn’t tell what was before him. He squinted and waited for his eyes to adjust. A skirt of light fanned onto—he wasn’t sure what, exactly. There, in a long line, were giant metal tubes that looked something like torpedoes. Maybe they were for a secret submarine? Maybe they were for a massive U-Boat and they’d be sent across the Atlantic to attack New York or Boston?
A high-pitched voice came from the edge of the light.
“Mützen…ab!”
Eli and the others immediately took off their caps and slapped them against the seam of their trousers. They stood at stiff attention.
There was a long pause and, during this silence, Eli felt a sneeze coming on. He wriggled his nose in the hopes he could fight it off. In Auschwitz, he once saw a prisoner get hit in the face with a crowbar for sneezing. It killed the man. He fell to the ground like a sack of wheat. The tingling continued deep in his nasal cavity, so he held his breath.
A man in a business suit stood before them. He wore a white smock and, even from this distance, Eli could see the sparkle of a Nazi pin on his lapel. Lurking in the distance were SS officers. They stood back, smoking.
“You’re in the heart of it now,” a kapo yelled. He extended both arms as if he were a magician. “Welcome to Takt Strasse.”
Eli had grown up in Berlin and he knew that a takt was a baton used by an orchestra conductor.
The kapo, who had the green triangle of a criminal stitched onto his striped uniform, pulled out a wooden club from behind a metal cabinet. He paced back and forth before adding, “On Takt Strasse, I keep time on your heads if you don’t move quickly enough. Do you understand, my assholes?”
He brought the club down onto an imaginary head.
“In this place we build rockets.” There was a deliberate pause. A knowing smile. “Yes, my assholes, we create machines the Americans and the British cannot even imagine. Our technology is going to win this war. You’re standing in the future.”
Eli looked at the torpedoes and nodded. Ah, he understood now. They weren’t designed to fly through the water. They were designed to fly through air and come crashing down onto cities. His eyes opened in the horrible realization of what was around him. Each one of these rockets could kill…how many?
“You are enemies of the Reich and in this kingdom beneath the mountain you will work to destroy your own countries. Do you understand me?” There was another wide smile. “In this place you will build wonder weapons the likes of which the world has never seen.”
He held the club and moved it like a scythe. “This is your last home, my assholes. The only way out of this camp is through the chimney.” He opened is arms. His voice was suddenly bright and friendly. “Welcome to Dora!”
Eli didn’t know what any of this meant, but he had a good idea. In Auschwitz, after his family had been sent into the sky, he had come to understand such speeches. In this place called Dora, death was a way of life. There would be death in the morning. Death in the afternoon. Death in the evening. Death would be everywhere, like oxygen. Death. Death. Death.
“Listen up,” came another voice. It was deeper and darker. “Approach the table in groups of five. We need to process you.”
And so it was that hundreds of starving men entered the most secret concentration camp in the Nazi empire. When it was Eli’s turn, he held his cap in both hands. He decided this made him look like a beggar, so he stood at attention. He stiffened his back.
“Age?”
“20.”
“Do you speak German?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Occupation?”
He needed to make himself useful because the Nazis believed one simple and ironclad rule: only valuable workers stayed among the living. Everyone else was wheeled into the darkness.
“I’m…an electrician,” he lied.
The prisoner behind the desk stamped a green work order and handed it to Eli without looking up. There was a number with an inky swastika punched over it. 41199.
Eli Hessel, a Jew from Berlin who hoped that many decades of life still lay ahead of him, turned from thoughts of the dead and let his mind focus on clear, clean water. Yes, he thought, he’d love a tall glass. There would be ice cubes, big ones, big enough to sting your upper lip when you took in the cool wetness. It would flow down his throat, wet and pure.
And with this image hovering on his tongue, he stepped into a sub-tunnel.
He went to work.
* *
The official name of the camp was KZ Dora-Mittelbau. The KZ stood for Konzentrationslager and work began on the tunnels on August 28, 1943 when a hundred prisoners from nearby Buchenwald were ordered to dig into the hardened rock of an abandoned gypsum mine. By the end of 1943, some 11,000 prisoners were hammering and blasting their way through a stubby mountain called the Kohnstein.
“Mountain” is too grand of a term, though. It was a ridge that lifted up from lush farmland, jack pines sprouted up from its hump, and it was home to a rich variety of wildlife. Beneath the soil was a tough rock called anhydrite. It was so hard, in fact, that tunnels didn’t need supporting beams, which is precisely why the Nazis decided to create a factory deep inside its heart. Huge internal spaces could be chiseled into the center of this mountain and, as a result, no American plane would ever spy the assembly line of V-2 rockets hidden inside. The Nazis knew the enemy would fly on, seeing nothing, suspecting nothing, and even if they found out what was happening in the cool depths of the earth, no bomb could ever punch its way down to the factory floor. It was a natural fortress. It was bomb proof. The war could never touch it.
In the early days of the camp’s existence, the growing cavity of rock was a place of constant noise and dust. Emaciated prisoners blasted holes into anhydrite around the clock. They hunched against walls before each deafening explosion—they pinched their eyes shut and held their breath—and as they crouched there with their hearts racing they must have wondered if the ceiling would collapse. Would the tonnage of rock suspended above continue to hold?
While they imagined a waterfall of rocks tumbling down onto their bodies, that’s when the cracking detonation of TNT happened up ahead. A huge cloud of rolling white covered them, it submerged them. Dust particles filled up their lungs. Whenever they spit, their saliva became like paste.
Once the dust settled they were ordered to clear away the largest chunks of rock. The prisoners were ghosts that tossed huge jagged pieces into rail cars called grubenhunten and then, by sheer force of will, these men muscled the carts down a track and out into the sunlight. There, they tipped out their load, turned around, and went back into the tunnel for more.
These withered men with burst eardrums slept inside the mountain. And because there was no plumbing, this meant sanitary conditions were beyond disgusting. Men relieved themselves into barrels of diarrhea, they walked across streams of excrement, and they were given hardly any drinking water. As a result, disease spread at a fearsome rate and prisoners fell to the ground in unrelenting numbers. Still, the work continued. It went on day and night.
For the Nazis, they didn’t care who lived and who died. It was slave labor. The bodies of these men were the property of the Reich. Even now, we’re not entirely sure how many prisoners perished from all the blasting and hauling but the numbers are thought to be in the thousands. We do know that the dead were hauled away to Buchenwald where they were burnt in a crematorium. The SS at Dora-Mittelbau felt this was too inefficient—all those trucks traveling back and forth, wasting gasoline—so they requested their own oven for burning the dead. This wish was granted.
By early 1944, Tunnel A and Tunnel B were finished, along with rail tracks that led out from their gaping mouths. Some 35 million cubic feet of space was now available for rocket assembly. If we think of Tunnel A and Tunnel B running parallel to each other—with a slight S curve to both—there were forty-six smaller tunnels that connected them. In this way, seven and a half miles of space had been chiseled into the Kohnstein. The world’s largest underground factory was finally ready for use and, if everything went according to plan, the Nazis would soon rain warheads down onto cities in a way the world had never seen before.
One thing was certain: the idea of a rocket was about to move from the realm of science fiction into the realm of science fact. What would soon rise up from blueprints would not only change the course of the twentieth-century, it would rumble down through the years to come. It influences us still. It threatens us still.
* *
Eli knew none of this when he arrived because the prisoners who built the tunnels were all dead by the summer of 1944. However, even if he did know how Dora-Mittelbau had been created, would it really matter? Not to Eli. He only cared about the narrow road to survival. This was part of the literal and figurative tunnel vision that existed in the underground camp. All living prisoners felt this way. The present and the future were all that mattered. The past? The past didn’t matter. It was a place of pain and loss. The past held images of happier times and of family members who had all been murdered. And so, Eli didn’t think of the past. It ceased to exist. It was a weight that threatened to drag him down.
He was housed in Barrack 118 along with 400 other men. It was a clapboard shack with thin windows and a dirt floor. It was one of many barracks that had been set up outside the tunnels and the whole outdoor complex was surrounded by electrified wire. Searchlights roamed the night. In the distance, dogs barked and he could hear classical music drifting out from the SS camp. Occasionally, laughter sliced the night air and, once or twice, he heard the sound of gunfire. The SS at Dora consisted almost entirely of men who had long careers at other concentration camps. They knew what they were doing. They were stone faced professionals.
Triple layered bunks had been shoved into Barrack 118 and it was here that shivering men nuzzled into each other for warmth. As the curfew siren wailed out, Eli searched for sleep. After sixteen hours of work—during which time he’d seen five men collapse from hunger and another beaten to death—getting a good night of sleep took on existential importance. A night of sleep might repair the damage that had been done to his joints and ligaments, it might help clot wounds, and it might allow his back to heal.
His uniform was infested with lice and, whenever he tried to slip into the syrupy void of rest, he could feel little mouths walking across the landscape of his body, nibbling here, nibbling there. If he thought about it too much it seemed like his skin was on fire, like he had already been shoved into the crematorium.
He scratched his eyebrow and felt a white speck moving beneath his fingernail. The man next to him twitched in sleep. His breath stank and, gauging from the smell of shit that was on the man, he obviously had dysentery and hadn’t made it to the barrel in time. While the man snored, Eli studied his skeletal face, how the eyes darted back and forth beneath papery lids. Maybe this man, this stranger with a homosexual’s pink triangle on his uniform, would magic into a corpse in the next few hours? Such things happened. Just yesterday the kapos woke up Barrack 118 for morning roll call and seven men had died during the night. One of them had hanged himself.
Eli glanced out the window. The moon was pock-marked and brilliant. He saw that it was bleached white, just like the walls of the tunnels of Dora. In the drowsy chambers of his imagination, he wondered if the moon and the tunnels were made from the same rock. He saw himself quarrying into the moon, digging down, down, down, deep into its belly where he could sleep in peaceful glowing warmth. Sleep, he thought. To drift away…
A gust of wind rattled the window.
He adjusted his wooden clogs beneath his head. They hurt the base of his skull but that was far better than waking up to find that someone had stolen them during the night. Imagine walking into the tunnels with bare feet, he thought. He could almost feel the cold against his toes.
When he was kid, he loved feeling grass beneath his feet. July sunshine trickled down through oak leaves and the warmth was delicious. He imagined stopping at a café for a slice of chocolate gateaux. Maybe he’d sink a finely polished fork into frosting and lift the crumbling goodness to his lips where—
He opened his eyes and felt a hundred mouths on his body. Stop, he counseled himself. Go to sleep. Go to sleep so that you may live.
And with that, he drifted into the abyss.
The lice, meanwhile, continued to feed.
* *
Unlike other camps in the Nazi system, Dora didn’t have a grand gatehouse that prisoners marched through on their way to forced labor. In places like Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau, the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei was emblazoned over a main gate. By contrast, the gate at Dora was simple, artless, and had no such phrase. There was, however, an unofficial slogan in the camp that everyone knew. It hung silently in the air. Sometimes the SS even said this phrase during roll call. “Vernichtung durch arbeit.” Extermination through work.
This was the essential element of Dora and we should note that between the years 1943 and 1945, one in three prisoners died there. Work camps like Dora realized they didn’t need a gas chamber: they simply had to work prisoners to death and, by doing so, they could extract as much useful labor as possible.
In his first week there, Eli came to know Dora well. There were the tunnels, of course, where he and thousands of others were forced to work. This underground area of camp was called Mittelbau, and this is where the world’s first rocket was built. In the years to come, the designer of the V-2, Wernher von Braun, would shed his Nazi past and go on to create the thunderous Saturn V for NASA, which lifted American astronauts to the moon. The bargain for the United States was simple: ignore von Braun’s past and in return he would deliver the most powerful rocket the world had ever seen. Whenever questions about Dora-Mittelbau did come up in later life, von Braun would simply smile and talk about Apollo, and Tranquility Base, and the bright pull of the future.
To the west of the tunnel entrance was the SS camp. This was off limits to the prisoners and yet, whenever they marched past, they could see fine homes, a fancy pub, dog kennels, and vegetable gardens. Just to the south of the SS camp was the rail yard where the V-2s were loaded onto trains and sent to launching pads across Germany. Further to the west was the gatehouse of the prison camp. Aside from a horrible stench lifting into the air—a stench that stung the eyes—the first thing a visitor might notice would be the guard towers, the searchlights, and the barbed-wire. The prisoners were woken at four in the morning by kapos. They entered the barracks with rubber truncheons and flayed away until everyone was assembled for roll call. Thousands of striped uniforms had to stand at attention while the SS strolled among them, roaring out commands. Dogs strained at leashes. Men in guard towers yawned and smoked cigarettes. They lifted their machine guns and took aim while a swastika on a flagpole snapped and rippled in the shadowy blue of sunrise.
Roll call lasted for hours. The prisoners stood at attention with their caps off while a kapo read off their numbers in German. Eli listened for his new name as a soft breeze moved through his uniform. He was no longer Eli Hessel. He was 41199.
The numbers were always shouted out.
“VIER EINS EINS NEUN NEUN!”
“Jawohl!”
He raised his hand and was counted among the living.
As the count went on, crows circled overhead. They wheeled around and landed on barrack rooftops. They cawed and hopped. Sometimes, if the wind was right, Eli could hear church bells bonging in the valley below. Wisps of smoke lifted up from unseen chimneys. He wondered what they were eating for breakfast. Eggs? He liked to imagine eggs. Boiled. Poached. Fried. Scrambled. Thick with butter.
When they were dismissed, everyone rushed for rutabaga soup, a slice of moldy bread, and coffee that tasted of acorns. When Eli drank the soup for the first time, he noticed that it tasted of petroleum. Blobs of oil floated on top. The soup arrived in fifty gallon drums—they probably held fuel once—but he didn’t care about this. He poured the soup into his mouth and tore at the green bread. The coffee too disappeared. When it was all over, he looked at his dirty hands and ached for more. Many of the prisoners went over to the empty metal drums and began to lick them clean with their tongues. One of the cooks, a burly man with thick forearms, hit them with a ladle.
“Stand back. That’s all for today!”
Some prisoners ate lice off their shirt. Others ate snails off fence posts. Others tried to eat leaves or tufts of grass. Eli watched all of this and wondered if he, too, might do the same thing in a few weeks. Yes, concluded. Yes.
An announcement crackled out from the camp loudspeaker. “Attention . . .” There was a shriek of feedback. “Return to the roll call square. Return to the roll call square immediately.”
They moved back and lined up. A brass band started to play and, in this way, thousands of men marched out of Dora for the tunnels of Mittelbau. The work day had begun.
As they moved for the tunnels, and the rockets, and all that the future might bring, Eli glanced at the guard towers. The wind picked up and the trees began to rustle. Birds soared overhead, riding the currents into quieter valleys. Behind the prisoners, the crematorium rumbled softly. The tall chimney looked like an inverted rocket. It belched up tarry exhaust, staining the bright blue sky with the fuel of flesh and bone.
His arms were heavy and he shuffled carefully to keep his clogs from falling off.
They turned for the tunnel. It was a gigantic black opening, a wide mouth. Soon, the long column of starving men were swallowed by the mountain. Eaten.
Eli focused on what lay ahead. No matter what happened, he told himself, he must not give up. He must fight to the death to live.
Our Personal Community by Curtis J. Graham
It was in the news. On a bright summer day in Helmand Province, Lance Corporal Wickie did his duty and killed an insurgent. A suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into the berm of Outpost Shir Ghazay. Wickie returned fire, then applied a tourniquet to someone’s wounded leg. He earned a Combat Action Ribbon, a Commendation Medal, and a Valor Device. He was promoted to Corporal, then Sergeant, and he reenlisted.
Before we deployed, Wickie told me he was getting out as soon as possible, that his contract couldn’t expire fast enough. He would eat the apple, and fuck the Corps.
I first met Wickie at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. I was a Private First Class with a single chevron on my shoulder. I had orders to report to an office inside a warehouse, and the Corporals told Wickie to show me around. Wickie was small, with a round head and big brown eyes, like someone’s kid brother. He brought me to a wall locker covered in dents and bootprints. He opened the door and pulled out a plastic cowboy hat. “Check out this bad boy,” he said. He dusted it off affectionately and rapped it with his knuckles. “OSHA approved.”
Outside, Wickie led me to the far corner of the lot, where rusty forklifts were parked in a row. He began to tell me about his dad. “Yeah, he was Secret Service for a while, before he got contracted for Blackwater. You know, spec ops. Assassin shit.” He pulled out a camouflage wallet and opened it with a rip. He handed me a black business card with a longhorn skull in the center. It said, Robert P. Wickie, Blackwater Operative, with a phone and fax number.
“There’s no address,” I said. “And why is there a fax number?” The card felt like printer paper.
“Obviously, ain’t no address,” he said, and took the card from me. He stuffed it into his wallet. “Works where he wants, when he wants, my old man.”
“How much does he make, doing that?” I said.
He took a while to answer, like he was making something up. Then he told me twenty thousand a week. “Bull crap,” I said.
Wickie sucked his finger and felt the wind. The sun was setting. “’Bout that time,” he said. We walked to the formation for dismissal, and Wickie realized he’d left his blouse out back. He was wearing a green t-shirt with a toothpaste stain shaped like a lollipop. The Corporals made him stand in his own formation for a while, facing a brick wall.
I’d been in Afghanistan three months, on an outpost called Shukvani. The base was situated in a depression surrounded by hilltops. The day Wickie arrived, he threw rocks at the windshield of the forklift I was driving and shattered it in three places. The Sergeant Major sent him away, to Outpost Shir Ghazay.
In the early months, I photographed things. I had a mattress in a metal bunk frame, a luxury, and I took a picture of it. The previous occupants had left us a mini fridge, a black loveseat filled with knife punctures, and a small TV. I took a picture of the sun setting behind an abutment, helicopters landing at night. A frozen steak grilling on wire mesh over burnt wood scraps. I uploaded the images to my Facebook profile.
One night, a short burst of gunfire woke me up. The noise echoed around the base, then stopped. Everything was quiet. I climbed out of bed and pulled on my flak jacket and helmet. The radio crackled with chatter. “Everyone to the berm, now,” said the voice of the Sergeant Major.
Outside, dust blew in the breeze. The ground was pale blue with moonlight. We sprinted across the packed gravel of the helicopter pads. I imagined I might shoot and kill someone tonight, then I stopped imagining. I racked my bolt while I ran, chambering a round. I reached the berm and lay against the baked earth. I caught my breath. Nearby, I heard a radio. Someone spoke.
They told us that a small convoy operated by the Afghan National Army, our allies, had parked just outside the base. They were on their way to another part of the desert and needed to pass through. They had no radios, so they fired their AK-47s into the air to get our attention. We were not in danger.
I walked alone across the crushed stone, back to the tent. I lay awake on my mattress, and felt nauseated from unspent adrenaline. I listened to mice as they ran around the tent, invisible, chewing holes in things and attacking one another over food scraps. Their tiny screams. I awoke when the sun shone through a rip in the canvas by my eye. The next day, I went to the computer tent and logged into Facebook. I checked my album titled Afghan 2013 for likes. People had commented on my pictures of our small television, the mattress, the single steak. Someone wrote, “Wow, really roughing it over there.” I deleted each of the pictures, then the album entirely.
A month passed before the big explosion happened. It felt nearby and sudden. It was like a punch of breeze, a gentle concussion. Across the desert, at this moment, Wickie was becoming a hero.
When the deployment came to an end, we kicked the sand from our boots and flew home in cargo planes. They searched every other bag for rocks and vials of moon dust. “Leave the country how you found it,” they told us.
Back at Camp Lejeune, I found Wickie sitting in a pickup truck outside the warehouse. He’d used his deployment cash to buy a black Chevy with four rear tires. We got talking about Shir Ghazay. “No one believes me, man.” He reached up and slammed the truck door.
I’d read the official report on the Division website, and I’d heard from others who were there. Private Cody talked about how Wickie just shucked a bunch of rounds from his magazine so that later, it would look like he’d returned fire. Rucker said he saw Wickie crouching beneath a truck, covering his ears during the firefight. Wickie stood in front of me and twisted his toe in the dirt. He told me that, last week, he’d been eating a sandwich at Chick-Fil-A when someone dropped a tray of dishes. He ducked beneath the table and barricaded himself with chairs. People laughed at him, he said.
I’d been out of the Marines for six months. I grew my hair long and wore flannel shirts. I was in college studying literature, and I’d recently signed up for a course in war poetry. On my way to classes, I walked past the campus veteran’s lounge. It was an oversized closet with a computer desk and a silver mini-fridge with Capri Suns for the veterans to drink. The students inside laughed often. I never went inside. I didn’t feel like one of them. Most of them wore combat boots with blue jeans, t-shirts from the infantry units they’d been in. Their hoodies were smattered with graphics of skulls smoking cigarettes. Aces of spades, fanged dogs. They probably had good stories, and I couldn’t think of any of my own.
In the poetry classroom, students took turns reading stanzas from Brian Turner’s “At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center.” The poem was about a veteran walking through aisles and seeing weaponry in household items. The students sat in a circle, reading aloud. They were careful to pause when appropriate, to read with continuity from one line to the next. In the poem, a box tips over, and nails trickle out like shell casings from a machine gun. Paint spills and expands like a puddle of blood.
A student with a combover read a stanza about dead soldiers lying on the conveyor belt at the cash register. I listened to the description of the body. A year ago, I had been standing in a medical tent watching an Afghan civilian dying. He had fainted from blood loss. He was naked, with a catheter inserted. His toes were all crossed over themselves, and he had gashes that peeled and showed the muscle beneath. I watched the Navy Corpsmen bustle around, wearing tied-on paper scrubs over their cammies. At the far end of the tent, a little girl lay on a plywood table. She would soon have her legs removed. She would live. On the wall were x-rays of her femurs and pelvis. I saw the faint gray silhouette of her flesh on the outside, cracked white bone on the inside. She had stepped on a doormat bomb the day before. The man in the bed would die after amputation. The next day, I would drive a forklift and carry a cardboard box containing his legs, and those of the little girl, to the pit where they would be burned. I’d drop them off, and I’d smell them burning as I drove away.
In the poem, none of the shoppers see what the narrator sees. I set my photocopied page on the table because my hand was shaking. I looked around the room and was conscious of my heart beating in my ears. The students kept reading and reading. I grabbed my bag and left the classroom before it was my turn.
I walked down the hallway, touching the wall at intervals. It was cool beneath my fingertips. Billboard flyers fluttered as I walked past them, promoting frisbee tournaments and drag concerts. In the bathroom, I dry heaved. I flushed the toilet with my foot and waited in the hallway for the hour to end.
My next class was American Education. I arrived early. There were two veterans in this class, and they always came in together. The guy was bald and in his late thirties. He wore cargo pants and brown shoes. The girl wore a pink sweater that looked like shag. They didn’t fit in with anyone but each other. They seemed to like it that way.
Today, we were giving presentations about our Personal Community. The guy went first, and he talked about the Army. He had a deep, loud voice. He shook a little, being at the front of the classroom. He spoke in short bursts, like a Sergeant addressing a group of young soldiers. He had to project confidence, because of his rank. He clicked through a slideshow of himself in various states of undress, posing with weaponry outside plywood buildings. The class clapped for him when he finished talking about the camaraderie he knew in Iraq.
The class was mostly queer and transgender students studying music education. The next person to speak was Skye with the green and black hair, the pierced lower lip. She spoke about her friend who leapt to his death from a parking garage. Another friend had opened the passenger door of Skye’s car and rolled onto the freeway while she was driving. The people who understand Skye’s post-traumatic stress, she said, are her Personal Community. Someone turned on the lights, and the classroom erupted with applause.
I stood next. I kept mine generic—my family, my friends. There was no camouflage in my slideshow pictures. I clicked through the photos as I talked. A camping trip. My uncle’s ’78 Nova. I imagined it wouldn’t take much to make them think I was someone, a person of valor. I’d just have to show the right pictures, ones with sand and smoke in them. I could tell them the story of how Wickie became a hero. I could talk about the sound and the blood, and the way it felt afterwards. I could be anybody. I could be Wickie. It wouldn’t have mattered what I told them, really. They would still applaud for me. They might even call me a hero.
I walked down the hall after class and passed the lounge. Someone had just told a joke, and there was an explosion of laughter. I thought about leaning in and knocking on the door. I thought about stepping over the threshold, pulling up a chair. Maybe they’d tell the joke again. Maybe I could hear it, too.
Shining Light on the Darkness: An Interview with Patrick Hicks
Andria Williams: Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I’ve just finished reading “Into the Tunnel,” the first chapter of your new novel, Eclipse. I was struck as always by what an immersive, detailed world you create, the tension you achieve, and the beauty and specificity of your language.
As the novel opens, we’re accompanying Eli Hessel as he arrives from Auschwitz — where his whole family was lost — to a vast, mysterious Nazi project deep in a mountain. The change does not bring relief. As he’s led into the dark, underground tunnel, observing the familiar cruelty of SS officers and the smells and tastes of punishment and broken bodies and death, he tries to piece together exactly what this horrible and mysterious project is and what it will require him to do.
We are learning along with Eli just what the deal is with this place, and that approach creates not only tension in the story, but an empathetic dread as we cringe along with each new shade of understanding. Did you always know that you wanted to open the novel this way, with the reader learning Eli’s situation along with him, almost in real-time?
Author Patrick Hicks
Patrick Hicks: The beginning came to me very quickly, thankfully. I could see it all in my head: the arrival at night, the huffing train in the background, the gaping mouth of the tunnel, the guard towers. I think there’s something deep inside us as a species that recoils at the thought of going underground, and I wanted to tap into that. Many of our legends and myths revolve around a fear of caves, and the underworld, and buried rivers. That natural dread of journeying beneath the soil must have been amplified a thousand fold for the prisoners of Dora-Mittelbau. Being underground? During the Holocaust? Can you imagine?
AW: No, I cannot imagine.
PH: It must have been a unique horror to be in that concentration camp. Imagine entering that warren of tunnels as slave labor and seeing the high technology of these new things called “rockets”, and now imagine knowing that you could shot or beaten or hanged at any moment. I wanted the reader to feel that sense of horrified amazement.
It also seemed like a good way to get at what I call “the moment of crisis”. That’s what drives all stories—a moment of crisis. It’s that moment in a character’s life when everything could change, the stakes are high, and the outcome is anything but certain. If a writer can find that moment, the tension will naturally follow. I wanted the opening chapter to unfold in real time, as you say, to make everything feel immediate and dangerous. It also makes the reader feel closer to Eli. He’s a likable man. We want him to live.
AW: Yes, from the very first line of Eclipse, the stakes feel incredibly high. My investment in Eli’s safety only grows as I read on.
Partway through the chapter, however–without at all diminishing the momentum–the reader’s granted a small measure of relief from in-the-moment dread when Eli’s narration is briefly replaced by a more authoritative narrator, who explains some of the history of the project inside Dora-Mittelbau. (That relief is short-lived as the nature of the project becomes known.)
“One thing was certain: the idea of a rocket was about to move from the realm of science fiction into the realm of science fact. What would soon rise up from blueprints would not only change the course of the twentieth-century, it would rumble down through the years to come. It influences us still. It threatens us still.”
Can you explain the project at Dora-Mittelbau, and the influence it still has? I’d be interested to hear more.
PH: We forget about it now, but the Third Reich had very sophisticated technology. The Allies had good reason to worry that they were quite literally being outgunned. The Nazis were developing an atomic bomb, they built the first jet plane, they had stockpiles of chemical weapons the likes of which the world had never seen before, and they also created the world’s first mass produced rocket—the V-2. Wernher von Braun, who would later move to America and build the Saturn V that got us to the moon, was the mastermind behind the V-2. He tested his prototypes at a military base called Peenemünde. The Allies bombed this site in 1943—we totally destroyed it—and this led von Braun and others to realize that a secret underground concentration camp was needed, it would be an underground factory that would churn out V-2s at a dependable rate. Hitler hoped it would change the course of the war.
Tunnels where the V-2s were made. Photo by Patrick Hicks.
And so, deep in the Harz Mountains, prisoners had to blast tunnels into the earth to create this factory. Thousands of lives were lost and, today, no one really knows about Dora-Mittelbau because what was built there—the rockets—were top secret when America discovered the camp. It was hidden from the press. We didn’t want the world to know much about the V-2s, so the horrors of this camp weren’t put in the public eye the way that Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen were. Even today, the name “Dora-Mittlebau” means very little to most people.
I wanted to change that. I wanted to show that this place created the blueprint of the latter half of the twentieth-century.
Those rockets became the ICBMs that exist today. They were built by German scientists who would go on to work for NASA—they’d get Apollo 11 to the moon—and in return we cast a blind eye on their crimes against humanity. That’s why the novel is called Eclipse. It’s about darkness and light. The horror of the Holocaust is directly tied to the wonderment of the Apollo program, and my main character, Eli Hessel, is involved in both events. While everyone is cheering for a successful moon landing in 1969, Eli Hessel is thinking about what happened in Dora. What would it be like to see your tormentors holding positions of high rank at NASA?
One reason some people think the Holocaust and the moon landings are hoaxes comes down to one irrefutable emotion: they both seem impossible. And yet, they both happened. We as a species did both of these things. There is ash at Auschwitz and there are bootprints on the moon. For me, they represent what we are capable of doing to each other, and they also represent what we are capable of doing with each other. Eli wrestles with all of this, and I’ve rooted everything in strong historical research.
AW: I’d love to hear about your approach to research. Both in this novel and The Commandant of Lubizec, I’ve been amazed by the absolute grounding in place and time you achieve, the attention to specific terms and images (carbide lamps, sodium lights, gypsum, kapo, Tranquility Base). What sort of reading and travel does your research involve?
PH: I really appreciate this question and I’m so pleased you felt that sense of grounding. As you know yourself with The Longest Night, all fiction is rooted in a particular time period, and it was important for me to make the reader feel they were in Nazi Germany. I wanted them to feel this in their bones, but I can only achieve this if I do a lot of research. So, in the case of Eclipse, I went to Dora-Mittelbau on two separate occasions and I spent many hours wandering around the camp, talking with curators, and getting into the ruined tunnels with a guide. I read eyewitness accounts of being at Dora, I did research on von Braun, the V-2s, and the Apollo program. This meant visiting the Kennedy Space Center, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama where von Braun developed the Saturn V. Did you know they have a V-2 on display at Marshall but there isn’t a plaque or really anything that explains the crimes committed at Dora? Those who were murdered have essentially been erased from the story. Seeing that—or really not seeing that—made me want to write about this all the more.
I did the same type of thing for my first novel, The Commandant of Lubizec, which is about a fictitious Nazi death camp in Poland. I did three separate research trips to the real life camps of Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec. I spent over 30 hours in Auschwitz. I interviewed survivors. I have strong feelings that if I’m going to write about the Holocaust, I have to get the history correct. I mean, I just have to. It would be an insult to the survivors and the dead if I didn’t get it right.
AW: What, then, do you think is the relationship between politics and art?
PH: They’re braided together very tightly. Art isn’t created in a vacuum and artists have opinions which invariably come out. If you’re going to write or paint or make music, it’s because you have something to say, and that “something” will be a statement on the world around you. We may not see the politics embedded in Shakespeare today, but they’re there. He was a man of his era and he wrote about the world he saw.
One of my jobs as a literary artist is to shine light into the darkness. If I can illuminate new ideas and nudge readers to consider new things, then I’ve done something that goes beyond just entertainment. Good writing provokes us to think differently. It challenges us to care and it forces us to see the world through the eyeballs of another human being. The act of doing that is immediately political because you have to take in the world from someone else’s perspective, and biases, and joys, and fears. I love how literature forces me to consider the world anew.
AW: Alexander Chee has said that “writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit—an exercise in finding out what you really care about.” With several books under your belt, have you figured out, or distilled, what you really care about?
PH: Oh, wow, what a great question. A complicated one, too. Writers tend to orbit around the same issues and approach them from different angles in different books. I’m deeply interested in how the forces of hatred and racism can turn into violence, and I feel a responsibility to help readers understand the Holocaust better. How we remember the past matters to me and I’m drawn to the idea that previous generations aren’t that much different from us. I care about cheating time and hauling the past into the present so that we might understand a particular era better, and maybe placing it into dialogue with our own concerns and values. That idea of “giving a shit”…if the writer cares, the reader will probably care too. We tell beginning writers to “find their voice” and while that’s important, it’s equally necessary to find out what you care about. Intellectual passion matters in writing. It’s the energy that propels narrative.
AW: One of the most moving passages in your previous novel, The Commandant of Lubizec, comes right before a group of prisoners decide to attempt escape.
“…As much as the guards wanted these prisoners to be faceless and anonymous, the very opposite was true. The prisoners were all individuals. Some had freckles. Others had crooked teeth…Many of the prisoners had ghostly pink indents on their fingers where a wedding ring once sat. Such a thing proved that they were beloved, once…At some point in time, the hot words of love had been whispered into their ears, and once, long ago, in what seemed like another life, they had all been the center of someone else’s universe. They were the sun. They were the stars and light. They were the molecules of God himself.”
In much of your work, fictional characters are given all the careful specificity and individuality of real people, until we feel that we know them. Why do you undertake this painstaking work, and why do you think it’s important?
PH: In order to write about a death camp, I knew that hundreds of minor characters would vanish into the gas chamber and never be seen again. But of course, they weren’t minor characters in their own lives. These were people just like you and me. During these scenes of mass murder, I wanted the reader to feel wounded that they were being taken from us. I wanted the reader to gasp at the monumental injustice of it all and see these people as fully realized lives. That’s the thing about genocide: it’s often viewed just as statistics, and I didn’t want that for The Commandant of Lubizec. I think that’s one reason why it’s made such a connection with readers. They see people dying in my novel—not numbers—people.
There’s a chapter called “Numbers” in The Commandant where all of these innocent souls are being forced to run towards the gas chamber and, in each case, I wrote pages of notes on who was in that crowd. My feeling was that if I didn’t care about these characters, than how would the reader care about them? In nearly every case, I had more information on these individuals than I put into the novel. I needed to see each of them, and I refused to make them faceless. That’s what the Nazis did. I wanted to see people—mothers, wives, fathers, uncles, piano players, poets, plumbers, book store owners, rabbis, children. They all had lives. And those lives were stolen from them.
Present-day site of the crematorium at Dora-Mittelbau, where over 20,000 souls were lost. Photo by Patrick Hicks.
AW: How do you maintain perspective, and avoid slipping into despair — if that is possible — when writing about and studying the Holocaust?
(I keep thinking of the way Eli tells himself, “All is well. Yes, all is well,” to cope with the constant threat and strain. Has such an intense working relationship with one of the darkest parts of human history ever felt like too much?)
PH: I’ve done research at ten camps now and…sometimes I feel too close to the Holocaust. When this happens, I back up and focus on the goodness around me. It’s always there though, hanging darkly in my imagination. For example, whenever I see the Yankees play baseball on television, their striped uniforms remind me of the prisoners at Auschwitz. Or whenever I see freight trains clattering across the prairie, I think of Poland. The same goes for smokestacks or crowds shuffling in the same direction. I teach at Augustana University, which is abbreviated on t-shirts as AU. That’s what Auschwitz was abbreviated to. AU. KonzentrationslagerAuschwitz. KZ AU. If you go to Auschwitz today, you can see that stamped onto certain items. I don’t know…the Holocaust flits through my brain all the time. At least I’m removed from it by the safety of several decades. How on earth do survivors cope with what they saw? How?
AW: Oh, wow – I never thought that about the Yankees uniforms, and I don’t know enough about the Holocaust to have picked up on the AU reference — but if I had studied it as much as you have, I can see how it might permeate all my perceptions. Like you, I have no idea how survivors are or were able to cope with what they have seen.
Which leads me to my next question, in the hope that we have learned from history: A common refrain, under the current presidential administration, is that many of its messages smack of fascism, or sound eerily authoritarian, or seem to endorse white supremacy. As a scholar of one of the worst eras of white supremacy and genocide human history has known, do these claims ring true for you?
PH: The Trump Administration is one of the most corrupt and reprehensible in our nation’s history. He is certainly a damaged human being who is a racist, a misogynist, and his narcissism—not to mention his unmoored relationship to the truth—all make him an ideal candidate for dictatorial aspirations. This is a man who does not like criticism and demands absolute loyalty. I have no doubt he will go down in American history as a thug and villain to our democracy. After studying white supremacy and fascism for so long, Donald Trump’s language has disturbing echoes with what happened in the Third Reich for sure. These comparisons can only be taken so far, though. Trump’s political savvy and acumen is thankfully well below Hitler’s own rise to power, and I take comfort in the fact that, unlike Hitler, Trump does not have a private army like the SA or SS at his command.
While I’m concerned about the state of our republic, the majority of Americans reject Trump’s toxic viewpoints. We also don’t yet have widespread political violence in the streets with men chanting his name and beating up bystanders. If that happens—if something like Charlottesville happens regularly and routinely—that’s when the claims of Trump being like Hitler take on a more ominous and deadly tone. Nazism was forged in the furnace of post-Great War Europe. Germany wanted a strong leader in the 1930s. Americans? Our nation was founded on rebellion. Sooner or later Trump will be tossed aside. Until that happens, it’s good to study how one man came to power in Germany and what his dark charisma unleashed. One of my favorite quotes is from John Fowles’s novel, The Magus. In it, he says that the tragedy of the Third Reich is “not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”
It’s necessary to keep such things in mind. Raise your voice. Get out there. Demonstrate. Vote. Our nation is greater than one man.
AW: Finally: I am a huge fan of your collection of poetry, Adoptable, about the building of your family: your wife and your sweet son Sean, adopted from South Korea. Each of these poems is so tender, so lovingly observant. You talk about your son’s arrival, as a toddler, and his initial terror; his mastery of the English language; and you imagine very movingly the birth mother who surrendered him mere hours into his life.
You write:
“what catches my eye is the gap
between when he burrowed into this world,
and when he was given to an orphanage.
In these missing hours, I imagine his birth mother
cupping the grapefruit softness of his head.
She breathes in his scent,
kisses his nose, memorizes
the topography of his face.
And then, reluctantly,
she lets him go.”
You’re able to turn your remarkable empathy and gift of language to almost anyone you choose. Can you talk a little about your journey to fatherhood and how it has influenced your writing and your art?
PH: I’m so happy we’re ending on this note, a note of love. I also want to thank you for these thoughtful questions, Andria. It’s been a fun conversation.
I wrote Adoptable at the same time that I wrote The Commandant of Lubizec, and although I didn’t realize it back then, I really needed to do this. I couldn’t write about the Holocaust without occasionally turning away to focus on the good things in my life. Adoption is complicated and beautiful and messy and confusing. My son will have plenty of questions about his birth country and his birth family—I won’t be able to answer these questions—but I’m looking forward to walking next to him as he searches. Aside from all the normal things a father worries about, I’m also thinking about racial issues, and belonging, and what it means to be an American. Since becoming a dad, I’ve realized all those clichés about being a parent are true. They exist for a reason. The toughest job you’ll ever love. Being a parent changes you forever.You don’t know love until you have a kid. They’re all true, at least for me.
I sometime wonder what my son will make of my writing when he’s older. One of the reasons I wrote Adoptable is because I wanted to capture the forgettable moments of his childhood—the day to day stuff. He already has huge missing pieces about background, so the least I could do was write about things he did as a toddler and try to explain how much we love him.
Being a parent has changed me as a writer for sure. I’m now totally aware that my need to write means that I’m not spending time with him. When you’re single it’s okay to be selfish and lock yourself in an office but, when you’ve got a child, that compulsion to get ideas onto the page takes on a new dimension. I’m a more focused writer now. I don’t flaff around like I used to. My writing time is more intense and disciplined. And when I do write about the Holocaust, I now see all of my characters as someone else’s child. I see the timeline of a single life more sharply. Maybe it helps me to remember how fleeting our time on this planet really is. And, when I think about how temporary our bodies really are, it makes the crime of genocide all the more monstrous, all the more important to write about.
“All. art. is. political:” An interview with Roy G. Guzmán and Miguel M. Morales
Our two featured poems for the month are selections from Roy G. Guzmán and Miguel M. Morales’s anthology, Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando. Here, WBT editor Andria Williams interviews the two editors about this unique, gorgeous, and necessary passion project. As Morales describes,
The pieces in Pulse/Pulso came from the initial days and months after the shooting. We needed to hold and sanctify those moments so we could have each moment that followed. So we could feel love and pride again. That is the passion I had and still have for this project.
ANDRIA WILLIAMS: Roy, one entry point into this discussion might be to start with your 2016 poem, “Restored Mural for Orlando.” The poem is beautiful and gutting. You have a masterful way of building the emotional investment with each turn, opening with the shooting itself, and then moving into a fond, pragmatic, and even tenderly humorous portrait of your family on vacation in Orlando. On that trip, you reflect that Orlando is where kids go to “fantasize about the childhood [they] didn’t have;” you’re surprised by the sight of your mother on a rollercoaster (“because she’s always been ashamed of her weight”), and note somewhat humorously that your parents ended up “buying a timeshare by mistake/ not really by mistake….”
As a non-poet but a fiction writer, I was simply impressed by the way you allow the “character” of yourself to guide us through the poem, which somehow, almost counter-intuitively, increases the intensity.
Can you talk a little more about the myth of Orlando for you, as a child, and how this mythos worked its way into your thoughts about the tragedy?
ROYG.GUZMÁN: First of all, thank you for your generous reading of my poem and, as a fiction writer, for noticing these rich aspects about the poem. I think one of the most important things I had to negotiate during the writing this poem was my position in all of this. I kept returning to that image of the club, to the colors, to what the victims and survivors might have been wearing, to the sounds. Those sensory details invited me into that space, but I had to figure out what I’d be doing in the reimagining of that space. I had to turn the gaze on myself. That is when a lot of these autobiographical details suddenly became important to my approach to the poem. I had to honor the victims and I had to be as clear as possible about my relationship to Orlando. As someone who grew up in Florida, I was affected in so many ways.
Pulse/Pulso editor and poet, Roy G. Guzmán.
The mythos of Orlando was important for me to talk about. I can’t remember how many times my friends and I would just drive up from Miami and stay in a hotel and do all kinds of stupid things. Most of us were teenagers. I probably went to Orlando a few times before I even set foot in Disney World. The timeshare event affected my family and me greatly. I’d just gotten my first job out of college and I wanted to treat my parents to something meaningful. I remember being in the info session for that timeshare and running all kinds of figures in my head to possibly work out this possibility. Obviously, I was naive and the people running the info session took advantage of that with false promises. Till this day my mom tells my stepdad and me that she never wanted to sign that contract, that we pushed her to. And she’s right.
2) AW:
In “Restored Mural for Orlando,” you write:
“I am afraid of attending places
that celebrate our bodies because that’s also where our bodies
have been cancelled / when you’re brown & gay you’re always dying
twice”
What was the particular importance to you of publishing an anthology — specifically of Latinx and LGBTQ+ writers — about the shooting?
In their poem “straight partner of ten years and anyone else,” Nicole Oquendo writes,
“do not erase my grief. there is a galaxy of this
spreading out inside my chest.”
Did you feel that the stories, the grief, of members of your community were not being heard in the aftermath of the shooting?
RG: We were totally not being heard. We still aren’t. It’s appalling how that’s always the case when tragedies affect marginalized communities. Again and again we see scholars and researchers build careers out of Black and brown pain, and whatever money they make hardly ever makes it back to our communities. This year, for instance, marked the second anniversary of the massacre. Instead of promoting queer and trans voices of color that responded with care and tact, most of the writing community decided to promote another cis white writer and what they’ve written about others’ pain or how they want to make the world a better place. I’m tired of this pattern. It’s enough to make me feel cynical. But we’re told to shut up and be grateful we’re still alive. That’s what the writers in this anthology are trying to resist.
MIGUEL M. MORALES: Pulse affected us all in ways we’ll be discovering for years to come. QTPOC weren’t being heard before the shooting, in the aftermath,or even today. But just because we aren’t being heard doesn’t mean our voices aren’t out there.
QTPOC communities across the country immediately felt connected to the shooting because so many times we’ve been relegated to the occasional “Latin Night” and even then, those spaces are filled with others trying to excoticize or fetishize us. No matter how comfortable we try to make those spaces, we are still being policed, attacked, and victimized. But through it all, we always — always — have each other. Honestly, it hurt to see so many commemorations of Pulse exclude our voices but we did what we always do, we buried our dead and made our own space. That’s what we wanted to convey with Pulse/Pulso, we have each other.
3) AW: Miguel, I know that you grew up in Texas and worked as a migrant farmworker beginning quite early in your childhood, that you lead writing workshops for farmworkers in Missouri and Kansas, and that you’re also an accomplished poet and fiction writer. Can you talk about how you initially connected with Roy to work on the Pulse/Pulso anthology, and about your own passion for the project?)
Pulse/Pulso editor and poet, Miguel M. Morales.
MM: I followed Roy on social media, but we didn’t interact much. Not long after the Pulse shooting, my friend and poetry sister, Sarah A. Chavez, asked if I knew Roy because he had a piece about Pulse that was going viral on the internet. It was “Restored Mural for Orlando” and I didn’t even finish reading it before I sent him a message thanking him for the piece. We began chatting and I shared with him how I wished someone would put together an anthology of brown queer voices responding to Pulse. That’s when he said a press approached him about doing that very thing. He said he was wary because he wasn’t sure how much he could commit to it because he was in school. But, like me, he wanted something to happen. I’m not sure who brought up the collaboration first but it was obvious that we were meant to work on this together.
Many of us endured sustained losses of loved ones during the AIDS crisis of the ’90s. Some of us have never come to terms with those losses. I didn’t want that to happen with Pulse. All I could think about in those first hours and days after the shooting were of the names of the victims. I wasn’t prepared for how similar they would look and sound to the names of people I loved. I had to do something even if it was simply to encourage/nag/beg action from more accomplished Latinx writers. As with most forms of activism and leadership, it didn’t come down to big names. It came down to us.
Everyone in this book stepped up when presented with the opportunity to honor the victims. Each of us relied on family, friends, and strangers for help. The enduring legacy of Pulse and of the lives lost is not of grief but of gratitude for the communities that sprung up across the country in the aftermath. The pieces in Pulse/Pulso came from the initial days and months after the shooting. We needed to hold and sanctify those moments so we could have each moment that followed. So we could feel love and pride again. That is the passion I had and still have for this project.
4) AW: I love the variety of the poems in Pulse/Pulso; some are quiet and sad; others, like Maya Chinchilla’s “Church at Night,” has moments that I would love to hear performed out loud (“Queerly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life….”) How did you decide how and where to place the pieces? Did an order reveal itself as you were editing, or was it more like fitting puzzle pieces together at the end?
RG: The organization of the anthology felt very natural in how it came together. As we accepted pieces, we’d add them to a file. I remember mixing a lot of these pieces and not thinking much about order. What was interesting is when Miguel and I came back to the document, months later, and found that somehow the order we’d put the work in worked. We came up with a lot of reasons for why Chinchilla’s “Church at Night” would go where it ended up and, for instance, why Chen’s work appears where it does. I’d like to believe something greater than us helped us with that order.
MM:I don’t remember us officially having to plan out the order, much less have a disagreement on the pieces we selected. It’s easy for editing teams to agree on which pieces make it into a collection. What really tests the team is when they come to pieces on which they disagree. I was waiting for us to have that disagreement but it didn’t happen. I think that’s because we stayed focused on honoring Pulse and while there are some pieces I wish had made it into the collection, I’m extremely happy with what we curated.
From the beginning, Roy and I worked to have our submissions include new, emerging, and established QTPOC voices. We worked even harder to make sure those voices filled the anthology. Of course we had to examine those terms because someone like Joe Jimenez is seen as emerging but many of us in the community know Joe as an established voice. And since we put out the call in 2016, some of the people who submitted have since become important and emerging voices. We also included writers who have never submitted work anywhere. Including them was essential to the tone of what we wanted to reflect. I’m so proud of everyone who submitted work whether it made it into the anthology or not. They all helped shape Pulse/Pulso into what it is.
5) AW: Julia Leslie Guarch’s poem, “Shh. Shh. Be Quiet” uses the last text messages of victim Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, sent to his mother as he hid from the shooter in a bathroom. (“Mommy I love you./ He’s coming. Im going to die.”) The effect is brutal. But such messages have also become familiar, as one public shooting after another rocks the US. How do you think Orlando fits into the larger discussion of gun violence in this country?
MM: It is clear that so many of us, especially QTPOC, are not safe living our lives, telling our stories, dancing in clubs, shopping, walking, driving, standing, sitting, praying, laughing, or breathing. Gun violence is the focus of so many these days due to the immediate and imminent threat of death that it poses, and it should be. We have to shut that shit down. Gun violence is violence.
The Pulse shooting is just another example, though a rare and extreme one, of the violence queer people, especially queer/trans people of color, face daily. Violence against us is dismissed by the authorities and eventually even by ourselves. Trans women are being slaughtered. Our vulnerable queer youth and queer elderly face violence and threats by those who are supposed to take care of them. We are targeted for sexual violence and other forms of sexual assault that go unreported, unacknowledged, and unrecognized.
In some places queer people are not legally safe in our workplaces or walking down the street or using a public restroom or in our homes. And even in the places where we are legally protected, we’re still not safe.
I am not attempting to dismiss the loss of the 49 lives and the injuries of the 53 others that happened on June 12, 2016. I’m saying that our survival is much larger than gun violence. If we only focus on bullets, we ignore the beatings, the bashings, the bullying, and hundreds of other ways the blood of LGBTQIA+ people is spilled every moment of everyday. Ignoring these forms of “everyday” violence gave permission to perpetrate the violence that happened at Pulse.
6) AW: Roy, in an interview in Hayden’s Ferry Review, you have said, “[Intersections of identity] are something that unfortunately in the U.S. [do] not get to exist simultaneously. Either people want you to wave the immigrant flag and that’s it, or wave the student flag, or wave the poet flag, and a lot of institutions prevent people from having all these different identities coexist. And for me it’s like, because I exist, I exist already within all these different identities.”
Can you speak a little more about this? Do you have any insights into how this problem might have developed, and whether any progress is on the horizon?
RG: Thank you for bringing me back to what I said in that interview–for which I remain grateful. I just got back from a research trip in Honduras, so a lot of what I experienced there is going to speak to how I respond to these particular questions. I find that a system built on colonization, classification, surveillance, torture, and power is going to want to control and stratify identity. Although I noticed these problems in Honduras, in a place like the United States, where people care so much about individuality and wealth, you can’t have layers of gray. Complexity isn’t valued because American society wants the world to speak only American English. Privilege isn’t recognized when people obfuscate different levels of hardship. Something that gives me lots of joy is seeing Black women, for instance, run their own successful businesses. But immigrants, at least those from Central America, are still treated like disposables. Our laws continue to see us as barbaric, social leeches, and unable to govern ourselves. The progress I want to see happen has truly yet to come.
7) AW: Miguel, you had a fantastic poem, “This is a Migrant Poem,” a couple of years back in Vol. 29 of The Green Mountains Review.
“This poem is a gift of a strong back, of sturdy legs,
of silence, of patience.
And a never-ending work ethic
a never ending work ethic
a never ending work of ethics.”
We are, as a nation, failing to deal ethically with people trying to enter this country, and now are being led by an administration that seems obsessed with and increasingly hostile to immigrants altogether. Can you talk a little about your understanding of the “zero-tolerance” policy, the effects you’ve seen? Has it been hard to keep writing and making art in a national climate that’s this openly hostile, or do you feel that the hostility has always been there and it’s only the openness that has changed?
MM: I grew up in Texas but I live in Kansas. While the first is a border state, the second acts like it is. They are remarkably similar in their geography and in their approach to immigration and to those they regard as “others.” Kansas is one of the states receiving migrant children forcibly separated from their parents at the southern U.S. border. Like any other community we are doing our best to keep eyes and ears on these children, hold each other up, and push back against those who advocate for this monstrous policy and shame the cowards who keep silent.
Because hate and hostility have always been there, and will always be there, the Latinx community has learned to pick and choose its battles. Though now we’re facing what we thought was far behind us — emboldened, willful, vile ignorance and an increase in extreme anti-brown violence. As an artist, it’s hard to find the moments to create in this environment. But I came of age in the AIDS activism of the 90s and that oppressive, destructive, and deadly time gave us some of the most powerful and creative moments in queer history. That’s the challenge Latinx artists, and all artists, face in these exponential series of crises. We’re also learning to embrace our anger and our rage. We’re channeling it into something positive.
8) AW: Miguel, in a 2014 blog post, after the Ferguson riots in St. Louis, you wrote
“…. there is… beauty in pain. We … have a gift and sometimes that gift requires sitting in our pain, processing it, and putting it through the artist’s lens.
It means taking what’s inside our hearts, inside our heads and on our tongues and putting it in words, on canvas, or in clay — that’s our ability, our gift. It’s our super power. In doing so, we can help others process their feelings. We can stand as examples to young people on creative ways to deal with these difficult emotions that make so many turn to, and live in, rage or to simply shut down.”
I’d like to close with [both of] your thoughts on what it means to write with a political consciousness. What does political art achieve when it is doing what it does best?
MM: All. art. is. political.
People who say otherwise speak from a place of invested privilege where their politics are so deeply inherent that their positions are seen as default and apolitical. Those individuals are deluding themselves and desperately want to conscript you into any and all efforts sanctioning that delusion.
For me, art has the most impact when it meets and merges with activism. As artists, we are tasked with holding a mirror up to society. We reflect its darkness as well as its beauty. Right now, in this moment, we have an abundance of both. Every artist strives for the apex of creativity. We are there. We are standing in a vulnerable sacred space that comes along once in a generation. We just have to be bold.
RG: I’ve been writing poetry consistently for about 6-7 years, though I’ve been reading it for much longer than that. Most of my first poems primarily came from restlessness and a need to heal. I’m not sure how much has changed for me since. I think the best art operates between imminence, urgency, and compassion, as the works in this anthology claim. However, I strongly believe that any kind of embodiment must begin away from the page. If you are not doing the work your words claim you do, then it’s hard for that work to connect with readers. It’s hard for you to even connect with what you’re talking about. I’m not implying that fiction writers engage in fiction because they themselves can’t do the work urged by their words; on the contrary, the best fiction does not come from the “best gaze” but from the best embodiment of those words. You can’t claim community if you’ve never provided community for others. If we are saying that all art is political, what we are also saying is that our words carry all kinds of responsibilities and possibilities.
One time I met with author Jeanette Winterson and she said that anything she writes, regardless of the genre, is an extension of herself, a preoccupation she wants to unpack, the self wanting to grow and learn.
I think about that often. How do we want to grow? What are we consuming? When will you be ready to give back?
New Poetry from Nicole Oquendo and James A.H. White
The following poems are reprinted with permission from the anthology Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando (Damaged Goods Press 2018), edited by Roy G. Guzmán and Miguel M. Morales.
to be born
by Nicole Oquendo
my spine is queer, curved enough
to hold me up while the news bends
and sways us. every day we die, and
one day it will be me, though statistically,
according to these headlines,
it’s more likely to happen soon.
but there’s new life to look forward to.
last year, my family taught me how
to press my chest and sculpt my own form.
i make love now by giving and taking in equal measure.
my brothers and sisters and those in between
see me standing next to them, signing all of my names.
Stained Glass
by James A.H. White
Fifty–the number of years my mother has lived. The number of paper clips currently
interlocked in a small tin bucket on my work desk. According to motivational speaker
Gail Blanke, the number of physical and emotional ties you should throw out of your
life in order to find it again.
Some say many of them knew each other. It’s often like that in our community. It’s
often like that in a nightclub. We recognize each other. There’s no darkness dark enough
to interrupt that.
The Orange County Medical Examiner’s Office, with assistance from Florida
Emergency Mortuary Operations Response System, identified, notified, autopsied (if
needed) and released all bodies to next of kin within 72 hours of the incident. That
is, all but one victim, whose father wouldn’t claim his gay son.
Phonesthesia is the term for sound symbolism, or, relating shapes to sounds. I see shame
played like tetherball, see it shaped like the tennis ball as it flies, bound, around
that metal pole, hear it on the slap of the child’s open hand or deeper-chorused fist. I see
shame falling on that victim’s burial like the kind of rainstorm written into movie
scripts–dark and heavy. I think of it registering unfairly on the faces of the closeted’s
families when they saw their loved one’s body and recognized it for the first time.
An installation at Chicago’s Contemporary Art Museum featured a row of bodies lined
across a gallery and blanketed by white sheets that peaked at the noses and toes hidden
but assumed molded beneath. A girl nearby says it all makes her sleepy before she falls
to the floor and pretends to sleep–like the dead. On the morning of the shooting, I
think of my brothers and sisters inside, not lined but scattered, sleep I imagine made
clearer to the young as something much nearer, perhaps much whiter.
I break down hearing about the group that hid in the bathroom but were found then
fired on, a couple in a stall injured not only by bullets but shrapnel from the wall and
door. Suppose the bathroom stall like a closet. Do you remember huddling? How about
holding onto yourself beneath a traditional Jibarro straw hat or flower bonnet? How
long did you wait before the car horn outside announced it had come to take you out
dancing?
New Poetry from D.F. Brown
So, Who Wants to Walk Slack?
Because we have no home in language
We keep memories there
As if the past were true
And grinning in a grainy b/w
Teenagers posing johnwayned
Twisted into facts
Jungle-wise who knows
What grows there deep
All night knotted in your heart
Form mangles with content
Hear clouds scrape dark
Clutch the claymore clacker like
Life depends on blasting 1000 pellets
Across the muddy path below
Meaning in its meat
As if out there
Our ass sad little war
Had not ended
Is never ever over and
Because it’s history we hold on
And keep sending our children.
Every Meal is a Happy Meal
Let us see the evening as raw meat
Finest Grade A Prime
Spitted ready for the burning
Charred and bloody rare
Leaking on the platter white
As we find our way into this scene
A table offered up with places
And take our portions of the gore
With salt and wines and candle flicker
Let us eat these products
Over faces of the hungry
From the heart range of this continent
The cowboy bounty of hard work
Slice and savor the marbled meats
And rub our full bellies round
And sense ourselves deserving
These cuts and servings
As if it were duty to an economy
That can no longer afford our appetites
Floating Jack’s Fork of the Current River,
Shannon County, Missouri, August 2010
I try to pretend but the wind
gets in my way, night enters and
shadows crawl along the gravel shoals
into the tree line across the water.
At any other campfire they would be
memories called up and spat
into the flames, sizzle for a second
and rise as smoke unto the stars.
But in this dark they crawl
over old sandbags to my heart—
great slobbering ghosts from Viet Nam,
and set their altars
dig out dog tags, cartridges,
belt buckle, buttons
canteen and rations—
ashes, ashes, old bones of heat.
Houston/2018
To read more from D.F. Brown buy Ghost of a Person: Passing in Front of the Flag at Bloomsday Literary.
Fiction from Sara Nović: After the Attack
Well, nothing at first, not right after. In those initial moments panic is still optional.
At the grocery store, the one across from your building on Frederick Douglass, or farther up on Ft. Washington near your boyfriend’s place, depending—a shrill, unfamiliar tone piercing the Muzak. It startles awake a sudden bond between you and other shoppers, people with whom you’d so far avoided eye contact, mumbling a continuous apology for bumping into one another. Now there is camaraderie in the unison groping of pockets, the rifling for phones among purses and reusable totes.
Across the river on Atlantic Avenue, in the urgent care waiting room, you and the receptionist both jump. The emergency alert system, this is not only a test.
Or on your couch at home, your phone dead from the night before, you receive no alert. You won’t see the special report ticker tape because you are watching Netflix. At the moment, it doesn’t much matter. At first, there are only unconfirmed reports.
It can, as it has before, happen at any time, and therein is the bulk of its power. But city mornings offer certain opportunities—more people on the street, on subways, concentrated in office buildings. People running late, or still bleary-eyed, unseeing, unsaying. See 9/11, 8:46 AM; see Oklahoma City, 9:02 AM.
The West Fourth Street station is bombed in the morning. In your Columbus Circle office tower, a splay of technological gadgets laid out before you on the conference table sound unanimous alarms. The first alert does not contain the word “attack”; it only says “explosion.” So you and your colleagues ignore it. Because the meeting is about to start.
Because New York is a big city, and old, and badly-kempt. Because, though you have watched your share of terror unfold live and on screens, it is still possible that this is not that. Possible is all you need, and in New York possibilities are myriad—gas line break, signal malfunction, flood, or trash fire. You’ve read the posters; the MTA boasts hundreds every year.
Nothing more will happen for a while. You get in line to pay for your groceries.
The receptionist will turn on the television just as you are ushered to the exam room, and you’ll scroll through Twitter in your paper gown, seeking a hashtag.
Or you’ll lie on your couch with your feet atop the armrest and let your eyes glaze hard against the electro-glow, allowing one episode to flow into the next. It is, after all, your day off.
When, that morning, about halfway through the meeting you remember it is a Tuesday, you pull your phone beneath the table and text your wife. She would’ve passed through West Fourth on her way to class. U ok? Saw the alert, you write, then put the phone back on the table, designating half an eye to the task of monitoring the indicator light that might signal her response. A moment later you see the graphic designer making a similar move. The meeting facilitator, who flew in from LA, does not notice.
The second alert changes things. It goes off mid-walk-up, echoing through the stairwell, and you abandon your grocery bags on the kitchen floor and turn on the television. There has been another explosion; cops are in pursuit of a suspect; there is speculation about his race and religion.
You shiver in your paper gown while your doctor, a Pakistani man from Jackson Heights, wishes for the attacker’s whiteness, laments the hate crimes his neighborhood will be in for otherwise. Why, when there is an attack, must they always suffer twice? As he talks you reach for your phone to text your roommate.
Or you fall asleep there on the couch before the computer, waking only when Netflix stops its auto-play, seeking validation that you are, in fact, still here.
After the second alert, you step out of the meeting to call her. She doesn’t answer. It doesn’t even ring. Maybe, you think, she has made it to class and is mid-lecture. Maybe she is stuck underground, train traffic bottled up beneath you. Maybe, you think, New York should get its shit together and get some goddamn phone service in the subway like every other city in the goddamn world. Some Russian oligarch is probably dragging his feet, trying to figure out how to wring more money from it first. Fuckers, you think, aware that in your glass skyscraper on the Circle, many have thought the same of you. You call her again—no dice. You see Adrian—your partner on the project—in the hallway. He is on the phone, and you nod at each other as you pass.
An inactive group text once made to plan a reunion dinner (failed due to irreconcilable schedules), is reanimated as friends check-in. Quickly, most everyone says they are fine—stay safe—and you wait for the stragglers to respond.
You ball up the paper gown and jab at your phone with one hand, pull your clothes on in brusque, awkward bursts with the other. You hop on one leg as you yank at the backs of your shoes. You hear from your roommate, or you still haven’t heard from your roommate.
You finally plug in your phone and the missed calls from your mother, seven in total, are how you find out something is wrong. You try to piece together the story from her news jumble. No, you rarely go to the place where it happened, but this is cold comfort, and you do not attempt to detail the reality of city living for her. You wake up your computer while you listen to her relief set in. Of course you take the subway, everyone does, but you’re home now. You remember a guy you’d had a crush on at your last job and wonder if he is okay, then if it is creepy to seek him out online and ask. You refresh Facebook to see if he surfaces.
The attacker’s manifesto has surfaced, though what it says doesn’t matter much. Whatever the angle it serves as fuel for someone else’s vitriol. Already the feeds have been coopted by trolls of diverse hatreds, practically gleeful in how the dead people are indisputable proof of their political stances, casualty numbers collected and laid out as evidence like a good hand of poker. As if in defiance, the body count fluctuates all afternoon. NBC volleys between 30 and 33 while CNN holds steady at “dozens.” A reporter reads snippets from the document, lines they have also turned into an infographic, to be shared and repeated in and out of context in the weeks to come.
Around the table, you and your colleagues are each engaged in your own ceaseless scroll, searching for a live newsfeed online. But the streams are jammed, or they are an erratic, pixelated froth—frozen in one moment, blurred and jerky the next, altogether unwatchable. Adrian drags a TV cart into the conference room, the kind the gym teacher used to pull out of the closet when it was time for the Sex Ed videos. Aptly, someone has drawn a penis in the dust on the screen. Once the TV is on you can no longer see it, but while the news flashes grainy Chopper 7 footage of fire belching up the subway stairwell, you still wish someone had wiped it off. You send another text as you watch the FDNY charge the flames. The hose water does not look like water; it looks solid, a length of rope lowered into the chasm, its impact on the flames inconsequential.
You want to go home, but with the subway down and traffic gridlocked, you are told to remain in a safe place as the police sweep the city for IEDs. Despite being forced to stay in the office, you are wholly unproductive. The guy from LA, trying to be kind, passes in and out of the room intermittently. At a borrowed desk he calls his home office, where the day is still new and unmarred.
The feeling when her message comes through: relief pushing up your chest with such force it is almost nauseating. Like eating something so sweet it burns your tongue, makes your stomach jump.
I’m good. stuck on train for a while. class canceled so headed home. love u.
You yelp when you read it, a weird, strangled sound, and you aren’t even embarrassed. “She’s okay,” you announce. And they are happy for you.
Politicians from all over the country call in to news shows to offer thoughts&prayers, having less to do with either endeavor than with being on record as having said the phrase.
You are out of the way and grateful to be so, way uptown in a place no one has yet thought to blow up.
You leave the doctor’s office and try to decipher the map of bus routes that might get you back to your place.
Or, when you hang up with your mother, you remember you were supposed to meet a date tonight. You text him to ask whether you are still on.
You cut out at 4:30, a rarity for you, but you weren’t getting anything done anyway, and you want to see your wife. You try to call, but it goes to voicemail. You’re grateful you had some contact, you feel lucky. On your way, you notice the receptionist has been crying, but you don’t stop to ask. Outside it is Sesame Street weather, such sharp contrast to the smoke screened footage of downtown, it feels as if it had all happened much farther away. Your phone rings but you don’t recognize the number, so you ignore it and contemplate the nerve of telemarketers these days. You walk home, thirty blocks, and think it really is a nice commute on foot, that you should do it more often.
The doorman greets you, searches your face and, finding no distress, looks reassured.
“Good to see you, sir.”
“You, too. All okay in your family?”
“Yes sir. And the missus?”
“She’s fine. She’s upstairs, actually.”
He gives you a look that suggests he is trying figure out what he might say next. You register the question in your arched eyebrows.
“It’s just—I’ve been here all day, sir. The other doorman couldn’t make it in, because of the trains.”
And you remember him bidding you goodbye early that morning. You excuse yourself and get in the lift and rush to your door, though you know before you open it—she isn’t there. You call and call on the landline but it goes straight to voicemail like the battery is dead. A while passes before you remember the unknown caller.
You never hear the whole message. You hang up as soon as you realize it is the police, call the number back. They are uncharacteristically polite as they cast you around the circuit board.
Finally, an officer says your name, your wife’s. Apologizes. Asks if you could come down to make an ID.
“There must be a mistake,” you say. “I heard from her after the attack. She said she was okay.”
“You spoke with her?”
“She texted.”
“Sir, we’d still appreciate if you came down.” He gives you directions to Washington Square Park as if you are an alien, and in that moment you feel like one.
You call your boyfriend and tell him to come over for dinner, you have been grocery shopping today and can make a nice stir fry; you can catch up on that show you’ve DVR’d.
You get a phone call from your roommate sounding groggy, saying yes, he is fine, but they’re taking him to the hospital—somewhere nearby, maybe Brooklyn Heights. Or you hear nothing and lament your morning quarrel over toast crumbs, or hear nothing and invent grand schematics for his escape from peril—perhaps he is still deep underground, inching along the wall of the tunnel, making his way home.
Or you flat iron your hair and put on extra mascara and things go back to normal. You feel guilty about it or you don’t. You take a cab in a wide arc around the affected blocks and look away when you see caution tape. You arrive at the restaurant right on time.
You take a cab, get out after ten minutes, feeling sick, remind yourself that nothing is for certain. You run twenty blocks buoyed by that hope, hail another cab. At the scene it is not yet night, the NYPD’s neatly ordered mobile generator streetlamps muted by a fuchsia sunset so striking it makes you want to punch something. The police have cordoned off the park, one corner swathed with tarps where the EMTs swarm. You know this is where you are supposed to go before anyone tells you; the policeman at the gate who checks your ID confirms.
In the makeshift tent: ferric scent of blood and antiseptic-as-cologne. A policewoman leads you down the row to a stretcher tagged with your last name. On the ground beneath it is your wife’s purse.
“I don’t understand. She messaged,” you say when the cop pulls back the sheet.
“It’s possible the message was sent with a delay, after extraction,” she says. “As they’re brought above ground and reconnect to the grid—the phones—it’s been causing some confusion.”
You stare at the cop as if she is speaking another language. She expresses her condolences, tells you to take your time and then return to the front table for the paperwork.
Beneath the sheet you take her hand, except she doesn’t feel like your wife anymore—fingers cool and taut—so you settle for stroking her hair, soot and shrapnel flecked through like glitter. You cry until you think your ribs might crack; you sign your forms and push your way out of the tent into the twilight. You stand there on the grass, holding your wife’s purse and wondering what the point of that goddamn arch is anyway, wondering what the hell you are supposed to do next. Once, when you were fourteen, you and your best friend skipped school and got high in this park, but you have never been as dazed as you are now, generator stars boring through your eyes and into your skull, no hope of an exit wound.
“After the Attack” originally appeared in BOMB, June 16, 2017.
New Essay: How does Politics affect Writing, and Vice Versa?
I recently attended the 15th International Conference on the Short Story in Lisbon, where I met many interesting writers, read from my own work, and participated in a panel that discussed the question in the title. I would like to thank my fellow panelists, all wonderful people and writers: Garry Craig Powell, Sandra Jensen, Rebekah Clarkson, and Robin McLean. In this essay I will expand on some thoughts from before and during the discussion.
What is considered ‘political’ in fiction writing, and how far can the definition be stretched? Is it merely engagé works dealing with topics war, oppression, instability, or injustice? Or is it also anything regarding social identity and issues like race, gender, and economic class? Likewise, creating feelings of empathy is often cited as one of the greatest roles or benefits of reading fiction: is this itself a political end, for example is belief that empathy is good or that there is such a thing as shared humanity a political belief? What about writers and readers who appear to fall short of that ideal? Is it true that reading, especially of the “great books”, is educative and character—and society—improving? I always wonder about Stalin, for example—a voracious reader of literature and history, and a loving family man to boot, who was still one of modern history’s biggest monsters.
Is there a duty (or responsibility) of writers (and all artists) to take a stand against injustice or make political statements in their work? If so, does this risk the work becoming too didactic or heavy-handed, possibly subtracting from its aesthetic appeal? If not, does the writer risk accusations of withdrawal, ignorance, or cowardice, especially if they should somehow ‘know better’ based on their time and place (something akin to a writer’s version of the ‘Good German’)?
Is a writer’s attempt to avoid anything remotely related to politics itself a privilege?
Or, in times of political danger or instability (which is really all the time), is there value in creating fiction that allows the writer and her readers an escape from this reality, however brief or superficial? Is all fiction therefore escapist in some sense, or is that modifier appropriate only to popular “genre” fiction?
Regarding so-called “genre” fiction, is it possible to read mystery, romance, thriller, or fantasy novels as apolitical? It is possible, but it would be missing the point that the stories that a writer chooses to tell or not to tell is itself a political expression. For example, the paradigmatic version of the romance is often an affirmation of the status quo, and thus on the side of the patriarchy or other oppressors.
Is it fair to say that the “best” works of fiction combine a sense of personal, individual, or particular aesthetic quality with something “bigger” than the particular story—a sense of collective, universal human solidarity, or a longing for justice, for example?
How important is the author’s identity itself in how she is read? And how important is the reader’s identity in how she interprets a work? How does this dynamic change in the case of pseudonymous or unknown writers? For example, the Torah is considered an archetypal text of patriarchy, but Harold Bloom reimagined it in The Book of J as a highly subversive and satirical work of a female courtesan in the Solomonic court.
Accordingly, how does the reader’s knowledge of (or assumptions about) a writer’s identity and biography either facilitate or preempt charges of cultural appropriation? Is such a charge only accessible to various minorities, or only against, for example, the typical Western (especially Anglo-American) white male who has long dominated our politics and cultural output? If there is some truth to this, how careful does a white male need to be when making characters and plots? Are there stories, characters, and words that can be used by one writer to great power, but used by a different writer to great insensitivity?
I have myself never been to Southeast Asia, and am ignorant of much of the literature and culture of that part of the world. As it stands, I would never even attempt to write characters or plots that involve, say, Vietnam, without the relevant knowledge and experience; to do so would be doomed to failure and rightly prompt accusations of cultural appropriation. There are many white male American writers who have written about Vietnam very powerfully and convincingly, however; veterans Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried) and Robert Olen Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain), for example, or David Joiner (Lotusland), an American who lived in Vietnam for years. Even such examples must be compared with someone like Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer), a Vietnamese-American writer who is obviously even more well-placed to write about his own country than the knowledgeable outsiders listed above. I think that charges of cultural appropriation can fairly easily be avoided by a sensitive writer carefully choosing only things that she can write about from experience or extensive knowledge.
Cynthia Ozick, an American writer most famous for The Shawl, has been primarily a writer of the Holocaust and its aftermath. She appears to refute Theodor Adorno’s famous (and probably misunderstood) quote that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” In Quarrel and Quandary, there are several essays that deal directly with the issue of politics and fiction. In fact, just quoting some of her lines would be much more effective than anything I could come up with. For example:
George Orwell, in “Why I Write,” asserts that “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” There are times when one is tempted to agree with him… Yet inserting politics into literature has, as we have seen, led to the extremist (or absurdist) notion that Jane Austen, for instance, is tainted with colonialism and slave-holding because Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park owns plantations in eighteenth-century Antigua.
As would be supposed, she holds that not only do politics and writing mix, but it is necessary that they do so. All of the writers I heard from at the conference would readily agree. Despite this, the apolitical writer is not a mere straw man. At one point she also mentions a speech E.M. Forster gave in 1941 arguing for “Art for Art’s Sake”, even at a time when evil was spreading across the continent. Here is the crux of Ozick’s essay:
Art may well be the most worthy of all human enterprises; that is why it needs to be defended; and in crisis, in a barbarous time, even the artists must be visible among the defending spear-carriers. Art at its crux—certainly the “Antigone”!—doesn’t fastidiously separate itself from the human roil; neither should artists. I like to imagine a conversation between Forster and Isaac Babel—let us say in 1939, the year Babel was arrested and tortured, or early in 1940, when he was sentenced to death at a mock trial. History isn’t only what we inherit, safe and sound and after the fact; it is also what we are ourselves obliged to endure…
There are those—human beings both like and unlike ourselves—who relish evil joy, and pursue it, and make it their cause; who despise compromise, reason, negotiation; who, in Forster’s words, do evil that evil may come—and then the possibility of aesthetic order fails to answer. It stands only as a beautiful thought, and it is not sufficient to have beautiful thoughts while the barbarians rage on. The best ideal then becomes the worst ideal, and the worst ideal, however comely, is that there are no barbarians; or that the barbarians will be so impressed by your beautiful thoughts that they too will begin thinking beautiful thoughts; or that in actuality the barbarians are no different from you and me, with our beautiful thoughts; and that therefore loyalty belongs to the barbarians’ cause as much as it belongs to our own…
The responsibility of intellectuals includes also the recognition that we cannot live above or apart from our own time and what it imposes on us; that willy-nilly we breathe inside the cage of our generation, and must perform within it. Thinkers—whether they count as public intellectuals or the more reticent and less visible sort—are obliged above all to make distinctions, particularly in an age of mindlessly spreading moral equivalence.
She mentions how Forster ends his speech with Shelley’s well-known quote that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, and notes the irony that Forster took this as a dictum from Mt. Olympus even while Panzers were running roughshod over Europe and the camps were already operating. I like the quote myself, but I would certainly not interpret it to mean that poets (or all writers) should withdraw from the world in the hope that the aesthetic beauty of their work alone is enough to improve the world. Ozick’s comments above demonstrate why that will never be realistic.
Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity rejected the possibility that there was a single “aim of the writer” or “nature of literature”. He compared writers who pursued private, aesthetic perfection, like Proust and Nabokov, with those seeking human liberty, like Dickens and Orwell. He says “There is no point in trying to grade these different pursuits on a single scale by setting up factitious kinds called “literature” or “art” or “writing”; nor is there any point in trying to synthesize them.” In response to this, I have heard it said that even aesthetic pleasure is political. If this is true than all the admirers of Lolita will surely perceive the political foundation underlying that aesthetically pleasing novel, even if not overtly present in the plot.
J.M. Coetzee is a white South African who was opposed to the Apartheid regime, but chose to avoid overt politics or write about it obliquely, almost in the form of Platonic ideas. Here is his quote explaining his method:
In times of intense ideological pressure like the present when the space in which the novel and history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business, is squeezed to almost nothing, the novel, it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry.
On the other hand, Nadine Gordimer, another white South African writer and life-long opponent of Apartheid, chose to deal head-on with political issues, or to supplement history, in her works. They both won the Nobel Prize, and both showed how writing about politics can still be done in many and various ways, including supplementing it, à la Gordimer, or rivaling it, à la Coetzee.
Social reform has been a goal of certain types of literature (and art) at least since the 19th century. Dickens comes to mind as one example among many. It has always been hard to pinpoint concrete effects literature may have had on politics, beyond vaguely influencing readers to feel empathy for people unlike them. One notable exception is the much-anthologized short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story tells of a woman oppressed and driven mad by her doctor husband’s “rest cure”, a real-life treatment popularized by a doctor named Weir Mitchell. After the story was published, Mitchell read it and actually retracted this psychologically destructive treatment method. Other real-world political effects came from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the muck-rakers, including Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, to name two more examples.
Could Kafka be considered a political writer? Is there a spectrum of how political aa writer is, or how political certain literary themes are? For example, alienation and outsiderness play a big part in Kafka’s work, but is this because of his identity as a hated minority living among another group of oppressed minorities, or because he held views against the imperial and royal Hapsburg authorities? On the other hand, is there anything political that could be found in Borges’ stories? He seems to stick rigorously to theme of intellectual escapism in the form of his unique literary metaphysics. What about Chekhov, whose incredibly deft, character-driven portraits seem, on the surface, to be apolitical? Or Zweig, who tried to be apolitical in all his fiction even while he was working to build a more cultured and cosmopolitan Europe in real-life (and who killed himself in Nazi-induced despair in 1942)? The answer is that, obviously, all these writers were/are very political.
And all art, including fiction, is political. That holds true even if the author herself denies it or tries to avoid it. We have been told to never trust the writer but to trust the work; this seems a bit of academic sophistry, but in the case of a politics—denying writer we may do well to keep it in mind. The fact is that art production can only happen when the artist is free. Freedom of speech is central to the artist just as it is for the survival of a free society. There is no escape from politics for a writer or for anybody. We are all bound to the systems of power and human behavior that surround us. To not see or to deny this only reveals one’s privilege.
My own biographical information, if relevant: I was an officer in the US Army for over four years and spent two years in Afghanistan. This has obviously had a big effect on my character and political development, but in the 10 years since I have been out of the army, I have mostly had no desire to write or create fiction dealing with military themes. The exception so far is my story in The Road Ahead, a 2017 anthology featuring writers who are all veterans of the American wars. My other stories and the novel I’m working on were not apparently motivated by any explicit political stance and are more like historical fiction. After this panel, however, I have realized that I was rather naive and that all of my fiction and ideas are very clearly based on political realities.
Recently, like many Americans, I feel that the gravity of the political situation demands of all of us to do more. I know other American writers who have told me that they are not able to work lately because of the weight of the 24/7 news cycle. I know others who are trying to produce art or poetry specifically engaging political issues (like gun violence, for example). As a white male from the global hegemonic power, who has participated personally, if incidentally, in the ongoing state-sponsored violence, do I now have a duty to anyone other than myself, to fight for justice or against oppression? Would it be considered insensitive or even unethical of me to write only for myself? There are probably no absolute answers to any of these questions, but most of their utility comes from their very formulation and expression. In the end, there is probably no absolute duty of a writer to bring politics into their works, but it will still always be a good idea, and probably the best thing we can do.
New Fiction from Ulf Pike: “Welcome Home, Brother”
My arm burned red resting out the window in the summer sun as I drove east out of the mountains. I passed through the shade of centuries-deep bluffs carved by the Yellowstone River, then curved south into open, tall-grass prairies.
A road sign for Little Bighorn Battlefield flashed by with its mileage—more than once a “stop along the way” during road trips when I was young. A few cars passed with the vanity license plate of General Custer staring across the plains at Sitting Bull. I tried to picture the battle, as I always had, hear the rifle-fire and war cries. I tried to picture my great-great grandmother, speaking no English, boarding a passenger train with her children en route to a new life in Montana. What might she have been picturing? What did she hope for and fear, studying the strange landscape into the West, into Indian Country, news of Custer’s defeat no older than her youngest daughter?
Being a fifth-generation Montanan had always nurtured in me a special kind of pride and ownership. But nothing felt that way anymore, not since I got back.
My brother-in-law’s penciled directions read end of the world gas station – L. I turned the wheel as I took in the derelict old building, scrawled with graffiti, a sunken canopy over absent pumps, pointed shards left in the windows. The truck bumped a few more miles through open range where sparse groups of horses pondered the ground and swatted flies with their tails. One tan and bony mare ambled along the shoulder of the road, unfazed by my passing.
As I drove through town past pairs of following eyes, I had to reassure myself that I’d been invited. Feral dogs with taut stomachs trotted through alleyways, cowed as if under an invisible raised hand. In a dirt lot a girl of maybe three sat alone on a swing, pumping her legs and grinning vibrantly. I caught her eyes and smiled. Behind her, two shirtless teenage boys with long braided hair played basketball under a netless hoop.
Turning onto a dusty two-track, I saw the first sign and slipped the directions into my shirt pocket. Through sagebrush up the hill, spray painted in safety-orange on scraps of plywood with arrows at the turns, they guided me to the Other Medicine Sun Dance.
————
I woke in the bed of my truck to the first rays of light and the sound of drumming, rhythmic and steady, above which men’s voices sang in solemn unison, one occasionally leaping from the rest, a piercing wail which made my blood rush. The first of the four-day ceremony had begun and the many family and friends who’d come to support the dancers and offer prayers gathered around the lodge, which was constructed of numerous tree trunks stripped and re-planted in a large circle around a much taller center-tree, all of them linked with draping boughs and long strips of thin fabric which wavered in the gentle morning breeze. I stood a distance away and waited. No one regarded me with scorn, nor did they encourage me to come closer, until a man in a wheelchair rolled up from behind me and told me they didn’t bite, “…most of them anyway.”
I followed close behind him and stopped at his side in the shade just outside the lodge. He wore a black hat with “Iraq War Veteran” embroidered in yellow around a Purple Heart. His face was puffy and badly scarred. Both of his legs were missing above the knee. When he turned his head to look up at me he seemed to smiled and spoke so as not to be heard over the singing: “An Offering Song.”
I nodded.
He extended his massive calloused hand and said even softer, “No Mud.”
I took his hand and told him my name.
“So,” he went on, keeping his grip, “how many years did they get out of you?” At my hesitation he explained, “I saw your vet plates last night when you drove in.”
“Oh, right. Just three. One deployment.”
His dark eyes were watery. He seemed to be looking vaguely beyond me. I asked him the same question.
He applied more pressure and pulled me closer as if to tell me a secret and breathed warm into the side of my face, “They took years I ain’t even lived, little brother.” He loosened his grip and disarmed his voice, adding a quick, “Hey!” before dropping my hand as if forgetting why he was holding it. A couple people glanced back with looks of restrained concern then sent their eyes in search of someone else.
A tall woman approached No Mud, crouched and put her arm around his shoulder, lowered her face to the side of his and said something softly in another language. He appeared to weep momentarily but quickly composed himself and kissed her on the cheek. She squeezed his shoulder as she stood up and then the back of his neck, glanced a courteous smile at me and returned to what she had been doing. We waited in silence until there was a change in drumming and the singers began a new song.
Four men emerged from a small tent behind the lodge and filed toward the center tree. They wore only red and white cloth around their waists and a whistle-like piece of bone with a feather at the end around their necks. No Mud nudged my leg and leaned towards me: “Eagle Dancers,” he said. I didn’t tell him one of them was my brother-in-law, but I figured it was obvious enough. Seeing him made me blush with the heat of a hundred eyes.
Each dancer stood his turn before the center tree as a long-haired elder wearing aviator sunglasses and latex gloves, used a surgical scalpel to make two inch-long incisions down each of their pectorals. Then like a lace through a stiff leather boot-tongue he pushed the sharpened end of two three-inch sections of deer antler under each bleeding loop of flesh. Four ropes hung from the top of the center pole, each split at the end like a Y. He attached these ends to either side of both antler tips thus marrying each Eagle Dancer to the tree. For the next four days they would go without food and be called upon to dance when the drumming and singing began, their sacrifice shared and elevated by the presence and prayers of their family and friends.
————
My brother-in-law had ridden bulls in a semi-pro rodeo circuit for a few years until finally giving in to the doctor’s insistence that his body wasn’t going to last another eight seconds up there, let alone under hoof and horn. He moved to Montana to cowboy with a vision in his head he gathered from accounts like Yellowtail: Crow Medicine Man andSundance Chief, a book he would later present to me as a gift. The author spent months with the Crow leader recording everything he was told. He was adopted by the Yellowtail family and in time participated in their Sun Dance. For my brother-in-law it was more than a romantic notion, it was a calling from a time he felt he was meant for, but by some tragic cosmic glitch had ended up fair-skinned and red-bearded in a world of credit cards and cell-phones.
He hunted elk, deer and antelope with both rifle and bow in the valleys and eastern plains of Montana and alone deep in the Tobacco Root, Beartooth and Crazy Mountains. Each time was a spiritual attempt, he insisted, to dislocate his self from his body and reintegrate with the universe. Though I barely knew him then, he would send letters to Iraq, to the brother he never had, a brother fighting in a war, also in pursuit of something beyond his sense of self. I received envelopes with return addresses of Deep in the Crazies and The teeth of a Chinook. I imagined him crouched behind a boulder high above the timberline gripping the paper and pencil, jotting down a few words between gusts. He was almost mythical to me, as I would learn I was also to him.
I read of his friends, the sweat lodges, feasts and the Sun Dance. The new-old way. I allowed myself to escape through his descriptions of rituals and celebration, of the eternal hunt and finding his forever eyes. Under stars after a night patrol through open desert, where there was no thing nor body, where officers would call for fire from artillery to explode in the emptiness, I’d relieve myself of armor and ammo, light a cigarette and try to imagine myself stalking elk in knee-deep snow through the mountains or crawling naked into a sweat lodge, into the womb of the universe, as he said it was called. I tried to imagine it and hoped to dream of it when I fell asleep—though dreams were rarely anything but fevered scenes of some repetitive task like cleaning a combat-load of bullets one-by-one after a sand storm.
People ask how hot it was over there and I tell them many nights failed to sink below triple digits and we patrolled often in a hundred-and-thirty degrees during the day. They raise their eyebrows and I don’t tell them of the eighty-plus-pounds of body armor, weapon, ammo, food and water. I don’t tell them how unnatural it all felt. And I don’t tell them how our suffering seemed almost absurd reflected in the stare of a shepherd, a shop keeper, a mother standing in the doorway of her home as we passed, assuming the worst of them. Theirs was an ancient suffering most of us could only wear like a costume. Whenever I locked eyes with them I found it nearly impossible to pretend they weren’t beyond us somehow, seeing us not as we imagined ourselves but as we truly were. They were willing us away.
Official U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Arlo K. Abrahamson.
Every day I wanted to leave more. And every day it was less from fear of dying. It was a feeling that slithered around inside. The best you could do was try and shake it loose and hope it coiled up in a different part of your body.
————
A stern wind carried dust from the road and drove it through the lodge. Thin strips of fabric tied to the tips of each tree thrashed at nothing from their knots. The drummer’s song fled out over the sage brush and a distancing presence was felt. New resolve seemed to rise in the dancers against the assaulting air, each of them tasting the ground in it with dry tongues, reassured of their purpose in the sting of splitting lips.
No sacrifice can be made if doubt is not confronted. No Mud assured me of this. I saw it in the dancers when they closed their eyes and gathered themselves against visible inner friction, lifting and dropping their bare feet as if to draw the song back from the squall driving it away. I imagined myself an Eagle Dancer, the person enduring suffering that it might be undone, though vanity banished the vision like a swirl of fine earth to some unseen end. The wind tore at us in gusts and No Mud secured his hat on his head with one hand.
————
As a boy I rode a dreamed horse through desert washes, open plains and timbered mountains with a carved tree branch for a rifle. I imagined ambushes and firing lead into swift animals, into enemies as they rose from behind boulders and thickets with bows drawn. I’d mouth the explosions of my rifle and fall from my saddle with an arrow sunk deep in the muscle. Invoking the movie scenes which most haunted my sleep, I’d break off the fletched end, clinch it in my teeth and push the tooled stone out the other side and pull it free, wincing with great drama at the tragedy of my own blood. I’d pack the entry and exit wounds with gunpowder and taste the bitter chokecherry wood as I brought the flame to each wound and my eyes would roll back in my head with the pain and smell of carbon and seared flesh and I would fall into sand, into pine needles, and follow the merging and dispersions of clouds.
After carrying my rifle for almost a year through the desert, the day finally came when I switched it off of safe and squeezed the trigger. It was not an ambush, not a battle, not movie material. It was a serene afternoon in late October. We were patrolling outside a rural village when someone spotted a tunnel entrance dug into the side of a canal. Ordered to recon by fire I prayed my bullets would find a meaning there. For months I tried to convince myself I was disappointed that the only thing I ever shot while at war was a hole in the ground.
“Come to the Sun Dance,” my brother-in-law wrote in his last letter. “As a warrior you are invited to help cut down the center tree for the lodge.” Even though most people I met seemed obliged to convince me, or at least themselves, that I was a warrior or some kind of hero, I had stopped trying to convince myself. When anyone shook my hand and thanked me for my service, or worse, for their freedom, I became vaguely nauseous as if shallowly buried beneath our feet was a decaying corpse we both pretended not to smell.
————
By the third day the Eagle Dancers seemed to have transcended the failure of their bodies and rose each time from the grass to pledge their feet to the drums and move in toward the center tree then back, breathing rhythmically through the eagle-bone whistles between their teeth with the drummer’s voices urging them in song to dance “for their heart’s deepest wound,” No Mud told me, “and pray for healing.”
The sun was high behind us and burned the back of my neck. I drank guiltily from my water and watched my brother-in-law. His skin was badly burned, as if bruised by exposure and peeling from his forehead and shoulders. His lips were visibly cracked and bleeding, the loops of skin in his chest stretched and raw from being pulled taut repeatedly by the weight of his body as he danced away from the center pole to the full extent of his rope, sometimes leaning back, his points of flesh pulling skyward as he sunk into the pain.
A breeze occasionally wafted smoke by, giving the air a burnt sweetness. Anyone entering the inner portion of the lodge received the attention of an elderly woman holding a bundle of smoking sage, which she would pass over and around the individual’s body in a motion that reminded me of an airport security guard scanning someone with a handheld metal detector, which she performed with similar practical efficiency. I followed No Mud’s gaze to a line of women approaching the lodge. Each stood before the elderly woman as she drew the smoke over their heads with a cupped hand and under each of their feet, indicating when she was finished with a hand extended in the direction of their next steps toward the long-haired elder wearing latex gloves.
“The women will make flesh offerings,” No Mud said to me leaning closer but not turning his head. Then looking at me askance and patting his stumps he said, “I already made mine,” managing an upside-down grin. His eyes returned to the elder who was pushing the root of a feather through the incisions he had made in a woman’s shoulder. “That’s my sister,” he said, “the tall, pretty one.” She waited her turn behind two other women. I remembered her measured smile and feeling politely tolerated. The elder held both ends of the feather and made a quick jerking motion breaking the loop of skin holding it in place. “I made her a promise,” No Mud continued. “I’m here to honor that promise.”
————
The Eagle Dancers laid in the cool grass under the first stars blinking into sight. A drumless song was being sung almost like a lullaby by two elderly men, both with long braided hair and wearing pearl-snap western shirts. No Mud invited me to eat with him. We filed through the tent and filled small bowls with elk heart stew and a piece of fry bread. Crickets seemed to sigh with relief in the cool stillness as we made our way across the matted grass of the field turned parking lot. I lowered my tailgate like a table and waited for No Mud to finish before asking him what had been bothering me ever since I decided to come to the Sun Dance. He laughed to himself and told me other tribes have made declarations of war against non-Native participation in their Sun Dances, calling it a desecration of their sacred ceremony. “Some people don’t think your brother should be here,” he told me plainly, “or you.” Feeling the blood run from my face I asked him what he thought about it.
He looked away past the lodge up a darkening hillside, tilted his head back slightly and spoke from a different place, “My grandfather says some people have blind sorrow, and they abuse us with it. They make themselves feel better by honoring us like ghosts. But they honor their own guilt.” Then leveling his eyes after considering this he continued, “Sometimes I wish I was a ghost.” He was quiet again and seemed to be listening to the men singing, who could be heard faintly. “If people tell you what you are for long enough then that’s what you can become in your own mind if you’re not careful…. But I think your brother has a good heart. Maybe he wants to assimilate to our ways for the sins of his people. Your people.” He laughed again, hitting my leg with the back of his hand. “Maybe it’s a sin for my people to let him think he can.”
Late in the sun of the final day the singers struck the drum with a tempered fury and dug for their most naked voices. The long-haired elder approached my brother-in-law, standing as if in a lucid dream, and removed the tether-loops from the antler ends letting the rope swing back to the center tree as he pulled out his scalpel and stepped around to face his back. Of the same size and depth as the chest incisions he calmly made six, three down the right, three down the left side of his back, pushing then the sharpened antler tips through each and attaching to them the six split ends of another rope which hung slack like a tail on the ground behind him.
A man from the far side of the lodge labored slowly toward them, his fists around a rope at his chest and slung over his shoulder pulling behind him six horned buffalo skulls linked and dragging the well-danced ground by their teeth, dust rising around them in the dry heat. This man collected the rope from the ground and tied them together so the chain of skulls lay only a few feet behind my brother-in-law. A third man draped a buffalo hide over his shoulders like a blanket and gave him a tall staff.
His first attempt to move forward summoned a kind of impossible acceptance to his eyes as the rope pulled taut and he planted the end of the staff, clutching it with both hands and leveraged himself forward, each step holding that acceptance as if too close to a flame. Sharp, deliberate breaths left his mouth as he pulled the skulls around the center tree, eyes cast to the ground, blood staining the white of his cloth and running in thin streams down the backs of his legs. The singers sent their drum sticks into the stretched hide as if to drive it into the ground and the high, clean voice of a young child sprang from among them singing with un-lived years. I heard the murmuring pleasure of proud parents.
My brother-in-law made his way around the inner lodge and soon he was near me and he lifted his eyes from the ground as he approached and held mine as if to pull himself closer. I shuddered to be recognized and though I wished to shield my heart from the piercing eyes I imagined all around me I could not. Righting himself before me, seeing me from some burning emptiness, he extended the staff to touch my shoulder, and spoke his only words in four days as if speaking them made our bodies present and visible again. Standing next to No Mud, who did not so much as shift his weight, my skin flushed to be so spectacularly recognized.
As the skulls were drug out of the inner lodge my brother-in-law was reattached to the center tree. Before the pounding of my heart could subside I was asked to participate in a final ceremony where a sacred pipe would be passed between anyone with a prayer before being given to an Eagle Dancer that he might finish his dance with those prayers in his guard. No Mud urged me to do it.
The elderly woman drew sage smoke over my head and under my feet and I again tried and failed to shield my heart. We lined facing one another as the lit pipe was passed down the line alternately, each individual placing it to their lips briefly and inhaling. At the mouth of the line where the pipe would be handed to a dancer, my brother-in-law stood waiting.
The final dance is a rite by which each dancer prepares their heart to break free from their rope by moving methodically, prayerfully into the center tree then back, gathering the strength and resolve needed to honor their sacrifice before sprinting backwards from the tree with enough force to break the loops of flesh, as foreshadowed by the women’s offerings. Each dancer in their own time did this, the sound of their separation a visceral snap in the dry air.
As the pipe-bearer, he went last. With it cradled in his arm he moved in toward the tree, his bloody legs tensing then gaining speed until meeting the full purchase of his rope. But instead of breaking free, his body bucked forward, sending its extended length past parallel with the ground and six feet above it then down on his chest with a dusty thud. Returning to his feet and immediately back to the center tree he danced without noticing half of the pipe lay broken behind him. A second time running back and he met the end of his rope as if being shot in the shoulder, one loop breaking sending that half of his body in a violent twist hinged off the other. On his third attempt, he broke free and stood panting for a moment before looking finally at the pipe.
His eyes searched back to where he had first impacted the ground. Kneeling there as if to make himself as small as possible he retrieved the other half. I looked at No Mud and knew nothing would be said. The collective silence was static like that of dry lightning and followed me back down the dusty two-track onto the highway, through the tall-grass prairies along the Yellowstone River, into the low sun.
————
We all crawled naked into the lodge, No Mud using his fists like feet, the rest of us on our hands and knees, shoulders and thighs pressing together as we formed a tight circle inside. The elder shoveled stones from the fire outside and placed them in the pit between us. Once full he crawled in and closed the flap behind him, sealing the lodge in darkness. At his side was a pile of beargrass bundles which he passed around one-by-one. “It opens your pores,” my brother-in-law whispered as he handed me one. Into a bucket of water at his side the elder dipped a cup and poured it over the rocks which hissed and steamed and he began to sing.
The heat was instantly unbearable, the vapor burning the back of my throat, searing my skin. I clinched my eyes shut and rocked back and forth begging myself to endure it. Everyone sang, their voices moving through my head with a submerged, burning singularity and I felt myself sinking into the ground. They soon began using the beargrass like whips over their legs, stomachs, shoulders and backs. I bent to the dirt in search of cooler air. Finding none I sat up desperate for breath. I gripped the beargrass and whipped my face reflexively then my chest and shoulders. I whipped my back repeatedly as if the thin clean sting of it might drive the deeper burning away. This went on until it seemed there was no time nor space and I was certain my muscle shone exposed beneath the skin.
The singing eventually ceased and the flap was peeled open, flooding the lodge with light and cool air. Relieved and suddenly proud, I watched for the men near the entrance to begin crawling out. But they remained seated with their eyes closed, inhaling sharply through their nostrils then letting the air out slowly, silently. No Mud clutched the beargrass between his legs. His chest rose and fell, glistening, spotted with the scars of many Sun Dances. I looked to the entrance and saw the elder watching me. He turned, reached up behind him and pulled the flap closed, sealing the lodge in darkness. There was only breathing until my skin became warm with it. I heard the cup emerge from the bucket and the thin, seething hiss of the stones.
New Movie Review: In “The Interpreters,” Home Is No Place At All
“The Interpreters,” a new documentary film by directors Sofian Khan and Andres Caballero, is a raw, emotionally vigorous, and, only too often, devastating look into the lives of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters and their efforts to flee home for the United States.
When it comes to narratives of the Forever Wars, interpreters consistently rate as some of the most important people working on the ground, frequently appearing in the novels and nonfiction works coming out of these conflicts, darting the intricately woven fabric of U.S.-focused narratives as charismatic, generous, and occasionally suspect men of two worlds. Very rarely, if ever, do they get to speak for themselves. This film gives them that opportunity.
“The American forces…call us interpreters, not translators,” a resonant voice narrates over opening frames of desert sand, Americans on patrol, soldiers and villagers deep in conversation. “The translator, he will just translate the word, exactly. We are interpreters. We interpret what they say to our soldiers, and what the soldiers say to our people.”
According to the documentary, over 50,000 local nationals have served with U.S. military and coalition forces since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But these so-called invaluable assets have found themselves flung forcibly from one fire into another, having been labeled traitors by their home countries for aiding outside forces, only to find themselves unable to acquire the necessary visa to enter and resettle in the United States.
Khan and Caballero make three such men the narrative focus of “The Interpreters,” which debuted at Telluride Mountainfilm Festival during Memorial Day weekend, 2018. “Philip Morris,” a quick-witted chain-smoker from Iraq; “Mujtaba,” a protective and desperate father of three from Afghanistan; and “Malik,” an Afghan interpreter still serving with the U.S. Air Force, whose striking features are half-concealed by a keffiyeh throughout the film. They are men who, were it not for the efforts of the filmmakers who sought them out, would otherwise be names on bureaucratic paper, anonymous victims of the machinations of the U.S. government.
Phillip Morris, Mujtaba, and Malik are three representatives of a significantly larger whole, men who were promised Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) by the U.S. government in exchange for their work as interpreters. They did this work at risk to their lives and the lives of their families. “When I started working with the U.S. Army, I was trying to help them to help us,” says Phillip Morris. “We spent our lives suffering because of Saddam’s regime.” With the outside support and aid of his best friend, Minnesota National Guard veteran Lt. Paul Braun, Morris’s SIV application moves through the doldrums of Washington bureaucracy and—after some tense back-and-forth traveling between the U.S. and Iraq—eventually sees Morris and his family safely relocated to Minnesota. According to the documentary, by law, the application and approval process should take no more than nine months. Morris’s takes four years.
Were it in Hollywood’s Midas hands, “The Interpreters” would be made as a kind of filmic victory lap with Morris as the only subject, a golden testimonial to the U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan and Iraq and the generosity extended to interpreters by our government. Of the three subjects in the film, Phillip Morris is the resounding success story, and certainly carries the bulk of the narrative. But what Khan and Caballero have done—smartly, and well—is avoid the gilded trap almost entirely. They choose not to rest on the laurels of Phillip Morris’s story alone, and instead show a range of experiences that are far more indicative of what it means to be an interpreter marked for death while waiting, interminably, for a promise made by a foreign government to be upheld.
In Mujtaba’s case, the waiting becomes impossible, and he flees the country with his wife and children. After arriving in Turkey, Mujtaba seeks out a smuggler who can take him and his family to Greece. In their desperate attempt to cross the Aegean Sea, the small smugglers’ boat capsizes, and Mujtaba’s wife and two of their three young children drown.
Following their rescue at sea, Mujtaba and his son are returned to Turkey. Now refugees, they are forced to try and negotiate the SIV application process while simultaneously avoiding deportation. Mujtaba is adamant in his belief that his wife and two children are still alive, and enlists the help of a volunteer from a refugee organization to look for them. It’s a painful thing to watch, knowing what Mujtaba is risking by living in denial and extending his time in Turkey because of it. The longer he stays behind to look for his family, the less tenable his refugee status becomes, and if his SIV is not approved, Mujtaba and his young son will be forced to return to Afghanistan.
It is a life lived between impossible choices, every one of which is likely to end in some degree of tragedy. Mujtaba eventually receives approval from the State Department to continue with the SIV application process. The approval, unfortunately, comes two months after his wife and two children drowned in the Aegean. He continues to refuse to go anywhere without them.
Throughout the film, American voices—both military and civilian—maintain what is (or should be) abundantly clear to anyone watching the film: Iraqi and Afghan interpreters are service members of U.S. and coalition forces, and they are being abandoned. It is an ongoing injustice, an ugly stain not only on the U.S. military, but the government that sent those Americans into Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place.
Journalist George Packer, who appears in the film, authored one of the most significant contributions to the conversation surrounding interpreters, SIVs, and America’s responsibility toward the people it enlisted to help fight its endless wars in 2007. Packer’s New Yorker piece, Betrayed, drew back the curtain on what was already a messy issue at the time. Reading it eleven years later, one can easily imagine seeing Malik, Mujtaba, and Phillip Morris’s names in place of those like Othman, Laith, and Ali, given how similar their stories are, the events and struggles of earlier years repeating themselves ad infinitum with each generation of interpreters looking for a way out. It could just as easily be Malik on camera in Afghanistan telling us what Laith told Packer in Iraq so many years ago: “Sometimes, I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”[1]
In the film, Packer—who reinforces the importance of interpreters in these ongoing conflicts—attempts to draw a line between past and present by referencing the unofficial evacuations from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War and the interpreters being left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan today: “For some Americans, their finest hour in Vietnam was at the very end, and I wondered if something like that was happening in Iraq—were people organizing some kind of exodus for their Iraqi contacts? It wasn’t as clear-cut a situation. But if you’re an Iraqi who’s gotten a death threat, it doesn’t matter.”
When the Americans began their own gradual exodus in 2011, Morris knew he faced an uncertain future. “I told [Lt. Paul] Braun, I told him, ‘When you leave, what’s going to happen to me?’”
In the case of Malik, another Afghan interpreter and the third subject of the film, that abandonment is a very real life-or-death issue. A marked man (his sixteen-year-old brother was beaten for information regarding Malik’s whereabouts), Malik is forced to move his family from house to house and never shows his face out of doors. The film follows him as he continues to serve as an interpreter while he waits on a response to his SIV application.
Malik holds to his belief in America’s mission in Afghanistan despite knowing that he cannot stay to help rebuild his country when and if we leave. He works diligently under the pall that is the outstanding threat on his life: “As I go to my work location,” he says, “I won’t take the same taxi, the same bus, and I won’t take the same gate every day. Daesh, Talibs, Al Qaeda…if they find out that I’m still presently working with the U.S. Air Force in Kabul, they may get me, and they’ll kill me.”
The SIV program for Iraqi interpreters was enacted in 2008, but stopped accepting new applications in September 2014, leaving tens of thousands of people—interpreters and their families—in the lurch and forcing them to go through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for resettlement, to little to no success.[2] The same SIV program was extended to Afghan interpreters in 2009 (the Afghan Allies Protection Act) and is still active, but the number of applicants accepted dwindles with every passing year. According to Human Rights First: “As of July 2017, over 11,000 Afghan principal applicants and 13,000 of their family members are still waiting at some point in the application phase.”[3]
In the end, too many people are being forced to fight over too few visas—for those principle applicants and their families, for example, a grand total of 3,500 SIVs have been allocated for fiscal year 2018.
“The Interpreters” is a visually striking and narratively incisive investigation into a human rights issue that is as long and convoluted as the Global War on Terror itself. Interspersed with cell phone camera footage throughout, it is very much a documentary of the moment, immediate and jarring, and the stakes are all too real. Any faults are few and far between, a roughness in the editing that does little to take away from the effectiveness of the whole.
In a film full of emotionally resonant scenes, the one that arguably strikes the strongest chord is also the most subdued, the most well-earned: late in the film, having just watched Phillip Morris reunite with his family only to hear Trump extoll the virtues of the Muslim Ban seconds later, one feels braced for the worst. It’s impossible to forget, after all, that while throngs of protesters outside John F. Kennedy Airport chant “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here,” that Mujtaba’s wife and children remain lost to the sea.
But then we see Malik, in 2017. A long white line at the bottom of the screen illustrates the amount of time it took the U.S. government to grant him his SIV. It is a freedom moment, a cause for joy, as much as it is a long pause that carries the weight of six long years of mortal uncertainty. We see Malik, and his quiet reveal reminds those of us on the outside looking in that a face is just a face, except when it is a target.
Malik and his family arrive in America in early 2017, just under the wire of Trump’s initial ban. His success is nothing short of a statistical miracle: between January and April 2018, only thirty-six Iraqi interpreters and their families were admitted into the United States.[4]
Khan and Caballero have made a landmark documentary, a film that is by turns devastating, uplifting, enraging, and only too timely: as of this writing, the Supreme Court of the United States has voted to uphold Trump’s Muslim ban, sparking renewed outrage among American citizens and recalling the most inhumane of Supreme Court decisions past. Having watched “The Interpreters,” I can only wonder what thoughts are on Phillip Morris’s mind. Is Malik at risk of being deported? How is Mujtaba—still a refugee in Turkey at risk of being deported back to Afghanistan—contending with this latest in a long series of setbacks?
Because of the Supreme Court’s decision, it stands to reason that by this time next year, thirty-six Special Immigrant Visas will seem like a lofty goal.
Early in the film, Malik says, “I hope that they won’t forget what I do for them.” Facing away from the camera, he looks out across the American base in Kabul, his body silhouetted between an aircraft hangar and a broad swath of dusty blue sky, tracking a single C-130 as it flies up and over the sun-bleached mountains in the distance. In that moment, Malik could be any one of the thousands of interpreters left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan—men still biding their borrowed time behind threadbare keffiyehs in the hot sun, waiting for a piece of paper to decide their fate.
By December of 1992, the world could no longer sit back and watch the starvation in Somalia. Humanitarian aid had been coming in for months but the warlords grabbed all the food and medicine for themselves and gave none to the people. The situation got worse until finally the United Nations decided to take action. Led by the U.S., twenty-eight countries organized a military task force called Operation Restore Hope. The goal was to supervise the distribution of food and supplies.
In Somalia we call Americans Mareekan. When I heard these Mareekan were coming to Mogadishu, I asked my mom who they were. I didn’t know the people in the action movies were Mareekan. “They are huge, strong, white people,” she said. “They eat pork, drink wine, and have dogs in their houses.”
This sounded like the people I had seen in the movies. Whoever they were, the militias looked worried about their arrival. Many rebels started burying their guns; some fled Mogadishu. There was confusion and tension everywhere. I couldn’t wait to see Mareekans land in Mogadishu! Hopefully they would look like actors in the movies and would spray bullets all over the militias.
And so at midnight on December 9, the thunderous roar of Cobra helicopters and AC-130 gunships filled the air. From the ocean came the buzz of hovercrafts, unloading tanks and Marines onto the beach. Our house was close to the airport and the sea, so all these sounds woke me up right away. Through the bullet holes in our roof I could see the gleaming lights of the planes, accompanied by the roar of tanks along the roads. My mother, Hassan and Khadija were all up, even Nima.
I was eager to see the troops and the helicopters in the morning. At dawn Hassan and I, holding hands, walked down to the airport past streets that used to have sniper nests. There were lots of Somalis in the street, all of them headed the same way, towards the airport. As we got closer, the sounds of the Cobra attack helicopters became deafening. We joined a group of other excited Somalis, some standing on the walls, others on top of roofs, watching as big Chinook heavy-lift copters took off and landed. We could see warships in the distance on the blue ocean; everywhere around the airport, Marines in camouflage were taking positions and setting up gun posts.
Someone said the Mareekans had rounded up the rebels who were controlling the airport and seaport. The crowd got bigger and bigger, we shouted, laughed and cheered in excitement. Security perimeters had already set up, blocking entrances to the airport. The Mareekan flag was waving, stars and stripes. That’s when it hit me: I had seen that flag in movies! These Mareekans were the movie people, and this was a real movie happening in front of us!
Commando must be here, I thought. This is it. This is the moment I had been waiting for, to meet Commando and watch him blow away all the militias! Helicopters dropped a shower of leaflets with photos and information about the troops. I picked up several of them. “United Nations forces are here to assist in the international relief effort for the Somali people,” it said in Somali. “We are prepared to use force to protect the relief operation and our soldiers. We will not allow interference with food distribution or with our activities. We are here to help you.” Because not so many Somalis could read, the leaflets also showed an illustration like a comic book of a U.S. soldier shaking hands with a Somali man under a palm tree, as a helicopter flew past. I couldn’t wait to shake hands with Commando.
Everything was moving so quickly—the tanks, the soldiers, the planes. We jostled for positions to watch the movie that was happening in front of us. Except there was no gunfire. I kept waiting for the battle to start, I wanted the Chinooks and Cobras to blast away at the rebels. But everything was peaceful. Then I remembered it’s always like this in the movies. First you see all the heavy machines and helicopters gearing up for action, then the battle comes later. I wanted to see the militias face these troops, but the rebels I had known since we returned to Mogadishu were now walking around unarmed, acting like regular people. They didn’t dare to face Commando.
I watched all day as the Marines took positions, more and more of them coming. Two men in uniform waved to let us cross the airport runway up to the sand dunes, so we could watch as the hovercrafts brought more and more Marines from the sea. Humvees and tanks roamed noisily but never fired a shot. I was getting impatient for the battle to start. We watched as the troops pulled out their stuck Humvees from the sand dunes. Hassan and I grew bolder and edged close to the troops. I stood there with my mouth open, watching them drink from a water bottle and smile at us. I made a sign asking for water, and the white guy in uniform went into the Humvee and handed me a plastic bottle. Then we made eating signs with our hands to our mouths, and they handed us tasty marmalade, bread and butter. The Commando lookalikes even spoke to us in Somali, but all they could say was “Somali Siko!” Somali move back!
One of the Marines threw a chocolate candy to me. I grabbed it and swallowed the whole thing. When I got home and told Mom, she gave me a hard slap.
“You must not eat pork!” she said.
I told her I didn’t think it was pork, it was sweet, but she didn’t believe me. How would she know what pork tastes like?
Night came again, and Mogadishu was noisier than I had ever heard it. But for the first time in two years, there was no sound of explosions and gunfire. We were surprised how the Marines lit up the airport. Lights came from everywhere, helicopters, tents, cars. It looked like daytime in the middle of the night. We were not allowed to get too close to the airport at night—“Somali Siko!” the Marines yelled over and over. But for the first time my friends, my brother and I could go out on the dusty streets after dark and play games, laugh and talk. We counted the helicopters as they flew over, and the big gunships that circled over the city. Falis’s movie theater could now stay open at night, but we did not go. For the first time in years, outside was even more exciting than the movies.
***
The year had changed to 1993, my ninth year of life. The U.S. troops and the star-spangled banner were now accompanied by blue UN helmets and flags of countries from all over Asia, Africa and Europe. Many non-military people also came to the city to help. We would see them jogging, and swimming in the green waters off the beach. One woman, some kind of aid worker, jogged every morning near our house. She was white, had long hair, and she smiled and remembered my name. I made sure to get up every morning and say hi to her when she passed. I watched her listening to music on her headphones and stretching. Sometimes she would sit and play games with me, my brother and Nima. She always brought us snacks like peanuts, candies and cookies, and she also brought painkillers, antibiotics and other medicine. We had never seen pills, so she explained what they were for, and how to take them. I think I fell in love with this woman; it wasn’t romantic but I just wanted to stay close to her. If I knew her name today, maybe I could find her in America, but I only called her what we called all non-Muslims, gaalo or infidel. One day she came to the madrassa, just to visit and say hi. Macalin Basbaas refused to shake her hand. Then one day we stopped seeing her. Soon we realized no one was jogging anymore.
The warlords were getting restless, they wanted the city back. Aidid had a radio station and was telling Somalis on the air that they should fight the “occupation” of Mogadishu. On June 5, UN forces went to the radio station to seize weapons. Aidid thought they were trying to shut down the broadcasts and he ambushed the troops, killing twenty-four Pakistani soldiers. That’s when things got bad. On July 12 the Americans sent Cobras over a house in Mogadishu where they thought Aidid was hiding and blasted it into rubble. He wasn’t there, but dozens of other people were killed. Aidid claimed the Americans had killed women and children, and he started to whip up Somalis against the infidel “invaders.” The Americans said only Aidid’s soldiers had been in the house, but the seed of resentment against the foreigners had been planted. Aidid wasted no time, planting roadside bombs in August that killed four American soldiers and wounded seven others. The Battle of Mogadishu had begun.
I had been waiting so long for this moment! I wanted to see the American troops in action and how they fight. Hassan and I were so excited for war, we ran toward whatever corner of the city we heard explosions or gunshots. Soon Cobras and Black Hawks were swooping down everywhere, hovering over buildings where militias were hiding. I looked up and cheered whenever the helicopters shot at a building, to me it seemed like the greatest movie. I stood on the streets and watched militias yell at each other, jumping from house to house and hiding in narrow alleys. We watched them take positions as helicopters hovered over them.
I thought the airplanes and helicopters would scare the militias away, but instead the huge, strong American men of the movies were being chased by Somali rebels on the streets. It was not what I expected. Soon everything had changed. We were no longer welcome near the Marines, there were no more candies or cookies. For the first time the Marines were aiming their guns at Somalis and pushing them around, even us kids. They looked nervous.
It is hard to explain why so many Mogadishans turned against the Marines and cheered the militias. The rebels had been killing us for four years, stealing our food and shitting in our houses. The Americans had been so kind. For sure it was partly the U.S. attack on the house that killed so many civilians. And at this point we were so familiar with death and destruction that this new battle seemed like a basketball game or a soccer match, it wasn’t even real life. People filled the streets, rooting for their home team. I too fell in with the crowd. I yelled out to the militias to let them know which side the helicopter was coming from. I threw rocks at helicopters. I ran with the crowd, repeating their cheers: “Up with Aidid! Down with America!”
The battle continued for weeks. The foreign troops slowly withdrew to the airport. Militias loyal to Aidid ruled the ground, but the foreign troops ruled the skies with their helicopters. At night it was hard for the Somali militias to see, but the helicopters with their infrared lasers were able to fire at their targets. Every night from our house I watched militias changing positions, shooting at helicopters. For a few minutes it would be dead quiet, then the helicopter would swoop down again and fire back. I believed my mother’s prayers saved us from the helicopter cannons but now I think it was the pilots’ precision.
On Sunday October 3, Aidid’s forces shot down two Black Hawk helicopters with Russian RPG bazookas. I heard the booming explosions and columns of smoke rising about a mile from our house. Naturally, I ran as fast as I could to watch this new action unfold. Everything was so dusty I could not see much or get very close. A crowd was dragging the bodies of dead Americans, and people said others were still alive, trapped. The rescue operation lasted until the next day. Sixteen Americans died and more than three hundred Somalis. A few days later I was playing hide and seek in the remains of one of the Black Hawks.
Five months later the Americans left Mogadishu. It was March 1994, my tenth year. The skinny rebels with their ugly brown teeth had beaten back the movie-star Marines. The Americans and the UN troops left so fast they didn’t even take their stuff. They left behind malfunctioning helicopters and vehicles, boots and uniforms. I joined a crowd that went to the same spot where the Mareekans had first invited us to watch them land on the beach in hovercrafts. This time we were looting the stuff they left behind, even the boxes of medicines, tablets, discarded syringes. We stuck the syringes into our hands for fun. We ate the tablets. Was it looting if they just left it?
The same militias whom we had cheered against the foreigners would soon turn on us again—stealing our food and shooting at us for sport. I felt shame that I had cheered against the Americans, the people who came to help us from the country of my dreams. But I now realize that I was lost—a nine-year-old boy caught between the teachings of Macalin Basbaas, my mother and her view on infidels, the American troops and their kindness and food, my love for my brave father and the glorious Somali basketball team, and the American movies I loved.
I stood on the beach, picking through the discarded camouflage uniforms with the American names sewn above the pockets. I held them up, hoping one would fit my skinny little body. My friends Mohammed, Bashi and Bocow laughed. I looked at them and scowled.
“I’m not Somali,” I said. “I am Mareekan. I was left behind by the Marines. And they will come for me soon.”
Interview with Matt Young, Author of Eat the Apple
Matt Young is a writer, teacher, and veteran. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the recipient of fellowships from Words After War and The Carey Institute for Global Good. You can find his work in Catapult, Granta, Tin House, Word Riot, and elsewhere. He teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Centralia College and lives in Olympia, Washington. His first book, a memoir titled Eat the Apple, is out now from Bloomsbury Publishing.
WBT: In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino, the Italian novelist and World War Two veteran, discusses how he “gradually became aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.” Calvino then relates the myth of Perseus and Medusa. Perseus, Calvino argues, not only kills Medusa with his shield’s reflection, but must also carry the burden of his experiences—and Medusa’s head—with him indirectly; otherwise, he will, well, turn to stone. Perseus’s strength, Calvino claims, “lies in his refusal to look directly, but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live; he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his particular burden.”
I have found this a useful metaphor for the problem of relating war experience. Too literal, you kill the experience. Too abstract, you don’t say anything at all. It is also the first thing I thought of when I encountered Eat the Apple’s humor, diagrams, cartoons, and pronouns (“you” and “we” and “Recruit” and “Young,” instead of “I”). Can you talk to us about how and why you decided to recount your military experiences indirectly?
YOUNG: The change in POV started off as art imitating life. In Marine boot camp you’re required to refer to yourself as “Recruit So-and-so” and it felt unnatural to write a story about boot camp using “I” so I let the third person do work there.
I struggled with the fact that most war memoirs I’d read had some kind of extreme circumstance at their center—that kind of Special Forces narrative that inundates the media these days. My experiences by comparison seemed tame and silly. But I thought about all the grunts I’d served with who’d had similar experiences over the four years we were together and I thought about all the battalions that had replaced us in country full of similar guys who’d also had similar experiences. Those two thoughts gave rise to that communal first person plural voice—I realized it was best to lean into that idea of not having a unique experience, painted myself as no different than any other.
Lots of early pieces I wrote were ‘How to’ stories. Some of those made their way into the final draft, but many more changed focus later on. That highly imperative second person, felt like it confronted both military and civilian complicity in Iraq. But ultimately, the second-person perspective loses its power quickly because it often forces the audience to acknowledge they’re reading a story in ways other perspectives don’t so I tried to keep it to a minimum and fit it with form to make it feel more natural.
I also found that those other perspectives helped me confront my past actions in a less direct manner and helped me be more honest about who I’d been and what I’d done. They made me feel less alone, took me off the page and put me next to the reader and let me show them something I couldn’t have with just “I”. There’s something about the removal of the “I” that let me cut a little deeper.
WBT: The essays in Eat the Apple are relatively short and incredibly poignant. I experienced each and every one like a punch to the gut. Did this economy come into your writing naturally? Or did you have to refine longer essays into the powerful vignettes they became?
YOUNG: When I started writing I set off to write flash. I wanted the essays to mimic memory, and flash felt like a natural fit. It’s often how I remember moments—a smell or image or sound recalls a tiny thing and sends it zipping through my brain for a microsecond and then it’s gone, but I’m left thinking about it and reflecting on it sometimes for days.
I didn’t write or journal during my time in the Marines so I had to do a lot of memory recall exercises, late-night texting of former platoon mates, and research online to find incident reports. That process itself felt fractured, which also seemed to fit what I was trying to do—piecing together four years of experience and emotion to make a narrative.
I love the lyricism that generally comes with flash essays—it felt like a fantastic way to spice up the sometimes complete banality of war. In the beauty of those lyrical descriptions the horror of what I’m writing about maybe becomes a bit easier to stomach for a reader as well—that’s the hope anyway.
WBT: In a Time Magazine essay, you write the following: “I tried to fictionalize what I’d done because I wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge that I never fulfilled that manly heroic expectation people have of military service.” As someone who writes fiction, I found this unsettling (in a good way). Could you expand on what you meant here and maybe tell us a little about what you consider the relationship between fiction and nonfiction?
YOUNG: It happened on two levels for me. My senior Marines had fought in Fallujah. I saw them as the peak of manhood, real heroes. They’d been in firefights, cleared houses, killed people. I wanted to have done those things then. I’d been told those men were the pinnacle of maleness and I was so uncomfortable in my skin and lacked so much confidence as a young man that I was an easy sell and bought in fully. Then, when I got home after my first deployment I didn’t feel like I’d measured up to them and when I went to tell my family and friends about what war was like, I felt like I didn’t measure up to their expectations, either. So I made up stories to tell them, made my experience more like my seniors’. I lied. And I kept lying for years because it made me feel good and it kept me from having to reflect about what I’d done and what had happened.
Then, by the time I got to undergrad at Oregon State and started writing I had those lies mixed up with my truth. When I tried to write stories about my experience I saw myself in the characters I created and immediately began to defend them, to make their experience mean something. I wanted them to be heroes, and so they turned into caricatures. They spent their time in my stories explaining “the real world” to civilians unironically. There was no truth in those stories, because I couldn’t be truthful with myself.
It’s a bit odd, maybe. You usually hear from writers that fiction is a more direct vehicle for the truth. But for me it wasn’t writing fiction that got me there. It was using fiction writing techniques. Lines between fiction and nonfiction are super blurry a lot of the time. The moment an event happens and someone documents it, it’s filtered through an individual’s lens—that person’s contextual place in the world. Are the things I recount and the stories I tell considered fact? Probably not, by most standards. Are they truth? 100%.
WBT: Toxic masculinity is a topic much in the news recently. For good reason. We spend a lot of time of WBT debating and thinking about violence and its effect on communities. But sometimes we can forget how cultures of violence eat away at men too, at how this toxicity is a two-way street. Eat the Apple bravely confronts this exact issue. For example:
“You’ve chosen the United States Marine Corps infantry based on one thing: You got drunk last night and crashed your car into a fire hydrant in the early morning and think—because your idea of masculinity is severely twisted and damaged by the male figures in your life and the media you surround yourself—that the only way to change is the self-flagellation achieved by signing up for war.”
I feel Eat the Apple responds to this “idea of masculinity,” and I encourage readers interested in this subject to buy and read the whole collection through (a couple times). Did you set out to write on this idea of what it means to be a man in the U.S. today or is this simply a byproduct of describing your particular experiences in the Marines?
YOUNG:
Short answer? No.
Longer answer? I set out to write my experience as an infantry Marine and it was impossible to write that experience without writing about the antiquated ideals of masculinity and anti-feminism, which construct the ethos of both the Marine Corps and especially Marine grunts. It was delivered via Drill Instructors, School of Infantry Instructors, senior Marines, and higher-ups—a kind of disdain for everything feminine. Drop back on a hike? You’re a bitch or a pussy. Have a girlfriend back home? She’s fucking some other guy behind your back because you can’t trust Susie Rottencrotch. Women Marines—WMs—are dehumanized; called Wookies (which I never got) or walking mattresses. Those are the more overt portions of toxic masculinity I, and most, experience.
Then it hits you from civilians, too. Again with their expectations—what a soldier is supposed to be, what they’re supposed to have experienced and done, and how they’re supposed to react to that experience. Usually civilians expect you to have killed someone, to be damaged irreparably by post-traumatic stress, to be that strong silent type, to be a hero.
But calling someone a hero negates their experience or their feelings about that experience. It tells them their individual feelings are wrong and replaces them with a narrative people are more comfortable with. Hero worship is part of toxic masculine culture and it’s an act of silencing. It says, Shut up about your experience, smile when I thank you for your service so I can feel better about myself, and take the beer I just bought you. It perpetuates the tough guy military narrative—a thing I’d bought into so much I lied about my true experiences to family and friends when I returned home. I really couldn’t write about anything in my life right now without confronting masculinity in our culture.
WBT: Hard question time. That quote above. Isn’t this exactly what happened? Didn’t the experiences recounted in this book change you in ways that you both wanted and did not want? It’s okay if you just say, “read the last chapters of Eat the Apple.” Readers should.
YOUNG: Unsatisfying answer time: For sure. Doesn’t every experience do that? Before that quote I speculate as to what might happen if I don’t join. Do I think now that becoming a Midwest caricature was the only other outcome? No. I could’ve joined the Peace Corps, or sucked it up and enrolled in community college, or reconciled with my parents, or hit the lottery. There are infinite futures I could’ve had that could’ve changed me and affected me in infinite ways, but at that time I thought I was a bad man on a road to even more badness. I thought the Marine Corps would give me direction and purpose. I thought it would make me a man. I’m impulsive by nature, so I went with it.
I spend most of the rest of the book examining how misinformed I was and how directionless I became. This is really the problem I had with writing fiction about my experience when I got out. I wanted it to mean something. I wanted to know the world and myself better and more fully afterward—or wanted to pretend my military service had enlightened me to those things—but everything became more convoluted. It took being out and going to college and gaining education and language that I could use to articulate my experience to help me understand my experience and myself more fully.
WBT: I teach Slaughterhouse-Five to students every year. Every year they get upset by the descriptions of masturbation, pornography, and the picture of Montana Wildhack’s breasts. I ask them why they get upset by the masturbation and not all the massacres of human beings. Eat the Apple does not pull any punches when it comes to the sexual life of Marines. Can you tell us about Eat the Apple’s reception? Have you had any pushback?
For the most part people have appreciated the honesty. I write a lot about masturbation in the book for a couple reasons—one because I (and most of us) did it a lot. It really is a way to stay awake on post or pass the time or make you feel like you’re still somewhat human, so it becomes part of the fabric of Marine grunt experience. But also, it’s super intimate—in some respect more so than sex. You’re at your most vulnerable when masturbating. All your shortcomings, your kinks, your dumb facial expressions, whatever. You don’t have to hide any of those things when you’re jerking off by yourself. I wanted people to see that part of myself. It helped me let down that masculine guard that’s always up in military memoirs. Everyone masturbates. It’s a great way to build empathy.
Some people see it as crass and childish or disgusting, which says more about them as readers and people unwilling to engage with difficult topics. Most of the pushback comes from older men who don’t like me scuffing up the spit polished Marine Corps veneer. They’re a dying breed I think—those men and the stories they love so much. People want more. If the festering gash that is civilian/military divide is ever going to heal it’s going to take acknowledgement of the breadth and depth of service experience out there.
That people clutch their pearls at sex and not violence is an issue of our puritanical and patriarchal roots. Sex is bad because it empowers women. Violence is good because it establishes dominance and power—regressive masculine traits.
WBT: A fellow WBT editor and I have an absolutely unscientific generalization about war literature. There has not been, we contend, a war book published in the last fifty years that has not mentioned dogs, dead or otherwise. We have many theories as to why, none of them particularly insightful. Your work spends a lot of time talking about dogs too. Why do Americans write so many war books about dogs?
YOUNG: Man’s best friend, maybe? Relatability to the audience? Shock value? Killing a dog probably has some kind of purpose in the moment—to get them to stop eating corpses, or to get them to shut up, or out of boredom. In terms of literary merit, the killing of a dog is maybe more powerful than the killing of a human. We’re so desensitized to human death. The killing of an animal, especially a dog, is much more rhetorically pathetic.
Tobias Wolff has maybe the best line ever about U.S. war writing in In Pharaoh’s Army: “And isn’t it just like an American boy, to want you to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart?” Of course, Wolff—being the brilliant writer he is—does not actually admire his sorrow, but interrogates it through the essay form itself—opens up the tensions implicit in recounting morally repugnant wartime experiences. I believe Eat the Apple to be one of the few memoirs since Wolff’s that accomplishes something similar. I also believe there is little “sorrow” in Eat the Apple and even less patience with those who might admire it. Did you consciously reflect on the privilege of reflection when writing these essays? How did you avoid falling into the trap Wolff describes?
YOUNG: I love In Pharaoh’s Army. One of my undergrad professors, Keith Scribner, recommended it to me when I was trying to figure out how to write about the Marines. Now that you mention that, maybe he saw me admiring my own sorrow in my fiction? Damn. My mind is kind of blown right now.
Anyway, after trying to fictionalize my experience I became very aware of the benefits and detriments of reflection. Honesty and humor kept me out of the trap. Those POV switches and different forms and styles were all working towards honesty and let me pull out the magnifying glass and pinpoint a sunspot to scorch the living hell out of my past self. Most of the humor in the book is self-deprecating—lacerating I suppose. I wanted the audience laugh at me. The humor at my own expense is naked honesty; the audience is laughing because of how horrible I am, which maybe makes the feel a bit of shame because of the rhetoric surrounding the military (“Support Our Troops!”). It creates a balance with those poignant moments and keeps me from verging into woe-is-me-I-signed-up-for-the-Marines-and-they-made-me-go-to-war-isn’t-that-sad? territory.
WBT: You teach writing. What do you tell your students on the first day of class?
YOUNG: Anyone who gives you a prescriptive fix for your writing, and means it, is a cop.
WBT: What do you tell your students on the last day of class?
New Fiction: Excerpt from Hilary Plum’s Strawberry Fields
An excerpt from the novel Strawberry Fields. Alice, a reporter, and the detective Modigliani are both working on the case of five murdered veterans of the Iraq War (including Kareem, named below). The investigation has extended in many directions, including toward the private military contractor Xenith, with whom the victims were involved.
Alice
Modigliani came over, a bottle brown-bagged in his hand. I’d hoped for wine but it was gin. He poured for us both and produced a jar of olives from his jacket, with his fingers dropped three into each glass. Thank you, I’m sure, I said, eyeing the greasy floating pimentos. Your table sucks, he said, rocking it back and forth with his hand.
The death of Farzad Ahmad Muhammad, I said.
OK, Modigliani said.
You remember it, I insisted. He was murdered in US custody. A British journalist got interested, and so there was an actual military follow-up. A few guys were held responsible, or kind of—I pushed photos toward him, tapped each face in turn—this one spent two months in jail, this one was demoted, this one not even discharged. These photos, I added, were Kareem’s. He was working on some kind of amateur investigation.
OK, Modigliani said.
Modigliani bent down and slid the lid of the olive jar under the short leg of the table. Now we have to finish these, he said. How did he die?
I said: He was hanging from the ceiling by his hands, which is common practice, but he was left there for days, and they beat his legs to interrogate him, the backs of his knees. Pulpified, is how the autopsy describes his legs—if he hadn’t died, they’d have had to amputate. They said the beatings were normal, but none of them realized how many teams were going at him, how many altogether, and blood pooled around the injuries until his heart stopped, with him just hanging there. They found him on the morning of the fifth day.
Modigliani nodded. And where does Kareem come in?
He knew one of the guys who was later held responsible, the guy who went to jail. They were based out of the same compound for a while, they met socially, if that’s the right word. I’m trying to see if maybe Kareem is the one who tipped off the journalist in the first place. Like, he gathered this evidence to give it to her.
And this works out to a motive for killing Kareem, what, seven or eight years later?
Fuck, I said, fuck.
Modigliani stacked the photos and pushed them back toward me, maneuvering around drinks and olives. He said: If the guy who killed the prisoner was Kareem’s friend, Kareem could have been looking to get him off, not get him punished. But you know that. Not to mention, he added, that we have four other victims.
I know, I said. The photo on top was of the bruised legs, and I covered it with both hands.
Alice—Modigliani said, looking in the direction of the air conditioner—your thinking is the opposite of conspiratorial. It’s the web without the spider.
He said: I think I’ve always liked that about you.
Later I understood this was the one thing he ever said that I truly believed.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, he went on, I’d think you were trying to distract this investigation from its real target.
Bill LeRoy, I said obediently, Xenith.
Right now he’s angling to replace the military in Afghanistan, Modigliani said. All private contractors, private air force. British East India Company model.
I said: At the same time he’s selling his forces to countries hoping to keep migrants in or migrants out. Or rather, Muslims out. Turn back the boats at gunpoint.
Modigliani shifted and I thought he was going to lay his hands over the photo, over my own.
What happens, I wondered, when a spider mistakes itself for a fly?
Modigliani finished his drink and rose. The table rocked again.
Have you ever noticed, he said, how rarely I ask a question?
After Modigliani left I went on: I’d called the guy who’d served time, the guy Kareem knew. He was punished most severely because he’d visited the prisoner the most and was supposed to be the one signing off, keeping track of the others.
I was only halfway through Kareem’s name when the woman who had answered the phone interrupted: He doesn’t know anything. Don’t call here again. She was gone and with her the background sound of a child’s off-key singing. I called again. I thought of going out there, to the Midwestern farmland where they lived, not far from where I used to visit a long-dead uncle of my mother’s. Amish in buggies or on bicycles on the road’s shoulder, cornfields, trampolines in yards that back then I’d coveted. He was a farm boy, this man, and at first I thought this should damn him. Shouldn’t a boy like that have known, have understood the body and what it won’t endure? Only once did they unhook Muhammad from the ceiling and by then he could no longer bend his knees. But tonight, the refrigerator assuming the role of crickets, the floor athrum with someone’s bass, I understood why this made no difference.
Strawberry Fields was published in April, 2018 and is available from Fence Books or your local bookseller.
New Poetry from Janaya Martin
More Than Twice
She said you better hush
before he comes back in here
like she knew who she was
talking to but didn’t
She was me and he was the
mistake you made more than twice
but he gave you a daughter who
gave you trouble, sometimes.
this is what women do, talk
nonsense and make trouble
all about the earth, but only
because no one lets them
keep things nice or clean
or quiet. let us just have
one damn thing.
Aretemisia Gentileschi, “Susanna and the Elders,” 1610.
First Wednesday Sirens
Working from home includes:
day-old coffee heated in the microwave,
snoring dogs and sometimes the desire
to add wine.
Yesterday, July 4, the incessant booming.
Today, Wednesday, the sirens.
Feels like a warning, a dry run, a war inside.
I feel like I should move the canned
goods to the basement, the bottled water too,
build a wall to keep all the crazy white men out.
Maybe I should have titled this poem, Me + My Uterus = 4-ever.
Odilon Redon, “The Crying Spider,” 1881.
Spider
my head feels heavy
so i let it hang like
a knot in a thread
and i drag it around.
i remember when i was 10
a spider crawled up my leg
i let it, even though i was terrified.
you are that spider.
how do i tell you that you
are that spider?
how do i tell you that i can hear
the words you do not speak?
how do i tell you that sometimes
i sit in the basement and listen
to the house, to the way
each foot plays a different note
across the floor.
The Ghosts Will Not Save You
My mother taught me that no house
is a home. Instead, each room is an opportunity
to be a statistic.
Instead, this is where you hide the pipe,
this is where you keep the bottles
and here, daughter, is where you keep
the secrets. All of them.
Stacked against the door, not as an offering,
but as a precaution or a reminder that you
will not leave here. At least not the way
you came.
Memoir by Sari Fordham: “House Arrest in Thirteen Parts”
Part I: The House, circa 1977
The house in Uganda was red brick with a metal roof, a rusted water tank, and a screened-in verandah that had once been painted green. My mother spent most of her day on that verandah. She read Psalms to us there in the mornings, combed our hair afterwards, and then wrote letters to my father’s family in the States or to her own in Finland. She was struck by how different the world was, how isolated each person was in their reality. It’s strange, she wrote my grandfather, that you’re skiing and otherwise getting in shape. Here the weather is usually so exhausting that you cannot get enough exercise.
The house sat at the top of a hill and was surrounded by jungle. Monkeys gathered in the trees, and such bright and peculiar birds flew through the clearing that my mother later regretted that she hadn’t started birding yet. The house had three bedrooms and a bath. With the exception of the verandah, it looked like an average American house, maybe a little older, maybe a little shabbier. By Ugandan standards, it was palatial. It wasn’t just the space, more than a family of four needed, it was also the amenities: running water, electricity, a fridge, a stove, a washing machine, and cupboards filled with items you could no longer buy in Uganda.
The Fordhams’ house on the hill.
We lived a mile from campus, a mile from all those grievances. Our closest neighbors were unaffiliated with the school and lived in what we called “the village,” even though the collection of mud huts belonged to a single Ugandan family: a patriarch, his wives, and their children. The wives and daughters collected water from our spigot every morning and carried it down to their communal kitchen. When my father was home, he would help hoist the pails onto their heads. One girl complained to my father that her neck hurt. “No wonder,” my father later said. He could barely lift the pails.
My parents were missionaries at Bugema College, a Seventh-day Adventist institution. The campus was twenty-one miles from the capital, Kampala, but the trip could take over an hour, depending on the conditions of the road or the number of military checkpoints. The distance suited everyone on campus just fine. The school had a dairy and a poultry farm, and beans and bananas were still available in the countryside. Whenever one missionary family eventually drove into town, they set aside personal grievances and ran errands for all the other missionaries.
The wives and daughters saw our house every day and had their own relationship with it. They walked past the screened-in verandah, the glass panes on each window, the light on the porch that turned on and off when the generator was working. They saw the external trappings of privilege and could only imagine what the interior held. We didn’t think we were privileged. My mother worried because she couldn’t buy toothbrushes in a store or children’s vitamins. To supplement our iron, she threw a nail in with the beans as they boiled.
My mother disliked the patriarch because he beat his wives, and she assumed he also disliked us and waseven spying on us for Idi Amin or someone high in the government. These were paranoid times. Bugema’s principal had been warned that “the American” was being watched, and my father was the only American on campus. When the patriarch asked my parents what they thought of Uganda, their answers were repetitive and chirpy: wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. They were on edge with every interaction. Yet when we were under house arrest, the patriarch was not the person who accompanied the soldier.
Part II: The Missionaries
My parents, Gary and Kaarina, met in 1966 at an Adventist university in Michigan. My father, tall and skinny, had grown up surfing in Hawaii and had a fondness for practical jokes. To my mother, he seemed like the all-American boy. Later, she learned that my father and his siblings had spent their childhood bouncing around foster homes. During the last such interlude, an Adventist family took in the three children. My father and his siblings converted, and then his mother, who came for visits, did as well. My father found stability in the church and worked his way through Adventist boarding schools, eating only two meals a day because that’s all he could afford. When my mother met him, he was studying for his Master’s in Theology because he wanted to serve God and because he believed Jesus was coming soon.
My mother ostensibly came to the United States to study for a Master’s in English. Like my father, she’d grown up poor, but hers had a different texture. She was born in Finland at the beginning of World War II and was raised during the harsh austerity that followed. Her father, a Bible teacher at an Adventist boarding school, gave his salary too freely to needy students and to missions, leaving little to support his five children, the eldest of whom was handicapped. My grandmother was so anxious about finances that she tried unsuccessfully to induce miscarriages during her last two pregnancies.
My mother lived with her family in a house without indoor plumbing or running water. As she later told us, an outhouse in winter was no joke. For washing dishes and clothes, she and her siblings carried up pails of water from the Baltic Sea. It was a decent walk even without the weight of water. My mother and her siblings were always busy with the task of subsistence. In the summers, they foraged for mushrooms and berries, which they either ate or sold. My grandmother, who had never been to the United States, wanted her children to aspire to a future outside of Finland, telling them that in American even the telephone poles were higher than anywhere else.
My mother was the daughter to leave. She received a scholarship to study abroad, but more to the point, she had no marriage prospects in Finland. Despite being raised among all those potential Adventist suitors, she was, when my father met her, a twenty-six-year-old spinster who looked sixteen. The eligible bachelors had dismissed her as the Bible teacher’s bookish, less captivating daughter. In a black-and-white photograph taken before her departure, my mother stands beside all her worldly goods, three small suitcases and a bundle. Her hair is tied up, her eyes downcast. What seemed lost on everyone in Finland, especially herself, is that she’s strikingly beautiful.
The Fordhams in Uganda (author Sari is on far right)
My father noticed immediately. He walked into the library looking for a date. Everyone knew that if you wanted to be hired as a minister, you had to be married. Earlier that day, he and his friends had planted books on each of the library’s study tables. The plan was to sit at the table with the most attractive woman, gesturing to the books. The hitch, for my father, was that my mother was a student librarian. Stripped of pretense, my father approached her directly and asked her out.
My parents got engaged four months after their first date, got married in Finland, honeymooned in Lapland, and settled in Indiana where my father pastored two churches and where my mother taught fourth grade, and where they rented their first house, a two-bedroom with wood panels and shag carpet. When Sonja was born, my mother quit teaching and spent her days photographing my sister and sending pictures to the beautiful baby contests advertised in the back of ladies’ magazines. My mother found America strange and lonely. People would say, “Come over any time,” but when my father drove her over, they looked confused, and she felt embarrassed in front of her new husband. She tried to get her driver’s license, but traffic frightened her, and she kept failing the exams. Church members critiqued her parenting. When I was born, my mother was ready to leave Indiana. She was tired of the winters, which she said were windier than those in Finland. She was tired of corn. When my father began talking about the mission field, she didn’t say no. In 1976, they moved to Uganda.
Part III: The Dictator
Idi Amin came to power in a 1971 military coup that was welcomed by most Ugandans. The deposed president Milton Obote had made himself unpopular by marginalizing Uganda’s largest tribe, banning oppositional parties, detaining dissidents, and declaring himself Life President.
The West supported the “regime change,” as coups we approved of were called. Milton Obote was a socialist, and Idi Amin wasn’t. Moreover, Idi Amin appeared malleable. Before Ugandan independence, he had served in the King’s African Rifles and had ruthlessly fought with the British against the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya. He boxed and played rugby. He was charming. He had a wonderful laugh. Western leaders considered him not too bright, despite the four languages he spoke.
Idi Amin preached an Africa for Africans, and then, in 1972, he expelled the Asians who ran the economy. It was not a small thing. There were 40,000 Asians, as the expatriates of mostly Indian origin were called, living in the country. After business hours, so few ethnic Ugandans walked the streets of Kampala that the city could have been a suburb of Bombay. The Asians had ninety days to leave, each taking with them only two suitcases of personal items. Their houses, furniture, appliances, cars, livestock, shops, pharmacies, coffee plantations, cotton farms, and factories were given to Idi Amin’s supporters.
Their bank acconnts were absorbed by the National Treasury. Uganda’s robust economy, a model on the continent, crashed hard. By 1976, you couldn’t buy oats in a store. Yet that one move helped mitigate Amin’s legacy with his countrymen. There might be nothing to buy in Kampala, but at least that nothing belonged to Ugandans.
The West came to view Idi Amin as a buffoon, and in private meetings, world leaders questioned his sanity. A popular theory was that he had syphilis-induced psychosis. Amin was surely aware of his reputation and might have seen it as an advantage. In any event, he was a man who liked a joke, particularly one where the West was the punch line. You laugh at me; I laugh at you. His official title-read in full before radio addresses-was “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Alhaji Dr Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE,” with the CBE standing for Conqueror of the British Empire. My parents laughed at that. They also laughed at the outrageous telegrams he sent world leaders. In a correspondence with Queen Elizabeth, he sympathized with England’s economic woes and volunteered to send “a cargo ship full of bananas to thank you for the good days of the colonial administration.” In Uganda, the killings began nearly as soon as Amin came to power. Concerned about a coup, he purged the army of soldiers from Acholi and Langi tribes, two ethnic groups allied with Milton Obote. He established the State Research Bureau, an intelligence agency infamous for torture. He killed those who threatened his power. He killed those who might threaten his power. He killed those who didn’t threaten his power at all. Bodies were tossed into the lakes, and the crocodiles grew fat. After fleeing Uganda, one of Amin’s former aides told Time magazine, “‘You are walking, and any creature making a step on the dry grass behind you might be an Amin man. Whenever you hear a car speeding down the street, you think it might suddenly come to a stop — for you. I finally fled, not because I was in trouble or because of anything I did, but out of sheer fear. People disappear. When they disappear, it means they are dead.”
Archives of New Zealand: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Idi Amin.
Humanitarian organizations were unsure how many Ugandans had been murdered. Some groups estimated that 80,000 had been killed. Other groups estimated that 300,000 had been killed.
Part IV: The Archbishop
On February 16, 1977, Janani Luwum — the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Boga Zaire — was murdered. The world had to notice.
Janani Luwum was a rare man, a warm individual — taking time to write letters to those he had met — and an innovative, effective leader. He encouraged theology students to take classes in Developmental Studies, and he promoted a Christian practice that looked African, not European. He was the most influential religious leader on the continent, and the first Ugandan to hold his position.
If Luwum had lived long enough to have a full career, he likely would have changed the Church. Instead, he became linked irrevocably with Idi Amin. They both were Ugandan men shaped by colonialism, both dynamic leaders, both capable of dazzling the camera with their smiles. These two men initially had a cordial relationship, despite the fact that Luwum came from the Acholi tribe, an ethnic group with sympathetic ties to the deposed president. The Archbishop used their friendship to temper the dictator’s excesses. Parishioners came to him with names written on slips of paper, and he would carry those names with him, cajoling Idi Amin into releasing someone’s brother, someone’s husband.
At the beginning of 1977, Amin survived yet another coup attempt, or invented one. Observers weren’t sure. What’s certain is that in response, he ordered the slaughter of everyone in Obote’s hometown. An entire town murdered and the world looked away. In the same fit of spite or fear, Amin purged the army of the remaining Acholi and Langi soldiers. A witness described the carnage to Time magazine. “You would hear a short cry and then sudden silence. I think they were being strangled and then had their heads smashed. Next day the floors of rooms C and D — the elimination chambers — were littered with loose eyes and teeth.”
It was too much. The Archbishop wrote Idi Amin an open letter and sent copies to government officials. Seventeen bishops signed the letter and Archbishop Luwum personally delivered it to Idi Amin. With the candor of an Old Testament prophet, he wrote: We have buried many who have died as a result of being shot and there are many more whose bodies have not been found. The gun which was meant to protect Uganda as a nation, the Uganda citizen and his property, is increasingly being used against the Ugandan to take away his life and property.
Few in Uganda were surprised when the Archbishop was arrested for “smuggling weapons,” fewer still when Radio Uganda reported that the Archbishop had died in a car accident on the way to the interrogation center. It was whispered that he had been shot. Some claimed that Idi Amin had pulled the trigger.
Part V: The Trip
After the Archbishop’s murder, even expatriates were anxious. The thing to do, the missionaries all said, was to be unobtrusive. Don’t make waves. It went without saying that you shouldn’t travel unless you had to. Any time you drove, you risked getting stopped by soldiers or by carjackers, soldiers being preferable of the two, but with the country on edge, who knew? It felt melodramatic to speak about getting killed. It felt presumptuous to clutch your passport and assume you were above it all.
For months, my father had been planning to drive into Kenya to attend church meetings. My mother had always intended to stay with us on the hill because it was safer and because she had little patience for the border crossings. She had created a shopping list for my father that might as well have said: buy all the things. Now this.
“No one expects you to still go,” my mother said. “No one.”
“I’m not that kind of missionary,” my father said. It was his favorite line.
My mother could feel the tug of their old argument. She sometimes veered away, setting her mouth and saying nothing further. More often, she railed. Why can’t you just once put your family before the church?
On the morning my father left, she was cheerful. My mother might shout during a fight, but she didn’t stew. As my father dashed through the house — “Where’s my Bible? Where’s my passport? Have you seen my glasses?” — she pointed him toward the items he needed, and when he was ready to leave she handed him a stack of aerogrammes that had accumulated on our table. For the past week, missionaries had been dropping off letters for my father to post in Kenya. Mail sent from Uganda was opened and read by someone, we all knew.
My father said goodbye to us in the yard. I sat in my mother’s arms and watched him go. It was a familiar sight. He left, and then he returned, often with presents. The best were matchbox cars. Sonja and I loved them because we loved him. At night, he would get on the floor with us and push cars around the legs of the dining room table.
“You better get going,” my mother said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
She didn’t have to say that we’d be fine. Of course, we’d be fine. If you didn’t count snakes and malaria, life on the hill was uneventful.
Part VI: The Press Conference-February 23, 1977
My father was in Kenya when Jimmy Carter held the second press conference of his presidency. Reporters wanted to know how Carter’s campaign promises were holding up to the realities of office. No one anticipated that Uganda would be mentioned or that the press conference would have international consequences.
Halfway through, a reporter asked Carter: “What if anything, do you plan to try to do to help victims of political repression in these countries?” The countries in question were Iran and the Philippines, and the reporter noted that despite human rights abuses by both regimes, the United States was aiding their governments. Carter spoke vaguely about changes his administration was making and then pivoted to Uganda. Uganda was a small, politically inconsequential country, one the United States was not supporting either covertly or overtly; still, the Archbishop’s murder was shocking.
“Obviously, there are deprivations of human rights, even more brutal than the ones on which we’ve commented up till now,” Carter said. “In Uganda, the actions there have disgusted the entire civilized world, and, as you know, we have no diplomatic relationships with Uganda. But here is an instance where both Ambassador Andrew Young and I have expressed great concern about what is there. The British are now considering asking the United Nations to go into Uganda to assess the horrible murders that apparently are taking place in that country, the persecution of those who have aroused the ire of Mr. Amin.”
It was a throwaway line. The press conference, broadcast live on television and radio, continued for fourteen more questions, none of them about Idi Amin. Jimmy Carter didn’t mention Uganda again.
The next day, Idi Amin announced that Americans couldn’t leave Uganda and were to report themselves to Kampala on February 28 for a personal meeting. No one was quite sure what this meant. It could mean nothing. It could mean we’d be deported. It could mean we’d be imprisoned or held in Kampala. There were only 240 Americans in Uganda. Most were missionaries like us, who had ignored the State Department’s travel warnings. There were also a handful of airline employees, oil workers, and technicians. Sonja and I were some of the youngest Americans. With our father in Kenya, we were likely the only American children without an American guardian in the country.
“Goddammit. Why couldn’t our first crisis have been a more dignified one?” a White House adviser reportedly said.
Part VII: Singing in the Dining Room
News of the house arrest, as the missionaries called it, moved swiftly through campus. There was news, and then there was news.What were the Fordhams going to do now? Would they be deported or worse? What was Carter thinking? The other missionaries were relieved that the leaders of their respective nations — Australia, Canada, and the Philippines – -had sense enough not to irritate Amin, and it was fortunate, they all said, providential even, that Gary was in Kenya. They knew my mother was Finnish, and they speculated on whether or not Sonja and I were dual citizens. We weren’t. That my mother was the last to hear the news said more about living on the hill than anything.
“Please, can we have some peace and quiet?” my mother said. “We’re trying to talk here.” Her voice was sharp, and I began weeping. “Oh, for goodness sakes,” our mother said. After the midday rain, a missionary hustled up to tell us. She called out “Hodi,” and my mother’s heart lurched. “Gary’s fine,” the missionary said, as she sat on the couch. In the dining room, Sonja and I were building a puzzle. We began singing because we liked to sing and because we finally had an audience, even if she was only a missionary. The women spoke as if we weren’t there, and so we responded in the only way we could: we raised the volume. “God is so good. God is so GOOD. God is SO GOOD. HE’S SO GOOD TO ME.”
To the missionary she asked, “What does this mean? What’s he thinking?”
After we went to bed, my mother turned on the radio. She confirmed the date and time we were to present ourselves in Kampala and wondered whether or not she should take us. Who would even drive us? Surely the Ugandan government wouldn’t seek out two children. Did anyone even know we were here? Who kept track of these things?
Termites flew against the glass with steady pings. A few had gotten into the house, where they fluttered on the floor, lattice wings propelling thick bodies. They were a delicacy. When they came flying out of the ground, children would leave whatever they were doing and run out into the fields to gather them. The termites were roasted and eaten. My mother carried the mugs into the kitchen and set them in the sink. She stood in the green darkness, water running through her hands, and cried.
Part VIII: The Letter
My father sat down to write his mother and stepfather. Despite attending meetings all day, he must have felt like he was on vacation. No teaching, grading, or lessons planning. And the food! In Uganda, we only spoke of such meals: toast with marmite, potatoes and green beans, spaghetti and peas, cake.
My father dated his letter February 24, the day after Jimmy Carter’s press conference. Either he hadn’t heard the news or the detention hadn’t yet been announced.
Dear Mother and Gordon,
Wanted to let you know all is well with us. There is trouble in the land, but we have not been bothered.
He filled the front page of the aerogramme with the minutia of our daily lives: mail in Uganda was censored, the dairy farm was down to six cows, wages for Ugandans were only fifteen cents an hour, fellow missionaries were requesting transfers.
Four days later, my father, fully aware of the events in Uganda, returned to the letter. He had left the back flap empty and so he turned to it and wrote in the date. February 28. So much could happen in four days.
I am still in Kenya (Union Session finished yesterday) and Americans are detained in Uganda. We are not sure what to do because Kaarina, on a Finnish passport, can leave more easily if I’m not there. We expected to get an indication today, but now the meeting [with Idi Amin] is postponed until Wednesday. I may go in tomorrow to be there for the appointment with the president and I may wait.
I wish I could contact Kaarina, but the phones are cut at the border. We know the Lord will watch over us, but feel it may be wiser to see what’s going to happen before complicating matters. The Lord Bless you. Love, Gary
My father was a phlegmatic man who liked to say, “Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.” After hearing we were under house arrest, he had continued attending meetings. He was a delegate, after all. Let the world burn around him, Gary Fordham would fulfill his duty. The letter to my grandmother, however, suggested that my father had identified a mountain as a mountain. Over and over, he used the pronoun we, as if he and my mother were in consultation. We are not sure. We expect. We know. We feel. Unable to contact my mother, he was conversing with her in his head.
Two decades later, after my mother died of cancer, he returned to this unconscious habit. We think. We hope. We feel.
“Who is this ‘we’?” I finally asked. “You and mom?”
“Yeah,” he said, and smiled. He never used we in the same way again.
Part IX: The Soldier
The soldier came in the morning. We were on the verandah when we heard the crunch of tires on a road that led to us and nowhere else. The rumble was a back and forth sound, a jostling of vehicle against washed out road, against mud, against potholes. My mother set down her Bible and the three of us watched the Land Rover jut out of the jungle, roll across the yard, and stop beside the frangipani tree. A soldier, dressed in green, sleeves rolled past elbows, climbed out, and there, from the passenger’s side, emerged Joseph, my father’s student.
“Good morning, madam,” the soldier said.
“Good morning, bwana,” my mother said. “Morning, Joseph.” The soldier was tall, or so he seemed to us, and dashing. His eyes followed our chickens, Rebecca and Sarah, as they snatched termites in the yard. “Can I help you?” my mother said. “If you came to see my husband, he’s not here.”
“Can we come in?” the soldier said.
My mother led them up the cement steps and through the verandah. She removed her shoes at the door and asked them to do the same. “All the mud,” she said. She motioned toward the couch and as the men sat, she asked Joseph how he was enjoying his classes. He answered that he was liking them very much.
Sonja and I scooted behind her. A soldier was sitting next to Joseph on our couch. Any other day, Joseph would have been the occasion. I would have climbed into his lap and demanded a story, but Joseph was not the point. There was a soldier in our house. He was wearing a beret and there were holes in his socks.
In the kitchen, our mother made cherry Kool-Aid out of water she had boiled the night before. We hadn’t had Kool-Aid in months, or as my mother liked to say, not in the memory of man. Sonja and I hoped the visitors wouldn’t drink it all. My mother hummed as she moved, reaching for our tall cups, then opening a Tupperware of dried finger bananas. She carried the Kool-Aid out first, giving a cup to both Joseph and the soldier. Then she brought out the dried finger bananas and held them out, and they each took one or two. Bananas were, well, bananas, but the Kool-Aid had made an impression.
“These are my girls,” my mother said. “Sonja and Sari.” We ducked and smiled. “What do you say?” she said.
Sonja stepped up to the soldier and said, “Hello.” The soldier took her hand and shook it. “You are welcome,” he said. I pressed my face into my mother’s waist, and they laughed.
“Okay,” my mother said. “You can go outside and play. Take the cat. Stay near the house, and for goodness sakes, don’t get too muddy.” And so we went, the reluctant Kissa looped through Sonja’s arms.
PartX: Inventory
Our mother frowned as we left, feeling what exactly, I shouldn’t know, but I’ve heard this story so often I can’t separate my memories from hers, my feelings from hers, and so I see her standing in our house, irritated. She was irritated at the excitement of her daughters, irritated at their father for being gone, irritated at Jimmy Carter for opening his big mouth, irritated at Joseph for accompanying the soldier, irritated at herself for not smiling more pleasantly, irritated that she had to smile. Underneath all her peevishness was fear. Quite absent was the triumph she later had while telling this story.
She sat in the La-Z-Boy we had brought from the States. It had come in a great shipment of things that had taken a year to be released from customs and only then, after my father had overcome his scruples and bribed the custom official. Opening those crates had been like a bad Christmas. So much bounty, so little practicality. Better to have brought more soap, more children’s cereal, more watches for bribes. Instead, there sat our La-Z-Boy.
My mother now looked at the soldier with as much pleasantness as she could muster. Even if she could remember where my father kept the watches, she didn’t dare bribe an official. It might be exactly the wrong thing. She wasn’t going to give Idi Amin any reason to throw her in jail. “If there’s even a speck of mud outside, my girls will find it,” my mother said. “So today, forget it. Mark my words, they’ll be filthy when they come back in. Do you have children?” When the soldier nodded, she rattled off her Questions For Soldiers With Kids: How many do you have? How old are they? What are their names? Are they attending school? Do you like being a father? If we had been at a roadblock, she would have concluded the conversation with a small present for the children (a pencil or a nub of soap), but today she was too anxious.
“Where is your husband?” the soldier asked. “Where is Gary Fordham?”
“Joseph didn’t tell you? He’s in Kenya.” It was not lost on her that the soldier knew my father’s first name. She was certain she hadn’t told him. “He’s attending the East African Union meetings.”
My mother hadn’t expected this visit, but now that the soldier sat across from her, his visit seemed inevitable. Of course, he was here. But what about Joseph? Why had he come?
The soldier explained that he had been sent with orders from Idi Amin Dada himself. All Americans were to appear before Idi Amin on Monday and couldn’t leave the country before then. He was here because the Ugandan government wanted a list of our family’s valuables. There was nothing menacing in the solder’s voice. It was the message itself that was menacing. Soon we would be separated from all that we owned. If we were lucky, we would only be kicked out of the country like the Asians. If we were unlucky, well, no one wanted to consider it.
“This is a misunderstanding,” my mother said. “I’m European, not American.” She excused herself and returned with her Finnish passport, which she handed to the soldier.
He flipped through it, giving the pages a cursory glance. “Gary Fordham, he is American? Your babies, they are American? Madam, why is your husband gone now? Why are you all alone?”
My mother smiled blandly.
“Thank you,” the soldier said, handing her the empty cup and the passport. He was polite. She was polite. “I must inventory your belongings now,” he said. He had brought a clipboard with him into the house.
“The furniture doesn’t belong to us,” my mother said. “It belongs to the school. A fine Ugandan school, as you saw driving in.That couch isn’t ours. The table and chairs aren’t ours. The refrigerator isn’t ours. If you take them, you’ll only be hurting the school.” She shot a look at Joseph.
“This one is Ugandan?” the soldier asked, nudging the La-Z-Boy.
“Oh, goodness,” my mother said. “Of course, you’re right. That’s ours. Actually, it’s mine, and I’m not an American citizen. It’s not an American belonging.”
The solder looked at her, pointedly, though he didn’t write anything down. He walked into the kitchen.
“The stove is the school’s,” my mother said, “But the pots and pans and dishes are mine. The Tupperware is mine.”
The soldier began to pull open drawers. “Does the silverware belong to the school?” he asked.
“No, it belongs to me,” my mother said. She claimed everything in the kitchen. She claimed the rice cooker my grandmother had sent from the States and the transformer that allowed it to work here. She claimed the cheese slicer, cutting board, and ceramic bowls (which actually were from Finland), and the can opener, dishtowels, and colander (which weren’t). In the back room, she claimed the washing machine. She smiled and nodded. Mine. Mine. Mine. They went through the bedrooms, attempting to separate the property of the school from the property of the Fordhams. The beds belonged to the school, as did the mosquito nets, the dressers, and the bookcases. The sheets and blankets and books were ours. The typewriter was ours, as Joseph pointed out. So were the matchbox cars, the Fisher Price toys, our Sabbath dresses, my father’s ties, a Swiss Army knife, an old perfume bottle, the radio, our hens, the dog. My mother claimed them all.
The car, our most valuable possession, was in Kenya, but Joseph suggested that the bicycle should be here. “Pastor Fordham bikes to campus every day,” Joseph said.
“Yes, Joseph,” my mother said. “He needs the bike to get to campus.” She wanted to hiss in his ear-Whose side are you on anyway, brother Joseph? “It’s in the garage,” she said to the soldier. Bicycles were impossible to buy in Uganda. Everything was hard to come by. Even our pots and pans would be snatched up on the black market. But the bicycle? Well, people had been killed for less. “I can show it to you if you think it’s necessary.” The soldier nodded. “But I think you should know, it belongs to me.”
“Your husband’s bicycle?” the soldier said. His incredulity sat between them.
“Yes,” my mother said. “I bought it, and I’m European.” Let them prove she didn’t own that bicycle.
“Madam, what is your husband’s? What belongs to him, eh?”
My mother said nothing.
Part XI: The Misunderstanding
Jimmy Carter set up a command center to monitor the crisis in Uganda and redirected a nuclear aircraft carrier to the coast of Kenya, along with five naval vessels. The ships, which had been cruising the Indian Ocean on routine missions, were not prepared to rescue us. Time later reported that between all of them, there were fewer than 200 Marines. Still, the message was delivered. “The President will take whatever steps he thinks are necessary and proper to protect American lives,” the White House Press Secretary announced. So much promised effort, so few endangered lives. Of course, every life is precious to its owner.
Idi Amin must have felt conflicted. When a British professor had insulted Idi Amin in 1975, Queen Elizabeth had apologized personally, and England’s Foreign Secretary had come to Uganda to secure the professor’s release. After a much more public criticism, President Carter was offering nothing but a show of force. Moreover, if Amin had seen the inventories taken by his soldiers, he must have been happily considering the political support he could secure with all those washing machines and cars.
But Idi Amin had learned what even a small country might do for its citizens. A year earlier, Palestinians had landed a hijacked plane at the Entebbe Airport and held Jewish passengers hostage. Idi Amin had played host to both terrorists and hostages. He was a Big Man, courted daily by Israeli negotiators. And then the raid happened. Israeli commandos freed most of the hostages, killed the terrorists and the Ugandan soldiers on duty, destroyed the Ugandan air force, and left Idi Amin looking weak and inept. He might not survive another such fiasco.
Idi Amin sent Carter a telegram stating that “the Americans in Uganda are happy and scattered all over the country” and that “Uganda has the strength to crush invaders.” He postponed meeting the Americans and then a few days later, canceled it. The fun was over. Idi Amin assured us we could leave the country if we wished. But why would we? Uganda was a beautiful country, and he had just wanted to thank us for our service.
My father was in the Finnish embassy when the final announcement wasmade. The clerks were creating counterfeit Finnish passports for Sonja and me, which they planned to smuggle into Uganda through a diplomatic pouch. It was as James Bond as anything we would be associated with. On hearing the news, my father thanked the clerks. Now for his errands. Of course, the Fordham family would stay in Uganda. The crisis was over. Why make a mountain out of a molehill?
My father walked to the nearest duka and bought two matchbox cars.
Part XII: The Foreign Government Dances
For years, the only accounts I had of the house arrest were my own memories and my parents’ stories. I looked for confirmation in Ugandan histories, but amidst the atrocities of the Amin years, the event was too small to matter. Then one day, I stumbled upon Time’s archives and discovered articles written in the midst of the crisis. Once I found one piece of coverage, I found more and more. I listened to Carter’s press conference and watched an ABC news report that was broadcast during the crisis. Experts called Idi Amin a “butcher” and said that while Amin didn’t usually kill foreigners, nobody knew what to expect. My American grandmother likely saw the news story weeks before my father’s letter arrived.
For most of my life, I considered this my mother’s story. My mother stood in the living room and made a rash decision. She hadn’t known, until she claimed that first item, what she would do. She was angry and that was part of it. A soldier was informing her we might lose everything we owned. She had grown up poor, and possessions mattered to her, never mind that she was a missionary. She was also anxious about us, her American daughters. When we were born, she hadn’t wanted us to be dual citizens or even to learn the Finnish language. She wanted us to be fully American, unable to return to the land she had left and still missed terribly. Our US passports were to be talismans, offering protections and opportunities that we, as Americans, would never fully appreciate. As she stood across from Joseph and the soldier and claimed everything we owned, she felt utterly alone, and so she did what she did. She was courageous. I think this, still.
My mother stood across from a soldier who carried his own stories and fears. He held all the power in their interaction, and yet, he must have known that he was far more likely to be killed by Idi Amin than she was. Surely, there had been whispers about what had happened to the soldiers at the Mugire prison. They weren’t just killed, they were killed with sledgehammers because bullets were too costly. If Idi Amin stayed in power, this soldier might join the disappeared, and if Amin was overthrown, he might be killed as retribution.
Standing beside the soldier, inexplicably, was Joseph. Joseph had no obvious reason to be at our house or so helpful. My father was a popular teacher who often ate breakfast in the cafeteria with his students. He was a hard grader to be sure, but he was also funny and kind. I don’t think Joseph came because he was angry at my father. His anger — if it was that — was probably broader. Why should expatriates have so much and Ugandans so little? Upon graduation, Joseph would likely be hired by the Adventist church and assigned a district that covered hundreds of miles and included multiple churches. He would work more than forty hours a week, but he wouldn’t be able to afford a car, and if he owned even a bicycle, it would be through charity. A rural church in Ohio or North Carolina might send money for one as their “mission project.” They would expect a thank you note and photographs. Where was the dignity for the Ugandan? Where were the opportunities?
My Finnish grandmother knew that some people were more valued than others. The church might teach that God loved everyone equally, but in this world, citizenship determined worth. My grandmother had tended cows as a child, and as she stood in the dung, warming her bare feet, she decided that if she had children, she would urge them to move away and to matter. In Uganda, an entire town was murdered and my parents didn’t hear about it. How many residents lived in that town? There were surely more than 240 people, but they had no advocates. Even today, the only record of their existence is their annihilation.
After the detention of the Americans, Time put Idi Amin on the cover, titling their piece “The Wild Man of Africa.” One of their sources, a Ugandan who bad self-exiled to Tanzania, described Idi Amin’s foreign policy: “He always acts the same way. He threatens a group of foreigners, and then he says everything is okay. Then he threatens them again, and then he says everything is okay. The foreign government dances back and forth-and everyone forgets about the thousands of Ugandans who are dying.”
Part XIII: The Matchbox Car
We were the foreigners, or some of them. We weren’t thinking about political dances or how Idi Amin might be using our presence in Uganda. Officially, my parents were thinking about God. In addition, my father was thinking about teaching, and my mother was usually wondering whether there would be any letters in the mail. We were all thinking about food. And with my father gone, I was thinking about matchbox cars.
Believing my father would be home soon, my mother used the last of the whole-wheat flour to make piirakka. It is a Finnish pastry, and for months, Sonja and I had been begging her to make it. She had waved us off, saying it was too hot here or that we didn’t have enough powdered milk or that piirakka wouldn’t taste right without rye flour. She stood over the stove, stirring the rice, stirring the rice. If she let it burn, she would feel even more foolish than she already did. “We’ll see,” she told us. Who makes piirakka in Uganda? Well, she was making it now, and we would see.
My father had originally planned to return that day and my mother expected that he still would. “He has class tomorrow. He’ll be back,” she said. Sonja and I spent the morning arguing about who would tell him about the soldier. We sat for a while on the patio steps, giving each other shoves.
“I’m telling.”
“No, me.”
Our mother poked her head out the door. “Daddy’s probably sitting at the border right now, just wishing he could hear you two fight. Oh, boy. He doesn’t know what he’s missing.” And then, “As long as you’re out there, keep the monkeys off the tomatoes.”
By the afternoon, Sonja was building a puzzle and I was pushing my matchbox cars around the kitchen floor. “Daddy’s bringing me a car,” I told my mother. “Maybe orange.”
“Don’t count on it. We’ll be lucky if he brings flour. And, good grief, if I step on one more car, I’m taking them away.”
By supper, my father still hadn’t come. My mother set the table. “Never mind, he still might come. Or he might stay the night in Kampala and come in the morning. We can wait another day, right, girls?”
She put the piiraka and some finger bananas on the table and told us that it was probably the first time they had been served together in the history of mankind, making us feel very important indeed. The piiraka had a salty, creamy bite, and though my mother had been complaining about their looks, she smiled after trying one. “This is a nice change of pace.”
We were almost done eating when we heard a car. We ran for the door. My mother was out of the house first, bare feet even, but once she got outside, she slowed to a walk. She kissed my father and asked how the border went. Sonja and I were jumping and shouting, soldier, soldier, soldier, and also, Kool-Aid.
“What’s this about a soldier?” my father asked. “Did you have any problems? Did you get to meet Idi Amin?”
“Nothing like that,” my mother said, “Someone came to the house to find out how rich we are. The girls are dying to tell you. But,” and she lowered her voice, “you’ll never guess who came with the soldier. It wasn’t Idi Amin, I’ll tell you that.” She turned to us.”Okay, girls, let’s go inside and you can take turns telling. Let’s not talk out here.”
My father picked me up, and I whispered in his ear, “Did you bring me something?”
“Do you mean oil?” he said.
“No,” I said. “A present.”
“A present? Like a matchbox car?”
I nodded.
“Oh, man! I just knew there was something I was forgetting. I was driving all day today, trying to remember what I had forgotten. At least, I think I forgot it.”
Each time he came back from Nairobi, he did this. Sometimes, he said he forgot to buy matchbox cars and other times that he forgot to pack them. When he finally found them in some obscure corner of his luggage, I would be near tears or full out crying. “Gary,” my mother would say.
“This is just terrible,” my father said now and smiled at me.
I looked into his eyes and believed him. I was sure that it was the worst thing in the world.
That night, we sat at the dining room table, the four of us. Sonja and I were still damp from our bath, and my mother was still cheery from my father’s arrival, though he had already confessed that he had been unable to bring back flour or oil or any of the other staples on her list. Never mind, that was tomorrow’s problem. Sonja described the Kool-Aid and how the soldier had drunk it, glass after glass. I nodded my head, as if it all meant something grownup and important and that I had noticed it, too. In my lap, I held an orange matchbox car. I ran my thumb over the silver chrome. My father asked what flavor the Kool-Aid was and if there was any still in the fridge. It was past our bedtime and soon our mother would send us to bed. She would tell us that our father had to teach tomorrow and that we would see him at breakfast. He would carry us to our rooms, one by one, and have prayer with us. Then, we would lie in bed and listen to our parents talking, to the hushed turn of their voices.
The house in Uganda was red brick with a metal roof, a rusted water tank, and a screened-in verandah that had once been painted green. At night, I would pretend that we lived in a boat. The jungle was the ocean and the thrumming frogs were the waves and we were far away from everyone else in the world. I would close my eyes and listen for the water, and I would imagine that we were completely safe.
Sari Fordham on a return trip to Uganda.
“House Arrest in Thirteen Parts” originally appeared in the print journal Isthmus Review No. 5, 2016.
New Fiction from Ulf Pike: Son of God
I. Esses
The warmth of his voice makes us wary of his intentions. He bears our sin of greenness like a precious burden, our softness like a direct order from God to transform us in his image.
A helmet fits his skull like the mold from which it was cast. When he removes it
his bare head glistens in the sun. We pretend not to look, as though he were a woman undressing, feeling almost queasy waiting for him to put it back on. His skin is fair and something childish in his face does not relieve it of an old mortality, which is what one feels when caught in his stare. Under the kevlar brim crouches some secret in eyes, level as a landless horizon. He takes in the world as if in the path of some vast, righteous burning.
“Without death,” he tells us, “there could be no beauty.” Behind us in all directions, warping heat weaves the sky and earth together like two banners in a low wind. He continues, “They had to consume death to know how to live.”
Had we not been standing around the smoldering carnage of a recent Apache gunship
engagement, talk might have remained speculative. The target was a small truck, now a skeletal remnant riddled with 30mm holes. We all lean on it and peer in. Of the reported three enemy kills, the charred remains of one are scattered in the bed. The way the body has come to rest, it looks as if his hand is trying to prevent more of his brains from spilling out. Esses fixes his eyes there while he removes one glove and probes gently around. He pulls at the partially coiled pink and black matter.
Standing at the tailgate he considers what he holds between his fingers like a sacrament.
He looks up, holds each of us in his gaze, searching our eyes as if for the words he wants to say.
He speaks warmly: “Even the light of a dead star can guide us.” He smiles, pleased by his
own insight. He says, “The past is always present but never as it was.” Then extending his hand: “Memory comes back in pieces, some of them not our own.”
II. Chrysalis
Upstream, an elk lowers his velvet crown to drink. A sudden gust tears a flurry of leaves from their branches and they flutter to the current like butterflies. He remembers being told as a child that before they could fly, they were caterpillars, and they ate milkweed because they knew it was poisonous to their predators. Some predators were too hungry to care and ate them anyway. Only one-in-a-hundred caterpillars would get to fly. But they ate milkweed anyway until they were fat, then they curled up in a sleeping bag called a chrysalis and hung from the branches of trees to wait for their second birth.
Abraham Begeyn, “Still Life with Thistle,” circa 1650s.
A storm rumbles off across the valley and sunlight breaks through in its wake. The dirt road is scattered with shining blue and silver portals. He remembers walking with his mother, holding her hand, imagining being pulled through them into that underworld and drifting weightlessly. He remembers her voice, excited to show him something beautiful. How she motioned ahead: “Oh, sweetie, look!”
Wing-to-wing, hundreds of Monarchs covered the surface of a puddle like a
burnt-orange blanket, undulating lethargically in afternoon warmth. He remembers crouching down and his hand recoiling to the sharp change in her voice, “No, no! Don’t touch! You can’t touch them, honey. They are very, very delicate.”
He remembers curling up on the couch early in the mornings and twirling her hair between his fingers while she leafed through the thin pages of her old King James Bible. She says it was the most obsessive thing he did. If he was crying in church it was likely because she wouldn’t let him claw his way into her long, brown, carefully styled hair. In the event of an outburst he would be escorted to the nursery and left with all the other criers. He learned to twirl his own hair and draw on the back of donation envelopes and prayer request cards, whatever it took to endure an hour of liturgy without causing a scene. According to the pastor there was an invisible war being waged inside of him and his soul was in the balance. According to his mother, his actions and even his thoughts could tip the scales.
When he walked through the sliding glass door, blood streaming from his scalp, holding a
fistful of his own hair in one hand and scissors in the other, her terror was quickly suppressed by rage. Following the swift and blunt force of her hand he was marched to the barber shop where for the first time he felt the cool, metallic pleasure of clippers vibrating over his skull and the feeling of wind moving over his exposed mind as they walked back home. They stopped on the sidewalk to speak with her friend who insisted on running her open palm over his new bristle. She cooed to the sensation and a mysterious pleasure fused him to that moment, to her touch, like a corridor of heated light.
He remembers hiking to Fallen Leaf Lake in northwest Montana and his father giving him
what was in his metal-frame rucksack so his weary youngest sister could fit inside. The extra weight made his shoulders chafe and bleed, made him proud. It rained a warm summer rain and when they arrived they were all soaked through their clothes, except for his sister who emerged from under the top flap of the rucksack dry as a bone. They had a small fire and he remembers feeling almost magical as he unrolled his sleeping bag and sealed himself inside.
Go Home and Dig It: A Review of Will Mackin’s Bring Out The Dog
“Crossing the River with No Name,” the eighth story in Will Mackin’s debut collection, Bring Out the Dog, describes the movement of a SEAL team “to intercept” Taliban coming out the Pakistan Mountains. Using night-vision equipment, the SEALs plan to light up the night-blind Taliban with sparklers that the Taliban cannot see, and then fire state-of- the-art weapons at the invisibly sparkled men, eliminating the threat before the threat can become a threat, before the threat knows that it is, in fact, threatened. They have done this, the first-person narrator explains, many times before.
A paragraph from early in the story:
“Electric rain streaked straight down in my night vision. Cold rose from the mud into my bones. It squeezed the warmth out of my heart. My heart became a more sensitive instrument as a result, and I could feel the Taliban out there, lost in the darkness. I could feel them in the distance, losing hope. This was the type of mission that earlier in the war would have been fun: us knowing and seeing, them dumb and blind. Hal, walking point, would have turned around and smiled, like, Do you believe we’re getting paid for this? And I would have shaken my head. But now Hal hardly turned around. And when he did it was only to make sure that we were all still behind him, putting one foot in front of the other, bleeding heat, our emerald hearts growing dim.”
A series of simple sentences, each spare, lithe, exquisitely precise, usually in clusters of three, each distorting the known or assumed physical world. The rain becomes part of the night vision. The mud rises up into the bones. The cold takes away warmth but provides an uncanny sensitivity to the enemy’s pain and fear. But then a pivot, a pointed reference to the carefree juvenescence of these would-be demigods, when they couldn’t believe they were getting paid to appear in the middle of the night and massacre a platoon of clueless, effectively blind, Taliban. And yet that was then, six intercepts ago; what now? What has happened to these emerald glow-in-the-dark hearts? Where has their youth gone?
Will Mackin knows intimately. A 23-year Navy veteran, Mackin flew jets, wrote speeches for the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, and spent six years as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller with a SEAL Team before retiring in 2014. As such, his work has a unique perspective not only on the endless succession of deployments and dislocations SEALs endure, but the disproportionate vision of people and country with all the power in the world and no idea what to do with it.
The next paragraph in “Crossing”:
“We made steady progress through the rain until we came to a river. The river looked like a wide section of field that someone had broken free, that had, for unknown reasons, been set in motion. In fact, the only way to tell the river from the field was to stare at the river and sense its lugubrious vector. But to stare at the river for too long was to feel as if it were standing still and the field were moving.”
Again: paradox. How can you make steady progress through then rain and then come to concentrated water? Then a simile that claims that what has stopped them, blocked their “progress,” has itself broken free. The pivot. A slight pause, an ironic reference to fact—slippery in all of Mackin’s stories—and an appeal to concentrated vision, some determinate perspective, which is immediately undermined and inverted when the land moves and not the river.
Soon the narrator is drowning in the river. The Virgin Mary appears. She tells him she won’t be saving him. “How come?” asks the narrator. “Because saving you would require a miracle, and you already used yours,” she said, “not unkindly.” The story then transitions to the States, and a teenage narrator who laughs at a sentimental loser football coach from Ocean City, NJ (what a place to be from! To live your entire life in!), sleeps with the football captain’s girlfriend, and smashes the mailboxes of rich people in the neighboring town. Then the narrator gets the miracle. They win the football game. A skinny kid whose name he can’t remember scores a touchdown.
Viktor Shklovsky argues that Leo Tolstoy “forgoes the conventional names of the various part of the thing, replacing them instead with the names of corresponding parts in other things.” He “estranges” because he refuses, Shklovsky says, to “call a thing by its name.” So too Mackin. As Peter Molin points out in his Time Now post, Mackin calls nothing by its name—the cold sensitive heart, the literally unnamed river that does not move, the skinny kid who he does not remember. In other stories, SEALs hunt for two captured American soldiers named “no-chin” and “chin,” the SEALs hold an elaborate memorial service for a killer Vermont Trappist monk dog killed by a SEAL. “What do you folks want to hear?” asks a tuba (!) player on an isolated outpost in middle of Afghanistan. Anything, nothing, go fuck yourself, says the crowd of soldiers high on horse drugs.
This aesthetic technique is not only a delight to read, but fits Mackin’s subject. His SEALs live estranged lives. They exist in multiple time zones. They travel by air from one nameless spot on the map to the next. They have the power of gods and the soft bodies of men. At the end of “Crossing the River with No Name,” the narrator, rescued from the river by a fellow SEAL (thanks for nothing Virgin Mary), goes on to intercept the Taliban. The narrator talks about how their leader Hal used to invisibly sparkle the Taliban in the middle of the platoon. “That would be the man we spare,” says the narrator. “And that would be the man who would drop to his knees in a cloud of gun smoke, raise his hands in surrender. That would be the man who would tell who he was, where’d he’d come from, and why.”
An act of divine mercy or human sadism? What’s the difference exactly? Estrangement, undulating perspective, chip away at once obvious distinctions. Mackin’s SEALs sleep with strippers, assault stripper boyfriends, take drugs, ignore training protocol, steal manpower away from other units because they can. Rules don’t win wars. SEALs do. So what then are these modern-day Templars of the sky and sea and mountain top winning with all this money, all this power, all this violence, all this freedom? Are they saving Afghanistan? Afghans? Iraqis? Civilians? Hostages? The World?
Psychedelic British Classic rock mostly. Pink Floyd songs about mean teachers. Led Zeppelin LPs in reverse. Mailbox busting. Girlfriend stealing. A sense of teenage disaffection clings to the narrator, a cynical half-irony, vague entitlement in the face of endless plenty, combined with band-of-brothers militancy, a love not of the country—dulce decorum est and all that Horace crap—but of each other and an unwillingness not to let one another down (because, as W.H. Auden says, our sex “likes huddling in gangs and knowing the exact time”).
In other words, the narrator—for all his explosions, all this violence, all those dead bodies—is not much different than any other American boy, any other American man.
How’s that for the horror of war?
Barry Hannah’s “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet” provides Mackin his epigraph. “We saw victory and defeat,” the epigraph says. “They were both wonderful.” Elsewhere in “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet” Hannah’s narrator, a U.S. Captain in Vietnam, reflects:
“It seemed to me my life had gone from teen-age giggling to horror. I never had time to be but two things, a giggler and a killer.”
Sometimes the SEALs call Mackin’s narrator “Fuckstick” (a nod to Fuckhead of Denis Johnson’s Jesus Son perhaps, another psuedo-bystander). Sometimes the narrator throws a charnel rock for no reason and imagines and asteroid hitting the earth and aliens—little bars of blue light—finding the SEALs dead bodies and asking each other why he threw the rock. Sometimes the narrator listens to a SEAL team leader speak about the imperative of “speed and violence,” about how the SEALs are on the top of the food chain for a reason, and notices how nicotine enters through the SEALs “thinnest of membrane on his upper lip.”
Displacement. Disproportion. Despair. We can call down the fire of gods in the form of drone strikes, artillery shells, and invisible lasers, but can we save the people around us from dying off one by one? Can we combat the battle fatigue evident after five deployments? Can we stabilize and make sense of the endless succession of kaleidoscopic dislocations born of a war with no clear direction, no beginning, no end?
No. Not really. But we can love our men. We can love the war. We can giggle and kill.
“Fools. Fools,” says Barry Hannah’s Vietnam Captain. “Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it.”
Go home and dig it.
Dig what? What can we fools at home dig?
“I lay back on the outcropping,” says another Mackin narrator, during a training exercise in Utah, waiting for a plane to blow up a fire truck that may or may not be a real fire truck. “The stone was warm, the breeze refreshing. Drifting off to sleep, I found myself feeling thankful to the war. What else would bring me up here on such a perfect day?”
Dorothy Parker once argued that Hemingway wrote not like an angel—as his many admirers insisted—but like a man. Mackin actually writes like an angel. Like an angel that wants to go back to being a man, or, rather, like a man with the perception of an angel and the soul of a man. The cumulative effect is as astonishing as the fact our country has been fighting a war for eighteen years and might well be fighting for eighteen more years: it estranges us to the experience of ourselves, to the experience of America, the experience of history. Our eyes grow, as Mackin’s says, “bright with relativity”—the war does not end; it cannot end. But we see. We fools see. Don’t we?
New Poem from Jacob Siegel: The Old Gods
The Old Gods (No. 9, 2003)
I.
The towers bloomed up in the dark
Like nails scrolling from dead fingers
While around them a languid curtain fell
In drifts of violet gas that settled on the roofs
All of us honeymooners and mourners
Aware of ourselves as objects in a landscape
That held above the chipped skyline
Bristling in the greater darkness
A dream of New York City
II.
We must have lived inside that dreaming
No more able to escape than words can flee the page
Our old Gods who gave us a magic by which to love
III.
In those days, we could take the D from 59th to 125th in one stop
Or all the way out to Coney Island
Not for the 24 hour pool room where the Russians played snooker a floor above the street
I did not go there with you
One night I had you with nothing between us
You were sat up on a jetty rock
I had the tide at my back
You in the shadow of Astroland
Lit by moon and amusement, a castaway
New Essay by Patrick Mondaca: The Hideous Hypocrisy of Himmelstoss
“At the head of the column trots the fat sergeant-major. It is queer that almost all of the regular sergeant-majors are fat. Himmelstoss follows him, thirsting for vengeance. His boots gleam in the sun…Then he steams off with Himmelstoss in his wake.”
Himmelstoss, as anyone who is familiar with All Quiet on the Western Front knows, is the sadistic corporal who bullies with less power. The fat sergeant major, whose girth underscores his lavish and immoderate lust for comfort while the rank-and-file tighten their belts in the trenches, is happy to be the weight behind Himmelstoss’s threats. As the protagonist (Paul Bäumer) recounts, he and the other soldiers immediately disregard both Himmelstoss and the fat sergeant-major, continuing on no worse for the wear.
Not every human is a Himmelstoss, and this photo almost certainly does not represent one. But those that are make life miserable for everyone else.
We’ve all had a Himmelstoss in our lives at least once. They’re school principals and executive vice presidents and postal deliverymen and yes, sergeants-major. Some are fat. One should not dwell on men like these for any more time than is necessary.
I encountered one during my time at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, coming home from Iraq.
“Where is your beret, Sergeant?” the Medical Corps sergeant major, who had halted me on my way to an appointment, said. “And why are you wearing a desert patrol cap with a woodland uniform?” Thinking it obvious, I respectfully informed the sergeant major that my beret was still in a metal box somewhere in the desert. “Put that cigarette out, sergeant, and stand at parade rest when you speak to me. And don’t you dare throw that cigarette butt in my grass,” the sergeant major said. His posture was threatening, though I sensed behind it the existential terror of a man without serious occupation.
What else is one to do in such a situation but put one’s cigarette out on the pavement, then collect and squeeze it carefully in one’s clenched fist? His wet eyes pleaded with me for a minor transgression. He ached to thrust himself upon me further, so that we might enter the kind of seedy relationships this type of flaccid fleshbag seems to require for satisfaction. At that moment, I was tempted to give in, but thought better of it.
“Roger, sergeant,” I said instead.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
“What’s your name? What unit are you with? Who’s your C-O? Take that flag off your right shoulder, you’re not in theater anymore,” he said, his voice picking up speed and certainty as he warmed to the subject. “Desert boots, that’s a no-go. Are you wearing a field jacket liner? Ohhhhh heeeeaaaayl naw,” he said, his voice rising almost to a full-throated shout.
It was true, I was wearing an old M-65 field jacket liner under my uniform top instead of the newer issued winter polypropylene. “Yes, Sergeant Major, I will remove it, Sergeant Major,” I said, standing corrected, quite literally, in the brisk winter air. I had no intention of removing it, and I didn’t. I wore the motherfucker to bed that night. Hell, I’m still wearing that thing, deep in the recesses of the old foot locker that keeps my mementos of such places, stinking of smoke and dust and sweat and bullshit.
Whether you’re still in the military or you’ve transitioned to the corporate world, or are a civilian and have never served, it’s always the same. An FSM lurks, waiting to gig you on some stupid, asinine shit. It’s a threat we all must face, and disregard, with a smile and a nod and a “Yes, Sergeant Major” or “Vice President” or “Foreman”. Because that is all they will ever be—the barking, savage whiff of authority barely missed, one step below or behind the real boss. Forever the bridesmaid, never the bride. And after you realize the measure of their soul, what else do they have left to them but the illusion of power, usually shouted? They’re stuck within this sad, diminished aura, a victim of their penultimate rank. Give them “their grass” for the moment, or “their metrics” at close of business, or “their tie rods” in even rows in the next hour, and then go home. Or travel. Or go to school. Or anything. I have a photo of an Army cargo truck in Baghdad with “Stop the Insanity” scrawled across its passenger door. Sometimes that’s all we can do to remind ourselves who is really in charge and continue our idiosyncratic lives, one graffiti’d door at a time.
I never saw that particular sergeant major again, thankfully. I supposed he moved on to harass other troops about their shoulder patches until the regulation was changed a month later. I would have loved to see his face the morning after the paper came down, applying the patch he’d fought so hard against with resignation, then instructing the soldiers he’d yelled at the day before to get within regs… admitting his own impotence one betrayal at a time. Since then, there have been other FSMs who have thrown their “stripes” around in the various settings in which I have worked. Though, now that I think about it, when has it ever really mattered to anyone but them? We the people remain unimpressed.
In the Vietnam War film Hamburger Hill, a couple of troops try and buck up their platoon “Doc” after a casualty chanting, “It don’t mean nothing, man, not a thing.” And the medic, thus consoled and encouraged, goes on to fight another day. We all have bad days like Doc in the film. That sergeant major I met long ago now might have been having a bad day too. Doc doesn’t survive the battle. He succumbs to his wounds after imploring his fellow soldiers to finish taking the hill, so they can have something to be proud of. And they do. They do it for Doc and for each other. Those are the things that matter.
While violence is likely not the answer to fix people who abuse authority, it’s unclear what is.
We can choose to fall prey to the insanity of Himmelstoss and the FSM and others like them, or we can take their fear and insecurity in stride, their insistence that only by obeying the rules can one hope to elude destiny. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Bäumer and his mates lay a good old-fashioned beat-down on old Himmelstoss, and it’s hard to feel sympathy for him. Like the bloviating sergeant major I encountered, Himmelstoss is a nonfactor. His existence to Bäumer and the men is of no great importance, like whether they live or die. It should be noted that Himmelstoss, when he’s himself sent to the front, does eventually perform bravely following a motivational beating by Bäumer in a trench. Yet it remains to be decided whether Himmelstoss was merely a desperate ass-kisser seeking the favor of his lieutenant or acting out of a moral obligation to his fellow soldiers. The men aren’t in it for Himmelstoss and the FSM though. They’re in it for each other as were the men in Hamburger Hill. The regulations may not get changed every time so you can smile at the thought of the senior enlisted man or supervisor or other inflated authority wiping egg off their face. Nor will every Himmelstoss you come across fetch the beating of a lifetime every time they push the wrong troop too far. But don’t you sweat it. In the end, they don’t mean nothing, man, not a thing. Finish taking the hill, and be proud of it.
Fighting Like a Girl Means Not Being a Pussy: Mary Doyle Interviews Kelly Kennedy
It’s never easy to voice suspicions that your boss is out to get you. No matter how you describe it, the accusation sounds crazy. By the time you’re ready to put your instincts into words, you’ve already spent hours, days, weeks making the argument to yourself and telling yourself it’s all in your head. It’s not until you’ve fully convinced yourself it’s true that you’ll talk about it.
Lt. Col (Ret.) Kate Germano wrote a book about it.
Germano had come into her new job as commander of Fourth Battalion with a specific set of goals. She took seriously her role in leading the unit responsible for guiding every female recruit from civilian to Marine as they met the challenges of Marine Corps basic training. The goals she’d set for her command, like boxes on a check sheet, had tick marks from top to bottom, and yet, it took her a long time to realize that, despite her successes, her efforts were being undermined. Eventually, Germano knew without doubt that her aim to prove women Marines could train alongside male Marines was being challenged by Marine Corps leadership. The men working against her started from the very top. But unlike most of us Germano had proof that her bosses wanted to see her fail.
She maps out that proof in her new book, Fight Like A Girl, (Prometheus Books, 2018) in a calm, methodical, and well documented way.
Helping her make that argument is her co-author, Kelly Kennedy. Kennedy, an Army veteran and journalist, uses her research skills and a logical progression to map out an argument so convincing the two authors bravely name names. The names include those of Germano’s former boss, Colonel Daniel Haas and even the then, Marine Corps Commandant and now Joint Chiefs Chairman, GEN Joseph Dunford.
In 2010, when the book I co-authored with Shoshana Johnson (I’m Still Standing, Touchstone, 2010) was released, I remember feeling such relief that the book was well received and that my work on Shoshana’s story had helped make people aware of what she’d gone through. I was anxious to speak to Kelly Kennedy about her work as a co-author on Germano’s project and what it meant to be a part of telling this story that was so important, and yet, not her own.
Mary Doyle: I understand your agents introduced you and Kate Germano in hopes that you would work together on this project. Why do you think they thought the two of you might be a good fit? Had you ever worked on a co-authored project like this before? And how long did the project take?
Kelly Kennedy: Well, at first, I didn’t. I had heard bits of Kate’s story, and I was a bit worried that the military had it right—that she was abusive. But the more I dug in, and the more I talked with her, the more I felt not only that I trusted her (she backed up her story with plenty of documentation), but that I needed to help her tell it. Because we’re both veterans, I was able to ask her some questions based on my own experiences, which sparked at least one chapter. But I was also able to tell her about my experiences as a civilian, which informed part of the story. This was my first time as a co-author. We worked on the project about 1.5 years.
Kate Germano (left) is interviewed by her co-author, Kelly Kennedy, during an event at Politics and Prose at The Wharf, April 10, 2018. Photo by Mary Doyle.
MD: Part of the reason I agreed to work with Shoshana Johnson on her book was because I thought her story was, not only compelling, but an important story to tell. Germano’s story couldn’t be more important in terms of women in the military and proof positive that the decks are stacked against them. Did the importance of this story weigh on you at all? Did the weight impede or inspire?
KK: It was tough to hear her tell it, and it was tough for her to tell it. She often calls me her “therapist,” which is something we hear a lot as writers. Part of recovering from a traumatic event is the telling of it until the words don’t hurt as much, and it develops an overall meaning, rather than just a feeling of pain. But as the #metoo movement hit, and as we see more and more women prove themselves in infantry training, and even as we talked about women in endurance racing or crossfit or the tech world, we understood how important it was to say this is an issue that effects all of us, and that, as women, we really need to feel like we have each other’s backs—that it should no longer feel heroic to say, “You okay? I got you. Here’s how to…”
MD: How did you develop your work method and what did that look like? Was there ever a time when you had to stop and iron out issues? Or were you in sync the whole time? Did you have any influence in how the story was told?
KK: We started by meeting up for interviews. I would type in all of my notes, and come up with more questions, and then we would meet again. Kate speaks in story—she’s clear and to-the-point, so that part wasn’t terribly difficult. The harder part, I think, was getting the more emotional details out of her. Okay, that hurt, but what did you do? What about it hurt you? Where were you?
Generally, we were oddly in sync. When I sent over the proposal with the first three chapters, I think she was relieved. She has said, in reading the book, that she was terrified, but that she laughed and cried and got angry and loved it. But part of that is because she’s so good. The third chapter—the one about her background—didn’t quite feel right to me. I liked parts of it, but I didn’t like all of it. I sent it to her and said, “I’m not feeling this.” And she added and reorganized and sent back something we both liked a lot. So it was collaborative and fun and so much work.
We had written the story about the investigation as basically a long slog of the things that had been said about Kate. Our editor said, “You know. I think you lose Kate’s voice here. This is her story.” So we regrouped on that and focused more on her reaction—that a lot of it was just nonsense, like hugging one person but not hugging someone else, or the captain who was angry when Kate yelled at her for not doing her job so she walked out of her office. These are not things that are normal in any other version of the military, so we concentrated on that.
And yeah, I set up the outline, and Kate liked it. I would write up a section based on something we had specifically talked about or something generally important, like the background of women in the Marine Corps, and then send it as a word document. She would add or not and send it back. But she saw everything at least twice before we sent it to the publisher.
MD: One of the most impressive things about the telling of this story is the bravery Kate demonstrates in being open about how personally devastating the entire experience was for her. She often says she could have taken her own life. Did you ever fear that the retelling would have a dangerous impact on her? Shoshana suffered from terrible depression and getting her to read pages always made me feel as if I was forcing her to relive things she didn’t want to recall. It made me feel guilty, as if I were forcing her to bleed for others’ entertainment.
KK: My whole career has been about traumatic stories—from being an education reporter covering the first kids-with-guns stories to a cops reporter to a war reporter. Fortunately, I was chosen as an Ochberg Fellow after the series came out that led to “They Fought for Each Other,” because not only was I traumatized by the events that inspired it, but I was doing some incredibly intense interviews for the book. One guy talked for eight hours and said he hadn’t told any of those stories before. The Dart Center, which sponsors the fellowships, teaches journalists not only how to handle their own trauma, but how not to retraumatize someone. I have to say, I’ve never had anyone refuse to tell me a story, and I think they trust that I’ll listen, and that’s huge. We’re so often shut down: You’ve already said that. I can’t hear this. But you’re okay now, right? And I trust that the people I interview will be helped in the telling, and that the written story will lead to them being better able to tell it again—to invite people in. I hated seeing Kate cry, but I knew she needed to.
Kate Germano (left) is interviewed by her co-author, Kelly Kennedy, during an event at Politics and Prose at The Wharf, April 10, 2018. Photo by Mary Doyle.
MD: When I co-authored Shoshana’s book, the “with” co-authored inclusion was negotiated from the beginning. Would you have accepted the job if you hadn’t had co-author credit? Kate can obviously write since she has published in the NYT and other places. Did you worry that her ability to write would make life more difficult or less?
KK: I had no idea. Kate fought from the beginning to make sure I got credit—she’s huge on that, in general, and she’s been amazing about including me in the publicity afterward, which is fun. I think I just had no idea how it would work, but I did wonder what she’d think of those first chapters. I felt good about them, and they felt like her to me, if that makes sense, and it ended up being okay. After working with her for this much time, and seeing her so devastated as she told parts, some of the accusations against her blow me away. The idea that she could be cruel or unstable? Didn’t see it, and I was watching.
MD: Kate makes some very bold statements and charges throughout the book, every one of which she backs up with detailed facts and a logical argument to support them. Did you have influence in how the arguments were presented? Did you know all along that you would need to include the citations and notes at the end? I was surprised at first to see the citations in the text but understand why you used them. It’s further proof that her arguments are absolutely sound. Here’s just one excerpt among many that is an example of her supporting arguments:
We also had women break their hips. Male leadership assumed it was because of a physiological limitation, rather than a combination of a lack of fitness, their poorly fitted packs, and recruits running during the hikes rather than taking short, choppy steps.
Just like everything else at boot camp, hikes were part head game, part physical fitness. A lack of mental preparedness could make five miles seem like a marathon. But some of it was due to a lack of attention by the drill instructor staff. The hip-injury rate at Fourth Battalion had me wondering if I was training teenagers or octogenarians.
A lot of the problem had to do with how the women wore their packs. They wore their packs too far down, so the hip belts hit the wrong place. So, as they added weight, they hurt themselves. As it turns out, at one time, our athletic trainer had conducted a class with the drill instructors to train them on how to fit the packs for the recruits. But she had given the class to the battalion the year prior, so the new Marines and recruits hadn’t gotten the training. Broken hips were the result of a problem that could have been remedied with a simple solution. No one had shown the recruits how to adjust their packs properly.
Literally, adding insult to injury, the Marine Corps used that data –the hip injury rate—as justification for why women should be excluded from ground combat jobs.
KK: Sure. She’s very well-spoken and thoughtful, so I had much of the argument from the beginning. I did a lot of the research, but she constantly reads and thinks and writes, so she was sending me stuff, too. The fun one was Mona. She told me about Mona, [a section in the book about an alligator] and I kept thinking it over and thinking it over, and then it became this metaphor. So I wrote it up, and held my breath and hit send. And she was right there with me. Because she can be so black-and-white, I think part of my role was to help people understand how empathetic and funny she is, too.
MD: Since she was relieved of command, Kate started speaking out in the press about her position that female Marines need to train alongside their male counterparts for a long list of reasons. The way she has been treated since she began speaking out is further support for her arguments. Not only are her charges eye opening, she has never been afraid to name names and to boldly confront the issues. Did you ever caution her about the potential consequences? What is her attitude in terms of what consequences she expects?
KK: She understood from the beginning. Much of the time, I was trying to explain that she was going to end up helping people, and that it would all be okay in the end—that someday she would be glad she was fired. I think she’s just now starting to believe me. It’s part of her make-up to be brave, so I can’t imagine her backing away from anything.
MD: I found it interesting that you began most chapters with a letter of support Kate received shortly after she had been relieved. You also included one nastygram but she must have received many more. Some of the comments on Marine Corps Times are about what you’d expect. How did you and Kate prepare yourselves for the potential of negative comments once the book came out? You must have been deep into the writing when the Marine Corps United story broke. Did that impact the project at all?
KK: We talked about Marine Corps United a lot, but not as something to worry about—it was as something to fight. We’ve surrounded ourselves with tribe. We’ve worked hard and done our best. We’ve focused on the importance of what she had to say.
MD: There are a couple of places where Kate’s husband, Joe Plenzler, adds his take on Kate’s situation. Hearing his perspective is a major shift in the story telling but it adds an angle you wouldn’t otherwise get since he worked at the pentagon and had direct connection to Marine Corps leadership. In fact, it is in one of Joe’s portions that the main nugget of this book is revealed. Was this Kate’s idea? Yours? Did you have to negotiate its inclusion at all? What did you hope his point of view would add? Here’s an example of Joe’s input:
I served with the Commandant, General Dunford, when he was the Regimental Combat Team Five commander back in 2003, then as his speechwriter in Afghanistan in 2013 for three months, then again for the first five months of his commandancy. He too was no help.
It was pretty clear to me that General Dunford wanted to keep women out of the infantry at all costs. He was the only member of the joint chiefs (senior leaders of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and National Guard) to ask the secretary of defense for an exception to policy in September 2015 to keep women out of ground-combat arms jobs and units. That’s one way of saying it. The other way is to say that he wanted to perpetuate the Marine Corps’ policy of discriminating against women for some jobs based on their sex alone—regardless of whether or not they could meet the standards. His request made a lot of headlines because it placed him in direct opposition to his bosses, the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who were pushing for all jobs to be open to any person, male or female, who could meet the standards. Even more disappointing, when Dunford didn’t get his way, he skipped the secretary of defense’s press conference on December 3, 2015, announcing the policy change. It’s practically a Pentagon tradition for both the secretary and his top general, the chairman of the joint chiefs, to attend together any press conferences announcing major policy changes.
In retrospect, it makes sense that the commandant would do nothing to ensure Kate’s complaint about systemic gender bias was properly addressed. It’s pretty evident that every advancement Kate made with her Marines at Fourth Battalion stripped away justifications for keeping women out of ground-combat arms jobs and eroded claims that women don’t shoot as well, don’t run as fast, and can’t carry the same weight as their male counterparts.
With every improvement to female performance, Kate was quashing critical elements of those arguments.
KK: We didn’t have to negotiate. I talked with Joe a couple of times to get some back story, and it started making sense to have him there. There would be no book without Joe because he was at the Pentagon to hear all the background, so it was nice to get him in there as a primary source having heard those conversations. But they’re also so different—Kate’s type A, obviously, and Joe, while incredibly talented and aggressive, is much, much more laid-back. I think he helps people like Kate, which was important to me—that people see more of her personality. I mean, you kind of go into the book judging her. But I think Joe also helps us better understand how we should (or could) feel about her story, almost like he gives us permission to just be pissed.
MD: Kate’s story is obviously an important one to tell. How do you feel about the role you played in ensuring that it has been told? Would you do this kind of project again? What advice would you give to others who are trying to tell their story in print?
KK: I’d definitely do it again. For whatever reason, I feel like we were the perfect team for this project—just our joint experiences fell in well together. I loved that we were able to include civilian and enlisted women, and I think some of that was me. My role, I think, was making sure that the Kate piece—the who she is a person piece—didn’t get lost in the facts piece.
MD: Just after Shoshana’s book came out, I received emails and phone calls from people who wanted me to help them write their stories. I imagine you are already receiving queries like that. I did end up doing one other co-authored memoir and seriously considered another but that project never came through. What would be your criteria for doing this again? What considerations would go into the decision?
KK: Some of that will be up to my agent, who believes I need to be careful at this point about choosing something that will allow me not to have to work a full-time job while writing a book full-time. I’m so glad I worked with Kate, but it was a labor of love for both of us. But also, I would need to believe in the truth of the story. At one point, Donald Trump’s biographer came out and basically said, “I wrote this book for the money, and it’s not truthful,” and Kate said, “Oh my god. I don’t know what I’d do if you felt that way.” My response: “I wouldn’t. I would never knowingly falsely represent someone.” That still stands. That happened a lot as a journalist, too: “I saw the story you wrote today. I want you to write a story about me.” You have to have some news judgment. I’m also finishing up a novel, so I don’t feel like I’m in a huge hurry to start something new.
MD: Has Kate had any interaction with Haas or BG Williams or even Dunford, since all of this kicked off? Have they expressed any regret? (I thought Dunford’s position was indefensible when he testified on the hill. It’s even more ridiculous after reading Kate’s book!) Does she ever worry that one of them will show up at a book signing?
KK: She has not. There is no response. It wasn’t their story, and honestly, they’ve already had their say. They released Kate’s investigation within 24 hours of her firing in an attempt to spin the media coverage. The investigation is still available online. I don’t think she worries about them showing up—and no. No one has offered any regrets.
MD: While they may not have come out and said it, it appears the Marines have taken many if not most of Kate’s suggestions and put them into practice. One small example is removal of the chairs that formerly were placed behind the women’s platoons in case one of them needed to sit down for fear of fainting. Has the Marine Corps leadership acknowledged the role Germano played in making those changes?
KK: Nope. But last month, they started pushing stories about how boot camp doesn’t need to be integrated because they’re doing such a mighty-fine job of integrating it now—and it looks as if they’ve made some changes. But it’s still not integrated at the battalion level.
MD: Is there anything you wanted to add that you wished I’d asked?
KK: This has been an odd project for me because I’ve usually stayed so far from a story I’m covering—I’m a journalist. This story was much more intimate, and I’m sure I could have stood back, but so many of the things she writes about have also happened to me or around me, or I’ve reported on them over the years, and so the story was important to me. In addition, I like her. She’s become a dear friend, and I’m proud of her.
MD: You have every reason to be proud, of her, and of this project. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Kelly! I think this co-author/big story relationship is so important and not one that is fully understood. I’m hoping your book, along with discussions about how these types of co-authored relationships come together, will help others understand that there are ways their stories can be preserved even if they can’t write them themselves.
—
Fight Like a Girl (Prometheus Books, April 2018) can be purchased at your local independent bookstore, online, or anywhere books are sold.
New Fiction by John M. McNamara: “The Mayor of West Callahan Creek”
A bare bulb in a hooded fixture illuminated the sign. Fog obscured the wooden placard, and as Joseph neared it, the black lettering seemed to recede into the white plywood. It read:
WEST CALLAHAN CREEK
POPULATION 1,187
EST. 1866
CITY LIMITS
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED
Prosecuted for what? Joseph Hunter walked his bicycle along the highway shoulder; the rear axle ticked off his progress like a metronome, tires crunched on the gravel. He paused and stared across the embankment at the billboard, and then chuckled.
The ashen fog had intensified since Joseph battled the shadows earlier that afternoon, enshrouding him more thoroughly than the day before, clouding his concentration and fuzzing his perceptions. The attack came as suddenly as an ambush. He’d developed an instinct for anticipating the murkiness, but it had descended upon him with viciousness soon after he crested the tallest of the hills on Highway 22, which paralleled the Loup River. He had pedaled off the road and kicked down the bike’s stand, then squatted and caught his breath. Under an overcast and featureless sky, he rolled onto his back and locked his hands behind his head. Then the choking shadows, their edges indistinct, (they lacked clarity, which he assumed meant he lacked it as well), assaulted in full force. His chest constricted and the panic rippled; the sensation felt like his organs were being drawn through seams in his skin. Deliberate breathing, measured and slow. Fingertips pressed firmly against the temples in circular rotation, eyelids lowered while his thoughts focused upon past recoveries.
Paul Vogler, Lane Near A Small Town, 1864.
No one had agreed with his decision to undertake this journey, not parents, therapist, or friends. To a person they fretted about the solitude, about his coping mechanisms, about tendencies they dared not name. His therapist warned about the risks of self-diagnosis, the danger of assuming Joseph knew what was best for Joseph. It’s the brain telling the brain how to fix the brain, she’d said. It’s unreliable.
He opened his eyes and glanced around, assessing the location for possible campsites. He made out a barely visible fence line beyond the sign, rows of barbed wire on wooden posts, and continued rolling his bicycle slowly, keeping to the edge of the highway in the limited visibility, fearful that in the fog a vehicle would encounter him with no time to react, to swerve and avoid striking him. He’d witnessed IEDs heave men and metal skyward in sooty, sandy-brown plumes, and believed the mockery of a collision on an American roadside might prove more than he could process. In the distance he spied spires of evenly-spaced lights vanishing up into the fog, each encircled by a woolly halo. Silos, he realized, like so many he’d encountered in towns across the prairie. They sharpened in definition as he neared the gated entrance to the co-op. Farther down the road he saw a dome of diffused light.
As he approached, its structure materialized: a Gas’n’Go with two pumps and a manual car wash bay. A widow sign advertised cold beer.
A hundred yards or so beyond the store, Joseph crossed a bridge with a low, steel railing, peered down at the slow-moving water, and imagined it must be the creek that offered the town its name. On the other side of the bridge, the gravel edge gave way to asphalt. The entrance to a parking lot; a single pinkish bulb cast an aura on the space. Joseph read the redwood sign with mustard-colored, inset lettering: West Callahan Creek Park. Below the lamp, a path led away from the empty parking lot; Joseph wheeled his bicycle and the small trailer in which he towed his camping supplies past the circle of light, along that dark path, navigating more by intuition than sight. He stopped, retrieved a flashlight from a pouch on the trailer, and switched it on. The fog refracted the beam into a ball of hazy illumination, affording little visibility of his surroundings, but he did discern a curtain of drooping tree branches a short distance from the path. Willows. They favored stream and creek banks, he knew; he switched off the flashlight and steered his bicycle toward them.
Joseph managed to pitch the tent in the foggy twilight (the mechanics had become rote during the two weeks of his trip), and when he’d spread the foam camping mat and unrolled his bag, he lay quietly on his back and listened to the environmental sounds: a sluggish hint of water, feathery wisps of the willow branches chafing when a breeze rippled, and (undulating along the creek like a current), the metallic clatter of a hog feeder. He dined on dried fruit, a handful of mixed nuts, two strips of beef jerky, and a packet of cookies, checked his cell phone for messages, surprised when he saw three bars in the upper corner (it seemed West Callahan Creek had a cell tower nearby), and then lifted the tent flap to go out and relieve himself. It was an evening routine he followed with rare deviation. (One afternoon when the western sky portended thunderstorms, he stayed in a no-name motel, lavishly soaking in a hot tub in the dark bathroom as the thunder bouldered, lightning illuminated the room, and the rain strafed the windows). He lay on his sleeping bag, reading of a North Vietnamese soldier who had survived that war on his Kindle for an hour before stripping to his underwear, rolling to his side and closing his eyes, wondering what dreams he might encounter, and how much of them he would recall in the morning.
—
Hello, someone called. Wake up in there.
Joseph stirred and rose to a sitting position as he realized someone stood outside the tent.
Hey. Open up.
Joseph said he was awake and slid into his jeans, then unzipped the tent and crawled out into bright sunlight. The fog had disappeared and as he stood, he glanced quickly at the topography of the park: flat ground, the willows trees he had discerned the previous evening lining the bank of the narrow creek.
This isn’t a camping area.
Joseph shaded his eyes with his hand and looked at the sheriff’s deputy who had retreated a step or two from the tent entrance.
Sorry. Last night in the fog, I couldn’t make out much and I needed somewhere to sleep.
Well, it’s a violation. I’m going to have to take you into town. Judge will probably fine you. Let’s go.
The sheriff removed handcuffs from his equipment belt and gestured for Joseph to turn around.
Are you serious? He couldn’t read the man’s eyes behind his sunglasses, to determine if his tactic was to scare Joseph into quickly moving on, not lingering in the town.
Dead serious. Turn around.
Joseph stepped toward the man, who gripped his wrist and sefficiently around. The sheriff affixed restraints to his wrist, gripped his elbow and guided him toward the path.
What about my stuff?
We’ll collect it for you.
During the short drive, while the deputy radioed in that he had a prisoner in custody, Joseph tamped down anger and worried about a rise of the shadows. The patrol car, with emergency lights flashing and siren keening, circled a three-story, red brick courthouse, situated in a town square ringed by storefronts. The deputy completed a loop of the building before steering the car to the rear of the structure. He parked beside a set of concrete steps leading to an iron door.
He opened the rear door and rested a hand on Joseph’s head, as he had when he placed him in the back seat at the park. Up the steps, he indicated. His tone, calm, without inflection.
The heavy door opened onto a small holding area with a polished wooden floor; another deputy behind a half wall, the upper section caged with chain link fencing, except for a small slotted opening on the countertop.
Vagrancy. The arresting deputy nodded to his counterpart, who smirked as he reached under the counter. A loud buzz sounded and he steered Joseph through another door, into a windowless, high-ceilinged corridor; creamy globes Joseph associated with school rooms hung from the ceiling.
Is this really necessary? Joseph loathed the plaintive quality of his own voice, as though he’d galvanized the words with solicitousness.
You can ask the judge.
At the end of the corridor, the deputy turned a polished brass handle and ushered Joseph across the threshold, into a courtroom filled with people, who rose almost in unison and began applauding. He turned his head to the right, where a woman wearing black robes rose from her chair behind the elevated judge’s bench, and with a wooden gavel in her hand, motioned for the deputy to bring Joseph to the area directly before the bench. She extended her arms and patted the air a few times, urging the people in the gallery to sit and grow quiet.
What is your name? Her voice startled Joseph, her tone officious but her smile playful.
Joseph Hunter.
The deputy gripped his wrists and unlocked the handcuffs. Joseph swiveled his head and studied the people in the wooden rows behind him. Everyone smiling, a few nodding and waving to him. His imagination flashed visions of horror movies through his mind, of human sacrifice cults and inbred cannibal creatures, and then he turned back to the judge, asking what the hell was going on.
You’ve been found guilty of violating our municipal code, Joseph Hunter. Do you have anything to say before I pass sentence?
Twittering and laughter from the crowd.
What is happening here? Are you kidding me? He rubbed his wrists where the handcuffs had bound him.
I’m quite serious. The judge leaned across the bench and aimed the gavel at Joseph. You do have a choice how you serve your sentence. Three days in jail. She paused and her eyes glinted as she surveyed the rows of people behind Joseph. Or you can serve as the honorary mayor of our town for this weekend’s sesquicentennial celebration.
The entire gallery erupted once again in applause as the deputy clapped Joseph on his back, leaned in and whispered an apology for the cuffs.
Personally, the judge said, I recommend you accept our offer as mayor.
Joseph stood dumbfounded as people streamed out of the wooden seats, entered the area beyond the counsel tables, and crowded around him in front of the judge’s bench.
He wanted to ask again if the judge was serious, but within the new context of the celebrity she had asked to confer on him.
Quite a bait and switch, he said to the deputy, who stood with his arms behind his back in a parade-rest position. The man, his eyes unmasked now, squinted as a smile enveloped his face.
We like a little theater, he replied.
A balding man gripped Joseph’s hand, pumping it as he introduced himself as the office holder Joseph would supplant for the two-day celebration of the town’s one-hundred-fiftieth celebration.
Ben Hampton. Happy to relinquish my duties and responsibilities, young man. Welcome to West Callahan Creek.
The judge banged her gavel several times, calling for quiet. The prisoner hasn’t chosen his sentence yet. What do you say, Joseph Hunter?
Joseph wagged his head, glanced around at the folks in the courtroom, and then looked up at the judge. That’s Mayor Joseph Hunter, your honor.
More laughter and applause, as Ben Hampton led Joseph out of the courtroom, trailed by townspeople. Let’s get you settled at the hotel. It’s really more of a bed and breakfast. Only four rooms, but they’re clean and comfy. You’ll like it there.
How did you choose me? Joseph followed Ben Hampton outside the courthouse, down a wide set of stone stairs, and onto the green expanse of the tree-lined lawn.
We left it up to the sheriff. The town did the same for its centennial and it seemed like a fine gesture for this anniversary. You kind of surprised us, though. We thought he’d nab a speeder where the limit falls from fifty-five down to twenty-five. The twenty-five-mile-an-hour sign might be blocked by a low-hanging tree limb. He chuckled. But finding you was good fortune. I hope all the festivities won’t inconvenience you unduly.
Gale Stockwell, Parkville, Main Street, 1933.
They arrived at a stone walkway in front of a two-story Victorian, crowned by a cupola with a pheasant weather vane, bedecked with gingerbread trim, trellises along the wrap-around porch laced with blooming vines; two women Joseph assumed were mother and daughter stood on the porch, smiling as he and Ben Hampton climbed the steps.
Good morning, mayor, the older woman said, looking directly at Joseph. Her gravelly voice reminded Joseph of the sound of his tires on the roadway edge in the fog. Your room is ready and I’ve laid out your things. She wore a wrap-around denim skirt and a pale blue cotton blouse.
Joseph paused until he felt a hand on the small of his back. He glanced sideways at Ben Hampton, who arched his eyebrows, nodded.
The younger woman, light brown hair pulled back in a long braid, wore black shorts and a sleeveless blouse, flesh-colored, pale against her tanned arms. She held open the screened door and Joseph entered the house. In the foyer stood a round oak table, covered in a lace cloth, upon which rested a vase of black-eyed-susans. To his right he saw a sitting room, with several upholstered wingback chairs, a red brick fireplace, and a settee with carved wood legs. To the left a dining room with a long table that he surmised cold easily sit twelve people.
I’m Sally Hutchins and this is my daughter Peggy.
He noted resemblances between the two women: blue-gray eyes, brown hair (worn longer by Peggy than her mother, and with straw-colored highlights), the square shape of the hands.
Here’s your room key. It’s up the stairs, last one on the left, with a view of the gardens out back. Why don’t you take some time to freshen up and I’ll come get you around noon for lunch?
Joseph thanked her, mounted the staircase, and turned left along a corridor papered with a pattern of alternating rose and lavender stripes. The door to his room hung open and as he entered he saw his clothing laid out on the canopied bed. In the adjacent bathroom, his sparse toiletries had been arranged on the black granite vanity. The floor was covered with white, octagonal tiles, the walls with white subway tiles; he twisted the taps of the claw foot tub and tugged the pull-chain handle of the old-fashioned commode; the water tank elevated above the bowl whooshed, and Joseph chuckled. He wondered how he could have achieved a greater contrast between the claustrophobic fog of the previous evening and the expansiveness of the morning’s surprising revelations.
As he had the night of the thunderstorm, Joseph drew a hot bath and lay with a wet washcloth over his eyes, recalling what have given him the impetus to begin this trip: sessions with the therapist, isolating himself in his parent’s house, watching marathon reruns of Law & Order and its spinoffs, eventually switching off the television because he needed no reminders of how horrible people could be to one another. Deciding to act according to his nature as a fighter, to learn to cope with the shadows without assistance, but not pushing himself to exhaustion. Going the distance, but not at a sprint. Trimming away life’s excess to reveal a core, essential truth about himself.
The darkness imposed by the washcloth reminded him of the previous day’s fog, how at twilight it had enshrouded him in a gray chrysalis. Something his father had expressed as Joseph left: hopefulness that his quest would be successful. He may not have fully understood his son’s need for this journey, but he identified with it as a mission. He had served in Vietnam. His father’s father had served in the second world war. Joseph associated singular smells with each man: cigarette smoke with his grandfather, Lava soap with his father. As a child, Joseph watched TV shows with his father about war: Combat, Twelve O’clock High, Hogan’s Heroes. When he asked why there no shows about Vietnam, his father said they didn’t make TV shows about wars that were lost.
As he dried himself with the plush bath towel, Joseph wondered: if he had a son, what smell would the boy associate with him?
Through the window overlooking the back yard, he watched Peggy clipping herbs from a raised-bed garden. Her braid slipped over her shoulder and she flipped it back; as she moved down the row of plants, it continued to slide over her shoulder and she continued to flip it away from her work. Retaking the same ground again and again, he observed.
—
When he sat at the dining room table with Sally and Peggy Hutchins and saw the size of the grilled pork chop on his plate (an inch-and-a-half thick, stuffed with a sage dressing), he nearly chuckled. After the meal, Ben Hamilton arrived with a garment bag: khaki slacks, white Oxford shirt, red tie, and Navy blue blazer. We guessed your size, he said. Weren’t sure if you were traveling with dress-up clothes. Why don’t you change and then I’ll take you on a tour of the town? Introduce you to some of the people who’ll be attending the dinner tonight at the lodge.
Joseph nodded, slinging the garment bag over his arm and retreating to his room. He had urged Sally and Peggy Hutchins to talk about themselves during lunch. People enjoyed that, he knew, and regardless of whether they blared like a horn or whispered secrets, it kept them from asking questions of him.
The clothes fit: not tight but also not loose enough to make him appear clownish. When he descended the stairs to the foyer, Ben Hamilton offered a thumbs-up. Sally Hutchins brushed an imaginary fleck of lint from his shoulder and bestowed a proprietary smile.
The two of them walked back toward the town square, which Joseph noticed had been transformed: patriotic bunting draped from building fronts, lamp posts, and second-story windows; a grandstand in front of the courthouse; and a banner stretched across the street proclaiming the celebration of the town’s founding in 1866. He and Ben Hamilton greeted folks who extended their hands, welcoming and congratulating Joseph. Most of the people on the street fit a curious demographic, old people and teens; there was hardly anyone Joseph’s age and he imagined them fleeing the town for more exciting settings as soon as they reached the age of mobility.
They circled the town square. The barber, pointing a finger at the hair falling onto Joseph’s collar, offered a free trim, which Joseph declined. At a florist shop, a woman pinned a red carnation in the buttonhole of the blazer lapel. Hand-crafted caramel was presented at a candy store. Every stop brought excessive yet heartfelt generosity and hospitality. He developed a soreness in his neck from the frequent nodding and tension in his jaw from the repeated grinning. But his anxiety of meeting new and unfamiliar people remained submerged as Ben Hamilton introduced person after person, names that floated away like windblown pollen, faces that morphed into a single countenance of genial salutation.
Fear of the shadows often menaced more frighteningly than the shadows themselves; he’d described the fear to the therapist as a light gray hint of the ebony darkness. Being enveloped by them was the least amniotic feeling he could imagine. When he told her he was unsure how to live, she counseled that PTSD was not a weakness.
Acknowledge it. Understand what it is, she’d said, and you’ll learn to control and handle it.
But it had not been in his nature to wait, so he embarked on the trip, and in a paradoxical twist, conceded that patience was one of the trip’s most constructive lessons.
Many of the people they encountered expressed hope that Joseph was not too inconvenienced by his honorary incarceration, to which he responded that all he was losing was time. Thoughts of loss had consumed him when he returned from the army, but one stood out above the others: loss of feeling that his childhood home was home. The absence of people his age in the town and his urge to leave home reminded him of an old song lyric: How you gonna keep’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree.
For Joseph it was the shadows; for the town’s youth it was the escape of the gritty sameness of their lives. Had any of them chosen the army, he wondered? And would they come to regret their decisions? The therapist told him regret was punishment levied by an internal authority. Self-imposed penance, she said. Forgiveness doesn’t always come at a cost.
As they approached the bed and breakfast, Ben Hamilton laid out the schedule for the celebrations: a dinner that night at the lodge, a parade the following day (during which Joseph would serve as the Marshall), and then a cookout at the park and fireworks.
Sally and Peggy will drive you to the lodge tonight. I’ll see you then, he said, and then walked away, a man with purpose in his stride.
Instead of mounting the steps to the porch, Joseph followed a flagstone path around the house to the garden in which he’d seen Peggy Hutchins clipping herbs. In a gazebo at the rear of the yard, he removed his blazer, reclined on a padded chaise, and closed his eyes, birdsong in the trees surrounding the yard serenading him. He had encountered so many birds on the trip and lamented not having brought a field guide to help identify them. One vestige of life in the army: the ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, under nearly any conditions.
—
The lodge hall struck Joseph as a haphazard fusion of a high school cafeteria and a roadhouse bar. It was cluttered with folding tables and chairs. Large, metal-framed windows overlooked the gravel parking lot on one side, and on the other a corn field. Framed photos hung on the wall of stiff men in dark suits, aligned in stiffer rows in front of the building. Guided to a raised dais, Joseph passed folks he’d met that afternoon, who greeted him with the intimacy of an old friend. The closeness of the space and the volume of people (more than a hundred, he estimated), sparked worry that the shadows would harass him. He envisioned them reaching out from the walls to harass him; a fear of reacting to them in the environment that engendered them often doubled the anxiety. A nagging feature of fear: it rarely emerged in a pragmatic location. Of course, what sort of location would that be, Joseph mused.
Remarks followed dinner. Ben Hamilton. The judge who had sentenced him and other town officials, but the keynote address was delivered by Selma Fenstrom, introduced as the town’s unofficial historian, a retired teacher and part-time librarian.
Joseph Patrick Callahan, veteran of the civil war, served in the 18th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, fought in several notable battles: Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Petersburg, where he sustained a bullet wound to his lower left leg, and as a result, he walked with a slight limp for the remainder of his life. Achieved the rank of sergeant. Returned to his home in Bristol after the war, but soon embarked west, by train to Omaha, and then, burdened with the tools and trappings of a farmer in the bed of a buckboard, followed the Platte River, turning north where it was joined by the Loup River and diverting then again along a then-unnamed creek. He paused one night to camp and, according to his journal, (the prized possession of the West Callahan Creek Library collection), determined he’d put enough distance between himself and Massachusetts to forget his home and memories of the war.
Joseph Callahan quickly learned he possessed no aptitude for farming and after two disappointing seasons turned instead to shop keeping, establishing and managing a general store for neighboring farmers and ranchers. The town of West Callahan Creek grew around the store, (Selma Fenstrom noted that the official date of incorporation differed from the date of Callahan’s arrival on this stretch of prairie, as detailed in his journal; they preferred the latter for purposes of marking anniversaries).
She spoke of Callahan’s service as the town’s first mayor, a thirteen-year tenure, his reluctance to observe the tenth anniversary of the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, his contrary attitude toward the neighboring Pawnee, Ponca, and Arapaho, (contrary to that of other settlers, Callahan advocated peaceful relations), and how he riled many townspeople by banning the wearing of firearms within the town boundaries. But he was overall a popular, if at times moody, citizen and public servant. Selma Fenstrom continued with her biography of Callahan, but Joseph latched onto the single word: moody. Was there within his journal a more detailed account of the cause of his moodiness? Sipping from his water, Joseph scanned the crowded room: Many of the attendees nodded at her recollections about the town’s growth, its sons who had served in both world wars, Korea, and Vietnam. No mention of any active duty service members or casualties from Afghanistan or Iraq, and Joseph hoped the town’s youth had wised up to the nationalistic rhetoric of army recruiters.
One hundred and fifty years on this prairie we call home, Sarah Fenstrom said, born of a wanderlust by a man from Massachusetts who answered the call of his country to preserve the union.
Joseph side-glanced at her as she neared her conclusion. A birdlike woman, with closely-cropped graying hair, wire-rimmed round glasses that reminded him of photos of John Lennon. Her voice belied her slight frame. Strong and confident. The commanding projection of a teacher accustomed to corralling fidgeting children.
In his final journal entries, Callahan reflected on his life, and logged his life’s greatest regret: he never married, never fathered any daughters or sons, remained disheartened within his pride that the town bearing his name would never be home to any descendants. But, Selma Fenstrom concluded, we are all the children of our founding father, Joseph Patrick Callahan.
The crowd applauded as she shuffled her pages and nodded once, then twice, and waved a hand at the audience, returning to her seat on the end of the dais opposite from Joseph. Ben Hamilton rose to the microphone, as Joseph stared at Selma Fenstrom, determined to speak with her at the conclusion of the dinner. Reminding everyone that during the town’s centennial, an honorary mayor had been drafted to oversee the celebrations, Ben Hamilton indicated Joseph with an extended arm, his palm up, gesturing for him to stand. Joseph complied, facing the room, grinning, bobbing his head, glancing at Selma Fenstrom, whom he discovered had been studying him in profile, squinting through her eyeglasses, smiling in a manner that made him feel she recognized in him something he didn’t wish to reveal.
Mayor Joseph Hunter, would you care to say a few words?
Ben Hamilton’s request startled Joseph, and he glared at the man for a moment as applause rippled through the room and people stood, chanting Speech! Speech!
Ben Hamilton beckoned him with a wave of his arm and stepped from the microphone.
Refusing was an untenable position, so Joseph stood, walked to the tabletop lectern, gripping it with both hands, and surveyed the crowded room as a tightening in his sternum warned that the shadows lurked patiently on the periphery of the room, awaiting the most inopportune moment to cloak him in debilitating fear and anxiety. But they remained at a distance, and he wondered if the good nature and the good will of the assembled people kept them at bay.
Thank you all, he said, hopeful his amplified voice repelled the shadows, even if temporarily. It’s an honor to be your honor.
Laughter coursed through the room. Joseph wondered if cheerfulness and good spirits could also inhibit his shadows.
I’ve been given every hospitality. I’m very grateful and looking forward to tomorrow’s festivities. Thank you all. He waved an arm above his head in a sweeping arc and stepped back from the lectern, nodding and smiling like a campaigning politician, and then returned to his seat. He glanced quickly at Selma Fenstrom; she stared at him with a close-lipped grin and nodded at him as she sluggishly blinked.
As Ben Hamilton announced an official end to the evening, Joseph side-stepped behind those seated on the dais until he stood beside Selma Fenstrom’s chair.
I’d like to hear more about Joseph Callahan, he said. If you have some time.
The woman’s eyes softened as she rose from her chair. Why don’t I meet you at Sally’s and we can talk there?
Joseph nodded. Thank you.
—
Selma Fenstrom’s late husband, a Marine veteran of the Korean War, exhibited symptoms of PTSD, although the condition then was called combat exhaustion or fatigue. His spells, she called them, never turned violent, but her research into the life of the town’s founder uncovered what she called common singularities.
It’s a contradiction in terms, I know, but too many quirks in their character aligned like fence posts.
Callahan’s journal alternated between brief and lengthy discourses. The short entries recorded mundane, day-to-day goings-on, notes about the weather (an unremitting concern in an agricultural community). But the longer entries revealed the man.
Bared his soul, she said. It was tortured at times by recollections of the war. He wasn’t alone in that out here on the prairie. Many veterans from both sides went west after the war. Seeking what they couldn’t find any more at home.
Callahan wrote that he knew when to stop his travels because it was in his nature to recognize it.
As I suppose you’ll know as well. It’ll be in your nature to know. Selma Fenstrom sat on the settee in the sitting room, cradling a glass of bourbon in both hands. Sally Hutchins had escorted them to the room, returned with the bottle and glasses, and then withdrawn as though she and Selma Fenstrom had choreographed the scene.
You mentioned he had a reputation for being moody. Joseph traced the rim of his glass with the tip of a forefinger.
Those were other people’s observations. Nothing too erratic. He mentioned trying to control his spells. That’s what he called them. He described how his conscience haunted him, like a specter, often at night, and at other, inopportune times.
Joseph chuckled at the mention of inconvenient timing.
Like yours, right? Selma Fenstrom lifted the bourbon to her lips and gazed at Joseph over the rim of the glass.
Sconces on either side of the fireplace and a floor lamp behind the settee illuminated the room in a golden glow, casting shadows in a variety of geometric forms against the walls, papered in a pattern of tiny roses among giant peony blooms. No good time for them, Joseph said. Did Callahan mention how he coped with his spells?
No. Only that they occurred. But he wrote about how coming west affected them. Founding this town gave him a new flag under which to fight. That’s a direct quote. An allusion to his war experiences, I’m sure.
A new flag. I like that, Joseph said.
A flag that represented him, not a nation at war. That’s what I want to believe. And that Joseph Patrick Callahan founded this town as a form of occupational therapy, long before the benefits of such an approach were even anticipated. He never called his spells demons. He understood what haunted him. Not a single incident but the cumulative experiences of his wartime years. We’re a curious lot, you know, people. We strive to isolate a problem’s cause, then fix it.
One fell swoop.
Exactly. Ridding the body of a parasite, but without destroying the host.
I’ve been questioning whether that’s possible.
Oh, my boy. It’s possible. Callahan wrote that toward the end of his life he felt like a husk, but he didn’t have the resources available to you today. Ironically, he was surrounded by men who shared similar experiences; talking to them might have helped quell the spells. Selma Fenstrom laughed at her own rhyming phrase. He could have held a group therapy session in his general store. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to set tongues wagging!
It would have done them a world of good.
I think that’s exactly what Callahan sought. A world of good. Not of war. Not of destruction and death. Juts a world of good. And he tried to establish that here. His writings reveal his wishes in that regard.
He sounds like an interesting man.
He was. Like many public figures, we’ve mythologized him, sanded down his rough spots to fashion a presentable figure. But I’ve glimpsed into his soul, as trite as that sounds. He possessed the breadth of a prairie sky and the depth and of the deepest well. A fascinating man.
Do you think he ever achieved his redemption?
Fascinating question. In all his writing, I’ve never seen him use that term. Unlike a lot of the people at the time, he was not religious. But I suppose redemption was wrapped up in what he sought. What about you, Joseph Hunter. Do you seek redemption?
Not by that name. Maybe reconciliation.
Selma Fenstrom nodded, braced herself on the arm of the settee and rose. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. She extended her arm and Joseph gripped her warm hand in his own. Trust your nature to help you recognize when it’s your time to stop. She clasped Joseph’s hand in hers as he walked her through the foyer to the door.
—
Seated in the grandstand in front of the court house, Joseph (wearing a blue sash with the word MARSHALL emblazoned in gold satin letters) applauded bands, floats bedecked in crepe-paper flowers and tugged by tractors, a convoy of fire trucks from neighboring towns, a procession of antique automobiles restored to pristine condition, and a bearded man in the uniform of a Union sergeant, riding a black horse and waving a sword at the crowds lining the streets that enclosed the square. Trailing the Callahan figure in a ragged picket line, half a dozen other men in Union garb paused every few yards and fired off a volley from their antique rifles. Joseph winced at the first report, but with repetition grew more confident the gunfire would not trigger the shadows.
Ferdinand Krumholtz, Dom Pedro II. von Brasilien, 1849.
He recalled his conversation with Selma Fenstrom, realizing his predisposition to try and glean wisdom from her familiarity with Callahan. Tracing the name of his spells through the histories of war: shell shock, battle fatigue, stress response syndrome, PTSD. Even Job, the embodiment of patience, was said to have suffered mental disturbances from battle. Every person around him bore a smile and he imagined that later circumstances in their lives might enforce grimaces or expressions of sadness; nothing was permanent. But then, the grimaces and expressions of sadness held to impermanence as well. He remembered moments when he and his brothers rested, post-action, guzzling water, leaning their backs against walls, removing their helmets and shading their eyes beneath blinding, cloudless skies, and then regarded one another as similar smiles and then laughter erupted to rinse the amassed tension from the clustered squad members. The parade. Could it be his victory parade? The conquest of fear. The taming of the shadows.
At the cook-out in the park, Joseph wandered among the crowd, asking questions, listening to the answers, and revealing some of his story to those who asked about his life. Person after person thanked him for his service, to which he nodded and told them they were welcome. His father early in young Joseph’s life had emphasized the importance of how to receive a compliment. It’s a gift to the giver to acknowledge their thanks, he’d said. Tell them they’re welcome and look them in the eye.
The fireworks that night drew a collective oohing and aahing approval of the gathered onlookers, and although Joseph flinched at the first noisy bursts, he soon relaxed on a grassy spot in the park, watching the display with what he could only define as a lightness in his heart, a sensation he wondered if Callahan had ever experienced in this town that bore his name. The deafening finale brought him and those around him to their feet in explosive clapping, and as the quiet night replaced the booming echoes, Joseph joined Sally and Peggy Hutchins for the ride back to the bed and breakfast.
As they wished him good night and walked toward their rooms at the rear of the house, Joseph felt an urge to ask them to linger, to engage them in conversation, could envision night stretching into dawn, as it had sometimes in Iraq, as man after man talked, the subjects varied and unimportant, camaraderie being the unspoken objective.
In the morning, Joseph descended the stairs for breakfast, with Ben Hamilton, Sally and Peggy Hutchins. He had hoped to say good bye to Selma Fenstrom, but reasoned such a farewell might seem anticlimactic. She’d provided Joseph all the assistance she had to offer the night before. At the conclusion of the light meal, the mother and daughter flanked him as they descended the steps to his bicycle and trailer. At the curb beside the sheriff’s squad car, the conjoined vehicles rested, cleaned and polished, the blue frame glinting in the morning sunlight.
As befits mayoral transport, the sheriff said, emerging from his car. I’m going to escort you to the town line.
Joseph grinned, gripping the hand of Ben Hamilton, looking him in the eye as the man thanked him for being such a good sport, accepted hugs from both Sally and Peggy Hutchins, and then mounted his bicycle and followed the sheriff’s car, its emergency lights flashing, as it crept back toward the town square, where several people paused and waved at Joseph, wishing him good fortune and a safe journey. No one had gathered to see him off or welcome him back from Iraq. A few blocks from the square, the sheriff steered to the shoulder and turned off his lights. Joseph pulled astride the driver’s window.
I know you’re not a marine, the sheriff said, but Semper Fi.
Joseph eyed him and the sheriff chuckled.
First gulf war.
Thanks, Joseph said. For everything.
Our pleasure. Stay safe.
Watching the car complete a gravel-spitting U-turn and speed back toward town, the sheriff blasting the siren briefly as he waved his farewell, Joseph recalled Selma Fenstrom’s confidence that his nature would allow him to recognize his destination, if not his destiny, that he would receive a signal that he finally knew himself. Shadows, he considered, might darken and diminish his vision, but they need not blind him.
New Poetry from JD Duff
Night Flash
You’ve been having nightmares again. The cruel shaking of a body resisting slumber. Hands twitching, chest jerking to beats of unknown song, playing over and over like memories you sold at a tag sale, buried on the Tuscarora trail, dumped in a white room at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Jules Tavernier, Heart of a Volcano Under the Full Moon, 1888.
I awake to the moon beaming unto a lonely bed, find you out back where dreams smear on a blurry canvas of recollection, and ghosts rise from wooded corners of truth.
I climb under the poncho liner that covered you through countless peaks of ice and frost, Persian sandstorms, fighting holes where you used the cloth to shield you from walls of claylike dirt. The June breeze dries the sweat around your lips. I lift a rifle from your chest, place it beyond the reach of ready palms. A single leaf rests on your cheek. Cicadas cry for their lost as I hush your silence with a kiss.
The Homecoming
It rained for a week after our mailman’s son died in a roadside bomb attack near Al Karmah. The sky wept as half-mast flags blew gently on the prairie’s haze. Signs of well wishes bowed in store windows, bellowed from alters of diverse domes of prayer, rested in alms of flowers and fried dough. A Corps led procession, thick with mourners, crowded the lot of the pearly mountain church. Bagpipes sang for a Lance Corporal draped in dress blues, mother betrayed by dark dismissals of nightly pleas, father wilting to soft hymns for his broken boy. The lone sibling stared at the casket, wondered why he survived the trashings of war while his brother lay in a box, waiting for rifles to speak his praise, a dark tomb to welcome another lost Marine.
Seal of God
Foxholes and submarines led you to farm life where you graze the vast splendor of still land. Crickets speak to the quiet hush of night as an elusive sky captures secrets, spits sins in large chunks of hail, disrupting the tranquil flight of time.
Faith’s armor shoves you in church where peace is offered between pews and sounds of crossfire muffle the graceful hum of atonement.
William Holman Hunt, Cornfield at Ewell, 1849.
You sneak home through cornfields; stalks reek with bruised dents of blistering flesh. Wounded frogs leap past thick tridents of reticent thought, darkness dismantled by the crippled promise of a swelling cherry dawn.
The euphonies of children replace cancors ofslivered screams as the wind blows you toward our kitchen, where we break bread with an Amish farmer and wait for God to heal us.
New Poetry from Yuan Changming
[anagrammed variations of the american dream]
A ram cairned me
In a crammed era [where]
Cameramen raid
A dire cameraman [or]
Arid cameramen
[Becoming]
A creamed airman [or]
A carmine dream
A minced ram ear
[a] maniac rearmed
As freedom turns into a dorm fee
Democracy to a car comedy, and
Human rights to harming huts
D.H. Friston, Scene from The Happy Land (The Illustrated London News, March 22, 1873)
[we have no more statesmen]
They have now become speech actors, working with
Eight classes of words and
Seven syntactic elements
Changing singulars to plurals
Passive into active, or otherwise
A whole set of rules
All as conventional
As idioms per se
Adding some new vocab every year
Their job is to make new sentences
Based on the same old grammar
New Essay: Axe by M.C. Armstrong
I met a woman on my way to Iraq. Just before I stepped onto the midnight plane to Baghdad, she asked me what should have been a simple question:
“Who do you work for?”
Her name was Moni Basu. She was a journalist. She had thick dark hair, an intense demeanor, and she wore a helmet that said “Evil Media Chick.” We were drinking coffee at a picnic table behind a beverage kiosk at the back of Ali Al Salem base in Kuwait. Her traveling companion, a photographer named Curtis Compton, had caught shrapnel from an IED during a previous embed. A moment before, Moni had given me, a rookie journalist, an important Arabic term: mutar saif. It meant lies, bullshit, summer rain, a thing that just didn’t happen in the desert.
I told her I worked for a magazine called “CQ.”
“GQ?”
“No. CQ.”
“You write for Congressional Quarterly?”
The questions never stopped with Moni. She could smell the bullshit.
“Convergence Quarterly,” I said. “It’s a new magazine. This will be our first issue. We’re sponsored by North Carolina A&T.”
“You work at North Carolina A&T?”
I nodded nervously. I’m white. A&T is a historically black college in Greensboro, North Carolina. Many people argue that the student protest movement of the 60s began at A&T when four courageous young men conducted a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1st, 1960. This was the part of our history that we advertised to the world.
“Do you know who graduated from there?” Moni asked.
“Uh, Jesse Jackson?”
“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?”
She said it like that, like a question, like she couldn’t believe that I was here with her and didn’t know this crucial fact. It was early March, 2008, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion. I’d been working at A&T as a lecturer in interdisciplinary writing for the past three years, but didn’t know a thing about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
“This is the guy who masterminded the attacks on 9/11,” Moni said. “You don’t know who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is?”
Moni glanced at Curtis who was applying a cloth to a lens with calm circular strokes. It was just beginning to dawn on me that I might be in way over my head, like maybe I was the man my father was afraid I was, a rube destined to die a ridiculous death in the coming days, my charred body hung from a bridge in some war-torn hamlet, men in loose-fitting garments cheering as my ashy corpse twisted in the wind. Or they’d put me in one of those orange jumpsuits and cut off my head, whoever “they” were.
I took a long sip of my coffee. Surely, whatever crush I had on Moni would not be reciprocated given my astounding ignorance about the war on terror. There I was, about to embed with Navy SEALS in Haditha, one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq, and I had no idea about the man who had started the very war I was trying to cover for a magazine that hadn’t even released its first issue. Yes, I was the guy who had traveled seven thousand miles to learn that the mastermind of 9/11 had been educated in my own backyard.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Rather than behave like a good journalist and question Moni relentlessly about KSM, I retreated to the bathroom to attend to suddenly struggling bowels. I stared at the graffiti from the troops:
Chuck Norris doesn’t consider it sex unless the woman dies.
Chuck Norris’s tears cure cancer. Too bad he never cries.
Here I sit, cheeks a’flexin, ready to unleash another Texan.
Here I sit, upon the crapper, ready to produce another rapper.
Can’t wait to go home.
Have a nice war.
They called my bus. I put on my army surplus helmet and bulletproof vest, jotted down a few notes about the jokes in the toilet. I sat close to Moni as the bus filled up. I didn’t want to lose her. I felt like I needed her, and I wasn’t used to that feeling, that fear. Basically, I didn’t want to be left alone in Iraq. On the drive to the plane, I made small talk about the record-breaking drought back home.
“It’s so bad in Atlanta,” she said, “that I keep a bucket in my shower just so I can save enough water for my garden.”
We walked across the tarmac and up the ramp into the loud bloated hull of a C-130 Hercules. It was me, Moni, Curtis, four soldiers, and two contractors. The C-130 is an exposed experience, a cabin stripped of padding and panel, the seats nothing more than net and pole, the lights a dim red, white, and blue, the floor studded with traction pads. After the plane took off, Moni fell asleep and so did one of the soldiers. Another sat with his headphones blasting so loud it sounded like spit was coming out of his ears. I smelled grape Kool-Aid powder. I looked around at the seemingly calm faces occasionally jostled by the turbulence. There was no turning back. For the past six months, I’d been obsessed with seeing the war for myself and escaping the media-saturated mindfuck of left versus right, peace versus war, WMDS, beheadings and 9/11 conspiracy theories. I wanted to see the thing for myself and now that I was here I couldn’t stop thinking about how blind I’d been to the very place I was escaping: America: my own backyard.
Other than KSM, what else had I missed? Was I about to get kidnapped and beheaded, my father dropping to his knees in our front yard with photographers clipping pictures all around him, just like the dad of Nick Berg, the famous decapitated contractor? And were contractors—these men snoozing all around me—were they the bad guys like everybody said? Was America evil? And why were our troops so infatuated with Chuck Norris?
All the lights went out in the Hercules, the cabin a dark tunnel of jiggling multi-national bodies as this massive airship began its spiral descent to Baghdad, the famous lights-out, corkscrew roller-coaster free-fall approach the military’s way of evading RPGs and demonstrating to rookie journalists just how simultaneously colossal and agile America can be if she truly wants to keep herself a secret.
_____
Baghdad seemed calm before dawn, more a dense constellation of sapphire lights than a bombed out wasteland. I pressed my cheek against the glass of the Blackhawk. Here was one of the oldest cities in the world, Babylon herself on a Sunday morning. As a thirteen-year old boy I’d seen SCUDS and Patriot missiles doing their duty on the news, my country at war for the first time in this city down below, but Iraq meant nothing to me back then. In high school, I owned a bong named the Enola Gay. History was just a game, a trivial pursuit, a place to get names for marijuana paraphernalia. Now I was here, in the center of the mediated world, seated next to Moni and Curtis and two soldiers manning swiveling guns as we strafed over the dark crawl of the Tigris River.
We touched down on a slab of cement behind a barricaded building known as LZ (Landing Zone) Washington. Apparently most of the soldiers at this chopper terminal for Green Zone activity were employees of a contractor firm known as Triple Canopy Security Solutions. Moni, Curtis, and I walked into the office with two soldiers who were in town for a court-martial.
The first thing I noticed inside LZ Washington was a photo on the wall, an autographed black and white shot of Chuck Norris next to the sign-in desk.
“What is the deal with all the Chuck Norris worship?” I asked Moni.
Chuck Norris doesn’t read, he stares at the words until they change into the meaning he believes they should communicate. If he blinks the whole process starts over again.
She shook her head and smiled, like I was paying attention to the wrong things. As we waited for a our ride to CPIC, the Combined Press Information Center, I stepped closer to the Norris board, the little flapping scraps of pink and green post-its framing the autographed photo, the post-its scrawled with doggerel travelers had dedicated to this classic example of the Whitmanian American, that man who contains multitudes. Norris’ life was actually quite remarkable, I realized at that moment. Not only was he an actor, but he was also a former contractor, a highly decorated martial artist who formed an entire school of Karate, and, on top of it all, he was a devout Christian political wonk who’d recently taken over William F. Buckley’s conservative column in hundreds of newspapers, railing against premarital sex, gay marriage, and other such signs of the apocalypse. The picture of Norris I saw posted in LZ Washington had him seated atop a motorcycle that might as well have been a white horse. Beneath were bits of wit like:
Chuck Norris doesn’t read. He stares at the book until it gives him information.
Chuck Norris wears cowboy boots. They’re made of real cowboys.
Chuck Norris doesn’t mow his grass. He dares it to grow.
I wrote down as many of these jokes as I could, determined to keep alive the lighter side of Iraq, but as we drove through the sunrise streets of Baghdad, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Moni had told me just before we’d gotten on the C-130.
“You don’t know who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is?”
How bad is America’s amnesia, its will to blindness? And to what extent is that blindness connected to our sense of humor, our addiction to nervous, absurdist jokes? Was I the only one who didn’t know the names of our enemies? How little did we know about “them”? From the back of a Humvee, I looked for faces. We passed by monolithic cement barricades, flashes of street vendors with exhausted leers pushing bales of blankets, a statue for the soldiers who’d fought against Iran in the grisly chemical weapons fueled war of the 1980s. God, how did I not know that the man who started this whole “war on terror” was a graduate of the school where I taught? Was the gap a function of too many rips off the Enola Gay as a teenager? Was I the only American who was this clueless about the Global War on Terror? Sometimes I felt extremely uncomfortable about just how much I had in common with the fool we’d elected President: George W. Bush.
_____
My father gave me some advice before I left for Iraq. He said that Operation Iraqi Freedom was just as much our civil war as it was theirs. He said all anybody talked about in the press was whether we were the good guys or the bad guys.
“But what about them?” he said. “Who’s their good guy? Who’s their George Washington? That’s the story you want to find. Talk to them.”
That was my goal. I knew I had bigger fish to fry than the graffiti dedicated to Chuck Norris, but talking to actual Iraqis without intrusive oversight was easier said than done. After being in Iraq for more than a week, I still hadn’t met a single Iraqi. On the eighth day of my tour, along with my military escort, a large mustachioed Mormon named Reynolds, I landed at Al Asad, a sprawling base that reminded me of summer camp, soldiers jogging and playing volleyball, fobbits zooming around in golf carts, a commissary store loaded with candy and chewing tobacco and cellophane wrapped soft core magazines displaying pin-up girls. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, under a shelter at the back of the base, as I was paging through a men’s magazine, I heard a familiar voice.
“Eat Boy!”
I looked up from my picnic table and ran down to the barricaded cul-de-sac where my SEAL platoon had parked their humvees. I hugged my old friend, now the Lieutenant for this platoon that was actually a Joint Special Operations Force (mostly SEALS mixed with contractors, CIA, and Rangers). Diet was a man I’d known since I was five years old. He looked different, his thick bristly mustache designed to create an air of gravity and power—what the Iraqis called wasta—but to me, it was pure comedy, a nod to the porn stars of the seventies or perhaps the viceroys of nineteenth century colonial England, Panama Jack.
“Nice stache,” I said.
Diet commented on the disproportion between the hair on my face and the hair on my head. Whereas he was growing a mustache, I was growing a beard, having learned from him that while mustaches suggest power to Iraqis, the beard suggests holy man.
“You’re in the back,” Diet said, as we stepped towards a humvee with the name “Leonidas” spray-painted on the back. Leonidas was an ancient Spartan king, and also a fictional character from a recent movie, “The 300,” which followed one Spartan unit’s heroic exploits during the battle of Thermopylae. According to historical legend and the movie, the Spartans died valiantly fighting against King Xeres and his Persian horde, the Spartan story told only because Leonidas was wise enough to send a man named Dilios away from the platoon on the night before the decisive battle so he—Dilios—might tell the story of the soldiers’ bravery to the masses.
“We’re driving?” I said.
Diet nodded and smiled. I was surprised and pleased, and scared shitless. I’d enjoyed the aerial views of Iraq, the absence of Iraqis, but was growing a bit suspicious of the embedding strategy, the careful hopscotch from base to base, the way we avoided all the spaces between, the people.
“You scared?” Diet said.
“Should I be?” I said.
“No,” he said. “That’s part of the story here.”
I put on my helmet and ceramic plated vest. Complacency Kills, said a spray-painted sign on the edge of Al Asad. A soldier named B. Dubbs was driving as we passed beyond the wire, the concertina and the cement barriers. Diet passed back a tin of Copenhagen. I threw in a pinch, feeling like high school, about to go rallying through the woods on a winter day, except we weren’t entering a state forest or the rutted lanes of an apple orchard. This was a war zone.
The Haditha burn pit. Part of the desert scenery.
Diet had described Haditha to me as the West Virginia of Iraq, a triad of tribal villages a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Baghdad. Unemployment was seventy percent. There was desert everywhere, many of the people making a living the way they had for thousands of years: fishing and farming, ghostly figures shepherding goats on the smoke-plumed horizon. There were men in robes selling what looked like lemonade from cheap collapsible roadside tables.
“That’s gas,” Diet said.
I nodded my head. Children ran along the shoulder with their hands outstretched. We threw them candy, jolly ranchers. I felt good. I loved the way the desert sky was skinning my eyes, the taste of my fresh chaw and its fiberglass shards tearing through my gums, the feeling of sharing a buzz with Diet in this surreal landscape that seemed to go back and forth between war-torn and exotic, novel and vivid on the one hand, tragic and impoverished on the other. I listened to the gobble of radio communications, smelled the sweat of the men, saw fruit stands pass by along the road, date palms and eucalyptus, a graveyard of jets, a black burned out hulk of a sedan on the shoulder a reminder that I was not in the Disney version of Iraq anymore and that, at any moment, one of these swaddled and stoic-faced roadside strangers might decide to press a button on a cell-phone he’d converted into a remote control and thereby remind me that not everybody shared the enthusiasm of the children for the foreigners with their tanks and their sunglasses and their gargantuan guns and their swollen lower lips.
I tried to keep my head in the moment as we approached Haditha, my vision of the world at that moment an opaque dust-smeared profile of Diet riding shotgun, his face a single sunglass eye and the edge of that thick mustache, a wire coming out of his ear, his lips mutely mouthing orders into a mic as we passed through a gate, and then we could suddenly see a lake to our left and the Euphrates valley to our right down below, this ancient river of grade school lore now a roaring spout from the cement jaws of a massive dam, the slabby Soviet architecture and the sulfurous smell of the Haditha Dam not enough to mute the feeling of ancient resonance, the awe of seeing distant cities of mud huts clustered behind palms on the east and west banks, a vast desert stretching out forever on the southern horizon, no billboards anywhere.
“Can we go for a swim?” I asked.
“You do not want to swim in there,” Diet said.
I wondered what that meant. Was the river polluted or was he wisely discouraging the appearance of recreation, a spring break scene of buddies privileged white men splashing around in sacred waters while dark people downstream were cutting each other’s heads off? I’ve always been a sucker for symbolic baths, half-hearted ablutions. When I see a new body of water, I want to swim. I kept telling myself to shut the fuck up, to remember the wisdom of Mark Twain: “It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
We parked the humvees and stepped out, were greeted by a pack of sand-colored mongrel dogs that threaded their way through our dispersing ranks. I gave one a tentative pat, stretched my legs and spit out my dip, then looked around the base at black missile-shaped tubes of inflatable boats leaned up against the cement barriers that fortified the borders, red and green storage containers forming a wall against the southern end of the camp, an empty plywood watchtower like the first leg of a Trojan horse.
“Who’s on the other side?” I asked Diet, as we stood on the bank of the river looking across at the camp on the eastern shore. He told me that was where the contractors slept. Sure enough, I saw the letters “KBR” sprayed in red on a cement wall, a few extremely thick men milling around. Kellogg Brown Root was a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton.
“What do they do?” I asked.
“They more or less take care of the trash,” Diet said.
The great secret of my time in Iraq, I thought for awhile, was that trash, the burn pits KBR ran and the rash of scary symptoms discovered in soldiers and in Iraqis, or maybe, I came to think, it was a chemical weapons discovery at the Haditha Dam, a story one of those KBR contractors told me in a tent one night back in Kuwait. According to him, we never told the media about these “WMDs” because the serial numbers indicated American origins. This was a big story, I thought, as big as they come, but after I put it out in The Mantle the very week C.J. Chivers of The New York Times released a similar story about such weapons being discovered all over Iraq, I realized people didn’t care, that our complicity in Iraq’s development of the very WMDs we’d used to justify the war meant nothing to most Americans.[1][2] No, I now believe that the big secret of Iraq is still that thing my father told me to explore: the people.
Diet showed me the trailer where I could take a shower, then ushered me into a maze of corrugated storage containers. I followed him across a wooden plank past a dark empty plywood room. Behind this was another row of these metal containers, the “ConEx” boxes that served as the sleeping quarters for his men, each door sprayed with their nicknames, monikers like “Lurch” and “Tree.” Diet’s door was marked by two big black letters: “LT.”
“Damn. Not bad,” I said, as I walked inside and beheld strands of Christmas lights forming vines above a red bed and a wall decorated with an ornate tribal tapestry, the pattern a pointillist spread of teal and brown leaves. I saw trunks of care package goodies everywhere, a Macbook on a desk under a reading lamp. Behind Diet’s computer sat a black and white photo of his father from his time in the Marines during Vietnam. Above the photo were Diet’s books, including a tattered copy of William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust.
As Diet took off his gear, I sat down in his black swivel desk chair and read through his Faulkner. I came across a line on a page that had been dog-eared, a passage I wrote down for some reason: “When a feller has to start killin’ folks, he most always has to keep killin’ em. And when he does, he’s already dead hisself.”
“You hungry?” Diet asked.
“What do you think?” I said.
“I know. Stupid question.”
He laughed. Eat Boy’s always hungry. Diet offered me one of his care-package nutrition bars, something with flax and honey and other progressive ingredients. It felt good to eat, to take off my shoes, to savor for a second the sense—the illusion—of finally having arrived.
“Fucking Eat Boy,” he said.
“Bet you never thought this was going to happen,” I said.
“No,” he said. “To be honest. I didn’t.”
I looked at the cutouts of women from Maxim magazine he’d taped to the walls. He had a white dry board on the back of his door.
“Let’s come up with a list of five stories,” he said.
I didn’t like the sound of that. I told Diet I could find my stories on my own. Diet, for good reason, looked at me skeptically, or perhaps paternally is the better word, or maybe it was close to the same look Moni gave me when I asked about Chuck Norris and told her I’d never heard of KSM. All three of them—Diet, my dad, and Moni—knew I knew nothing, and thought this was to my detriment, but sometimes I wondered if there wasn’t a certain advantage to my naïvite.
“Just out of curiosity,” I said. “Why does there have to be five?”
“It’s a good number, Eat Boy. One story a day for a full work-week.”
Three months earlier, after our local newspaper had backed out on sponsoring me because my father had threatened their editor (his patient) with a lawsuit if anything happened to me while I was in Iraq, Diet had called from me Haditha and challenged me to “be a man,” to make the trip happen in spite of my father’s resistance. So, like my president, I faked my way into Iraq, came up with a magazine of my own. I was proud of this, my American ingenuity, but as Diet stood there telling me what stories to write, I felt like he was meddling.
“I wanna meet some Iraqis,” I said.
“Right now?”
“Yeah.”
“You wanna meet Captain Allah?”
“Yes, I wanna meet Allah.”
That’s how the name first sounded to me—Captain Allah—Captain God. Like, sure, let’s go straight to the top. I had no idea who he was, but he sounded important and he definitely sounded Iraqi. Diet and I walked back through the maze of trailers that finally spilled out into the open air of the Iraqi night, some of the brightest stars I’d ever seen, the lighting of the base kept deliberately low, the vast miles of desert all around us offering no diffusing glow to the constellations, Orion stippled with a dress of chain mail armor, stars below his belt I’d never seen before. I spun around in the cool night air like I was stoned, saw a tall black SEAL walk out of the shower hut with a towel around his neck, saw the mongrel dogs play-fighting down at the southern end of the base by the red punching bag hanging beneath the watchtower.
We walked into the room of one of the platoon’s translators, a thick-bearded Jordanian named Rami who had a large American flag posted over his bed in the same fashion that Diet had a tribal tapestry tacked over his. Cutout pictures of women in skin-tight apparel modeling machine guns dotted Rami’s walls.
Diet was briefing Rami on what was about to happen and I was admiring a photo of a blonde woman in a black dress wielding a black rifle when a tall man with a feathered mullet and a gold tie walked through the door, his entrance worthy of a sitcom scene. I half expected a studio audience to explode into a roar of applause. He was gangly, a silver pen clipped to his left breast pocket, his white dress shirt and olive suit freshly ironed, his eyes moving left to right in a furtive display of awareness and anxiety that evoked Kramer’s character from Seinfeld. But this was unhinged, unrehearsed. Here was a man like me, who did not know his role, and no feature of his appearance suggested this more than the feathered mullet.
“Matt, this is Captain Al’A Khalaf Hrat. He’s the leader of the thirty man Iraqi Swat Team we’ve been training over the past few months.”
“Assalamu Alaikum,” I said, rather proud of myself for remembering this rote greeting.
I shook the man’s hand, felt a strong calloused grip. He responded with a deep voice and an abridgement of the conventional crib sheet Arabic greeting:
“Salaam.”
He took off his jacket, revealing a shoulder holster, two pistols tucked beneath his arms. He took that off as well, spoke at length, looking back and forth between Diet and me, never once looking at Rami, which I thought was “interesting,” as they say.
“He wants to know where you’re from,” Rami said.
Either Arabic is the most inefficient language in the world or Captain Al’A wanted to know more than just where I was from. Rami wore a tan jumpsuit with an American flag above his left breast. I was anxious, aware that a lot was going to be lost in translation. I had my journal in my hands with all of the questions I wanted to ask, but felt tempted, as I almost always do, to improvise, to throw my notes aside, and go with the feeling of the moment.
For the first time in my life I was not only in Iraq, but I was finally sitting with an Iraqi, the leader of a SEAL trained SWAT team, perhaps the Iraqi equivalent of Vic Mackey, Michael Chikliss’s character from my favorite cop show, The Shield. Was it possible that Captain Al’A’s mullet meant to Iraqis what Mackey’s shaved head meant to Americans? Was I dealing with the alpha dog, the badass, a rogue cop, the sort of man who made his own rules? I kept getting this comic vibe from Captain Al’A, the ghost of the American mullet and its connotations of “I don’t give a fuck, throw me another beer” mentality.
After telling Al’A that I was from a town close to Washington, D.C. I decided to forget my questions about statistics and George W. Bush and the fifth anniversary of the invasion and “the Al Anbar Awakening,” and I elected, instead, to ask him about his hair. I told him I liked his mullet. I told him that I understood that different hairstyles meant different things to different people, that the mustache was supposed to mean power and the beard holiness, “but what does the mullet mean?”
I exchanged a quick look with Diet who shook his head in crestfallen disbelief. Captain Al’A crinkled his eyes and also looked toward his boss, perhaps not expecting the interrogation with the American journalist to broach such serious subjects as the symbolic significance of a mullet. I felt like such an amateur. I wondered what Moni would do. Over a hundred thousand Iraqis had already been killed in the war and I was asking questions about hair care. I looked down at Al’A’s feet, determined to get serious with the next question, scolding myself for my improvisational approach, my belief in naïvete perhaps nothing more than the sophist’s justification for laziness, a tragicomic foreshadowing of the America to come. In the seconds between my question and Al’A’s answer, I noticed the Captain wore ankle length socks. There were subtle pin stripes in his pants, a sharp pleated crease. He removed a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and offered me one.
I took it. We both lit up. And then he began to talk, his deep voice drawn into higher registers by the frenzy of his thoughts, glottals and hisses clashing, Rami listening from his desk, the Captain seated on the translator’s bed, Diet standing over us. When Al’A finished speaking, he took a deep inhalation and blew a clean two-pronged stream of smoke out of his considerable nostrils, his face—his wide eyes and large nose a bit reminiscent of the Muppet character, Gonzo.
“He says that his men are not afraid of death,” Rami said. “He says that in some cities his haircut is not allowed, that it means a man is gay, and if you are gay you can get killed. But he is not gay. He just does what he wants. He is not afraid of death. He has lost eight family members, three brothers kidnapped and killed. His uncle, who was the police chief—he and his three children were murdered. It has been a terrible time for Hadithans. Hundreds of people leaving the city for Syria and elsewhere. Refugees. There was a man, an insurgent, who spoke to an American in public so everyone could see. Fifteen minutes this man and the American talk so everyone can see. Then the insurgent goes and kills an old innocent man, a barber. What do you think people thought? Do you understand the game they play? You cannot be afraid of death.”
Lately, I’ve given a lot of thought to this moment, the story that emerged out of that question about hair. Many of the men we armed in Al Anbar, men like Al’A, joined up with the Islamic State. Many of those who did not continued to flood Syria, contributing to the destabilization of that country and its civil war that goes on to this day. So I’ve thought about Al’A’s words a lot, his story, the flood of death in his family. I’ve thought about these words specifically: “You cannot be afraid of death.” This value, what some used to call bravery, has not aged well in the twenty-first century, or at least the American version. Sometimes we now call people who embrace death “cowards.” The absence of fear in the face of death runs totally counter to the American way of life and the way it’s so structured around careerism and self-interest, retirement and insurance and health care, keeping people alive into their nineties, banking their bodies in the faceless retirement communities we find near our beaches and deserts, Florida and Arizona.
That night I looked into the spaniel calm of the Captain’s eyes as another divided slide of smoke issued from his nose. A million thoughts were rushing through my head. I thought of Native Americans, the ones who got the haircuts and joined us, the ones who didn’t, the Shawnee who occasionally came to dance at my elementary school when I was a child. Was I engaged in a timeless rite in that moment, sharing tobacco with a Brave? How ironic was it that the white man, or at least the white man’s corporation, was now the one to provide the tobacco? And who, truly, was the savage in this “game” of drones and beheadings, snipers, IEDs and WMDs? What would you think if you were in the Captain’s shoes, an Iraqi man working with Americans in the heart of a war that might well be illegal and might possibly (and simultaneously) produce positive unintended consequences, your every move fraught with the implications of poverty versus complicity? A simple conversation could cost you your life.
I felt a tremendous surge of affection and pity for Captain Al’A. We continued the interview. I learned that he belonged to the tribe known as the Jughayfi. He was born the son of a worker at a local oil refinery. He witnessed the Iran-Iraq war and thereafter the first war with America. For a long time, like most Iraqis, his hatreds were pure, thoroughly controlled by an oppressive regime and its lockstep media, a government that kept tight control over the textbooks in the schools.
“You were not allowed to think,” Al’A told me. “Everything was military.”
God, I wanted to drink a beer with this guy and tell him about what it had been like the last five years in America, generals galore on TV, generals on the radio, CIA on NBC, assassins on Fox, anchorwomen cheerleading the war, military budgets exploding, everybody in the country shaving their head like yours truly, everybody with their support our troops bumper stickers and tree ribbons, every chicken hawk politician suddenly with polished flag pins posted on their lapels, country musicians turned to jingoistic sycophants for the war machine, everybody every day constantly reminded by the streaming ticker on the TV that we were living in code orange and it was all the fault of people like Captain Al’A.
“How have things changed?” I asked him.
“Come downtown with me,” he said. “Come see the souk. It used to be so small you could fit it into the back of a truck. Now it’s like, it’s like—it’s like Europe. It’s like Paris.”
Rami laughed, said to me, “Matt, it’s not that nice. Definitely not Paris.”
“You should come to the market,” Al’A said.
I looked to Diet like a teenage son begging permission from his father to go to a party with the older guys, that archetypal convertible revving in the driveway. Diet looked back at me like I wasn’t quite ready to take that ride, a long pointed blink.
“Don’t worry, Eat Boy,” he said. “We’re going downtown tomorrow.”
I was terrified—thrilled, intoxicated by war, confident in the seal of my spectatorial membrane, my security detail. I’d never been “downtown” in a place where barbers were murdered in the streets, a city where there were “attacks” every day. I felt like I was doing the right thing. I was finally getting around to my father’s advice. I was talking to an Iraqi. But there was still a veil over the scene, a translator and a lieutenant, cement barriers everywhere outside. To go “downtown”—that might actually qualify as reality, an authentic “beyond the wire” glimpse of Iraq. Hot dog! Come on, Daddy-o! Can’t I see beyond the walls?
Diet told me to wrap it up. I suggested a photograph with the Captain before calling it a night. Then, in a moment I’ll never forget, Captain Al’A stood up and brandished a small bottle of “Axe” cologne. This baffled me. We’d been sitting incredibly close the whole evening and not once had he broken out the cologne. Smell, of course, is not conveyed in a photograph, so why the hell would a man spray himself with cologne prior to a photo? To comb one’s mullet or tighten one’s tie—this I understood. But as I flew back to America, I couldn’t stop thinking about this final gesture. Why had this man with a mullet sprayed himself down so profusely with cologne before locking arms with me? Was this a custom my crib sheets had neglected to apprise me of? And why, of all colognes, was he wearing Axe? And why do I focus on trivial things like haircuts and colognes when there are body counts and ideologies and elections and secret prisons everywhere?
Perhaps the answer is simple. I don’t know. I’m a coward. I’m an American idiot. But maybe that’s too easy, modesty to the point of dishonesty and disavowal. So let me try to step it back. Most Americans know Axe as the Walmart of colognes. Axe is the most aggressively advertised cologne slash body spray on the marketplace, a cheap and strong smell for young men looking to score. Axe is what we advertise to the young after advertising Viagra and Cialis to the old and Coke to all. As I sought Iraq, perhaps Iraq sought me as well, reaching out with the one smell that could not possibly be misinterpreted. Maybe Iraq, too, was befuddled by the multitudes Chuck Norris contained, the strange mixed messages of our muse and our media.
Ultimately, whether Iraq and Captain Al’A were are as confused about us as we were about ourselves, I think it’s safe to say that I’ll never forget either. Captain Al’A, the way his mullet brushed my bare scalp as we wrapped arms for the photo, his locks dusting me with a musk laced with body odor and American tobacco, his ribs for a moment in contact with mine, their texture uncovered by his absent holster, the awareness of those bones sharpened by that most pungent of musks; begging for my approval, hungry for my adoring stare.
M. C. Armstrong embedded with JSOF in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. He published extensively on the Iraq war through The Winchester Star. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Esquire, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Mayday, Monkeybicycle, Epiphany, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Viva la Muerte and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with Yorick, his corgi, whose interruptions to his writing are frequent but welcome.
Interview With Will Mackin, Author of Bring Out the Dog
Guest Interviewer Peter Molin of Time Now interviews U.S. Navy veteran Will Mackin. Mackin’s work has appeared in TheNew Yorker, GQ, Tin House, and The New York Times Magazine. His story “Kattekoppen” was selected by Jennifer Egan for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2014, and his essay about being an extra on Breaking Bad, published in GQ, was nominated for an American Society of Magazine Editors “Ellie” award. Mackin’s debut collection of short stories, Bring Out the Dog, is on sale now.
Describe the path that led to you joining Naval Special Warfare? What were your thoughts and impressions of the SEALs when you first joined them? At what point did you feel you truly belonged?
MACKIN: I volunteered, interviewed, screened, then went through direct support selection, which is nowhere near as grueling as what the operators/SEALs go through. Most SEALs were personable one-on-one, but I found them to be very insular as a group. I never felt like I truly belonged.
From “Kattekoppen”: “The variety of ideas among soldiers developed into a variety of ideas among units, which necessitated an operational priority scheme. As SEAL Team Six, we were at the top of that scheme. Our ideas about the war were the war.” How are SEALs different from soldiers in line-units? What motivates them and what’s important to them? What were you surprised to learn about the SEALs, as individuals and as a collective fighting force?
MACKIN: The main thing that differentiated our unit from “straightleg” units was our budget. We had a lot of money to throw around. There was also a genuine desire on the part of the operators to fight, kill, and vanquish, and absolutely zero tolerance for administrative bullshit. This would sometimes bite us in the ass because no one ever wanted to plan. What we lost in lack of planning, however, was often made up for in execution. As individuals I was surprised to find those who I wouldn’t have expected to be SEALs. In other words, guys who didn’t fit the mold of the tattooed, bearded, Harley-riding Alpha male. They were just normal dudes with this ridiculous and well-disguised drive.
In the Acknowledgements to Bring Out the Dog you write, “To rejects of all shapes and sizes,” but also “And last but not least, a sacred debt to the men and women of Naval Special Warfare Development Group.” What lies behind those two sentiments, which seem to express contrasts. What specifically do you owe DEVGRU?
MACKIN: I was assigned to Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, from 2006-2011. Our mission was to research and develop tactics, techniques, and procedures for operators in the field. I’d deploy with those operators to test whatever gadgetry or tactics we’d come up with. Meanwhile I’d fill in on some operational requirement, like forward air control. I’ve always felt an affinity with the fuckups and rejects who populate the entire spectrum of military activity. Some just hide it better than others.
What are your thoughts about movies such as American Sniper, Lone Survivor, and 0-Dark-Thirty? How did you try to differentiate your take on the SEALs from other works that celebrate or castigate them, or treat them as heroes, barbarians, or traumatized victims?
MACKIN: I purposefully didn’t watch any of those movies, nor read any of the books, because I didn’t want to think my way around them. Character-wise, I tried to stick with the guys who surprised me by being SEALS, those who were able to sidestep the everyday macho nonsense without losing an ounce of respect.
Who and what were you reading before you joined the military? Were you writing? Did you publish or attempt to publish anything? Were you reading and writing while in the military?
MACKIN: The first book I loved was “The Outsiders” by SE Hinton, which I read in the sixth grade. As part of our lesson my English teacher brought in a boom box and had us listen to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” start to finish. She then related that song to the plight of the Greasers. I’ve been hooked on reading and writing ever since.
While in Navy I read mostly nonfiction and I wrote in my journal. I published columns for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Believer (“Dispatches from Iraq” and “Nutrition is a Force Multiplier”, respectively) under the pseudonym Roland Thompson.
When, where, and why did you begin working on the stories in Bring Out the Dog? As you began to write, what attracted you to fiction, rather than memoir? Who or what helped most to develop you as a writer and reach your full potential? When did you realize the stories were getting good?
MACKIN: I started writing the book in 2011 after I transferred from DEVGRU to the Navy ROTC unit at the University of New Mexico. I gravitated toward fiction because it allowed me to better explore the anxiety that I’d felt during certain real-life situations. Those who really helped me were George Saunders, my friend and mentor since we met at a writing retreat in 1998; my editor Andy Ward, who gave me enough rope to hang myself; and Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker, who never failed to set the bar really high. I knew when a story was getting good when I’d derive energy from it and not the other way around.
What was the kernel of the first story that made it into the final selection, both in terms of its relation to things that happened in real life and when you began to write about it? Which story in Bring Out the Dog was hardest to write and why?
MACKIN: We lost a dog on the first night of my second deployment to Afghanistan. The circumstances behind that loss and its fallout informed Great Circle Route Westward Through Perpetual Night. The cat-head shaped licorice and the seven-foot tall Dutchman, both featured in Kattekoppen, were real. I wrote The Lost Troop over a long weekend in April of 2017. Otherwise every story took forever to finish, with lots of iterations and getting stuck. The hardest story to write didn’t make it into the book.
One of the recurring characters in your story is Hal, the SEAL team chief who expresses very strong ideas about tactical competence, unit discipline, and team-culture fit. What is complicated about Hal, what is simple, what is ambiguous, and what is problematic?
MACKIN: Hal is a combo of five or six real guys, named after the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. What makes him complicated/ambiguous is his love for his men versus his love of the war. What makes him problematic is his ego. The only simple thing about Hal is his mullet.
Many Bring Out the Dog stories describe a new team member or potential new member striving for membership and acceptance. What attracts you to this type of story?
MACKIN: It wasn’t so much an attraction as a default. Aside from providing built-in conflict, that striver was me.
From “Great Circle Route Westward Through Perpetual Night”:
“The stars were so bright we could have gone unaided. Still, night vision afforded certain advantages. I saw ice crystals trailing off the drone’s wingtips, meteor shower in the ionosphere, plasma connecting unnamed constellations. Down in the valley I observed wind, not just playing on the corn, but the actual movement of air in evergreen loops. The sky was jade, the faraway mountains aluminum, the river like something you’d discover out the window of a time machine.”
What is the story of writing this paragraph (which I chose almost at random)? What’s the real-life origin? What’s the literary genesis?
MACKIN: The real-life origin was me stopping to look through my goggles while on patrol. The literary genesis, I’d say, occurred in the space between my eye and the night vision screen, or reality and its projected image, how those things were different but also the same.
What feedback about Bring Out the Doghave you received from members of the SEAL community? Are you worried that it might not be well received?
MACKIN: Most guys say they like it, but I think they’re lying. I had to stop worrying about it or I would’ve gone insane.
Check out an excerpt from Mackin’s Bring Out the Dog Here and Buy it Here
New Fiction: The Lost Troop by Will Mackin
We had a dry spell in Logar. It was December and the weather was dog shit, so a degree of slowness was expected. But this went beyond slowness. It was like peace had broken out and nobody’d told us. Nights we’d meet in the ops hut for the mission brief. We’d tune the flat screens to the drones—over Ghazni, Orgun, and Khost—only to find all three orbiting within the same cloud. We’d listen to static on the UHF. We’d stare at phones that never rang. We could have left it all behind, walked off the outpost into the desert, never to be seen again. We could have created the Legend of the Lost Troop. Instead, we chose some place where we imagined the enemy might be hiding—a compound on the banks of the Helmand River, a brake shop in downtown Marjah, a cave high in the Hindu Kush mountains—and we ventured out there, hoping for a fight.
I thought of the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, who, when their island fell to the Americans, didn’t know that it had fallen. Who, not long after, didn’t hear that A-bombs had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that their emperor had admitted defeat. Those soldiers hid in tunnels, on Iwo, for weeks after the war was over. For months, even. For them, the fight continued in those dark and narrow spaces, until they ran out of food. Until they drank the last of their water. Until, absent the means and/or the will to take their own lives, they climbed out of ratholes into the sun, to wander warm fields of lava rock in surrender.
I wondered if, one night, we’d drop out of the starry sky in our blacked-out helicopters and land near a walled compound in the desert. We’d run toward that compound with the rotor wash at our backs, through the dust cloud that had been kicked up by our arrival and out the other side. Through a crooked archway in the compound’s outer wall, we’d enter the courtyard. And there, among the fig trees and goats, we’d find an American tourist with a camera slung around his neck. Having served his time in Afghanistan, our fellow American had gone home, fallen in love, got married, and had the two bow-haired daughters now hiding behind his legs. Maybe he’d wanted his girls to see how brightly the stars shone in the desert. Maybe he’d wanted to share with them all the strange places the Army had sent him, way back when. I imagined that he’d look over at us and then say, with understanding and remorse, “Dudes, war’s over.”
But, as far as we knew, it wasn’t. Therefore, we met in the ops hut every night at eight. In the absence of new intelligence, we’d review old intelligence. We’d double-check dead ends and reexamine cold cases. Finding nothing mission-worthy, Hal, our troop chief, would open the floor to suggestions. It’d be quiet for a while, as everyone thought.
“Come on,” Hal would say.
He’d be standing in the middle of the room. We’d be sitting on plywood tables, balancing on busted swivel chairs, leaning against the thin walls. The drones, orbiting inside moonlit cumulonimbi, would beam their emerald visions back to us. Lightning would strike twenty miles away and the UHF would crackle. I, for one, didn’t have any good ideas to offer.
One night, Digger spoke up: “Who remembers that graveyard decorated like a used-car lot, out in Khost?”
I raised my hand, along with a few others.
“I think we might need to go back there,” Digger said.
The graveyard in question was on the northern rim of a dusty crater. We’d patrolled just to the south of it, a few weeks prior, on an easterly course. The “used-car lot” decorations were plastic strands of multicolored pennants. One end of each strand was tied high in an ash tree that stood at the center of the graveyard. The other ends were staked into the hard ground outside the circle of graves. The graves themselves were piles of stone, shaped like overturned rowboats. I couldn’t recall the name of our mission that night, its task and purpose, its outcome. But that graveyard stuck with me. I remembered the pennants snapping in the wind, dust parting around the graves like a current.
Digger, who’d been closer to the graveyard than I was, thought that the graves had looked suspicious. He thought they resembled old cellar doors—the type, I imagined, you’d find outside a farmhouse in Nebraska and run to from darkened fields as a tornado was bearing down. Digger postulated that at least one of those graves was made of fake stones.
“Styrofoam balls,” he suggested to us in the ops hut, “painted to look like stones, then glued to a plywood sheet.” Digger though that, if we sneaked into that graveyard and pulled open that hypothetical door, we might discover a Taliban nerve center, a bomb factory, or an armory. Digger had no idea what could be down there, but he’d got a weird feeling walking past that graveyard that night.
“Good enough for me,” Hal said. “Let’s make it happen.”
We rode our helicopters—two dual-rotor, minigun-equipped MH-47s—northeast from Logar. We sat in mesh jump seats, across from one another, roughly ten per side. The MH-47, at altitude, stabilized like a swaying hammock. Lube, dripping from the crankcase, smelled like bong water. Beyond the open ramp at the back end of the tubular cargo bay, we watched the night pass by like the scenery in an old movie.
The 47s dropped us off in a dry riverbed, three miles east of the graveyard. We patrolled westward under heavy clouds. The clouds carried a powerful static charge, while the earth remained neutral. Sparkling dust hovered, and through night vision I saw my brothers, walking with me, as concentrations of this dust. All I heard, as we walked, was my own breathing.
We connected with the crater’s easternmost point, then walked in a counterclockwise direction along its rim until we reached the graveyard. We found the pennants torn and tattered, the ash tree diseased, the graves crooked. None of the stones were made of Styrofoam. Not one of the graves was an elaborately disguised entrance to a nefarious subterranean lair. Though, upon closer inspection, I noticed that the dust that I’d remembered parting around the graves, like a current, actually funnelled into the spaces between the stones. In fact, it seemed to be getting sucked into those spaces, as though there were some sort of void below the graves, which lent a measure of credence to Digger’s theory.
From the top of one grave, I selected a smooth, round stone, about the size of a shot-put ball, and I heaved it into the crater.
Joe, our interpreter, was right there to scold me. “I would expect such disrespectful behavior from the Taliban,” he said, “but not from you.”
Joe was Afghani. His real name was Jamaluddein. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1980, he’d escaped to the U.K. with his parents; he was twelve years old at the time. Now, as a middle-aged man, he’d returned to help save his country from ruin. He wore armor on missions, but he carried no weapons. His interpretations of our enemy’s muttered words were always clear and precise. He had a bad habit of walking two steps behind me on patrol and closing that distance whenever we made contact with the enemy. Thus, I’d seen conflagrations reflected in the smudged lenses of Joe’s glasses. I’d heard him whisper prayers between sporadic detonations. His voice, with its derived British accent and perpetual tone of disappointment, exactly matched that of my beleaguered conscience.
So I jumped into the crater after the stone. I found it at the end of a long, concave groove in the dust. Turning toward the crater’s rim, I saw my boot prints in the dust, descending the slope, each as perfect as Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. On my way back up to the graveyard, I was careful not to disturb those tracks, or the flawless groove that had been carved by the stone. I wanted these things to remain, I suppose, in the event that an asteroid should slam into the planet, sloughing away the atmosphere, boiling the seas, and instantly ending life on earth. Our troop—asphyxiated, desiccated, frozen—would lie scattered about the graveyard, preserved in the seamless void of space forever, or at least until other intelligent beings came along and discovered us. Perhaps because those beings existed as thin bars of blue light, incapable of offensive or defensive action, they’d puzzle over our armor, our rifles, our grenades. They’d wonder, especially, why we’d worn such things to a graveyard. There would be no mystery, however, regarding the boot prints in the crater, since they’d know, from the boots still on my feet, that I was the one who’d left them. Furthermore, they’d deduce, from the groove, that I’d descended into the crater after a stone. Only one particular stone could’ve cut that groove. And they might find it, among a thousand others, right where I’d returned it, atop the grave, just moments before the asteroid struck the earth. But none of that would explain why the stone had been in the crater in the first place. “Did one of them throw it?” the curious bars of blue light might ask themselves.
she be all tired.
she be like a flattened house shoe
she be full of compunction
she be remembering what was said.
she be told what she deserves.
she be believing everybody.
she be weepin’ in the bathtub
she be like her momma,
she be lying.
she be saying it’s the arthritis
she be talking like it ain’t her head
she be actin’ like hurt don’t bother her.
she be actin’ like she foolin’ somebody.
she be foolin’ no damn body.
she be scattered.
she be slidin’ across marbles.
she be grabbin’ onto nothin
she be almost breakin’ her wrists.
she be lying on the floor
she be holdin’ her stomach
she be trying not to vomit soggy cake
she be wishin’ she ate almonds instead.
she be losin’.
she be wantin’ rest.
she be told she ain’t gettin’ shit she want
and she be still wantin’ shit.
Annibale Caracci, circa 1580s.
juanita
juanita put on her tap shoes and danced in her kitchen,
in her living room, she composed. and into her gilded bathroom
mirror, she gave monologues before powering on
her home recorder that, in those days, weighed a sailor’s duffel bag.
debuted films at thanksgiving, after feeding a houseful. she, in a
form-fitting black dress made of sturdy garbage bags.
“i am more than wife, mother of ten, church organist.”
then, she started with captain and tennille, followed by neil diamond.
nieces, nephews elated. her children feigned embarrassment,
but devotees, nonetheless.
a woman from disbanded and reshuffled peoples. owned by a
garden variety, bearing traces of many countries,
the dominant, the birthplace of black magic.
what might have been if they hadn’t
made us afraid of our gods? she could have
been another brooklyn starlet, sing stormy
weather like lena horne in the movies. what if we harnessed
the power of our goddesses?
you favor her. nearsighted. prone to excessive
pounds in mid-life, obsessed with communing
with the dead. her grandfather, angel, the cuban cigar maker,
joined in the chorus of guantanamera, and when she strummed
like memphis minnie, nada, rocked back and forth
the way grandmothers do when they are stirred.
all principle and heart–that one. sung time in a bottle with sam, her second husband.
sam on guitar, juanita at piano. time was
a real question for those graying lovers.
never enough time for a woman
whose first husband tried to reduce her
like soup stock. being mad took more time
than she could give. so she produced.
wrote about an urgency for peace,
though we were not the ones who begged for war
but in 1984 she scribbled in “jesse.” argued
about the virtues of speaking one’s mind
to punks who called it a wasted vote.
you hold onto the ways that you might be like
juanita, though you know you are dot’s child.
in a family large enough populate three small towns. you
were never one to be known in these townships. not like aunty,
who mailed everyone copies of her latest records,
performed at all family gatherings, taught whosoever will how to play.
when there are so many, there are so many to lose.
juanita weeped the longest over all bodies–ah, yes,
another way you are like her. your spirit, too, is made
of blown glass. at the last burial before her own,
she warned those within the sound of her voice that she was tired.
you were young but old enough to know the weight of words.
juanita is a starlet. it is time for another moment under glaring lights.
it is quiet on the set, a recreation of 1943. she is small-wasted again,
and in high heels. she looks directly into the camera, then up,
when studio rain hits her face.
hot tea
precious one, emancipate your feet. stretch
your soles from here to far from here,
across acres of african moons.
young dignitary, miles of highway
know the impression of your shoe
by heart. it is tender at your core.
the injured hum their names in
your ear like seraphim. faces soaked
up by the cortex for sight cannot
be unseen like the ground where
they last stood cannot not absorb
a life poured out. this agony, you
haul with all subtle movements
and speak at movements of
national proportions. in squares,
your voice expands beyond
itself and crescendos into a whispers.
hot chamomile with lemon and honey
will help. i have prepared this for you.
sit as we remember our future. rest
until you are well again. and you
will be well again to move us further.
tony
this father’s son is loved not only by this father
but by the holy angels too, and by a few demons
who step to him on the street to give him what-up
jabs on the shoulder. i do not mean to compare
this father’s son to the son of the father, but that is
what this father’s son had been to sisters.
one came to him at night spooked by utterances
in her own head. one saved for him her best jokes.
another came when broken by a boy. the last placed her
report cards on the table just before he sat down to eat.
all waited for his perfect response, better than imagined.
to sisters, this father’s son was close to the son of the father
when this father/a daddy departed. not to be with the father,
but to be with a woman he met in night school.
to sisters, the one who gabs with the unseen, the formerly broken,
now zealot, the first to die, a comedian and especially, the last,
the critic of religious patriarchy, who loved showing off
her report card, this father’s son, a shepherd. for that moment
in time, sisters, not yet knowing what else they could be, were lamb.
inflammation
1.
something almost remembered
then, pushed away for a later date
only to finds its way into the body, dawdle there
and hope to be recognized, assessed, sifted through
for what good it carries, then separated from its waste.
if left alone for too long it splinters
into the convolution gray matter
latching onto cells weakening them
sometimes it arrives as a simple question
while listening to gossip radio, while not
wanting to be bothered by anything too
onerous like separating sewage from my
cells while driving home from a hard-day’s work
the words link together and i remove them
like a chain from the bottom of my belly,
straight out of my mouth—
“what do i do with the men?”
2.
i know what the question means.
you get rid of them. i said “rid” motherfucker, rid of you. praise be to–
well, not all of them, of course.
i love daddy. he was forty when I was born.
when i turned forty i was the adult daughter.
tenacious. never falling apart for too long, anyway
since enacting my three day rule
three days to be dumbfounded, three
days to panic, three days to flounder
full recovery occurs on the fourth day.
too goddamn much to do to flounder four whole days.
so by the fourth day I am fortified,
and so daddy shares with
one part regret, one part pride
in his accomplishments of bedding women
sometimes a handful in one weekend. some
served with him on neighborhood watch. most
were the mothers of the pta, he was president, and
a poor man with classical tones resounding from his
long,, thick cords; like blues from a cello
and, women moved to the sound of him.
bed became a verb that broke my mother.
but she’s dead now, so what does it matter. daddy’s nearly ninety.
growing older provides perspective. distance
dilutes notions about what to do with the men.
3.
the question is absurd.
4.
there were four of us girls. i was the baby.
the others had me my by eight, ten, and eleven
years so i benefitted from my sisters’ skill in hair braiding
and designing clothes. my favorite was the red jumpsuit with
shoulder ruffles. i looked like a five year old disco queen
the day i wore it for my birthday. one sister picked my hair out.
i do not blame any of them for their lack of warning
about life in a girl’s body; the ownership some feel they have.
to take without permission. they never spoke of rape by the
neighbor or by nana’s boyfriend. “it’s just the way it was,” one sister
told me. “it was our job to be okay.”
I do not want to answer. I’m done being a traitor
It is difficult to defend this place where I enter the story.
I am middle aged, not a helpless girl.
real women grow up and care for the most devastated among us
and I already decided a long time ago that I would be the giver
not the taker of care. not the interminably wounded
and, I love a woman so what does any of this matter to an old dyke like me?
feminine discomfort is an act of treason.
5.
I know the forces against my man-child–
6.
the one long gone was the easiest of all.
a stack of papers, a hearing or two, the crack of a gavel
and it was done. i did not wish a brother dead.
and every day, i am reminded, i forgive him and
every day i am reminded, i am the one who is sorry.
7.
i have chosen the path of the giver.
Shh…i will only say this once. do not repeat this to anyone. the leading cause of death for
young black women between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five is intimate partner
violence. Four times greater for black than it is for white. The consequences for
perpetrators of intimate violence is less when the victim is black than when she is white. shh… i will only say this twice. the leading cause of death for young black women between
the ages of fifteen and thirty-five is intimate partner violence. one last time, i will say, the
leading cause of death for young black women between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five is
intimate–
Brie Golec trans woman of color stabbed by her father,
Yazmin Vash Payne trans woman of color stabbed by her boyfriend,
Ty Underwood trans woman of color shot by her boyfriend
within days of each other—
debbie and i once made soup out of dirt and rain.
as teens, she had ramell. i had an on again,
off again, thing with jesus. between debbie and ramell,
were ramell’s hands that behaved any which way they pleased
especially when clenched into spherical solids.
my hands secured notes in white envelopes.
“god loves you,” my hands told the pen to tell the paper
to tell debbie. no wonder debbie cut her eyes at me
whispered loud enough for me to hear her talk about my
whack old lady clothes to the other girls. ramell and i both lost
the battle against our powerless hands. i was outcasted.
ramell and debbie made a baby.
when debbie’s little brother became a teen his hand held heavy
steel to the face of his pretty boo across the street. when the steel
exploded with one motion of a rogue finger little brother’s hand
brought the steel to his own face. however, that time the rogue finger
refused. it triggered the same dumb ass question.
long before any documents were filed, i recognized
the man i married had hands like ramell,
but the righteous knows what’s up.
race matters. gender belongs to somebody else.
i know men who want to reclaim their innocence.
deemed guilty without due process. I will speak their cause,
but speaking mine would perhaps pose a conflict of interest as
the earth collapses between us.
8.
the body becomes inflamed in the protection
of itself swelling occurs while the question is held in the nerves.
i sit on the floor of my bedroom and in four square breathing
i release the question back out into the air to revisit at a later date
man-child barely knocks. i struggle to my feet. open the door.
taller than me, he lowers his head to my shoulder. “goodnight mom,”
he says. n four counts, i release the question and hold him.
i hold him as the question finds its way back into my body.
demands to be answered demands to be answered demands to be answered demands to be answered demands to be answered demands to be–shhh…. do not repeat this to anyone.
New Poetry by Liam Corley
A VETERAN OBSERVES THE REPUBLIC AND REMEMBERS GINSBERG
Claes Moeyaert. Sacrifice of Jeroboam, 1641.
America, I’ve given you all, and now I’m less than one percent.
America, fourteen-point-six-seven-five years of service I can’t characterize as other than honorable, three hundred ninety-one days pounding dirt in other people’s countries, and one hundred seventeen sleepless nights per annum in perpetuity, September 11, 2017.
America, I’m willing to renegotiate our social contract. I won’t complain about the clean bill of health charged against me by the V.A., and you can stop involuntarily mobilizing memes of my demise in support of indecent campaigns. America, believe me when I say I’m not dead broke, I ain’t so straight, I’m not all white, and I don’t love hate.
America, when will you realize we are peopled with two-and-a-half times more African Americans than veterans, discounting three million souls in both tribes? Here I incorporate them all, the ones hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, survivors whose lives matter, because we both know the wary grief of looking at a uniform we paid for and wondering whom the man beneath has sworn to protect and defend.
America, into this veteran poem I will take all the graduates of Columbine and Sandy Hook, the ones who lived after having no answers for the warm muzzle of a gun, and their teachers, especially the ones who ran toward shots. The hall of the American Legion will overflow with such heroes, streaming like the blessed dead of Fort Hood and Chattanooga across the Styx in Charon’s commandeered craft, the open door of welcome forced, as always, by warriors still living.
America, let’s rent a cherry picker to take down the F in the V.F.W. sign, let what is removed drop horribly in the pail. Police will gather in their surplus riot gear and nod in understanding fashion, their years of service trailing them like a sentence, arming them with arcane questions of whether civilians we protected yesterday will kill us today. America, out of the sands of Kandahar and Ramadi, I go with them too.
Furthermore, America, in this election season, I go with righteous immigrants and refugees, fellow sufferers of long journeys in inhumane transports that leave them in permanent pain. O, my desperate ones, border-crossers of unwilling countries, you who pay taxes of sweat and fear, you are not alien to me, or my thirty-five thousand brother and sister dreamers in green and khaki fighting for something that isn’t wholly ours in dangerous places where we simply do our jobs.
America, when will you give Cyber Purple Hearts to all who have had their lives taken out of your senile, digital grip, starting with the twenty-four million whose secrets you’ve let slip into China’s voracious panda pocket? We shall update and tweet ourselves feverish with the chant, “Uncle Sam is my Big Brother” in protest of all those Xis and Putins and Snowdens and Kims and Transnational Criminal Elements stealing our binary essence. I’m not joking, America: I foresee the day when every iPhone will be issued with a trauma kit, every laptop with a liability release for unauthorized remote access.
O America, my love, my burial plot, all this I will put in a phantom poem, my own republic, for you to receive, a sea bag of sights unseen to tumble down the ramp of a decommissioned C-130, this empty box, this absent limb.
New Memoir by Krystal A. Sital: SECRETS WE KEPT
We are of Trinidad—my grandmother, my mother, and I.
Our island is located in the Lesser Antilles of paradise, a dot on the map that is often forgotten. It like ah drop ah oil, some say, as doh somebody forget to wipe it ahwey.
The bodies of water that seep into the island are as much a part of the island’s identity as they are a part of ours, and everywhere we have come to settle after abandoning home has been with the proximity of the seaside in mind. Perhaps the openness of the sea soothes the inner turmoil of us island women, or perhaps it shows the island’s inability to contain us.
While attending school in Trinidad—hwome, as we will call it for the rest of our lives, though we are all now settled in America—we’re taught how Christopher Columbus discovered it in 1498. That the Carib and Arawak tribes were indigenous didn’t stop historians from calling it a discovery. In conversation with Americans, I’ve heard my grandmother and mother draw the same facts from our elementary education, the same ones I mention to others today. Do you know why it’s called Trinidad? It’s because of the three hills along the southern coast of the island—Morne Derrick, Gros Morne, and Guaya Hill. When Columbus first spotted the land on July 31 in 1498 he was inspired to name it after the three hills—La Trinidad, the Trinity. These ternate hills that peak above the clouds in mottled greens, picturesque, majestic, form a wall that breaks the patterns of the most ferocious hurricanes, a natural protection that no other island in the Caribbean owns. The Trinity represents our most powerful guardians.
Rising with elegance along the bluffs, the supple branches of immortelle trees stretch wide, their leaves on fire against the backdrop of a perfect Caribbean sky. Native to Venezuela, just off the coast of Trinidad, these mountain trees shine emerald all year round in their natural habitat. Once they were brought to Trinidad to cast shade over the cocoa plantations in the 19th century, they too, like all else touched by the islands, changed. Their roots burrowed deep, and they exchanged their greenery for fire petals that flicker orange and red along the regions of Trinidad and Tobago. Sown into the very history of the terrain, we choose what of the island we will share with others, and so the beak of a hummingbird dipping into the beaded nectar of an immortelle flower creates the ambiance for the stories we choose to tell. And so, like the fingers of a hand skimming the water of a glassy tide pool, you touch but the surface.
What we never say is how historians call the naming of Trinidad a “historical hoax.” Columbus had every intention of baptizing the next land he found La Trinidad. Its having three hills was either mere coincidence or a miracle. It depends on how one chooses to tell the story.
Most people shake their heads in confusion when we tell them where we’re from. Where? they ask. Where exactly is that? And sometimes those who have a vague familiarity with the Caribbean will say, I thought everyone there was black.
On our islands you will find descendants of the Carib and Arawak tribes, Europeans, Venezuelans, Chinese, Syrians, French, Portuguese, and Lebanese, but of them all, the two largest groups by far are East Indians and Africans. Centuries before Trinidad became a British colony, before Sir Walter Raleigh discovered the natural Pitch Lake that gleamed the blackest blue along spools of water on Trinidad’s knee, before Columbus spotted the island, Amerindians called it home. They called it Ieri— Land of the Hummingbird. But when Columbus sailed upon them, these people were captured, enslaved, and littered along the coasts of other Caribbean islands, forced to work for Spain.
Our island changed hands, and when the British captured it from Spain, they brought enslaved Africans to work the leafy grounds of the sugar plantations. This was the only group of people to exist on the island as slaves, and when slavery was abolished in England, the wealthy landowners in Trinidad then brought indentured laborers from India to replace the Africans on the plantations.
At least we geh pay, the Indians now say, dem niggas an dem come as slave. They know the history but continue to etch in these lines drawn for them. They perpetuate a war, the East Indians and Africans, one group thinking they are better than the other, East Indian children rhyming in the schoolyard, Nigga nigga come foh roti, all de roti done, when de coolie raise e gun, all de nigga run. And Africans taunting, Eenie meenie miney mo, ketch ah coolie by e toe, when e ready let im go, eenie meenie miney mo.
And so this enmity between Africans and Indians led them, and others, to maintain the perceived purity of their bloodlines, further carving hatred into our islands’ history. Interracial couples and their multiracial children are still shunned as they were in my mother’s childhood and my grandmother’s. The blended are labeled mulatto, dougla, cocopanyol. These words are hissed and spat at my family: my grandmother is mixed, my Indian grandfather is not.
The shorelines of the islands are still unmarred by cement skyscrapers, but throngs of tourists trample lands natives can no longer afford, and boardwalks, chlorinated pools, and lobbies adorned with plastic plants have been cropping up with the image of paradise being sold.
But the republic of Trinidad and Tobago is where coconut trees rise out of the land, their backs braced against the breezes, spines curved into C’s all along the shores, and coconut husks ripped from their mother trees dot the sand on every coast.
Our stories are rooted in the Caribbean, our histories woven into its bougainvillea trellises with their paper-thin petals; the lone road winding round and round the mountain like a serpent strangling a tree, coiling up and down again to the virgin beaches untouched by hotels and tourists, crowds, and money; the foliage so dense and green it’s a prismatic shade of malachite, almost as though the vegetation itself is choking the life out of the island. This is a place where the intoxicating aroma of curry drapes itself around you in layers; where bake and shark sandwiches are fried on the beach; where the main ingredient for every dish is the heady bandanya, our word for culantro—no, not cilantro, it is much stronger than that. Here, people devour every part of every animal from the eyeballs to the guts and lick their fingers and pat their bellies when they are through.
The island can be traversed in a day, less than that if you know what you’re doing. A mere ten degrees north of the equator, it is a place of heat so intense it can drive a person insane, and yet the waves curling against the seashore deep in the valleys between mountains and the luminous rivers that seem to fall from the sky itself can quench that same person’s soul for eternity.
Trinidad is our fears and our loves. There we discovered our beings, we dug deep and planted our roots assuming we would never leave, sucking on the armored cascadura with its silver-plaited shell, devouring the sweet flesh beneath, the only fish the legend says ties you to the land forevermore, smacking our lips when we were done. We never thought we would have to leave this place, since our mothers and fathers planted our placentas beneath mango and plum, pomegranate and coconut trees.
But in the end we choose to flee.
We leave. We do. With no intention of turning back, we embrace America for everything Trinidad was not.
You Leave for Afghanistan
If I’m writing this, it means I can’t sleep and that the rain outside my window drops blindly in the dark.
The crops need it, the cashier told me earlier, ringing me up for a pint of milk, making small talk, making change.
And now the tipped carton has marred the pages on my too-small desk. I’m trying not to make too much of it—
this mess, the disasters my life and pages gather. I’m trying to be kinder to myself, more forgiving.
Outside, a leopard moth lands on the screen, shudders to dry its wings. One touch from my finger would strip
the powdered coating that allows it to fly in rain. I wish it might have been so easy to keep you
from boarding the plane that took you to war. In the predawn, my neighbors still asleep, I am the only one
to hear the garbage truck grind to a stop, its brakes the sound of an animal braying.
The rain has stopped, too. I look over the smudged papers on my desk. Nothing important has been lost.
When you come home safely to me in six months, we will be able to say, nothing important has been lost.
You Send Very Little News
You don’t know all the time I’m killin’. I watch it pass ‘til nothing’s left . . . I let my memory carry on. —Buffalo Clover, “15 Reasons”
I try to imagine where you live now, try to read beyond what operational security allows.
You say it’s dirty there and hot. There’s sand everywhere. You have a French press for coffee.
Here, I keep things green for you—lie in the fresh grass with the dog until we no longer smell like walls,
make entire meals out of honey and peaches. I choose fields in Connecticut that remind me of the farm,
stare up at the now goatless clouds, imagine that the distant bird I see is the shape of the plane that will bring you home.
They Lie Who Don’t Admit Despair
I’m trying not to think about you,
but when this combine rocks and rolls,
it shakes my mind and shakes my body,
the way your leaving shook my soul. —Chris Knight, “Here Comes the Rain”
I’ve had some dark moments
while you’ve been gone. Mostly I’ve been okay, having made up my bullheaded mind to just get through it. But last night you said that in a few weeks you will ask me to stop sending mail, because you are that close to coming home. And I felt a lightness I haven’t known since meeting you. From that first day, this absence weighed on us. When you return, we will be together for the first time without the threat of imminent departure.
I imagine you this morning with warm flatbread, steaming coffee. I imagine you smiling. I’m smiling, too, listening to the house creak. Imagining you here.
You Call from the Airport to Say You Are Home
When we began, our hummingbird bodies did a thousand anxious pirouettes midair, dazzled and unfazed by the sour nectar we had to drink at end of season.
You are back now, and we will do it all again, but with sweetness. All the beauty of bodies in love. How generous is war to give us two beginnings.
At the Harbor Lights Motel After You Return
The fish aren’t biting on Key Largo
the morning we spend together
after you return. You nap all day,
sheets spiraled like a carapace
around your torso and legs.
Next to you in bed, I touch your head,
stroke the hair you’ve grown long,
and ask what it was like over there.
But you pull the blankets higher
and turn away to face the wall.
Hours later, I call to you from the doorway
to show you a snapper on my line. You dress,
find me on the dock where we drink beer
as the sun slumps behind the palms.
You sleep through the night, and in the morning,
before you leave for a dive on a coral reef,
you tell me that turtles sleep like humans do—
you’ve seen them at night tucked into the nooks
of wrecks, heads withdrawn into shells;
you’ve seen their eyes blink open in the beam
of your dive light; you’ve even seen one wake
and swim away when a fish fin came too close. They have nerve endings there, you tell me. They can feel when something touches their shell.
When you return from the reef, I ask you
again how it was over there, and this time
you begin to tell me what you can.
The Persistence of Measurement
There’ll be a thousand miles between us when I pass the border guard. Is that thunder in the distance, or just the breaking of my heart? —Chris Knight, “Here Comes the Rain”
The morning he leaves me, my lover buries a lamb—a runt who’d only lived a few days— on a hill of the Tennessee farm where we met.
Does he think, as he digs the grave, as he presses his face to the cold wool to say goodbye, of the last time he caressed my hair or pressed his body against mine? Or are his thoughts already in Memphis, with her?
I wouldn’t know. I was not given the dignity of a burial, just an email sent after he’d been drinking, blaming me for asking too many questions, asking too much of him, for failing to give him space.
In Connecticut, winter refuses to relent. It is still the season of waiting. I look out the window of the room where I waited faithfully for half a year, where I wrote him daily. The sky is cruel: clouds still take the shape of farm animals, and birds become the plane that never brought him home to me.
Part of me will always be waiting for the return of the man I met in summer, before the deployment changed him. But that man is thousands of miles away. He will always be thousands of miles away.
An Interview with Krystal A. Sital, Author of SECRETS WE KEPT
In her debut memoir, Krystal A. Sital paints a vivid picture of life in Trinidad, which to any tourist’s eyes must seem like something of a paradise. Blue-green waters, intersected by rapid streams and jungle vegetation: the inhabitants of Trinidad are surrounded by the call of the Caribbean filled with carnivals, rum, calypso, and soca music.
For the people born and raised in this island paradise, of course life is littered with far more harsh realities. Extreme poverty, land unsuitable for farming or sustaining life, lack of education or opportunity, a caste system determined by money, race, ethnicity, religion, sex, and other accidents of birth.
The book begins as Krystal and her family, now living in the United States, learn that her grandfather, Shiva Singh, has suffered from a life threatening brain aneurism. As the reality of his condition grows more critical, Krystal is confused by her grandmother’s reluctance to immediately approve of the suggested procedures recommended for his survival. In contrast, Krystal’s mother, Arya, the daughter of Shiva, seems devoted to him and sits day and night by his side.
As the entire family grows more weary and distraught over the multiple surgeries and the harsh reality that Shiva will never fully return to normal, Krystal wants to know why her mother and grandmother have such wildly divergent emotions for him. One evening, she finds a way to question her mother.
Secrets We Kept is the story Krystal draws out in her gentle interviews with her mother and grandmother. The story is brutal and nuanced and unfortunately, timely. In the first pages, I am immediately reminded of the Rob Porter domestic abuse scandal in the White House, the #metoo movement, and even my own family’s history we avoid thinking and speaking about—those times when our father beat the crap out of our mother and us, and how that treatment made life and love of him so confusing.
Q: Did you have any idea that the release of your first memoir would come at a time when the topics it addresses would make it so political? Even if that timing wasn’t taken into consideration, there must be some feeling that it lands when conversations around it bring it into a political space. How does that make you feel? What if any reaction have you had from it in this caustic political time?
Krystal: It’s both fortunate and unfortunate that this book comes out during such a politically charged time. Unfortunate because, as human beings, we are still viciously fighting about things like immigration, domestic abuse, and women’s rights and health; and fortunate because since there is still so much silence and inequality, a book like this helps sharpen the focus on important discussions and hopefully laws around these topics.
Now looking at it as a work of art in this particular political sphere is maddening. Arts and humanities are being obliterated across the US and so it makes it extremely difficult for books that deal with issues like violence against women and children, immigration, colonialism, race, and class to make it into the hands of the right people. The political climate we’re caught up in right now is detrimental to the arts from every angle and so it’s important we all fight for it. Art, at its most micro level, is a voice being heard and we need to make sure we never squelch that.
Q: When I think of a Caribbean island, I imagine the beauty as a place to go to as an escape from the harshness of everyday life. That picture might serve as somewhat of a metaphor for the relationships your mother and grandmother lived. Strong, beautiful women who make choices they think will most help them escape the poverty of their circumstance, but instead land them in ugliness they cannot escape. Is that an accurate way of seeing this story?
Krystal: That’s such a lovely insight! Can I use that as though I’d planned it the entire time? I’m just kidding. It’s very interesting hearing and reading how others interact with the characters and the islands, what readers bring to the table and what they thought my intent was.
Having lived in America now for more than half my life, I see how people here view the Caribbean. From here it is this place of intense beauty, a place you want to escape to, not from. And Trinidad is a beautiful island, the kind of beauty that absolutely takes your breath away, the colors so vibrant you wonder if what you’re seeing is actually real. But the islands—both Trinidad and Tobago—are so much more than that and so I wanted to use the island as both a character and a backdrop. While divine in its appearance, here was this island where horrific things happened and these horrific things were never spoken about except when passed from mother to daughter, this cycle of storytelling that’s never been broken but also never recorded. And I think that’s what bothered me the most about this—is that the stories of women by women were always lost in the Caribbean while men were the ones who dominated and dictated history and we, as women, didn’t take our rightful place in the history of the Caribbean, of Trinidad and Tobago.
Questions like this is so fantastic for a classroom setting because it explores a body of work on multiple levels. My students and I often discuss the reader’s interpretation of literature versus the authorial intent. How you manage those two becomes a very individual choice but I strive to find some kind of harmony there when I read books, balancing the author’s purpose with my own response and history as a reader.
Q: Some would read this story as a cautionary tale about the violence of men and yet, in the second to the last sentence in the acknowledgements of your memoir, you write; “My beautiful partner, my husband, Pawel Grzech, I love you. Thank you for creating a beautiful family with me.” That line makes me believe that you have been able to carve out a loving and respectful relationship with your husband which is so different from that of the older women in your life. How did their experiences help or hinder the family life you now have?
Krystal: I have indeed been able to find love; respectful, honorable, egalitarian love, and the person with whom I spend my life with is everything I’ve said. While people often tell us we’re lucky, I don’t think luck has anything to do with it. I am with him for many reasons—too many to ever list—but my grandmother’s and mother’s stories played a vital role in my decision when I chose my life partner. Their tales were, as you’ve said—cautionary. As much as we were working together to write women into Caribbean history, their first instincts were to arm and warn me. My grandmother didn’t want to settle for what was prescribed for her, shunned to the outskirts of society, so she left and spent her life paying for her decision but she was able to make a choice, one that was completely hers and that is what she shared with her daughter. I won’t give anything away from the book but those moments where Arya bears witness to her mother time and time again, are isolated and incredibly important because those are the moments that shape Arya and influence the decisions she makes when choosing a husband and then later on as a mother.
I very much feel as though I owe these women and the women before them, my life. This book, a small gesture in the grand scheme of things, is to honor and thank them for helping me become who I am today and allowing me to have choices, to grow up in a space where I don’t feel forced into a decision because it’s the best one at the time. They’ve endured everything for me and while there are narratives and lives that follow unbreakable and inescapable cycles, they’ve worked their entire lives to make sure I’m outside of that. That kind of altruism is powerful.
Q: I grew up in a household where my father’s violence made loving him extremely complicated. After my parents divorced, they both became happier people, but it was difficult to square the man he became without remembering the man he was, especially since he never admitted the violent and terrifying world he had created. After hearing the stories, how would you describe the emotions you have for your grandfather and father now?
Krystal: Thank you for sharing that with me. I need to acknowledge your story because our voices and stories as women are often separate and though many of us hail from different cultures and places, when we come together, we realize how universal they also are.
My emotions for both men remain complicated. Even after writing this book and writing through some very difficult questions I found myself asking and attempting to answer, I’ve come to understand that we are not only shaped by our experiences but by that of our family members as well. That is something I would have vehemently disagreed with twelve years ago but now I bear the burden of inherited violence, history, and loss. At the same time, I’ve learned to step back and allow my mother and grandmother to narrate the experiences and relationships they’ve had with my father and grandfather. Those experiences have helped to mold me through their re-telling but cannot define or influence my thoughts completely. Just as I give them space to be, they must understand that as a being wholly separate from them, the same people we’ve known throughout our lives can be very different to each of us.
I feel like I need to say I love my father dearly. We have a wonderful relationship and a very unique bond, quite similar to the type of bond I have with my mother but that can’t come through in a book like this because in this book I am part historian, part daughter, part granddaughter, part storyteller (to name a few!), and there are only so many perspectives I was willing to take on. Our story—mine and my father’s—is for another time.
Q: Not only is this story about the highly charged domestic violence issue, it touches on the equally charged issue of immigration. By the end of the book, you ask your mother if she ever thinks she would live in Trinidad again. She answers with one word. Never. I know you wrote a piece that was published by the New York Times, When Agents Came Knocking. As an immigrant in the U.S. today, how does the current climate make you feel about the America?
Krystal: As an immigrant, I’m terrified! The US is not a very welcoming place right now and because I am a first-generation immigrant, I constantly feel as though I’m a part of several worlds which doesn’t help because I don’t feel completely anchored here. But then I remind myself that the people who are making immigrants feel this way are no more native to this land than I am. Sure many of them were born here but their history with this place is much more explosive than mine ever will be. They are the descendants of immigrants and it’s a fact that they keep forgetting. The only natives America has are the Native Americans. These two groups of people (one of which I am a part)—Native Americans and immigrants—are being attacked, murdered, mutilated, and forgotten. The thunderstorm of immigration, as you so poetically put it, is something that should touch us all. What is happening in this country right now has happened in other parts of the world throughout history and the reason we study history is to understand, learn, and prevent, something we’re clearly not doing at the moment.
As someone who has lived here as an undocumented immigrant for a long time, I do feel a particular responsibility to others, especially to the DREAMERs. I could easily be them and they are frightened. Circumstances and political climates change but the fear of a child being left behind, a mother being ripped from her children, a father being torn from his family, remains the same. No one would want that for themselves regardless of how they came to be in that desperate situation so instead of carelessly throwing around blame, we need to stand by immigrants and Native Americans. As a race—the human race—we need to rediscover our humanity because I think we’re losing it.
Q: The cruelty of the violence is sometimes displayed as something through which the men experience pleasure. There are hidden smiles and other indications that these are not just bouts of temper. Have you come to any conclusions as to the source of this violence? Any opinions of what Trinidad or even the US can do to reduce or prevent such violence in men?
Krystal: I have some theories. My grandfather was a product of the time, culture, society, history and that’s not said to excuse him in any way. He was also mentally unstable. It’s just that no one was equipped with the language or skills to name it or treat it at the time. Acts of violence like beating your wife and children are things that are taught at home because children see their father or uncle or brother doing it. But my grandfather did it tenfold, with a grotesque intensity and satisfaction that no one should try to understand because then you run the risk of empathizing with his actions and his actions are and will always be wrong. He needed help and because of his status in the society he lived in and also the time, no one could offer that to him.
In Trinidad, the US, anywhere in the world, the only way to prevent or reduce violence is to always have a conversation about it. And that is definitely something I adore about the US—there is always open dialogue. Sometimes that dialogue can get a bit crazy and out of control but the freedom to have those conversations is always there. We need to provide a safe environment to address these conflicts and situations way before college. Women and gender study departments are crucial but they come too late in education. As a student who minored in that area my mind was blown when I realized that these things are talked about and studied. And now as a teacher of that as well, I can see my students feel the same way I did and I don’t want that for them.
The key is in the literature. Choosing engaging and important texts that speak to our students and their experiences is one of the best ways to tackle this issue of violence and I know I’m not alone when I say we need to change the way schools are structured right now—to move away from testing and toward critical thinking. A step in the right direction is to change the assigned reading materials. Get some more diversity for one. That’s always been lacking but also choosing books and texts that deal with the world we occupy. It’s one way but I am certain it will make an impact and a difference. I see it in my own classrooms every semester.
Q: All of the dialogue in this book is written in complete island dialect. While at first it helped set the flavor of the story, it also made it difficult at times to understand what was being said. In a space where we are often told to stay away from dialect, how did you come to the decision to handle the dialogue in this way? Did you receive any pushback from your editors?
Krystal: You’re actually the first person to say it was difficult to read at times. And your reaction is what I expected every time someone came into contact with my dialogue. I kept waiting for someone to object or try to change it but it never happened. In the meantime I studied Caribbean authors like Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Audre Lorde, Zadie Smith, Jamaica Kincaid, and Andrea Levy alongside African American authors like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston all of who paved the way for me to feel free when writing dialogue. I read and studied these authors and many more like them while at school and then I taught them to my own students. These writers teach us that our voices are important and they come in all different forms and should be celebrated.
I teach in the most diverse city in the US—Jersey City—so my classroom is a rainbow of faces, representative of my true America and I get to observe how my students react to language in these texts. They played a large role in helping me decide how much of it I wanted to use and where. For example, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God remains one of those books that changed my life from the language to the characters to the plot to the masterful storytelling. I accepted this as a fact until I taught the book years after reading it for the first time. Some students just couldn’t read it the way it was written so they turned to listening to it and even then couldn’t immerse themselves. I had to respect that this book and the way it was written was not for everyone. There were choices I would have to make about dialogue that would alienate some. In the end I wrote it the way I did because the most important thing was the voices of the women. I couldn’t claim to give voice to the voiceless if I didn’t allow the women to speak for themselves.
Q: Food plays an immense role in this story. Every major scene is laced with spices and flavors that stick to you in the same way the smells must conjure up so many memories for you. It also starkly illustrates how Indian and Hindu your family’s culture is, something many people probably don’t understand about Trinidad. I found myself wanting the recipes. How did food influence the writing of this story?
Krystal: Food makes the world go round! At least my world. My mother loves to cook. It’s like meditation to her and I understand this because she’s passed that on to me. If I’m in the kitchen cooking up a storm my husband will ask no questions until I’m all finished and then reap the benefits of whatever was bothering me.
People often bond over and around food. Enticing and intoxicating, food takes away inhibitions and once I understood this, I helped create this environment for my mother and grandmother so they could tell me their stories. This proved the most effective way for me to help them open up. And along the way, I learned tons of new recipes.
Now I find it very interesting that you say it’s definitively Indian. It’s true that a lot of the food is Indian because it’s just a fact of what they cooked but at the same time it isn’t. Trinidad’s cuisine, like many other places around the globe, is unique because cultures have come together to create something new and I was mindful of this. Many of the dishes I write about are the product of Indian, African, French, Spanish, English, etc. coming into contact in one place over time. Examining any one dish on the island from the way it is seasoned to the way it is prepared, then cooked, is fascinating because sometimes that one dish can have as many as five cultures coming into contact with one another.
As for the recipes, perhaps that’s a future project. Wink. Wink. (Though I’m not sure who I’m winking at).
Q: Are there any other questions I didn’t ask that you wish I had? Topics you would like to cover?
Krystal: You didn’t ask if I had any fun! Because while this was one hell of an emotional roller coaster ride, it was also so much fun. The characters you read about are people I created with so much care and they are people I hold close to my heart. As serious as this book is, it is also reflective of the life and desire and fun that exists in Trinidad and Tobago.
The wolves are restless this morning. Pacing the woods, huffing and murmuring. It’s not that they’re hungry; Rin fed them each four squirrels. No, it’s a clenching in the sky like a gathering fist. The wet heat pushing in on her temples.
Juney feels it, too, her head swaying, fingers splayed. She is sitting on the wooden floor of their kitchen, face raised, rocking and rocking in that way she has. Hair pale as a midday moon, eyes wide and white-blue.
“It smells sticky outside, Mommy. It smells wrong,” she says in her clear, direct voice, no hint of a whine. Soldiers don’t whine. And Juney is the daughter of soldiers.
“Nothing’s wrong, little bean. Maybe we’ll get a summer storm, that’s all. Come, eat.”
Juney is nine years old, the age of curiosity and delight before self-doubt clouds the soul. Fine hair in a braid to her waist. Bright face, wide at the temples, tapering to a nip of a chin. Delicate limbs, skinny but strong.
She lifts herself off the floor and wafts over to the kitchen table, a polished wooden plank the size of a door, where she feels for her usual chair and settles into it with the grace of a drifting leaf. Starting up one of her hums, she dips her spoon into the granola Rin made for her—sesame seeds, raisins, oats, and nuts, every grain chemical-free.
“More milk, please.”
Sometimes, when Rin is not hauling feed, chopping wood, weeding, or fixing some corner of their raggedy old farmhouse, she stands and watches Juney with wonder, her miracle daughter, and this is what she does after pouring the milk; she leans against the kitchen counter, still for a moment, just to absorb her. Juney moves like a sea anemone, fingers undulating. She can feel light and sun, shadow and night, and all the myriad shades between.
“I want to go weed,” she says when her bowl is empty, sitting back to stretch, her spindly arms straight above her, twiggy fingers waving. The scrim of clouds parts for a moment, just enough to allow a slice of sun to filter through the windows, sending dust motes spinning and sparking into the corners of the kitchen. She rocks on her chair inside a sunbeam, hair aglow, fingers caressing the air. She can hear their cats, Purr, Patch, and Hiccup, stretching out on the floor. Smell their fur heating up, their fishy breath slowing into sleep.
“Me, too,” Rin says. “Let’s go.”
Juney was born in the upstairs bedroom, amid Rin’s outraged yells and the grunts of a stoic midwife; she knows her way around their ramshackle house and land as well as she knows her own body. Rin only helps by keeping unexpected objects out of the way, as even the dogs and cats have learned to do. No tables with sharp corners; no stray chairs, bones, mouse corpses, or drinking bowls. The house itself might be a mishmash of added rooms and patchwork repairs, windows that won’t open and trapdoors that will, but everything inside has its place.
Out in the backyard, Juney stops to sniff the thickening heat—the clouds have closed over again, gunmetal gray and weightier than ever. “Itchy air,” she declares, and makes her way to the vegetable garden. Ducking under the mesh Rin erected to keep out plundering deer and rabbits, she squats at the first row of tomatoes. Weeding is Juney’s specialty. Her fingers climb nimbly up the vines, plucking off the brittle spheres of snails, the squishy specks of aphids. Her palms caress the earth, seeking the prick of dandelion leaves and thistles, the stubs of grapevine and pokeweed, and out they come, no mercy for them.
Her father loved planting. Jordan Drummond was his name, Jay to all who loved him. Jay, flaxen-haired like Juney, face white as a Swede’s, eyes set wide and seaglass blue. Tall and rangy, with enormous feet, and so agile he might have been made of rubber. He, too, was born and bred on this property, back in the time when it was a real farm. Helped his parents raise cows and corn all his life, until the farm failed and drove him into the army. When his platoon razed the date groves around Basra, acres of waving palm trees, their fronds a deep and ancient green, their fruit glistening with syrups—when they ploughed those magnificent trees into the desert just because they could, he wept as if for the death of a friend.
Now Rin arranges her days around forgetting, pushes through a list of tasks tough enough to occupy her mind as well as her muscles. Juney comes first, of course, but her wolves take concentration, as do her chickens and goats and vegetables. She has staked out her ground here with all her companions. If anyone wants to find her, they have to negotiate half a mile of potholed unpaved driveway, barbed wire, electric wire, a gate, and her four dogs, who are not kind to strangers. Not to mention her army-trained marksmanship.
Juney feels her way around the spinach and carrots, pulling and plucking. “Mommy, what are we doing today?”
“Going to town. The clinic. Not till we finish the chores, though. Come on, let’s feed the critters.”
“Which clinic?”
“Yours.”
She hesitates. “Have I got time to do the birds first?”
Juney’s favorite job is tending the bird feeder. Rin wanted to throw it out after that mama bear knocked it off its squirrelproof stand, plunked herself on the ground and dumped the seeds down her throat like a drunk—Rin watched the whole thing from the kitchen window, describing the bear’s every move to Juney. But the feeder means too much to Juney to relinquish. She judges how empty it is by feeling its weight in her palms, plants it between her feet to hold it firm, fills it to the brim from the seed sack, and deftly hangs it back up. Then she sits beneath it, head lifted while she listens and listens. “Shh,” she says this morning. “There’s a nest of baby catbirds over there.” A faint rustle, the quietest of hingelike squeaks. “Three of them. They want their breakfast.”
Leaving her to sit and listen, Rin kicks the sleepy cats outside to make their way through the day and eases her car out of the barn. The barn sits to the side of her house, on the edge of a flat field that used to hold corn. Beyond that, a hardscrabble patch of rocks and thistles meanders up a hill to scrubby hay fields and a view of the Catskill Mountains to the south. Otherwise, aside from her yard, the ancient apple orchard in the back, and the vegetable patch, she is surrounded by woods as far as the eye can roam.
Ten acres of those woods she penned off for her three wolves, leaving them plenty of room to lurk. Wolves need to lurk. They are normally napping at this time of morning, but the seething heat has them agitated and grumbling. Rin can sense their long-legged bodies moving in and out of the shadows, scarcely more solid than shadows themselves. Even her absurdly hyperactive mutts are feeling the unwholesome weight of the day, but instead of expressing it with restiveness like their cousins, they drop where they stand, panting heavily into sleep.
Frederic Remington. Moonlight, Wolf, 1909.
The entire compound is preternaturally still. The yard, the woods, the porch cluttered with gnarled geraniums and fraying furniture; the rickety red barn with its animal pens clinging to its side for dear life; the piles of lumber and rusting machinery—all are as somnolent as the snore of a summer bee.
Rin looks at her watch. “Time!”
Juney straightens up from under the bird feeder, wipes her earthy hands on her jeans, and walks toward her mother along the little path planted with lilac bushes, a path she memorized as an infant. She puts her head on Rin’s chest, reaching the exact level of her heart.
She smells her mother’s fear even before she hears it in her voice. The sweat breaking out slimy and oyster-cold.
Juney was conceived in the back of a two-ton, Camp Scania, Iraq, under a moon as bright and hard as a cop’s flashlight. A grapple of gasp and desire, uniforms half off, bra up around Rin’s neck, boots and camo pants flung over the spare tire. Jay’s mouth on her nipples, running down her slick, sandflea-bitten belly, down to the wet openness of her, the salt and the sand of her, the wanting of her, his tongue making her moan, his fingers opening her, his voice and hers breathing now and now and now.
Wartime love in a covered truck, that desert moon spotlighting down. His chest gleaming silver in its glare, eyes glittering, the scent of him sharp and needing her, the voice of him a low growl of yes like her wolves.
But even through the slickness, even through the wanting and wanting, she felt the desert grinding deep into her blood. Toxic moondust and the soot of corpses.
As Rin drives her rackety maroon station wagon along the rural roads that take her to town and the clinic, Juney hums again beside her, rocking in her seat, her warbly tune following some private daydream. The windows are open because the AC refuses to work and the sweat is rolling down Rin’s arms, soaking the back of her old gray T-shirt, the waistband of her bagged-out work pants. She glances down at herself. She is covered with dirt from the yard. Probably has burrs in her hair. Once she was slim with just enough curve and wiggle to make Jay smile. Long hair thick as a paintbrush till she cut it for war. These days, squared-out by childbirth and comfort food, she looks and moves more like a lumberjack. Still, she should have had the decency to shower.
Juney is mouthing words now, rocking harder than ever to her inner rhythm. Rin should teach her not to do that—it makes people think she’s retarded—but she doesn’t have the heart. Juney rocks when she’s happy
“Tweetle tweetle sang the bird,” she croons in some sort of a hillbilly tune.
“Twootle twootle sang the cat.
You can’t get me, sang the bird.
I don’t want to, sang the cat.
Tweetle and twootle, tweetle and—”
“Juney?” Rin is not exactly irritated but needs her to quit. “You’re going to be okay at the clinic, right? No screaming like last time?”
Juney stops singing long enough to snort. “I was a baby then. And they stuck me with that long needle.” She takes up her song once more, then stops again. “Are they going to stick me this time?”
“Soldiers don’t mind needles. It’s just a little prick, like you get every day in the yard from thistles.”
“Yeah. Who cares about needles?”
“It’s just an annual checkup to see how much you’ve grown. Nothing to worry about. They’ll probably tell you to eat more, skin-and-bones you.”
“That’s ’cause you won’t let me have candy. I’m going to tell the doctor to order you to give me candy.”
This is an old battle, Rin’s strictness about food. She is strict about a lot of matters. No TV, no cell phones. No radio, either, not even in the car. Yet there are limits to how much even she can cushion her daughter. Thanks to the law, she is obliged to send her to school, and there, as if by osmosis, Juney has absorbed the need for the detritus that fills American lives. Despite all Rin’s efforts, Juney has caught the disease of Want.
Rin wonders if Juney’s daddy would approve of how she’s raising her: Jay, the only man she’s ever wanted, ever will want. Jay, gone for as long as Juney has been alive. And look what he left behind. A broken soldier. A fatherless daughter. The wolves who patrol the woods like souls freed from the dead, their thick-furred bodies bold and wild—the ones who won’t be tamed, won’t be polluted, won’t be used.
It was Jay’s idea to raise wolves. His plan was to do it together once they were done soldiering—he had always wanted to save them from extinction, the cruelty of zoos and those who wish to crush them into submission. “They need us, Rin,” he said to her once, his big hand resting tenderly on her cheek. “And we need them.” So when she found herself alone and pregnant, she decided to carry out the plan anyway. She tracked down a shady breeder over by Oneonta and rescued two newborn pups, blue-eyed and snub-nosed, blind, deaf and helpless, their fur as soft as goose down, before he could sell them to some tattooed sadist who would chain them up in his yard. One was female, the other male, so she hoped they would breed one day. As they did. “Never try to break wolves,” Jay told her. “They’ve got loyalty. They might even love you, who knows? But we must never tame them. They’re wild animals and that’s how it should stay.”
Her guardian angels. Or devils. She hasn’t decided which.
“We’re here!” Juney sings out. She knows the town of Huntsville even when it’s midmorning quiet and raining: the asphalt steaming, the wet-dust funk of newly soaked concrete.
Rin drives down the main drag, a wide, lonely street with half its windows boarded up and not a soul to be seen. A Subway on the left, a Dunkin’ Donuts on the right, its sign missing so many letters it reads, duk do. The CVS and three banks that knocked out all the local diners and dime stores. A Styrofoam cup skitters along the gutter, chipped and muddied by rain.
Pulling up the hill into an asphalt parking lot, Rin chooses a spot as far away from the other cars as she can get, her stomach balling into a leathery knot. She hates this town. She hates this clinic. She hates doctors and nurses. She hates people.
Pause, swallow, command the knot to release. It won’t. She sweeps her eyes over the macadam, down the hill to the clinic, over to the creek bubbling along behind it. Back and forth, back and forth.
“Mommy, we’re in America.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” One breath, two. “Okay. I’m ready.”
If Rin could walk with her wolves flanking her, she would. Instead, she imagines them here. Ebony takes the front guard, his coat the black of boot polish, eyes green as a summer pond, the ivory curve of his fangs bared. Silver brings up the rear, her fur as white as morning frost, her wasp-yellow eyes scanning for the enemy, a warning growl in her throat. And the big stately one—the alpha male, the one Rin named Gray, his body a streak of muscle, his coat marked in sweeps of black and charcoal—walks beside her with Juney’s fingers nestled into the thick fur of his back, his jaw open and slavering, ready to tear off the head of anyone who so much as looks at her.
With her invisible wolves around her and her daughter gripping her hand, Rin plows through the now-strafing rain to the clapboard box of a clinic and up to its plate-glass front, on which, painted in jaunty gold lettering, are the words Captain Thomas C. Brittall Federal Health Care Center’s Pediatrics/U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
“Department of Vaporized Adolescents,” she mutters, pushing open the cold glass door and its cold metal handle. They step inside.
***
Naema Jassim is standing in the white starkness of that same clinic, suspended in one of the few moments of tranquillity she will be granted all day. Her hands, long-fingered and painfully dry from constant washing, press down on the windowsill as she gazes into the hot wetness beyond. The sky has turned an uneasy green, tight with electricity and tension. Even from inside her clinic office, the air smells of singed hair and rust.
“Doctor?” Wendy Fitch, the nurse, pokes her head into the room. “Your nine a.m.’s here. We have four more before we close. TV says the hurricane’s due around two.”
“Yes, the rain, it has already come.” Naema turns from the window, so slight she is almost lost inside her voluminous white coat, her black hair gathered in a loose knot at her neck. Face long and narrow, eyes the gold of a cat’s. A star-shaped scar splashes across her otherwise smooth right cheek.
Behind her, a sudden wind catches the weeping willow outside, sending its branches into a paroxysm of lashing and groaning. But the tightly closed windows and turbine roar of the clinic’s air-conditioning, set chillingly low to counteract the bacteria of the sick, render the premature storm as silent as dust.
Naema slides her clipboard under her arm and moves to the door.
Outside, the trees bend double and spring back up like whips. The clouds convulse. A new deluge drives into the ground, sharp as javelins.
A mile uphill, the wind seizes a tall white pine, shaking it until its ninety-year-old trunk, riddled with blister rust, splits diagonally across with a shriek. It drops onto the Huntsville Dam, already thin, already old, knocking out chunks of concrete along its crest until it resembles a row of chipped teeth.
***
Rin grips Juney’s hand while they sit in the waiting room, her palms sweating as she scans every inch of the place: walls too white, lights too bright, posters too cheerful, a television screen as big as a door blasting a cooking show. But she refuses to look at the other women. Their calculating eyes. Their judgments. Their treachery.
The monologue starts up in her head, as it always insists on doing at the VA, even though she is only in an affiliated pediatrics clinic, not a full-fledged hospital full of mangled soldiers and melted faces. She fights it as best she can, trying to focus on Juney, on her wolves growling in their hot fur by her feet, but it marches on anyhow, oblivious to her resistance: Where were you ladies when I needed you, huh? I saw you fresh from your showers; I saw you listening. Scattered, every one of you, like bedbugs under a lamp. Where were you when, where were you. . . .
“Stop.” Juney pulls Rin’s hand to her chest. “Mommy, stop.”
Rin looks for her wolves. They are crouched around her still, tongues lolling, their musky fur and meat-breath reassuring. She should have brought Betty, her service dog. She keeps telling herself she doesn’t need Betty. But she does.
Juney lifts her nose and Rin can tell she is smelling the medicinal stinks of the clinic. All scents are colors to Juney, an imagined rainbow Rin will never see. The disinfectant in the wall dispensers, sickly sweet and alcohol sharp—this is her yellow. The detergent of the nurses’ uniforms, soapy and stringent, she calls bright orange. The chemical-lemon odor of the floor polish: purple. The pink of freshly mown grass, magenta of oatmeal, green-bright breath of their cats, black of their dogs panting. The glaring white of her mother’s alarm.
Rin sends her mind to her hand, still clasped against Juney’s narrow chest. Juney’s heartbeat reminds Rin of the chipmunk she once held in her palm, soft and weightless, alive and warm—a tiny bundle of pulsating fluff.
Another soldier mother is squeezed into the far corner, holding a feverish infant to her breast. A second sits by the wall with her child, its back in a brace. A third walks in with her toddler daughter, whose right hand is wrapped in a bandage. The beams of the women’s eyes burn across the room, avoiding one another yet crossing like headlights, smoldering with their collective sense of betrayal.
Time inchworms by.
Finally, a hefty nurse with frizzled blond hair steps through the inner door, the name fitch pinned loudly to her bosom. She runs her eyes over Rin and Juney and all the other mothers and children suspended in this stark, white room. “Rin Drummond,” she calls.
Rin cannot speak.
“Mommy?” Juney lifts Rin’s hand off her chipmunk heart and jumps down from her chair. “We’re ready,” she tells the nurse and pulls her mother’s arm. She and Rin follow the nurse’s broad back down the corridor and into an examining room.
“Just strip to your undies, honeypie, and hop up here,” the nurse tells Juney. “Doctor Jassim will be here in a jiffy.”
“Thank you. I know what to do. I’m nine years old and my name is June Drummond.”
“Of course it is,” the nurse says, unruffled.
“Did you say ‘Jassim’?” Rin asks, finding her voice at last. “Who’s he?”
“Doctor Jassim is a woman. She’s been a resident with us for half a year now. She’s very good, don’t worry.”
“Where the fuck is she from?” Rin’s hands curl up tight and white.
“Mrs. Drummond, relax, okay? She’s the best physician we have here. You’re lucky to get her.” The nurse leaves, closing the door with a snap that sounds more as though she is locking them in than giving them privacy.
Juney peels off her T-shirt and shorts and kicks away her flip-flops. Both she and Rin are dressed for the heat of the August day, not for the clinic’s hypothermic AC, so her skin is covered in goose bumps. Rin finds a baby blue hospital robe hanging on the back of the door and wraps Juney’s shivery body in it before lifting her onto the plank of the examining table, its paper crackling beneath her. She is so fragile, her Juney, a wisp of rib cage and shoulder blade, legs pin-thin as a robin’s. Rin holds her tight, not sure who is comforting whom.
***
The wind rampages through woods and parking lots, streets and gardens, seizing sumacs, maples, and willows and shaking them until their boughs drop like shot geese. Up the hill, the rain-bloated creek presses its new weight against the crumbling dam, pushing and pounding until, with a great roar, it bursts through, leaps its banks and rushes headlong down the slope toward the clinic; a foaming wall of red mud, branches, and rocks flattening every shrub and tree in its path.
Inside, the air-conditioning hums. Voices murmur. Babies whimper.
Wendy Fitch hovers by the door of the examining room, checking her watch. Dr. Jassim might be great with her patients but the woman has zero sense of time. Whether this has something to do with her culture or is only an individual quirk, Wendy doesn’t know, but the doctor needs to finish up here and fetch her son from his friend’s house, the boys’ summer baseball camp having sensibly closed against the impending storm. The rain is beating on the windows now and Wendy can feel the patients’ parents growing more restless by the minute, as eager as she is to get back to their canned food and bottled water, their batteries and candles. Her pulse quickens. As a lowly nurse, she has to bear the brunt of the parents’ ire, and these are no ordinary parents, either. They are all military veterans, half of them ramped up or angry. Like that pit bull of a woman, Rin Drummond.
“We better hurry, storm’s coming on quick,” Wendy says when Naema emerges at last from the first examining room. “Watch out for this one,” she adds in a whisper, touching her temple. “Room three.”
Naema nods with a resigned smile and walks toward the door.
***
Rin can’t believe they gave Juney an Arab for a doctor. Typical of the VA to hire the second-rate. The woman probably bought her certificate online, did her training on YouTube. Probably blew up some sucker of a soldier or two on her way here, as well.
“Mommy, what’s wrong?”
Rin takes a breath. And another. “It’s okay. It’s just this place.” She strokes her daughter’s hair and pulls her close once more, feeling her frail body shiver.
A knock on the door. Gentle, yet it sends a spasm through Rin’s every nerve.
The door opens and in walks a woman in a white coat, as if she’s a real doctor. No head scarf, at least, but there’s that familiar olive-brown skin and blue-black hair. She’s carrying a clipboard file, which she reads before even saying hello, which Rin considers damned rude. Then she looks up.
A splattered white scar on her right cheekbone. Most likely a shrapnel wound. Rin would know, having some fifteen herself.
“Good morning,” the doctor says to Juney, voice snake-oil smooth, accent not much more than a lilt but oh so recognizable. “You are June, right?”
But Juney isn’t listening. Her head’s up, cocked at the angle that means her mind is elsewhere. “Mommy?”
Rin is shaking. The face. The scar. Her breath is coming short and airless.
“Mommy?” Juney’s voice is more urgent now. “I hear something.”
“There is no need to be frightened, dear,” the doctor says, and Rin can’t tell whether she’s talking to Juney or her.
“Mommy!” Juney jumps down from the examining table, her robe falling off, leaving her in nothing but white cotton underpants, skin and bone. “Something bad’s happening!”
“Get out of here!” Rin yells at the doctor.
“What is the matter?” The doctor looks confused.
“No, not her!” Juney cries. “Run!” And she hurls herself into the dangerous air, unable to see the metal table covered with glass bottles and needles, the jutting chair legs on the floor.
Rin reaches out and catches her, but she wriggles free in true terror. “Let us out!” she screams, and the doctor turns around, bewildered, saying something Rin can’t hear because at that moment the window bursts open and a torrent of red water crashes through, smashing them against the wall, knocking them over, pounding them with a whorl of mud and branches and shattered glass. . . .
Rin’s soldier training, her war-wolf heart, these are not in her blood for nothing. She struggles to her feet, seizes Juney around the waist and forces the door open, kicking away the flailing doctor tangled in her white coat, her long hair, her scar, and her legacy.
Rin slams her face down in the water and steps on her, using her body to lever her daughter through the door and out of the water to safety.
An Interview with Helen Benedict, Author of WOLF SEASON
Helen Benedict is the author of seven novels, five books of nonfiction, and a play. Her most recent novel, WOLF SEASON, is this month’s fiction selection on The Wrath-Bearing Tree.
WOLF SEASON “follows the war home,” as a starred review in Library Journal puts it, examining war’s reverberations on the lives of three women and their families. There is an Iraq war veteran named Rin, who keeps three wolves from a pack she started on her land with her late husband; she is raising a daughter who was born blind, perhaps from lingering effects of Rin’s service. There’s Naema, a widowed Iraqi doctor who has come to the U.S. with her son. And there is Beth, a Marine wife raising a troubled son, who awaits her husband’s return from Afghanistan even as she fears it.
Helen was generous enough to take the time to speak to me about WOLF SEASON, war, writing, the strengths of fiction vs. nonfiction to speak to specific themes, Charlottesville, and more.
The Wrath-Bearing Tree (Andria Williams): Helen, you’ve said that your newest novel, WOLF SEASON, is about “the long reach of war.” Can you tell me a little more about that?
Helen Benedict: The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars have affected all of us in America, whether we know it or not. Our morality, our politics, our pocketbooks – all have been profoundly changed. But, of course, the most affected are those who have either served or suffered in those wars, and those who love them. Of the women in WOLF SEASON, Rin is a veteran of the Iraq War, Naema is an Iraqi refugee, and Beth is married to a marine deployed to Afghanistan. All three women are raising their children alone because of the fallout of war. Of the men in the novel, Louis is also a veteran, Todd the marine, and they, too, are profoundly affected by their experiences of war. The characters in WOLF SEASON personify the ways that war has permeated the little town of Huntsville, NY, the people who live there, and, in a sense, us all.
But I don’t want to characterize WOLF SEASON as purely a war book, for it is just as much about tenderness, love, and hope. It is also about the way human beings can rise above through horror and trauma to find and help one another, even when the odds are against them.
WBT: To which character in WOLF SEASON do you hope readers will feel most attached?
HB: I hope that all my characters are compelling in their own ways, but I suspect the answer to this has more to do with who a reader is than anything else. Already, I have heard a full range of reactions to the characters in WOLF SEASON: some readers like the women best, others the children, while yet others especially love the wolves, and some relate most to the men. One of the aspects of writing I love the most is seeing how varied the reactions of readers are, and how everyone brings their own interpretations to a book that can be quite independent from mine.
WBT: Helen, I’ve read that you grew up living all over the world, on islands in the Indian Ocean; in Berkeley, CA; and in England. You’ve said that during your years of island living you did not attend school and were allowed to “run wild,” and I was instantly reminded of Margaret Atwood’s youth, and her wild-and-free summers in remote camp sites with her entomologist father, her mom, and her brother.
Do you think the period of free time you experienced had an effect on your imagination, or somehow helped foster a writerly way of thinking?
HB: Yes! Largely because of these travels, I spent a lot of time alone as a child, so learned to read early and took comfort in books. I was an addicted reader by the age of six or seven, so much so that I’d be heartbroken when a book ended. Then I discovered I could continue the magic by writing myself.
I also learned about poverty and suffering by living on those islands, which were poor and disease-ridden at the time. Even at the age of three, I was profoundly saddened by seeing starving children and people living in shacks. Children understand these things much more deeply than we adults realize.
WBT: With such an international childhood and youth, how did the issues facing women in the American military first come onto your radar? Your nonfiction book, THE LONELY SOLDIER, was the first book I read by an academic discussing female service members; if it was not the first, then at least it was the first one I heard of, with the largest impact and starting the most national discussion. Most academics I know, at least in my experience, rarely think about the military at all. What brought you to this topic, and with such conviction that you’ve continued to address it across at least three books?
HB: I am not really an academic, but a journalist and a novelist who happens to teach. The research I did for THE LONELY SOLDIER, which was indeed the first book to look at women who served in the post-9/11 wars, was essential not only for my journalistic work, but for my related novels, SAND QUEEN and WOLF SEASON. Over a stretch of more than three years, I interviewed some 40 women veterans of the Iraq War, and then later I also interviewed Iraqi refugees. These interviews, along with other research, informed my imagination, allowing me to plunge deep into the interior lives of refugees and soldiers to create my fictional characters; something I would never have dared do had I not spent so long listening to real people.
As for why I came to this topic, I’ll start by saying that all my work, whether fiction or nonfiction, has looked at the powerless and the outsider, and much of it has especially focused on women. When I saw the U.S. invade Iraq for no reason and learned of the destruction and death we caused there as a result; and then also learned about the epidemic of sexual assault in the military and the moral injury that the war was causing to women and men, I had to write about it. I care passionately about justice, and the right of the oppressed to be heard.
As for why I turned from journalism to fiction – from THE LONELY SOLDIER to my novels, SAND QUEEN and WOLF SEASON – that is because I wanted to get to what war does to our interior lives, our hearts, our morals, our souls, our minds. That is the territory of fiction.
WBT: I first read THE LONELY SOLDIER as a relatively new officer’s-wife, and to be quite honest, felt like I went through several stages of grief while reading. It was difficult to reconcile my husband’s recent, major life decision, and his well-intentioned enthusiasm for it, with the book’s description of the military as based on a model of predation, and occupied by, in essence, various levels of predators very graphically rendered (recruiters who force teenage girls, for example, to give them head in parked cars). It was also difficult to consider our family’s new path from the perspective of my conviction that I was a feminist, with a deep concern for other women. How had I not known this was happening to female service members? I remember the striking detail that the women profiled in the book asked to use their real names, as a way of “fighting back.” THE LONELY SOLDIER was the first step in a long and rather painful exposure of, what may not necessarily be my experience with the military, but what is the truth for many women.
I guess my question here is one that’s bothered me to some degree for more than thirteen years: Do you feel that a person whose life work is spent within an institution like the U.S. military has chosen, in effect, to side with an oppressive regime? Is it possible to still be an ally to others, those often ignored or hurt by war and by institutionalized racism, sexism, and violence?
HB: I think this is a brave question, and in a way, my answer lies in WOLF SEASON, as well as my other related books, because my veteran characters are all struggling with questions like yours, especially how to push back against injustice and wrongdoing within the military, and how to feel like a good person when you have come to feel you were used to do wrong.
My veteran characters have been distorted by war and its inherent injustices, yes, but they also want to love, mend, and amend. This is the essential struggle in the aftermath of war for us all – how, having done a great wrong, we can grope our way back to doing some right.
Another path, and I do see veterans doing this, is to help the real victims of our wars: the innocent Iraqi citizens whose lives we have destroyed. This, too, is a theme in WOLF SEASON.
But going back to the earlier part of your question, yes, I do think that joining the military is to give yourself to an institution that usually causes more harm than good. But that said, I also think it’s important to fight wrongdoing from the inside. Part of our duty as citizens of a democracy is to hold governmental institutions accountable when they go wrong, and to expose and fight and correct that wrong wherever we can. I know how much courage it takes the military from within, but I’ve seen active duty service members and veterans do it, and I admire them deeply.
WBT: You were in Charlottesville, VA, during the horrifying neo-Nazi rally this past August. How did you end up there at that time, and what did you observe, on the ground? What, for you, did that event say about America circa 2017-18?
HB: I have written about that terrible day in Charlottesville before, so all I’ll say here is that I was at an artist’s residency nearby, so went to bear witness and counter-protest. The main point I made in this essay is that, as a writer and reader, I know that using one’s imagination to put oneself in the shoes of others is the key to empathy and compassion. The racists, Islamophobes and anti-Semites who attended the rally that day refused to use their imaginations to do any such thing, thus freeing themselves to dehumanize the people they wished to hate. It was a sickening sight to behold, the screaming red faces of those who relish hatred; the opposite of what writers and artists stand for.
WBT: You’ve addressed themes of systemic violence through both fiction and nonfiction. How do you feel these genres are uniquely suited to addressing political issues?
HB: Nonfiction explains it, fiction explores it. In WOLF SEASON, as in any novel, I was able to plunge into a character’s heart to show how it really feels to be the victim or the perpetrator or violence, and what that does to the human soul. The field of fiction is the human interior – our hearts, our minds, our morals. I love that. That’s why I read novels, and that’s why I write them.
—
WOLF SEASON is available from Bellevue Literary Press or wherever books are sold. A reading group guide is available for download here. You can find out more about Helen Benedict’s writing on her web site.
Blood Money: C.E. Morgan’s ‘The Sport of Kings’
On May 17, 1875, under blue skies and wearing the flapping green-and-orange silks of his legendary employer J.P. McGrath, a diminutive, tough, whip-thin African-American jockey named Oliver Lewis, weighing little more than a hundred pounds, careened to the first Kentucky Derby victory on a chestnut Thoroughbred with a white blaze and two white socks named Aristides. Thirteen of the fifteen jockeys surrounding him as they thundered down the home stretch were also African-American. In fact, black jockeys would dominate the sport in the south for another thirty years, winning 15 of the first 28 Derbies.
Aristides’ trainer, Ansel Williamson, had been born a slave in rural Virginia. Purchased by a wealthy horse breeder, he learned the art and science of groomsmanship, and was eventually hired by J.P. McGrath, of the famed green-and-orange silks, who’d been born dirt-poor but, after winning $105,000 in a single night in a New York gambling house, started a Thoroughbred farm that went on to become one of the most famous of its time.
That a former-slave-turned-Hall-of-Famer trained Aristides–whose statue now stands at Churchill Downs–and an African-American jockey the size of a young girl rode the pounding horse to victory, hints at the intrigue, breathtaking chance, and monumental toil involved in the sport of horse racing. It also, for novelist C.E. Morgan—with her sharp comprehension of history and a penchant for literary gambles of her own–sparked the genesis of a brilliant, winding epic novel of a racially and economically fraught America: The Sport of Kings.
Spanning over 200 years as it moves back and forth through time, The Sport of Kings opens in the mid-1950s. Henry Forge, a restless, ambitious teenager schooled from birth in the racial politics of the south, sets in motion a shocking crime against his father’s black groom, Filip. The event is one of several sharp seismic blips in the bedrock inequity of Forge Run Farm, initially founded by Henry’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel Forge, who came on foot from Virginia to Paris, Kentucky in 1783, accompanied by one slave. On such an act of claim and hubris the farm was built; and, as author Morgan levels her steady eye at the parallels of human history, a nation.
Young Henry Forge turns the family’s tobacco farm into a Thoroughbred empire where the green grass is “the color of money.” His frustrated cosmopolitan wife, Judith, leaves him before too long and, in a deeply un-maternal move, also leaves their sole child, Henrietta, for him to raise. (One can’t help but wonder if Henry and his daughter, or at least their naming scheme, are a nod to legendary horse trainer Leo O’Brien and his daughter, Leona; or if, given Morgan’s divinity school background and this father-daughter pair’s ruthless streak, it’s more of a Herod/Herodias sort of thing.) Henrietta is bright, offbeat, and enthusiastic in youth, qualities that become warped into a strange, intellectual coldness by her father’s intense, even immoral, over-involvement in her life. When Henrietta blurts a racial slur at school and is penalized, her father, irate, decides to homeschool her on a strange curriculum of evolutionary biology, manifest destiny, and horsemanship.
Henry Forge is, to put it mildly, obsessed with genetics. He’s especially intrigued by the strategy of linebreeding: the idea that doubling down on a certain lineage can perfect and purify it, yielding—if the circumstances are just right–the ideal specimen. (Even today, the odd, invisible world of dominance, alleles, and zygotes is a hallmark preoccupation of the sport, so much so that even the casual gambler can combine mares and stallions on fantasy web sites such as TrueNicks.com to produce virtual “nicks,” foals with an edge on wins. The site’s slogan could have come from Henry Forge himself: “Do more than just hope for the best.”)
The cloistered universe of Forge Run Farm is rendered in such careful and specific detail by Morgan that its sheer particularity could become claustrophobic–even her other characters realize how deeply weird the Forges are and try to get away from them, like the salt-of-the-earth veterinarian, Lou, who skitters to her truck to escape “these crazy people”—if it’s not for the sea change the author delivers halfway through the book, when Allmon Shaughnessy arrives on the farm.
Allmon is a 24-year-old fresh off a seven-year prison sentence, schooled in the Groom Program at Blackburn, and an undeniable talent with horses. He’s the only child of a wandering, handsome, alcoholic father, Mike Shaughnessy (“known in high school as that Irish fucking fuck”) and a caring but overburdened African-American mother, Marie. At fifteen, Allmon is noticed for his athletic promise and brought into a pre-NFL program, the Academy for Physical Education, where the coaches’ focus on phenotype is not so different from the horse breeders’ whom Allmon will encounter later (“‘How big was your dad?” “Six-two.” “Good….I want you big, fast, and I want you mean”).
But Marie’s chronic health problems, revealed to be lupus, are sinking the household. As with Erica Garner–the daughter of Eric Garner who was killed by police violence in 2014 for selling cigarettes without tax stamps, herself dead at 27 from a heart attack after childbirth–a legacy of racism and poverty live in Marie’s body, the “gendered necropolitics” of anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence, the sequelae. “Make me an animal,” Marie begs, in a heartbreaking prayer, “so I won’t know anything. Make me a man, so I won’t give a damn about anyone.”
Her son Allmon does give a damn, but he is orphaned too young to know what to do with his anger and his aching heart. He is led into crime by older boys on the street; tried as an adult for possession of narcotics, an illegal firearm and a stolen car, he is sentenced to seven years, some of which is described in horrifying detail as he learns to defend himself.
The introduction of Allmon to the farm—their first ever black groom, hired by Henrietta without the blessing or even knowledge of her father—will change the course of the Forge family forever. Most likely not in the way you, avid reader, are thinking, because Morgan will not give the reader what he or she expects. But—and there’s that wink at history again—change is coming, and change is, as Lyell and Darwin would agree, nature–and therefore man’s–most unstoppable force.
—
C.E. Morgan was born and raised in rural Kentucky. She attended Berea College, a tuition-free institution founded as an abolitionist school in 1855, and later, Harvard Divinity School. And like Allmon’s mother, Marie, she is no stranger to chronic pain, as indicated by this interview with Commonweal Magazine:
Anyone who lives with poor health or chronic pain, or who has endured poverty—real poverty—knows what it is to live with lack and a resulting fear so incessant that it becomes thoroughly normalized, invisible in its ubiquity. If you’re lucky enough to have that fear begin to ease, which it has for me only in the past year, it’s an odd experience. A stranglehold eases off your entire body.
An essay Morgan wrote for the Oxford American, “My Friend, Nothing is in Vain,” suggests that her own brand of chronic pain may, like Marie’s, be auto-immune in nature, like lupus.
But it’s important to keep in mind that a novelist need not have experienced firsthand that which they write into their work, and Morgan’s first preoccupation is with the way she renders her subjects. “Evil’s breeding ground is a lack of empathy,” she explains. “Evil acts reduce the other to an object, a being to its component parts, and obliterate subjectivity….So I locate moral beauty in an other-regarding ethic.”
She’s also concerned with the notion of “attunement”: “Humans struggle to remain attuned to one another—they want to turn away because of fear, or ambition, or boredom, or some lure of the ego. It’s difficult. It requires radical vulnerability, radical risk.”
Writing so boldly outside one’s historical period, race, and gender also puts the novelist in a position of “radical vulnerability,” and the whole thing can only work if it is a radical risk: the author wholly invested, putting her emotions and reputation on the line, tapping into voices that are not her own. It’s a gamble with a nearly paralyzing moral and ethical obligation, and that’s before you even get to the whole issue of “craft.” But if the stakes were not so high, how else could Morgan have propelled herself to create a character as stunning in thought, action, and voice as “The Reverend,” Allmon’s restless, glittering-eyed, charismatic preacher of a grandfather? (Morgan is excellent at writing convincing, multi-dimensional characters of faith, and their sermons; her first novel, All the Living, a quietly gorgeous, small-scope book taking place over only three months and focusing on just three characters, features pastor Bell Johnson, whose words read much like Morgan’s prescription for novel writing itself, her “other-regarding ethic”: “My heart was like a shirt wore wrong side out, brothers and sisters, that’s how it was when God turned me, so that my innermost heart was all exposed.”) But The Reverend is a different kind of preacher. An urgent, assertive, slightly wild and dogmatic man with an Old Testament streak, he has chosen a life of urban poverty and service. He harshly judges his own daughter, Marie, for her decisions, and is easier on his flock than his own family, much like John Ames’s grandfather in Gilead. He also speaks many of my favorite lines in the book:
“Y’all act like Jesus is dead! Well, let me ask you this: Is Jesus dead in the ground? ‘Cause I heard a rumor Jesus done rose up from the grave!”
A woman cried out, “He rose!”
“And how come he rose up out of that dark and nasty grave?”
“Tell me!”
“How come he said, ‘Eat my body and remember me?’….Because my Jesus, my Jesus is the original Negro, and he said, only I can pay the bill…”
…Now the Reverend stopped suddenly, plucked a pink handkerchief out of his suit pocket, and mopped his streaming face, and when he spoke again his voice was conversational: “Now eventually somebody’s gonna tell you Jesus ain’t had no brown skin. And you know what you’re gonna say when they tell you that? You’re gonna say: If Jesus wasn’t born no Negro, he died a Negro. What part the cross you don’t understand?”
—
The Sport of Kings is by no means a “perfect” book: its arc treads a little too close to Philipp Meyer’s The Son to feel wholly new, and at one key section, delving back into the early days of slavery on Forge Run Farm, the novel takes a sudden dive so immoderately Faulknerian—all dark and lushly incestuous and overwrought–that it threatens, like kudzu, to choke up the whole book.
But The Sport of Kings possesses a certain perfection of spirit, a reckless authorial gamble. Something special happens when a novelist combines that gamble with a terrific intellect and a heart for human suffering. We end up with a book that’s one in a million, a Secretariat, a Hellsmouth, pounding for the finish.
—
And what of those African-American jockeys who dominated the sport of horse racing in its early decades? The athletes like Isaac Burns Murphy, whose 44% win rate has never been surpassed, and whose earnings would have made him a millionaire if he lived today; or Jimmy Winkfield, who won 220 races in 1901 alone, every one of them a threat to life and limb?
Sadly, Jim Crow racism, and sometimes direct sabotage, thinned their ranks. The Irish jockeys of the northern states were not, on the whole, kind. Isaac Burns Murphy was once discovered, apparently drunk, on the back of a horse prior to a race; it was later proven he’d been drugged by an opponent. Winkfield escaped segregation in the United States with a successful second career in Russia, winning the Russian Oaks five times and the Russian Derby four; but when he was invited back to the States for a Sports Illustrated gala in 1961, he was told he could not enter through the front door.
No African-American jockey has won the Kentucky Derby since 1902, though Winkfield placed second the following year.
The sport is now dominated by riders from Latin American countries, immigrants from Venezuela, Mexico, Panama, rural gauchos of small stature and true grit. (Leona O’Brien, that daughter of famous horse trainer Leo O’Brien, whom I mentioned earlier? She went on to marry her father’s jockey, the Puerto Rican-born John Velazquez, now the highest-paid in his sport; they have two children). Morgan gives these newer jockeys a brief nod in The Sport of Kings, and a reader can’t help but think that fifty years from now, there will be a novel in their story, too.
THE WORDS ON THE INTERNET SAID MICHAEL HERR HAS DIED
Where were you when Michael Herr died in 2016? What were you doing? Did you listen to the opening voiceover of Apocalypse Now? Martin Sheen’s main character said “all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I wanted a mission and for my sins they gave me one.” Did you watch Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket at the helicopter scene when Matthew Modine’s Joker asks the doorgunner “How can you shoot women and children?” “Easy,” the gunner replies, “you don’t lead ‘em so much.” Or did you go right to the original source, a first edition of Herr’s Dispatches from the bookshelf and flip to the passage when Herr overheard a bunch of infantrymen watching a helicopter full of journalists fly off an LZ, leaving Herr behind —“one rifleman turning to another, and giving us all his hard, cold wish: ‘Those fucking guys,’ he’d said. ‘I hope they die.’”
I did none of those things. I was aware of them all, though, when my internet surfing tripped up against the news that Michael Herr had died. The journalist that I, like all my peers who once reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Yemen and all the other places, wished we could have been.
It had been a long time since Herr had written anything, the last a short book about his dead friend Stanley Kubrick. The ultimate sin for any writer is silence, and by my reckoning Herr had chosen silence since 2001—an interview in a documentary “First Kill,” and nothing since. The author of Dispatches, the book that is the accepted highest standard for embedded reporting, had nothing to say about 15 years of war in the Middle East and South America in which journalists of all size and stripe broke their backs to emulate his style, approach, and see-it-all mindset. He had nothing to say about any of it— no comment on Sebastian Junger’s calling his own book War, as though it could somehow be definitive; no television commentary on Fox News or PBS, no taking a stand one way or the other; Herr neither boasted nor complained when reporters and freelancers, present company included, aped his surrealistic style in ways much more akin to plagiarism than homage.
I emulated him from my first moment in Iraq as a reporter in 2007. I got off a helicopter at the LZ at Forward Operating Base Summerall and a young captain offered to take my bags. “I packed them,” I told him, “I’ll hump them.” I learned that lesson from Herr, who wrote “I never let the grunts dig my holes or carry my gear.” And I thought of Herr when I first introduced myself to the soldiers at the Bayji Joint Security Station, where I arrived a month after a truck bomb nearly destroyed the place. The soldiers would look at me with either a scowl or a strange grin. Like Herr said, “It was no place where I’d have to tell anyone not to call me ‘Sir.’”
When I got back, I couldn’t wait to talk about it, sending photos and stories here, there, everywhere, hustling up any publication I could. That was 2007.
Goodbye to all that.
Now, it’s been eight years since my last time in Iraq. I think about it every day. I wonder how my life would have played out, if I hadn’t gone? Would I have been one of the ignorant yahoos yelling at TV, certain that my opinion was the right one?
Maybe Herr’s silence was a form of discipline. If he realized he had nothing left to say, maybe it makes sense. Otherwise it was a sin, for bottling up his wisdom and pulling a Salinger while the world crashed down around him. Call it coping, choosing peace and quiet over the endless cacophony that’s only gotten worse—why demean oneself in such a world? Would his opinion or observation have carried any extra weight because of a book he wrote in 1977? Chances are much better that in raising his voice, he would have only made another more target for revisionist history. What did he make up? Is Dispatches really nonfiction? Composite characters? Is he a fabulist? Did he even go to Vietnam?
Iraq and Afghanistan were chockfull of Pentagon lies, media misperceptions, and first-person “so there I was” memories. What would one more blowhard have added to the mix?
Instead, Herr retreated into the silence—not even mystery, since there was no Salinger-esque clamor for his reemergence. Surely, we was sought out now and then, but those entreaties didn’t reach the public (at least as far as a Google search can find).
Three movies, three books; that was his output, more or less. And hardly full credit for all of them – he wrote voiceovers for Apocalypse Now and The Rainmaker, and co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket. Most of Full Metal Jacket’s dialogue came directly from Gustav Hasford’s underrated The Short Timers. R. Lee Ermey took a lot of credit for improvising the drill sergeant’s dialogue—but plenty of his profane monologues are right from the book; anyway, Hasford died in 1993, so he’s not around to correct anybody.
And Hasford’s no saint. I own his personal copy of Dispatches, annotated with quite a few short references, including a few times where Hasford wrote in pencil: “Problem. Did I steal this?” next to scenes that appear suspiciously like moments from Dispatches. Nothing major: a scarf on a character, a description of a spooky night. Maybe the word “spooky” itself, which both Hasford and Herr loved and used in equal measure.
Herr co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick, but Kubrick didn’t have the balls to go for Hasford’s original vision—in the movie, the drill sergeant is killed by Vincent D’Onofrio’s tubby Private Pyle. It’s the same in the book—with the vital change that the Gunny knows what’s coming, knows Pyle has lost his marbles and is about to shoot him dead—and the Gunny is proud of him. He created a killer and he knows it.
The second change is even starker. In the movie, a sniper kills Joker’s friend Cowboy, and later, Joker kills the female sniper.
In the book, the sniper is never seen, picking off members of Cowboy’s squad one-by-one until finally Cowboy is in the sniper’s sights, shot in the legs so he can’t move. The sniper intends to draw each desperate man in the squad out from cover as they try to rescue their wounded.
Joker knows this, so Joker shoots Cowboy, who knows it’s coming and whose last words are “I never liked you, Joker. I never thought you were very funny.”
In 1987, it’s unlikely a movie audience would have accepted a conclusion where one American soldier mercy-kills another. A lot had changed since 1979’s Apocalypse Now, which ended with Martin Sheen’s Willard decapitating Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz.
The modern version would probably feature Navy SEAL Team Six swooping in at the last minute, rescuing Cowboy and Joker as Mark Wahlberg laid down suppressing fire and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson karate-chopped whatever faceless Muslim jihadist villain presented a threat. He would probably choke a female Muslim terrorist to death with her own hijab headdress – saying “That’s a wrap, bitch.”
It makes sense that Michael Herr remained silent, given our current culture. He’d lived long enough to see Vietnam demystified and reconstructed—turned into “do we get win this time?” foolishness matched with Vietnam’s real-life economic boom. Vietnamese tourist posters once used the English slogan “A Country, Not a War.” By 2017, it’s doubtful that clarification is even necessary.
Herr became a devout Buddhist, meditating at his home in upstate New York. It certainly sounds like a man at peace with himself, who was coping just fine with everything he’d seen and done.
This generation eof soldiers, journalists, and contractors has just started reckoning with these issues. As a coping method, “silence” is certainly the last choice many of us have made. Dignity, modesty, humility—all surrendered just like the old Iraqi firebases were lost to ISIS, overrun while we weren’t even looking. Who can blame us? This merry-go-round has too many brass rings hanging just within reach: book deals, screenplays, talking slots on news programs and bytes of space in internet columns, essays in collections that might be read, might not. So much to say, and too many years to go before Herr’s perspective is finally attained.
What it comes down too, maybe, is trying to add to the obituary – to overcoming that sense of dismay when one realizes its first paragraph is likely written. Herr got there – he knew what the first paragraph would basically say: “Author of this, screenwriter of that; lauded as a visionary journalist who created a new method of war reporting, who turned the businesslike voice of Ernie Pyle inside out, crafting war reporting as a surrealistic nightmare—and yet so entertaining.” They didn’t say that in so many words, but it would have been honest if they had—and I’m not sure to call it “entertaining” is a compliment. Herr did show that war reporting—embedded reporting, specifically—could capture the soldier’s voice and life while keeping the real focus on the writer. Pyle didn’t, not really. Herr’s prize—and curse—was presenting his story first and foremost. For those of us today writing in first person, third person, it doesn’t matter—it’s a means to an end, and the byline is often the subject.
My bookshelf is full of novels and nonfiction telling war stories from dozens of points of view. There is the patriotic jerkoff next to the self-flagellating regret; the melodramatic tale of a bright-eyed lieutenant rests on top of the cynical observer laughing at his own joke; a detached reporter unwilling to choose a side rests on a shelf full of world-weariness and guilt. My own literary attempt is right there with them—all my reporting packaged in my own self-produced creation, a marketing tool and manuscript to send to publishers back when I had something to say. It doesn’t hold up—my conclusions fall apart, what I think I saw in 2009 revealed as a mirage just a few years later. I’m glad it wasn’t published.
I’m certainly like to hear myself talk like the rest of them—I write reviews of books related to the wars, offering my take on somebody else’s. Now and then, I trundle to a library or small venue where the silverhairs spend an evening, and I narrate my photos and encapsulate my three summers spent in Iraq. It’s a paying gig; I can reuse my script and just make sure to change the venue’s name when I thank them for having me. I know the questions that they’ll ask. It’s all very familiar, and if it’s boring to me, I tell myself it’s maybe new to them, and isn’t that worth something?
I was in the Army, went to Iraq in Desert Storm decades ago. I play the veteran’s card when I can, an easy comeback against the sunshine patriots of this rancid and toxic modern era. But like my presentations, it all starts to feel a little hoary, my version of Fat Elvis creaking out “Love Me Tender.”
Still, in writing classes, I do enjoy using different drafts of my work as examples of revision—to show how the overblown melodrama of the first draft becomes a reasonable conclusion by the final. It’s a form of coping, the drafting and revision that is—working out the absurdities that no audience should be subjected too. But like I tell the students: You don’t know that at the time. I meant it when I wrote it. Nobody sets out to write a bad first draft.
Think of our emotional investment with a first draft as a kind of reverence—we’re so pleased with our words, with our thoughts and with ourselves. The revision process requires us to be—in Lester Bangs’ perfect words—contemptuously indifferent, to be willing to cut things out without passion or prejudice.
In that vein, I have deliberately disconnected with the soldiers I spent that Iraq time with, eliminating our ties on social media—no harm done, no big blowups, just a casualty of their grotesque Trumpian politics and my disinterest in tolerance of the same. We weren’t friends. What was it we spent together in Iraq? A month? Three? In the scheme of my 50 years, no time at all. It’s an edit; a paragraph in my story that doesn’t fit anymore.
If I walked into a classroom and started spouting the virtues of Dispatches, I’d be preaching to a room of those who have never heard the name of the book or the author. I would have to spend time raving about it, and who is interested in hearing some old man run his mouth about the “bad old days of jubilee?” There are so many other books to read, and who says Dispatches is better than any other? I thought it was Michael Herr, you thought it was David Finkel or Sebastian Junger or Clinton Romesha or Siobhan Fallon, or Zero-Dark-Thirty or Lone Survivor or whoever or whatever you thought spoke to what you expected a war experience to read like, to look like, to capture the violence and the chaos in a way that made you say: “they got it.” You wouldn’t believe me if I said there was a time when we agreed on Michael Herr. He’s been copied and parodied and distilled and diluted until he’s just another name from another time, another war, and what’s he really got to do with what we’re talking about anyway?
Elvis Presley died in August, 1977, and Dispatches would be published two months later. In the next 10 years, Herr would then help on Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket—that trio arguably the most iconic creative outputs born from Vietnam. But from 1987 to his death in 2016, nothing of true note. Still, enough that, for a time, Michael Herr was the agreed upon war reporting standard—the center of the spoke from which everything would radiate.
What does Elvis have to do with it? Because Lester Bangs’ 1977 prediction was right: When it comes to rock and roll, my generation has never agreed on anything like our parents once agreed on Elvis. When it comes to war reporting, no future generation of reporters will agree like we once did on Michael Herr. And nobody—nobody—will ever repeat his decision to sit on the sidelines during 15 years of war filled with reportage from so many of his imposters—and say nothing.
I am the most envious of that. His ability to take himself out of the game, to accept that what he had to say was said, in a book on a shelf. If we ever want to know what he thinks, we can always go right there, to words that will not change.
I’ve left behind my own record, of stories here and there, of essays and reviews in this publication or that. In my reporting, I did my part to make these wars palatable for the masses. I feel a hint of moral crime in that participation. And it happened during a war. Put war and crime together, and what do you come up with? Did that thought occur to Michael Herr? Did he see all his copycats and sycophants and think “be careful what you wish for?”
Michael Herr showed us how to cope in a world riven by noise and discontent. Just be quiet. He has been dead for many months, but I need not bother to say goodbye to his corpse. I only wish I could say goodbye to you.
With much respect for Lester Bangs, and Elvis Presley.
Nathan Webster reported from Iraq in 2007-09 as a freelance photojournalist. He is also an Army veteran of Desert Storm. His work appears in many publications.
New Poetry By Abby Murray
Hercules and Cerberus, 1608. Nicolo Van Aelst, Antonio Tempesta. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
13 WAYS TO APPROACH A THREE-HEADED DOG
I.
Those who tell you
to carry raw meat
have never met me.
Bones are better,
they last longer,
but if there’s
no bones to be had
bring peanut butter.
II.
In this analogy
I am always Cerberus.
My beloved is inside,
changing.
When he wants me
to sleep in his bed
he comes to me
shaped as a body
like yours.
III.
I grew old here.
Compliment the quartz
mouth of my cave,
my heavy collars,
the bronze of my bark.
Tell me I sound
familiar.
IIIa.
I live to be recognized.
IIIb.
My hearing is spent.
Your language
is a red fruit
everyone loves
to chew.
If we lock eyes
I’ll stand.
V.
I wouldn’t call
human souls
delicious
or even tempting.
I swallow
what I must.
Dogs escape
all the time,
cats too, crows
and wolves.
I let wolves pass
because they sit
a while before
they go,
they don’t trust
this river any more
than I do.
We watch it twist
around itself together.
VII.
What would I buy
with your money?
Lie down. Stay.
VIIa.
I do not know what a changed mind
feels like. Grass? Maybe sun?
VIII.
In this analogy
you are convinced
you are sui generis.
You will be the one
with quick feet.
In this analogy
the ferryman drops
your fare into a sack
with everyone else’s.
Bring water.
I’m not saying
it will buy you
time
but I am thirsty.
In this analogy
you are the one
who thinks you saw
the city shimmer
before it split.
You’re not wrong.
XI.
My beloved
has built a city
where all the bread
is free.
XIa.
His garden
is free of spiders,
nothing
that can be crushed
is sent there.
XII.
Show me what
a sleeping dog
looks like.
XIII.
Are you the moon?
If you are,
make me know it.
I keep a song
in my throat
for you.
Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson, George Routledge and Sons.
HOW TO DIE IN PEACETIME
Welcome the cancer cell,
its sense of justice
more twisted than the DNA
inside its rebel membrane.
Welcome its obsession
with reproduction and division,
the way it makes a home
in the left breast and waits
so patiently, still a pearl
within a pearl within a pearl.
Welcome its false history
and family-friendly values,
its desire for more and more
children, the way it butchers
its own meat forgiven
by the prayers it sends abroad,
the way it campaigns for leader
of the immune system
and loses gracefully each time
until it doesn’t, until the first
letter is tied to the first
brick and flies through the first
window of a neighbor’s house.
Welcome its lavish parties,
electrons everywhere,
flags that flicker like emblems
of peace in the bloodstream,
welcome its marksmanship
when it shoots down the doves
who wake it each morning.
Your body is a sovereign
unable to wage war on itself,
your body is a black night
rippling with radiation.
This is peacetime, this is grace,
this is our merciful killer
rising like a star in our bones.
Let us raise our telescopes
and toast to its brilliance,
its speed, its true aim.
ARMY BALL
You’ve outgrown the army ball,
the men I mean, not us, the wives,
who spend hours buffing time
from our necks and faces.
We dazzle in our pearls
and tennis bracelets clipped like medals
to our limbs: my OIF amethyst,
OEF diamond studs, SFAT cashmere.
Some new wives miss the mark,
overshoot the dress code
and show up in wedding gowns.
They pick and pick at the tulle,
the crystals, the ruching.
At our table, your jaw is softened
by gin and a single year,
the one before Iraq
when Blackhawks dropped you
into the unarmed mountains of Alaska
and you floated down like bread.
We toast the dead and drink.
We howl like dogs for the grog.
Men come forward with liquor bottles
so large they contain entire wars,
dark rum for the jungles of Vietnam,
canned beer for Afghanistan.
A bowl the size of a bus tire
is filled with two hundred years
of booze and we serve ourselves
with a silver ladle made in America
but polished last night, too early,
its grooves blushing with tarnish.
RANGER SCHOOL GRADUATION
A cadence is written like so:
wives show up for the mock battle
at Ranger School graduation
in heels and spandex skirts,
some of us threaded into silk thongs
and some bare-assed,
some in black and gold
I heart my Ranger panties,
all of us too late
to hear this morning’s march:
You can tell an army Ranger by his wife!
You can tell an army Ranger by his wife!
Because she works at Applebee’s
and she’s always on her knees,
you can tell an army Ranger by his wife!
This is how we sway like choirgirls:
America oils our hips.
Rope off the wood chips
and call it a combat zone.
When you’re paraded into the lot
beside Victory Pond I pretend to know
which smudge of red is you.
Already I am washing your uniform, your back.
Your mother says oh, oh!
and claps: the sound of deer ticks
kissing your blistered necks
before we can.
New Poetry by J.E. McCollough
Kintsugi
The breaks on my soul
Are only ever repaired
Slowly.
Old pieces
Of the broken bowl,
Fixed
Back into their usual places
With silver. With gold.
Molten laces gleaming
Across my chest,
Across my beard,
And spreading from the corners of my eyes.
New Fiction: Excerpt from Taylor Brown’s The Gods of Howl Mountain
There was the stone pagoda, three-tiered, built on a small hill over a stream that shone like pebbled glass. The platoon had dammed a pool in the stream. They crouched in their skivvies, soaping and scrubbing the August grit from the creases and crannies of their bodies. Howitzers were perched on the hills around them, like guardian monsters. Still, the Marines washed quickly, feeling like prey without their steel helmets and green fatigues, their yellow canvas leggings that laced up at the sides. Their dog tags jingled at their necks, winking under the Korean sun.
Rory stood from the pool, feeling the cool water stream like a cloak from his form. His bare feet stood white-toed on the curved backs of the stones, eon-smoothed, so like the ones on the mountain of his home. He walked up the hill toward the accordion-roofed temple where they were billeted. He passed olive shirts and trousers drying on rocks and bushes, spread like the skins of killed beasts. The air felt full of teeth. Earlier that day, searching an abandoned village, they had taken sniper fire. Their first. They were Marines, but green. The whip-crack of the shots had flayed the outermost layer of courage from their backs; they were closer now to their bones.
A pair of stone lions guarded the entrance to the pagoda, lichen-clad beasts with square heads and heavy paws. “Foo dogs,” the Marines called them. There was a nisei in their platoon, Sato, whose older brother had fought with the 442nd Infantry Regiment in World War II. All Japanese Americans.
“Komainu,” he said. “Lion dogs. They ward off evil spirits.” Someone had thrown his shirt over the head of one of the beasts. Rory pulled the garment away, so the creature could see. He stepped on into the temple. The air felt cool here, ancient, like the breath of a cave. The black ghosts of old fires haunted the sconces. The place smelled of incense and Lucky Strikes and nervous Marines. Their gear lined the walls. He had never been in a place this old. Granny was never one for churches—“godboxes,” she called them—and those in the mountains seemed flimsy compared to this. Desperate cobblings of boards, some no more than brush arbors. But standing here alone, nearly naked at the heart of the temple, he felt armored in the stone of generations. Swaddled. No bullet could strike him here. No arrow of fear.
He wanted to remain in this place, so still and quiet amid the hills of guns. But a cold wind came whistling through the temple, lashing his back, and he remembered that fall was coming soon, for leaves and men. Blood so bright upon the sawtooth ranges, and the screaming that never stopped.
He could never forget.
Rory woke into the noon hour, his bedquilt kicked off, his body sweat-glazed despite the October bite. His lost foot throbbing, as if it were still attached to the bruised stump below his knee. He rose and quickly dressed. His bedroom window was fogged, the four panes glowing a faint gold. Paintings, unframed, covered one wall. Beasts of the field, fowls of the air—their bodies flaming with color where the sun touched them. They reminded him what day it was: Sunday. He scrubbed his armpits and washed his face, slicked his hair back and dabbed the hollow of his neck with the sting of Granny-made cologne. He donned a white shirt that buttoned to the neck, a narrow black tie, the bowler hat that had been his grandfather Anson’s. He looked at his face in the mirror—it looked so old now, as if a whole decade had snuck under his skin in the night. The flesh was shiny beneath his eyes, like he’d been punched.
He was sitting on the porch, carving the mud from his boots, when Granny came out. She had a pie tin balanced in the crook of one arm.
“I can get that,” he said, jumping up.
“I’m fifty-four years old. I ain’t a god-damn invalid.”
She sat primly in the beast of a car, straight-backed, as if she were riding atop a wagon. It was no stretch to imagine her riding shotgun on a Wells Fargo stagecoach, a short-barreled shotgun in her lap. She looked at him as he slid behind the wheel.
“You had the dreams again?”
“No,” he lied.
“You need to take that tincture I made you.”
“I have been.”
“You been pouring it through that knothole in the floorboard. That’s what you been doing.”
Rory fired the engine, wondering how the woman could know the things she did.
In an hour they were down into tobacco country, square after square of mildly rolling fields passing on either side of them, the clay soil red as wounds among the trees. Giant rough-timbered curing barns floated atop the hills, like weathered arks, holding the brightleaf tobacco that would fill the white spears of cigarettes trucked all over the country. Chesterfelds and Camels and Lucky Strikes. Pall Malls and Viceroys and Old Golds. The highway wound through Winston-Salem, where the twenty-one-floor Reynolds Building stood against the sky like a miniature Empire State. It was named after R. J. Reynolds, who rode into town aback a horse, reading the newspaper, and went on to invent the packaged cigarette, becoming the richest man in the state.
“They say it’s the tallest building in the Carolinas,” said Rory. Granny sucked her teeth, wearing the sneer she always did when forced to come down off the mountain.
“It ain’t whale-shit compared to the height of my house, now is it?”
They passed Greensboro and Burlington, assemblies of giant mills, their smokestacks black-belching day and night, while beneath them sprang neat little cities with streetcars and straight-strung telephone lines. They passed Durham, home of Duke Power, which electrified most of the state, and then on into Raleigh, passing along the oak-shadowed
roads as they wound upward toward the state asylum at Dix Hill. It was massive, a double-winged mountain of brownstone that overlooked the city, four stories high, the narrow windows stacked like medieval arrow slits. The center building looked like something the Greeks had built, four giant columns holding up a triangular cornice, with a glassed rotunda on top.
They signed the paperwork and sat waiting. When the nurse came to fetch them, Rory went in first. His mother came light-footed across the visiting room floor, hardly a whisper from the soles of her white canvas shoes. She was like that, airy almost, like a breath of wind. She could be in the same room with you and you might not even know it. Her black hair was pulled behind her head, waist-long, shot through with long streaks of silver. Her skin ghost-white, as if she were made of light instead of meat. As if, squinting hard enough, you could see her bones.
“They treating you good?” Rory asked.
She nodded and took his hands. Her eyes shone so bright, seeing him, they ran holes in his heart. She said nothing. Never did. She was always a quiet girl, said Granny, living in a world her own. Touched, said some. Special. Then came the night of the Gaston killing, and she never spoke again. Rory had never heard her voice. He knew her smell, like coming rain, and the long V-shaped cords that made her neck. He knew the tiny creases at the corners of her eyes, the size of a hummingbird’s feet. He knew the feel of her hands, so light and cool. Hands that had scooped out a man’s eye with a cat’s paw, then hidden the detached orb in the pocket of her dress.
There had been three of them, nightriders, each in a sack hood. The year was 1930. The men had caught her and a mill boss’s son in an empty cabin along the river. The place was condemned, destined to be flooded under when the waters rose. They bludgeoned the boy with ax handles, but she fought them, finding a cat’s paw from a scatter of tools, an implement split-bladed like a cloven tongue. She took back from them what she could.
An eye.
None of them was ever caught.
The boy they beat to death was named Connor Gaston. He was a strange boy, people said. But smart. He liked birds, played the violin. His father ran the hosiery mill in town. A boy of no small advantage, and she a prostitute’s daughter. Probably one herself, the town said. Didn’t she live in a whorehouse? Wasn’t she of age, with all the wiles and looks? Hadn’t she lured the boy there to be beaten, robbed?
She refused to defend herself. Some said a hard blow to the head had struck her mute. Others said God. The doctors weren’t sure. She seemed to have one foot in another world. She had passed partly through the veil. The Gastons wanted her gone, buried. Forgotten. This stain on their son’s name. The judge declared her a lunatic, committing her to the state. Her belly was showing when they trucked her off. Rory was born in the Dix Hill infirmary. The Gastons were already gone—packed up and returned to Connecticut, with no forwarding address.
Rory and his mother sat a long time at the table, holding hands. Rory asked her questions, and she nodded or shook her head, as if too shy to speak.
“Any new paintings?”
She nodded and brought up the notebook from her lap. They were birds, mainly, chimney swifts and grey shrikes and barn swallows. Nuthatches, bluish with rust bellies, and iron-gray kinglets with ruby crowns. Carolina wrens, chestnut-colored with white thunderbolts over their eyes, and purple-black starlings, spangled white. Wood thrushes with cinnamon wings, their pale breasts speckled brown, and lemon-breasted waxwings with black masks over their eyes. Cardinals, red-bright, carrying sharp crests atop their heads, and red-tailed hawks that wheeled deadly over the earth.
They were not like prints on a wall. These birds were slashed across the paper, each creature angular and violent and bright, their wings trailing ghostly echoes of fight. They were water-colored, slightly translucent, as if she painted not the outer body of the bird but the spirit, each feather like a tongue of fame. Strange fires that burned green and purple, rust and royal blue. Rory knew that eagles could see more colors than men. They could see ultraviolet light, reflected from the wings of butterflies and strings of prey urine, the waxy coatings of berries and fruits. Sometimes he wondered if his mother was like that, if she discerned the world in shades the rest of them couldn’t see. As if the wheeling or skittering of a bird’s flight were a single shape to her, a poem scrawled in some language the rest of them didn’t know. His heart filled up, like it always did. Tears threatened his eyes.
“They’re beautiful,” he said.
As always, she sent him home with one. This time it was a single parrot, lime green, with red flushes about the eyes. He would paste it on the wall of his room, part of the ever-growing aviary that kept him company.
It was late afternoon when they started toward home. Rory lit a cigarette, Granny her pipe. Their smoke unraveled into the slipstream. They passed city cars painted swan white or flamingo red, glade green or baby blue—bright as gumballs under the trees. Every yard was neatly trimmed, many staked with small signs that read: WE LIKE IKE. The people they passed looked strangely clean and fresh and of a kind, like members of the same model line.
Soon they were out from beneath the oaks and the traffic thinned, falling away, and the land began to roll and swell, an ocean of earth. In the old days, Rory would ask Granny to tell him stories of his mother. Of how beautiful she’d been and how kind. Of how she once held a death vigil for a giant grasshopper she found dying on the porch, singing it low lullabies as it lay legging the air on its back, green as a spring leaf. How she buried it behind the house with a little matchstick cross.
“Girl had angel in her blood,” Granny used to say. “Where she got it, I don’t know. Not from me.”
But all those old stories had been told, again and again, save one. The story only his mother could tell. What really happened that night in the valley.
The land rose before them, growing more broken and steep, the mountains hovering over the horizon like smoke. Howl Mountain was the tallest of those that neighbored it, the fiercest. It rose stout-shouldered and jagged, like the broken canine of some giant beast. On its summit floated a spiked island of spruce and fir, a high-altitude relic of prehistoric times. The wind whipped and tore through those ancient evergreens, whirring like a turbine, and it did strange things.
It was said that gravity was suspended at the mountain’s peak, and in the falling season the dead leaves would float upward from the ground of their own accord, purring through the woods, as if to reach again those limbs they’d left.
There was a lot of blood in the ground up there, Rory knew. Guerrilla fighters from the Civil War, throat-cut and shot and hanged by rope, and frontiersmen before them, mountain settlers with long rifles who warred with the Cherokee, dying with arrow-flint in their bellies, musket balls in their teeth. And who knew how many rival tribes in centuries past, blood feuds long forgotten before any white man showed his face, the bones of the fallen scattered like broken stories across the mountain. Some said it was all those men’s souls, trying to rise, that made the dead leaves lift.
Rory thought of what Eustace had told him, when he was little, of how men in the mountains had made a sport of eye-gouging and nose-biting. How those wild-born woodsmen faced each another inside rings of roaring bettors, their long-curved thumbnails fired hard over candle flames and greased slick with oil, and how Davy Crockett himself once boasted of scooping out another man’s eye easy as a gooseberry in a spoon. Back then there was no greater trophy in your pocket than another man’s eye, followed closely by the bit-off tip of his nose. A cruel story, like any Eustace told, but designed perhaps to make the boy proud of what his mama had done when cornered.
He was.
He just wished it had not stolen her voice, and he wondered sometimes if there wasn’t something wrong with him, that he wasn’t himself silenced by what he’d seen in Korea. By what he’d done. He looked at Granny.
“Is it true you got that eye hid somewhere, stolen by some deputy you had in thrall?”
She sniffed.
“Ain’t nothing but trouble in that eye, boy. Some things are best left buried.”
“I got a right to see it.”
“Sure. And I got a right to tell you to go to hell.”
Gods of Howl Mountain is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press on March 20, 2018 and is available now for pre-order wherever books are sold.
An Interview with Taylor Brown, Author of Gods of Howl Mountain
It’s the characters, so wonderfully vibrant and alive in their all-too-human variety―scared, tightly wound, angry, damaged, yet resourceful and resilient, some honorable, some not―that demonstrate Brown’s prodigious talent. Brown has quickly established himself in the top echelon of Southern writers.
An excerpt from Gods of Howl Mountain appears in this month’s issue of The Wrath-Bearing Tree.
Thank you so much for answering our questions, Taylor.
Let’s start with some background on Gods of Howl Mountain. The novel is set in rural North Carolina in the 1950s. Rory Docherty, a young man freshly home from the Korean War, has returned to the mountain where he grew up. He lives with his grandmother, a folk healer; his father is dead and his mother, mute since witnessing a terrible crime, has lived most of her life in a mental hospital nearby. Rory finds work running bootleg whiskey for a powerful local family. But when he falls for the daughter of a preacher, he gets himself into a new brand of trouble that may open up secrets about his mother and his past.
Begging my own Yankee ignorance here: Is there a Howl Mountain, North Carolina? How did you develop a fascination with the Blue Ridge Mountains and its long legacy of family feuds, bootlegging, folk medicine, snake-handling, and more?
Taylor Brown: There is no Howl Mountain, North Carolina — the place and history are products of my own imagination. That said, I was inspired by the history and folklore of Blowing Rock, a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. The town itself is named after “The Blowing Rock,” a rock formation that stands three thousand feet above the Johns River Gorge and is storied for a powerful wind that blows upward out of the gorge. Legend has it, a heartbroken Native American brave leapt from the cliff, only to be blown back into the arms of his lover. That idea of mysterious winds inspired the cyclonic updrafts at the top of Howl Mountain, which I do envision as being in roughly the same area as Blowing Rock. However, I wanted to be free to create a geography and history of my own.
Though I grew up on the Georgia coast, I’ve long had a fascination with the Blue Ridge Mountains, as well as the world of bootlegging, folk medicine, stock car racing, and more. As a child, I remember hearing my father play the song “Copperhead Road” by Steve Earle, still one of my favorite songs. The narrator is a Vietnam vet whose family has been involved in bootlegging for years, and who returns from Vietnam to begin growing the new cash crop of the region — marijuana. I can remember sitting in front of the stereo in my dad’s study as a kid, playing that song over and over again.
Like most of my novels, Gods of Howl Mountain started with a short story. This time it was “Kingdom Come,” the second story in my collection, The Season of Blood and Gold. With that story, I decided I wanted to write a novel set in this time and place. In fact, it was a large part of my motivation to move to western North Carolina in 2009, where I lived for two years–first in Asheville, then in Black Mountain, NC.
It’s strange how organic these books become over the years. In 2013, I met Jason Frye, a writer who has become a great friend and editor of mine. Jason is from Logan, West Virginia, and his grandfather used to catch rattlesnakes to sell to the serpent-handling churches in the area. Jason has a black-and-white photograph of this one-armed snake-handling preacher on his office wall, and he directed me toward Dennis Covington’s incredible book Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia. Later, I ended up seeing someone who was in herb school in Asheville, and she was an incredible help for the specifics of Granny May’s folks medicine.
So, as you can see, this story has traveled quite a long road with me.
WBT: I can’t help but notice that many of your novels and stories feature characters whose lives have bumped up against the vast movements of history and, in particular, war. There’s Callum and Ava in Fallen Land, for example, caught up in General Sherman’s “March to the Sea” in the final year of the American Civil War; or Lawton in The River of Kings, who’s still grappling with the legacy of his recent service in ways that sometimes baffle or worry his college-student brother. In Gods of Howl Mountain, Rory is a Korean war vet and amputee, and you’ve mentioned that your newest work-in-progress features a female Army vet as well. Where do you think your attentiveness to veterans comes from–and your–what I would call–remarkably mature, long-range, compassionate interest in the ways war shapes whole generations, whole nations?
TB: That’s a very good question, Andria. I’ve begun writing a little about my father, who was killed in a motorcycle accident last fall.
WBT: Yes, I remember that, and I am so sorry.
TB: He was of the Vietnam generation, and I grew up with stories of his time in the Army. For instance, he sent his 21st birthday on guard duty at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, marching through a hailstorm. Later, he graduated from the University of Georgia Law School and Army OCS at Fort Benning in the same year.
Fortunately, he was never sent to Vietnam, but the threat of war hovered over his entire early manhood, as it did over his entire generation’s. He had so many friends who were impacted. One of his good friends, Sully, was a Green Beret in Vietnam, and I know my father was very moved by how the war has impacted his friend–the emotional and physical trauma. I think, as a burgeoning writer, you’re maybe especially attuned to such stories or emotions.
What’s more, 9/11 took place during a very formative time for me: when the towers fell, I was a freshman in college–nineteen years old–and I knew my generation was going to war. The military was never an option for me, as I was born with bilateral club feet, which have necessitated a multitude of reconstructive surgeries. but so many of my friends had to consider their involvement (or lack thereof).
Of course, 9/11 kicked off the GWoT, so our nation has been at war for most of my adult life. I think it’s easy for the average civilian to forget that; after all, so little of the general population has “skin in the game” these days. But, as a writer, I think your job is not to be incognizant or unaware of such things, you know? I think your job, in some part, is to try and empathize with the experiences and traumas of others, to put yourself in their shoes (or boots).
WBT: Yes!
In a “Writer’s Bone” essay interview with Daniel Ford, you mentioned that you’ve written several stories based on old ballads, and that Fallen Land was inspired by an American ballad of Irish descent, “When First Unto This Country, A Stranger I Came” (Library of Congress Archives of American Folk Song #65A2). What is it about these ballads that speaks to you so strongly? Was there any particular music that inspired, or worked its way into, Gods of Howl Mountain?
And, as a fellow writer, I’m curious: Are you careful about the music you listen to when working intensely on a novel, the way some authors are careful about what they read? Do you have “sets” of music that have sort of accompanied each of your novels?
TB: Yes, as I mentioned before, I think Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” certainly influenced this book–it’s just a song that’s been big in my imagination since I was a kid. It’s a modern ballad, really, and I love how it juxtaposes outlaws from two different generations. Steve Earle’s “Johnny Come Lately” does much the same thing, exploring the vastly different homecomings of soldiers returning from WWII versus Vietnam.
WBT: I know that song! We had it on an old Farm Aid CD when I worked in rural political organizing. Steve Earle is a good guy — a big supporter of Farm Aid! And wow, that video really has the same feel as the opening of Gods of Howl Mountain. I can see how the tone of it worked its way into the novel.
TB: As for the old ballads like the one that inspired Fallen Land, I think there’s something so timeless and visceral about them. These were songs of the people, sung again and again and again, the verses evolving over the decades. I think of those ballads as survivors, really. It’s like natural selection–only the strongest songs survive century after century, migrating from old countries to new ones, from mountains to prairies to coasts. There must be a nugget of truth or beauty or power in these old songs that just won’t die, that continue to move our hearts and blood.
I’m fairly careful about what I listen to when I’m actually sitting there writing. Often, it’s music that doesn’t have lyrics, or else I can’t understand the lyrics well–I don’t want to have other words in my head. Rather, it’s the mood or atmosphere of certain songs that seems to help. Also, there’s music that helps with certain projects, but not while I’m actually writing. For instance, I’ve been working on something that relates to motorcycles, and I’ve been playing various renditions of my favorite song of all time–“Vincent Black Lightning 1952”–on repeat.
Not surprisingly, it’s another modern ballad.
WBT: You are thirty-five, and Gods of Howl Mountain is your fourth book. This just might make you the Leonardo DiCaprio of fiction writing! What is it like to have published “early and often?” In Virginia Woolf’s “Letter to a Young Poet,” she famously writes, “For heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty.” How would you respond to Ms. Woolf?
TB: Ha, sometimes I feel a lot older on the inside than I look on the outside! To be honest, though, I only had a few short stories published before I was thirty. It may seem like an “overnight success,” but I spent the large part of a decade working in near isolation, writing and throwing away two novels before Fallen Land, as well as tons and tons of short stories. I really didn’t know another serious writer until I was around thirty years old.
I’ve heard that Virginia Woolf quote before, and, I don’t know–I think that sometimes writers use it as an excuse. Looking back at my early stories, there are some cringe-worthy moments, sure–and plenty of things I would do differently now–but I don’t regret them. We only have so much time to express ourselves in this life, and early work shows us where we were then and how we’ve arrived where we are now. It’s all part of the journey, I think.
WBT: I love that–“we only have so much time to express ourselves in this life.”
This seems like a good time to ask if you have any advice for the even-younger poets (or fiction writers) out there, those who hope to make writing their life’s work?
TB: I think Harry Crews said it best: “Get in the chair.” There’s really no secret but that. Desire, discipline, and force of will. And what did Calvin Coolidge say? “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” I think that’s as true of writing as it is for anything. It isn’t going to be easy. You’re going to get knocked down again and again and again. You’re going to have to write through shitty jobs and shattering heartbreaks and rejections. But that makes you tough–not just with writing, but in life.
I hear young writers whine sometimes because they got rejected from the hippest new lit journal. Fuck that. In my book, rejections are badges of honor. Paper your walls with them. Each is proof that you kept writing despite all the forces trying to keep you from making your art, and every rejection is one step closer to the glorious moment of publication. Every rejection makes that moment sweeter. So keep your chin up and keep swinging, and remember your heroes went through these same battles. If they didn’t, you might want to find new ones.
New Memoir: Solitaire by Lauren Hough (Part II)
Part II of II
I should’ve been more concerned when someone fingered the words “Die Dike” into the dust on my rental car. I should’ve told someone.
I was a twenty-three year old Combat Rescue Controller in the Air Force. Sounds like a cool job. Makes you picture me jumping out of a helicopter, returning enemy fire, and saving a pilot. What I really did was read, play a lot of solitaire, and once a week, sit in the corner of the briefing room, clicking “next” on Power Point slides.
When I found that first threatening message, my unit was on an exercise in Egypt, a welcome trip away for our middle-of-nowhere base in South Carolina. An exercise is when you go somewhere else to play solitaire on your computer because you’re not allowed to read at your desk—reading would look unprofessional. You spend your off hours pranking each other—gluing sleeping bags shut, dropping raw eggs into someone’s boots, duct taping people to cots with cardboard “free blow job” signs.
That first note, I wanted to believe someone just had a bad sense of humor. I rubbed the dust off the car, hoping no one had seen it. And I forgot about it because something else happened while I was in Egypt. I got orders to Araxos Air Base in Greece.
All I had to do was keep my mouth shut about the stupid prank that read like a threat. In two months, I’d leave my miserable base in South Carolina. I’d move to Greece. I’d swim in the sea. I’d drink ouzo. I’d play more solitaire. I’d be more careful about who I told I was gay. I’d become someone else—something I’d been doing as long as I can remember. New country. New town. New story.
After two years at Shaw Air Force Base, I’d been to plenty of exercises. But I’d never been to Egypt. I was thrilled to go. I saw the pyramids and the sphinx, all the images I’d studied in my picture Bible when I was a kid. Knowing I was headed to Greece next, that annoying threat was just that—annoying.
I returned to Shaw and hoped, nearly believed, I’d left that problem in Egypt. Maybe that problem hadn’t come from my base. Maybe one of the Marines from Camp Lejeune or a soldier from Fort Bragg who’d come to the exercise had left the threat on my car. Then I woke up one morning to four flat tires. This was not the kind of “prank” we played on each other – it looked like I wouldn’t be able to just forget about that first threat. I should’ve called the cops then. Should’ve saved the next note, the one on paper, stuck under my windshield wiper, the one that said I’d burn, or the one after that that said we’re going to kill you.
When my car burst into flames one night in early December, I knew things looked bad, but I still held onto some slight hope—I had my escape plan. I had received orders to move to Greece in January. They were signed. I’d been issued plane tickets. I just had to wait it out.
The night of the fire, I’d agreed to babysit for Sergeant Little because it meant spending a couple nights with HBO and without roommates arguing about who emptied the dishwasher last or what movie to watch. I liked Sergeant Little. He only hit on me once and only sulked about my rejection when he was drinking. I’d been in the Air Force long enough to know that’s about as much as you can hope for in a military guy. I found they took rejection easier if I told them I was gay. Of course, they’d tell others. After two years at Shaw, most of my small unit knew about me. But other than some unfunny jokes, it hadn’t been a problem. Anyway, I liked Little well enough, his kid wasn’t too much of a pain, but mostly I liked his two german shepherds.
That night, I’d sent the kid to bed, popped EDtv into the VCR—because I was lesbian and required to watch every Ellen movie—and I settled in on the couch in the family room at the back of the house. Then I heard the windows rattle in their frames. Sergeant Little’s dogs went nuts. I ran to the front window and saw my brand new car, my shiny black Acura Integra engulfed in flames.
The kid wandered into the hallway, half asleep in her pajamas. I told her to go out back. I didn’t know if the house was on fire, but if it wasn’t, it would be soon—I hadn’t parked but two feet from the garage. I was trying to get a hold of the dogs when I saw the Little’s idiot kid open the front door. I think she was twelve at the time. When I was twelve I was taking care of twelve younger kids. She couldn’t figure out not to run towards the fire. Anyway, I got her turned around. I threw the dogs out back with her and ran back in for the phone, and a blanket so she wouldn’t freeze. I called 911 and watched a fireball shoot into the air high enough I could see it from the back of the house.
The firemen doused the flames, and called the sheriff. They told me the house was safe. I sent the kid to bed. I called Sergeant Little, and he said not to let anyone in the house. Little liked his guns and maybe they weren’t all legal.
Sheriff Horton moseyed up to the front porch where I sat on the steps drying my hair with a towel. Didn’t take much to dry it. I’d chopped off most of my hair that summer when the swamp that is South Carolina hit a hundred degrees with a hundred percent humidity and walking outside was like opening a dishwasher mid-cycle and climbing in.
He took his hat off, beat it against his thigh to shake off the water. I stood and realized he was shorter than me. I stepped back. I’m six feet tall, and guys don’t like feeling short. I offered him my hand which he crushed in his own meaty palm. .
“Looks like arson,” he said and stared at me like I was supposed to respond with something more than no shit.
So I said, “Yeah I can smell the gas.” I mimicked his accent. Sometimes the mimicry’s unintentional. The way someone talks is the fastest way to tell someone isn’t like you. Come back from years overseas to West Texas, you learn the accent fast. If you sound different, people start asking you questions you don’t want to answer, like “where are you from?” After a while, you mimic without even thinking about it. It’s safer when people don’t think you’re different. And an accent is easy to change if you learned to change it when you were young.
I lit a Marlboro, something to do with my hands because I knew better than to put them in my pockets. Southern rules often follow military rules. You don’t talk to an authority figure with your hands in your pockets.
I offered him a cigarette. He asked if I thought that was a good idea, nodded over to where my car sat, still steaming. The firemen were packing up their hoses, shouting and joking on the lawn. I said I doubted there was much risk of combusting. He asked if maybe we should go inside. I raised the cigarette like that was the reason we would not be going inside. He raised his eyebrows like that wasn’t a good reason. I told him it wasn’t my house. I couldn’t give permission, because I thought that seemed reasonable. I don’t know what he expected to find. A lighter?
He asked me if I knew who’d done it. I said it was probably the same person who’d been leaving me death threats. He pulled out his notepad and asked for names. I told him I didn’t have any. He asked with a smirk on his face why someone would threaten me, but he already knew the answer.
I’m not always this cool and collected, not even usually. This is what happens when faced with an authority figure. I can’t meet their eyes. But I wouldn’t show fear, either. I know better. I’d been through this before. Not with the cops, but when I was growing up, interrogation was one of the adults’ favorite pastimes. I knew the drill: Stay calm. See the question behind the question. Stick as close to the truth as possible. Don’t give too much away or they’ll think you’re hiding something—liars always explain too much.
I took a drag off my cigarette to buy enough time to think of an answer. I told him someone thought I was gay. I didn’t say I was gay. I wasn’t all that clear on the rules but “I’m gay” was a pretty clear violation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
He asked me if I was gay.
I said, “Hey, don’t ask, don’t tell, right?” The decade’s favorite punchline.
Sheriff Horton didn’t laugh. He said he didn’t have a problem with gay people. He liked Ellen.
I told him, “I can’t answer that. You know I can’t answer that.” He asked me if anything was wrong with the car.
“Other than it’s smoldering in the driveway? No.” And I remembered what my brother, Mikey said when I last saw him at our grandfather’s funeral that August. I hadn’t owned the car a month. I’d been circling the restaurant parking lot where Mom and her sisters said to meet for dinner, searching for a spot my doors might be safe from other car doors. “Seriously,” he said. “I’m gonna get out and kick one of your doors in and you’ll thank me ‘cause you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
I said, “The fuck you will.”
I think the sheriff caught my smile. One silver lining of being a cult baby is that you learn, if not to expect the worst, to not be surprised by the worst. I’ll cry in frustration when my internet’s out. But when someone torches my car, well, that seems about right.
Sheriff Horton took down some information on his notepad with a pen he held with four fingers: name, insurance company, number, address. There wasn’t much more to tell him. He tried to be my buddy then, like we’d go out for beers after. Asked me where I was from. That question. I never know how to answer. I’d been telling people I was from Boston. I said Texas because guys like Sheriff Horton aren’t too fond of yankees.
He asked how I liked South Carolina, the Air Force. I said it was alright. But I was going to Greece in January.
He said, “We’ll see about that.” And he snapped his notebook shut.
The firemen left. Another squad car pulled into the driveway. Sheriff Horton walked over to the car, met the new deputy. Gave orders. The new deputy, a skinny kid who looked like he’d slept in his uniform, took some pictures, collected evidence in plastic bags.
I asked Sheriff Horton if I could get my things out of the trunk, see if anything survived—the chem warfare suit I’d been issued for Egypt that I still hadn’t returned, souvenirs I’d bought in Egypt, a chess set for my dad, a painting on papyrus for my mom, a hookah for my brother, little trinkets for my sister’s kids. He said I’d have to wait until they were done processing the car. Everything was evidence now. I watched from the porch but no one was talking to me. I told them to knock if they had any more questions. I went back inside. I gave the dogs a couple biscuits, sat on the couch, and waited for morning.
My buddy Sheriff Horton called my office a few days later. He said someone had seen a white car speeding away from the house. Asked if I knew who drove a white car. I couldn’t think of anyone. Then he asked me take a polygraph. I’d watched enough television and read a few legal thrillers. I knew I was a suspect, so I called the base legal office. The base lawyer told me I shouldn’t be too worried. I should stop talking to the cops. Tell them to talk to her. Don’t talk to anyone. Call her back if anything changed.
I waited while the Air Force took over the investigation. I waited as the investigators asked every airman on base if they knew Senior Airman Hough was being harassed, if they knew Senior Airman Hough was gay. She’s gay. I waited while investigators showed up at my grandma’s door in Texas. But they didn’t know she’d been an Air Force wife. They didn’t even finish introducing themselves before she slammed the door in their faces and called me.
The investigation took another bad turn when they talked to my roommate. He said I was a liar. Sometimes when we watched a movie set in a place I’d been, I’d say, “Hey I’ve been there.” I grew up all over the place—Japan, Switzerland, Argentina, Chile, Texas. Sometimes I forget that some people never stray too far from home. Most people know where that is. But I didn’t understand why he thought I was a liar just because I said I’d been there, unless I’d slipped. Maybe I’d forgotten my backstory. Maybe I’d switched stories, told him I’d grown up everywhere, told someone within earshot I’d grown up in Texas. Maybe I shouldn’t have been drinking around people.
The truth is, I am a liar. If you ask me where I’m from, I’ll lie to you. I’ll tell you my parents were missionaries. I’ll tell you I’m from Boston. I’ll tell you I’m from Texas. But those lies, people believe. I’m better at lying than I am at the truth because the lies don’t make me nervous. It’s the truth, the thought of telling it that triggers my nervous laugh and my sweating palms, makes me not want to look you in the eye. I know I won’t like what I’ll see.
I moved back into the dorms on base that I’d been so eager to leave a year earlier. Senior Airmen were allowed to move off-base where most of us shared the rent on run-down trailers to save money. Off-base, there were no dorm inspections, no First Sergeants trolling the common areas for rule-breakers. I liked thinking I had some privacy, but I’d been wrong. I’d let my guard down, trusted the wrong people with little bits of information like, I’ve been there. So now, at least on base, I wouldn’t have roommates.
2000
It hadn’t been a year since Barry Winchell, an Army private, had been beaten to death with a baseball bat in a barracks hallway at an Army post in Kentucky because he was gay. I was scared before. But the worst I feared was getting kicked out of the Air Force. Even the act of torching my car seemed like a far leap from murder, a beat-down seemed more likely. That is, until June, when I got the next note: “Gun knife or bat I can’t decide which one.” And of course, I thought of Winchell. And I was terrified.
The note clarified my priorities. I’d been happy over the past few months that it seemed whomever torched my car was finished with me. I thought they’d leave me alone now that I was being investigated, afraid to show themselves. Maybe they’d transferred to another base.
The investigation had stalled. My insurance company, frustrated with the lack of an outcome, sent their own investigator. He looked at the evidence the cops had, interviewed me and a few people on base, called Sheriff Horton some names, and cleared me of wrong-doing in two days. I figured the Air Force investigators had given up trying to pin the arson on me when I got new orders to Greece. Maybe they’d let me go this time, if only to wash their hands of the problem.
But now, with this new note, getting kicked out of the Air Force was no longer my biggest fear or the most likely outcome. I called the Air Force investigators. They asked me if I’d touched the note. They took me over to their office, led me down a hallway, into a room, told me to sit there in an office chair, and they sat across from me.
Campbell was built like a linebacker, all shoulders and forehead. He was wearing a navy suit in mid-July. I wondered how many times the FBI had turned down his application before he took this job, Air Force Office of Special Investigations, OSI. He’d be playing bad cop. Maldonado was pregnant and her legs didn’t reach the floor. Campbell waited while she tried to adjust the office chair—the paddle that lowered the seat wasn’t working. They switched chairs. This didn’t look much like an interrogation room. No mirror on the wall. No metal chairs. Just a government issue gray desk and three blue office chairs.
I stared at the gold cross that had slipped out of Maldonado’s blouse during the fight with the chair. She’d be playing good cop but she’d push for execution if she could. She tucked the necklace back in, cleared her throat, opened a folder. I half expected her first words to be, “should we pray?” That’s how this used to happen. But they just sat there looking at me like it was a game to see who’d speak first. I looked at my hands. I asked for a lawyer. Maldonado said I wasn’t a suspect. I shouldn’t need a lawyer. Not a very convincing good cop.
“When did you find the note? Who left the note? Is this the first time this has happened?”
“I want a lawyer. The base lawyer told me not to answer questions.”
“You’re not a suspect. This isn’t about your car. This is about the threats. We’re trying to help you.”
And the tears filled my eyes and I wiped them with the back of my hand. I wasn’t crying. My eyes were leaking. There is in fact a difference. The leaking happens when I’m frustrated.
Maldonado asked me, “Why are you so upset if you didn’t do anything?”
I wanted to shout at them. I wanted to tell them I grew up in a cult. That they used to pull me out of bed late at night and make me confess to things I didn’t understand. I told them I wanted a lawyer.
They gave up after a while. Wrote some notes down in the folder. Maldonado said she had to eat something. Campbell took me to another room where another agent, a lab rat with dandruff and a yellow collar, spread ink on my hands and arms and took impressions. He pulled hair from random spots on my head for a DNA test.
I knew then they weren’t looking for who sent me death threats. They didn’t believe me. Maybe they thought I didn’t want the investigation to stall, didn’t want to go to Greece. They were still convinced I’d torched my own car.
They wanted my DNA because a rag had been stuffed in the gas tank. The rag never ignited. Whoever did torch my car filled it with gas and lit it that way after trying to light a rag in the pouring rain. The cops had found a hair on the rag. Campbell had mentioned it earlier, hoping for a reaction.
And they let me go. I walked across the street, back to the legal office and sat down to wait for a lawyer because I wasn’t in a cult anymore, and a lawyer could make them stop asking me questions I couldn’t answer. The lawyer said to stop talking to the investigators. He couldn’t represent me because he’d just moved over from the prosecuting side and had worked on my case. If there was to be a court martial, they’d have to send a defense attorney from another base. I hadn’t considered there would be a court martial, at least not with me as the defendant. Up until that conversation, I assumed they’d either figure out who did it or drop the investigation, because I hadn’t done anything. But I had bigger worries than a court martial.
I’d always slept with a knife by my bed—too many nights when some drunk airman tried my doorknob. I replaced the knife with a little snub-nosed .38 I bought at one of the ten pawn shops between the base and Sumter, the nearest town.
I drove out of town and practiced a few shots on a row of beer bottles. The bottles remained intact. I’d barely qualified with a rifle back in basic training. I wouldn’t have qualified with a 9mm, if the good ol’ boy major beside me at the range hadn’t pitied my piss-poor shooting, said, Aw shit, and blown a few more holes in my target. His target had a single hole through dead center, where every one of his bullets had passed. And, if I had to shoot, I’d be shooting without my glasses at night. I hoped I wouldn’t need the gun. I’d end up killing my television or someone across the hall.
They told me I couldn’t work in my office anymore. My security clearance was suspended because of the investigation. They moved me to the gym where I traded IDs for towels, where no one looked me in the eye.
I only had two friends before all this. We used to drive up to the gay club together in Columbia every weekend which was better than the bar in Florence by virtue of having more than ten customers. We’d try to forget we were in the military, try to forget we might be seen by some airman who liked the music and the drugs, who’d get popped on a piss test one day and sell us out to save his ass. Now they couldn’t risk being seen around me. They’d be gay by association. I didn’t blame them. Even as a kid, being my friend had been a risk.
So I spent my evenings in my dorm room reading through the slim pickings available at the base library. I was used to being lonely. But I’d see groups of friends in the dining hall, at the gym, at the weekend keg parties in the courtyard between dorm buildings, and mostly, I just wanted the distraction of hearing someone talk.
One morning in August, I was told to report to my commander’s office. I called base legal. They said they’d assign me a lawyer now that I was going to be court martialed. Don’t say a word. You’ll have to sign the charge sheet. Call us back.
I stood at attention as my commander, Colonel Young read the charges: Arson with intent to defraud. And something about conduct unbecoming but I hear they always add that. If there’s a crime becoming of a US Airman, I’m guessing they wouldn’t charge anyone for it.
I signed the charge sheet, headed over to base legal, locked myself in the bathroom and cried. I was going to have to call my parents.
The legal office let me use a desk and a phone. I called my mom first because I didn’t know how to reach my dad. When I’d told her about the car back when it happened, she said, “Oh Jesus, Lauren. This gay thing. I don’t know about it. You’re running with the wrong crowd.”
I wasn’t running with any crowd. I was sneaking off on occasion to a gay bar. Sometimes I’d go home with someone. Sometimes I’d go home with the same person more than once which is basically marriage if you’re a lesbian. But I didn’t know how to have a relationship or what that word even meant. And I barely had friends much less a crowd.
I was worried she’d tell me more about how this lesbian thing wasn’t a good idea, “you can’t have kids, it’s just hedonism, Lauren.” Hedonism would require some degree of happiness.
Mom hadn’t had much time to get used to what she called this lesbian thing. When I told her a couple years ago, she’d said she hoped I’d change my mind. Since those first arguments, when it seemed like all she did was cry on the phone, and I’d cry after we hung up, we’d agreed to a sort of don’t ask, don’t tell policy of our own.
She said she’d pray for me. She said she’d come to the trial. She asked me if I needed money for a lawyer. I told her the Air Force was providing one.
“I’ll be okay. I need a number for Dad.” She said to ask Valerie, my sister. She might know.
Valerie was still at work when I called. So I tried to call my brother. We didn’t talk much, not since I left home and joined the Air Force. He was in college, still living with our stepdad, Gabe, even after the divorce, after Mom had moved to Massachusetts.
I hadn’t talked to Gabe in years. I called the house and Gabe answered. I didn’t get the words out, can I talk to Mikey, before he hung up. I wasn’t sure until that moment that I would call my dad. But somewhere between the click of the line going dead, and my setting the phone back into its cradle, I knew I would call him. I walked back to my dorm room and waited for my sister to call. She gave me the number for a commune in Sweden where she thought Dad might be.
We were never sure where he was, because Dad was still in the Family. Cults like that word—family. I didn’t know if he’d ever leave. He’d visited a couple times since we’d left the cult when I was fifteen. But the joy of each visit had dissolved into heated words and tears as he defended them. His eyes damp, he’d say, “Let’s just agree to disagree.” And I’d tell him, “They told you to say that.” Because they had. I’d read the memo. But sometimes his love for me broke through the fog of a cult member’s brain. When I’d told him I was gay, he didn’t condemn me as I knew he was supposed to. Instead all he said was, “Oh, honey, that must be so hard on you.” I hoped I could break through again.
I called the home. I never concerned myself with time zones. I didn’t care about who I woke up. They’d never been all that concerned with respecting my sleep. The guy who answered the phone pretended he didn’t speak English at first. Said he didn’t understand. That line, “I don’t understand,” is the sum total of my Swedish. I said I’m was looking for my dad, tall guy, American. I think he’s going by Stefan. Married to a woman who probably goes by Esther.
He said, “Oh he’s not here?” Something close to an American accent. Hard consonants, gratingly positive inflection. “Listen. Can you call back in a few hours?”
I asked, “Is he not there right now, or he doesn’t live there?” I had to be careful. If this guy hung up the phone, there would be no way to reach my dad.
He said, “Doesn’t live here.”
“Well, I can’t call back. I have to find him. It’s an emergency.”
He said, “Okay. Call back in a half hour? I need to ask someone. God bless you.”
I could hear a party gearing up in a room down the hall, loud voices, Limp Bizkit—Friday night in the dorms.
I called the number again. Three rings. Four. I was afraid he wouldn’t answer. I was afraid they’d pack up the home and leave because of a phone call. But on the seventh ring, he picked up. “Hello?” he said.
“Were you able to find anyone?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I’m not sure, of course. This is the number of a home in Moscow, but you’ll have to look up the country code? He might be there. If not, ask for Swiss Aaron. He might know.”
Moscow. The OSI was going to open and entirely new investigation into my phone bill. But I couldn’t worry about that. Swiss Aaron passed me on to someone else who passed me on to someone else. Another home in another country. In all, I went through five numbers before I called a different home in Sweden, and Dad answered. Even in Swedish, I knew his voice. I said hi.
He said, “Shatzi!” He always calls me that, it’s something like a German version of “sweetie.” “Hey, kiddo. How are you?” I’d done the math by this point. It was five am and this was how excited my dad was to hear from me. I wanted to cry. I wanted to ask him if he’d been fishing lately, anything but what I had to tell him.
“I’m in trouble, Dad.”
“What? No. What’s the matter?” he said.
I told him everything—started with the death threats, moved on to the car, the investigation. “Anyway, there’s going to be a court martial,” I said. I knew he might be fuzzy on what that meant. “It’s like a trial, Dad. It is a trial. And if they say I’m guilty, I’m going to jail. The max is ten years.”
“But you didn’t do anything,” he said. “So there’s no need to worry?” At least he didn’t didn’t offer to pray with me.
I told him, “No. It looks really bad. I’m the only suspect because they never looked for who did it. And they’re saying I didn’t want to go to Greece.”
He interrupted me then, “Why wouldn’t you want to go to Greece? That’s so stupid.”
I said, “Fuck if I know, Dad. But they’re saying I couldn’t afford the car and didn’t want to go to Greece so I torched it. I don’t know. It looks bad.”
He asked for my number. He said he’d call me back. I figured he’d wake up the shepherds, whoever was in charge of the home. They’d pray about it and decide it wasn’t in the Lord’s will for my Dad to care about what happened to me—Story of my life. I wondered if he’d call me back at all.
My phone rang. “Hey, so when is this happening?” he asked. I gave him the dates. He said he was coming. I couldn’t believe it. My dad who hated that I’d even joined the military. Who I hadn’t seen but a couple times since my parents divorced when I was seven. Who stayed in the Family long after we’d left. My dad was coming to my trial. I’d fought against letting myself hope. He said he’d called his brother, a lawyer, who told him I needed a civilian lawyer. Said his mom had left him some money and he’d pay for a lawyer.
And so my Dad gave me a lawyer named Gary Myers who said I could pick an Air Force lawyer from a different base, and should. Gary would run the defense, but an Air Force lawyer was free. I might as well have both. The Air Force gave me a captain from a base in Oklahoma. I named him The Apostle because he asked if I was a Christian. When I said I’m not anymore, he wanted to pray with me. I wanted him to defend me. But if he just wanted to pray, I had Gary Myers who was exactly as big a prick as you want defending you.
I’m serious. He yelled at me on the phone for talking to Sheriff Horton and the investigators on base. I said, “I didn’t know any better. I talked to legal and didn’t talk to him after that.”
He said, “Well maybe you’re not a complete fucking idiot. Alright. Keep your mouth shut.”
My court martial was held in October of 2000. The trial lasted four days. Mom and Dad shared a rental car from the airport and stayed in the same hotel. They showed up every morning and sat outside the courtroom. They couldn’t come in, in case they were called as witnesses. And I needed Mom as a witness.
The prosecution started. (All these words—prosecution, jury, trial—are called something different in the military. But we’ll skip the lesson in military law.) They said I was a liar, bought a car I couldn’t afford. I didn’t tell anyone about the death threats.
Sergeant Little said, “Those dogs always bark at anything on the street, even if they’re dead asleep.” I thought we should all drive over to his house, play a game of touch football on his lawn to prove his dogs wouldn’t bark unless someone rang the doorbell.
I wasn’t surprised he’d turned on me. You may think you have friends who’ll help you bury a body. But when the cops show up and flash their badges, your friends will point to bodies you’ve never seen to keep the cops from looking their way. There are only two sides, and when it comes down to it, even those with nothing to hide will side with those who have the power.
They put my old roommate, Eric on the stand. He said, “She always locked her car.”
If I always locked my car, no one could have filled it full of gas without setting off the alarm. What he didn’t mention was that soon after I’d had the alarm installed, I’d regretted the money I’d wasted on it. The fighter jets set off every car alarm on base every time they buzzed over. We’d talked about it. He said I should have the alarm sensor recalibrated. Instead, I stopped locking my car, to keep it from going off.
He said, “Her CDs weren’t in the car when it burned.”
If my CDs weren’t in the car, obviously I’d removed them before lighting the car on fire. Or I’d brought them into the house to listen to something, or reorganize my CDs, a favorite hobby of anyone with two books full of CDs. Maybe by mood this time. I don’t actually remember and I didn’t then either. I just remember the exasperation I felt as he said it. “A few days later, I saw her CD case in the house.” And the prosecutor looked at the jury like he’d found the smoking match.
Eric said, “She didn’t want to go to Greece.”
As my dad said, that’s just stupid. I hoped my lawyers would have an argument because all I could think of was, that’s stupid.
He said, “She borrowed my gas can a few weeks before.”
Okay, that did look bad. Really bad. And my explanation after the fact wouldn’t help much. The last time I’d driven through Alabama, before borrowing the gas can, I’d been jumped coming out of a gas station bathroom because a high-schooler told her boyfriend and his buddies, “that’s the pervert was usin’ the ladies’.” I was only spared serious injury when a trucker named Jimmy T saw my uniform and stepped in about the time I hit the ground. Jimmy T told me as he helped me back to my car that he didn’t much care for my “lifestyle and such. But that uniform means somethin.’” And “you can’t come back to Jesus if yer already dead.” Guess he wasn’t a “once saved, always saved” sort of Christian.
To avoid a repeat of the experience this Thanksgiving, I was planning to only stop at busy truck stops if I could. Just in case, I borrowed Eric’s gas can. But on the way back I’d given it to someone who came up to me and said he was out of gas—I figured it’d do him more good than giving him money. And then they’d found the molten remains of a gas can in my car.
This was the prosecution’s big moment. And they played it up, and Eric was happy to play along. He wanted to be a state trooper when he got out and moved home to Ohio. His brother was a trooper and told Eric his association with a known felon wouldn’t look good on his application.
He said, “She joked about the whole thing. She didn’t seem scared at all.” We’ll ignore that assessment of my fear level because he didn’t know. I did joke about it. That’s true. And that, my outward reaction to the entire affair didn’t fit what everyone seemed to think should have been my reaction. Seemed like they’d have believed me if I’d cried in front of them. But they didn’t grow up the Family. They didn’t grow up in constant fear. They hadn’t learned sometimes all you can do is fucking laugh.
Sheriff Horton took the stand, after a small commotion caused when he walked into the courtroom wearing his gun, and the Air Force police had to take it from him. He corroborated Eric’s opinion of my unlikely affect. He said I was too calm when I talked to him. Most people, he said, “They’re crying or foaming a the mouth to kill the bastard who did it. She laughed about it.” See what I mean?
Gary asked him if he’d tried to find the white car the neighbor had seen speeding away, if he’d looked at anyone else.
Horton shifted in his seat and said, “Well, no. But she wouldn’t take the polygraph.” (If you’re shouting “inadmissible,” Gary said you’re wrong. “Damage done,” he said. “No reason to put a neon light around it.”)
“It’s all circumstantial,” Gary said. “This is what happens. You’ll even start to believe you’re guilty. Just hang tough until it’s our turn.” He didn’t seem the type to play cheerleader. Leading up to the trial, he’d been all business. How I was holding up wasn’t any of his concern. Now he was trying to comfort me and that scared me. I knew I wasn’t guilty. But guilt or innocence had never mattered all that much in my experience. And I was learning my experience in the Family wasn’t as unique as I’d believed it to be when we left. I was sure I was going to prison.
In between testimony, Gary paced the hall and talked to himself. The Apostle prayed with Mom—turns out he was useful after all. Dad sat in a chair and looked dazed. I stood outside and smoked. And I thought about going to prison.
I knew I couldn’t do it again. I’d been locked in rooms before. The last time, when I was fourteen, I broke down after only two days. The walls closed in and I couldn’t breathe and the world got dark. It changes you each time. You go through the first few hours in silence. Then you start talking to yourself. You time your pulse. You pick at split ends, scabs, and ingrown hairs. You sleep. And when you wake up, the room is smaller. You have to get out. Your chest tightens. You need space. Just a little breeze. You have to see the sky. One star. You tell yourself it’ll be okay, they’ll let you out. But you don’t believe your own words. The harder you try to control your breath, the worse it gets. You start to really panic then, and you’ve lost. Once the panic starts, it doesn’t end. You can learn to ride the waves, but every single wave is a fight for survival. And you don’t come out stronger. You lose something each time. You lose faith in yourself. I wasn’t doing it again.
The prosecution rested and my lawyer, Gary took over. My new sergeant, the guy who replaced Little, said, “Every airman on base is driving a car they can’t afford. That’s what idiot kids who’ve never had any money do.”
A couple airmen from my squadron said, “Everyone knows she’s gay and some people have a big problem with it.” They’d seen the first message in Egypt, the one in the dust on my car. Shouldn’t have been a surprise. The car had been parked right where everyone smoked outside the operations center. But I’d been too busy hoping no one had seen the writing to ask if anyone had.
My friend who’d given me a ride when my tires were slashed told them all about that morning. Another roommate said, “She never always locked anything. She’s a slob. Sometimes her CDs are in the house because she never sleeps and she listens to music late at night. All she ever talked about was leaving this base. Do you know how much it sucks here?”
The lab guy said, “The DNA test on the hair they found on the rag was inconclusive.”
Gary said, “The results I have here say it’s not a match.”
“Well, yeah,” the guy said. “That’s what I said.”
Mom took the stand and told them how many countries I’d lived in and maybe I wasn’t a liar when I said I’ve been there. She said, “When things go really wrong, Lauren gets quiet or tries to make it a joke. If she needed money, she would’ve asked me. She knows she can.”
It was strange watching my mom on the witness stand. She didn’t look at me. But she was defending me. And I wondered then why she hadn’t before, when I was younger, when I needed her to protect me. I flashed through all the times I’d been in trouble, with Gabe, with the shepherds. And I couldn’t remember a single time she’d spoken up, told them to stop. But mostly, she wasn’t even there. And I wanted to know why. But I’d been asking for years. I was starting to wonder if she even knew.
I liked that Mom and Dad were going to dinner together every night during the trial. They weren’t fighting.
I’ve never seen Parent Trap but I think most kids nurse a fantasy their parents will get back together. I was no different. After Dad, Mom had married my stepdad and my stepdad was an asshole. My dad was nice. Seemed like Mom would realize that, as though maybe she hadn’t known, and they’d realize with all this time spent together they were still in love. And I was glad they’d have each other because I wasn’t going to prison.
The military makes you shop for prison, even before you get the verdict. You have to box up your belongings for storage. You’re given a list of what you’re required to take: five white t-shirts, five black t-shirts, one white towel, five pairs of socks, five white sports bras, one bar of soap, and so on. So after I packed up my room, I borrowed Dad’s rental car and drove to Walmart where I bought what I needed off the list. I stopped in sporting goods and looked at the knives. That wouldn’t work—too slow. The base hospital was a five minute walk from the courtroom.
I dropped the car at the base hotel, gave Dad the keys and a hug. He wanted me to stay there. Just have a beer at least, he said. “Your mom wants you to call her.” I didn’t stay for a beer and I didn’t call. I knew she’d convince me to sleep in her room.
Back in my dorm room, I wrote them each a note. I didn’t say much. Just told them not to blame themselves. Told them I was sorry. I hid the note behind a painting I left on the wall because my brother painted that and I wanted to look at it some more. Everything else I owned was boxed and labeled for storage. I put on my blues, made sure my ribbon rack was straight, and shoved the gun under my service jacket, under my belt at the small of my back. I checked the mirror. You couldn’t tell. I took it out again and sat down to wait for the morning.
I sat there on my bare mattress all night, and all night, I tried to talk myself out of it. It was only ten years. Maybe I wouldn’t get the full ten. They’d offered me two but I would’ve had to say I did it. I couldn’t do it in front of Mom, how do you make your mom watch you die? But what if they cuffed me right away? Dad would be there and maybe he or someone else would know and cover her eyes. I’d have to be fast. The sentence was only ten years, and I could take ten years. I’d be thirty-three when I got out. That wasn’t so old. I stared at the painting and wanted to call my brother who I knew wouldn’t try to talk me out of it. He’d know what to say without trying, and I wouldn’t want to die more than I wanted to live in a cell.
When they said not guilty and Mom started crying, I cried too. And then I started laughing. I knew people were looking at me, the jurors were questioning their verdict. Who laughs? Who goes through a trial and then fucking laughs. Cult babies laugh. Of course, they didn’t know that. But I laughed. Maybe it was just how the tension fell out of me, maybe because I’d get to live, because that one time, maybe the only time in my life, my parents stood up for me, and I won.
The finest restaurant in Sumter, the town near the base, was Outback Steakhouse. So that’s where we went to celebrate. I sat across from my parents. We placed our drink orders and Dad looked around the room. He said, “You know, there are a lot of black people here. I’ll bet we could find some good barbecue.”
Mom, said, “Jesus. Ethan. You can’t say things like that. Lauren, do you have a cigarette?” I passed her one and held out the lighter. She looked around, “How long does it take to pour a glass of wine?”
Dad said, “Why can’t you say that?” He left the States when he was nineteen and hasn’t spent more than six months here since. “Do you both have to smoke?”
“Yes,” we answered in unison and Mom caught my eye and winked at me. The waiter came back for our orders Dad forgot what he’d wanted so Mom and I ordered while Dad searched the menu again. We finished and the waiter looked impatient so Mom ordered Dad a steak.
“Shit,” he said. And scooted out of the booth, nearly ran out of the restaurant.
I looked at Mom. “Probably left the lights on,” she said. “Sorry we were late. He left his wallet, went back in for his wallet, and then left his phone. Did you know he left Valerie behind in Berlin when we moved? I took the train the day before with you and Ann. You were only one, and I was still pregnant with Mikey.”
The wine arrived. Still no sign of Dad but Mom said, “We’ll just toast when he gets back.” We clinked glasses. “Anyway,” she said. “He was driving the car, it was a little Mini, no room for all of us and our stuff. He just had Valerie. And he left her at the flat. He didn’t realize it until he got to the checkpoint to leave West Berlin and saw he had both passports. Valerie was just sitting there at the door to the flat waiting for him for nearly an hour. She was only four.”
Dad scooted back into the booth. “What are you laughing about?” he asked.
I said, “Nothing, Dad. Taken care of?”
“What? Oh yes. So. We should toast, yes?” Sometimes he doesn’t sound American anymore. I watched them together. Dad changed subjects mid-sentence. Mom grew impatient and snapped at him. Dad tried to tell jokes to cut the tension but the jokes fell flat.
The fun thing about being a child of divorce is, you’re half of both parents. And both sides of you are tired of the other’s shit. And I watched them then and saw it. Dad needed an adult in his life to make sure he left the house wearing clothes. Mom wanted him to be an adult, back when she wanted anything from him at all.
I didn’t want to let go of the fantasy they’d get back together but at this point it would’ve been as silly as believing the Antichrist was on his way over to join us for dinner. The older you get, the easier it is to burn chapters in the book of fairytales in your head. I ordered another beer.
Once I let go, dropped the childish idea, it was easier then. I saw them then as separate people and I could laugh when Dad changed subjects mid-sentence. And I was glad I’d gotten my sense of humor from my mom because there are only so many variations of “A rabbi and a priest walk into a bar…” and none of them are funny. But I was glad my dad was that nice guy, who can’t remember his wallet but remembers every detail about you, every word you’ve ever said. And he helped my mom into her jacket, and turned up the radio in the car when Bruce Springsteen came on, because she loves Bruce.
The next week, I didn’t expect to go right back to my desk. I had “won,” but I knew I’d lost even the small place I’d carved out for myself at Shaw. They’d already replaced me since I was supposed to be in Greece. Besides, there was the issue of my security clearance. They gave me a new job that still wasn’t my old job, but at least I wasn’t handing out towels at the gym. My new job was supervising the new airmen, just out of training, who’d been assigned to maintain the dorms—changing lightbulbs, cleaning day rooms, mowing lawns. At first it was fine. I drove around in a golf cart and made sure everything got done. But soon it became apparent how much damage the OSI had done with their little investigation—Do you know Hough’s gay?
Everyone on base knew who I was, and what I was, and it didn’t take long for word to spread to the baby airmen I was supervising. Mostly it was just jokes. Where’ve you guys been? You’re two hours late. Hey, don’t ask, don’t tell, right? But a few of them stopped listening to me altogether. I’d assign them to clean a dayroom, they’d tell me I shouldn’t be wearing a uniform much less stripes and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it.
A month passed and orders came again, to Greece again. But I only got a day to celebrate before the orders were cancelled. The Greece assignment required something like an add-on security clearance called the Personnel Reliability Program. The PRP is supposed to ensure only qualified people have access to nuclear weapons. Mine was denied because I had a food allergy. I guess you never know when someone will bring guacamole into the office and bam, my avocado allergy sends me into a gauc-fueled rage and I hit the launch button. You just can’t take that sort of risk. I knew then they were never going to welcome me back. My career was over. And that’s when I heard from Mikey.
Because we couldn’t talk on the phone much, this was long before everyone had a cell phone, we used to send books. I sent him “The Fountainhead” because I thought Rand had some great ideas. (I was nineteen.) He responded with “Of Human Bondage.” I sent “Slaughterhouse Five.” Mikey sent “Catch 22.” I sent “Trainspotting.” A few months later, he sent me “Fight Club.” We’d underline passages we liked, sometimes write notes in the margins. And we’d been doing this ever since I left home. So when I opened my mailbox and saw his blocky handwriting on a package, I didn’t open it in the mailroom. I waited until the end of the day, and all day, tried to guess what he’d sent me. When I got back to my dorm room and tore open the brown paper, I sat down and laughed—Oscar Wilde. I flipped through the book and found the passage he’d circled.
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
My little brother had been with me through it all. We grew up together in the Family, slept in the same bed for years, had the same stepdad who would never think we were good enough to love. Mikey had seen the worst in me and still loved me because it was never a question—He was my brother. And he knew what I wanted, maybe understood more than I did why I joined the Air Force. I thought I’d find something in the military. I’d wear the same uniform as everyone else. They’d have to accept me because I was one of them. I’d find what every book I read, every movie I watched told me I’d find, friends and maybe even a sort of family, a place where I belonged.
But all I’d done was join another cult. And they didn’t want me any more than the last one had. And there was my brother, telling me what I knew but hadn’t been able to admit. I’d never belong. But maybe that was okay. I stayed up all night reading. And I knew what I had to do. I wrote a letter.
A few days later, I walked into my commander, Colonel Young’s, office. I handed him the letter I wrote. I didn’t trust myself to speak. The letter said, “I’m gay. Please process my discharge.” And on January 12th, 2001, I was given an honorable discharge, and forty-eight hours to leave the base. My discharge papers say, “homosexual admission.” They don’t say the other part, that the Air Force was never going to let me leave Shaw Air Force Base, that they didn’t care who’d been threatening me, who’d torched my car, or what that person might do next. The paperwork doesn’t say that they would never accept me, that they gave me no choice.
I’d thought of exactly one way out of Amarillo, one thing I could do with my life. I didn’t have a backup plan. So I did what I’d been trained to do my entire childhood when we could fit everything we owned in a suitcase, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. I packed what I needed, and tossed what I could do without. A yard sale might’ve helped with the gas money. But they only gave me forty-eight hours. And no one had heard of craigslist in Sumter, in early 2001. I drove the little Ford Aspire my mom paid for with her credit card to Washington, DC, the farthest north I could reach on a couple tanks of gas.
I lived in my car a couple months. Some things are easier for cult babies who’ve practiced showering in a cup of water. I sold my car and rented a room not much bigger, and got a job as a bouncer at a gay bar. And I tried to come up with a new plan for my life.
Caspar David Friedrich, “The Sea of Ice,” (1823-24).
Headstrong
I’m sorry catches in the throat
and bruises in that wavering
hesitation like a rock falling
back to earth. See how it curves
under the skin, twists and cuts
as it hugs the voice box.
I forgive sways like a tamarack—
hackmatack, red larch, juniper,
larix laricina—of the low-lands
with roots in cool mud and branches
in the soft air where we hold
the belief we are stronger than wind.
The end is as blue as slag and twice
as worthless. This is where I say
I never meant it, and this is where
you say it doesn’t matter anymore
because words are less than
clouds and leaves and stone.
Nicolai Fechin, Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya (1914)
Daughter
we are raising fire
a shock-headed girl
in this cold season
when you start a fire
be to windward, wait
for it to break out within
mind now what I say
remain quiet
for when fire breaks
we call these special days
nothing to me is sweeter
than a crackling flame
* some words borrowed from Struwwelpeter translated by Heinrich Hoffman (“any thing to me is sweeter,” “shock-headed peter,” “they crackle so, and spit, and flame,” “mind now, Conrad, what I say”) “The Attack by Fire;” The Art of War by Sun Tzu (“material for raising fire,” “special days,” “days of rising wind,” “when fire breaks,” “remain quiet,” “wait for it to break out within,” “when you start a fire, be to windward”)
Jacob Hoefnagel, “Orpheus Charming the Animals”
Homes Will Be Stripped Bare
this is one world
and this is another
the borders merely
traced out on the ground
with a small stick
in one world, animals:
zebras, giraffes,
lions, horses,
and dinosaurs
bide their time
stand together
quietly encamped
kept in readiness
for a decision
made in a single day
to overthrow their kingdom
cause commotion at home
the animals know
there is no time to ponder
just march to the place
beyond ordinary rules
* some words borrowed from “Weak Points and Strong” (“the lines of our encampment be merely traced out on the ground,” “quietly encamped”), “The Attack by Fire” (“bide your time,” “kept in readiness”), “The Use of Spies” (“there will be commotion at home”), “Attacks by Stratagem” (“overthrows their kingdom”), “Maneuvering” (“ponder before you make a move”), “Laying Plans” (“beyond the ordinary rules”), and “Waging War” (the homes of the people will be stripped bare”) The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Fairy Tales from Hans Christian Andersen (1914), Doubleday
The Book Closes
words become a strange
dream an explosion
the releasing of the trigger
another shovelful of earth
to plant secrets a storm
breaking with the momentum
of a round stone and yet
no real disorder at all
just the melodies that can never
be heard the colors
that can never be seen
just like the little birds
that fly far away further
than we will ever know
* some words borrowed from “The Traveling Companion” by Hans Christian Anderson trans. Erik Christian Haugaard (“he dreamed a strange dream,” “another shovelful of earth,” “the words became a picture,” “the little birds flew far into the world,” “the storm broke”) and from “Energy” The Art of War by Sun Tzu (“give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard,” “more hues than can ever be seen,” “releasing of the trigger,” “and yet no real disorder at all,” “the momentum of a round stone”)
New Poetry by Amalie Flynn
POLLINATE
When I dream about the words
They fall from the sky. Dropped
From planes that hover and the
Words are dropping and dropping.
In clusters. And again and. Again.
How the words are dropping. Like
Bombs.
I wake up my husband. Shake his
Shoulder. Our two children. How
I shake their shoulders and we go
Outside. To watch the words fall.
Stand feet bare on grass. And we
Look up. At a sky full of munition.
How it stretches as far as it goes.
The sky full of words falling. Falling
On us. Falling on this town.
And the letters bend and curl. How
The arc of the stems twist in the air.
Crotch and vertex. The descenders.
As the letters fall down. The letters
Of the words. This typography of
The words we use now. Hear now.
Here in America.
And the words are hitting. Hitting
Our house. How the children are
Covering their heads with hands.
With letters and syllables slapping
A roof. The word liberal. The word
Fascist. Hitting and again. Liberal
And fascist. How liberal fascist hits
Until the house is covered. A liberal
Fascist hanging. Closed bowl of the
Letter b split and hanging from a
Gutter. Or how merit-based falls.
Hits the ground. Making explosion
Craters in our backyard. How the
Word elitist floats. How there are
Elitists in the swimming pool.
Down the street. All over this town.
The word liar hangs from the trees.
Dud bombs that are quiet. Hanging
Like leaves. Or ready to detonate.
And the word white sprays down.
Pelts down. Followed by silence.
And then power. How the words
White and power fall down onto
This town.
A canister opens and releases the
Word globalist. How globalist hits
The synagogue. Hits the synagogue
And hits it and hits it again. Over the
Mosque words fall down. A fleet of
Terrorists attack a mosque. How
The words terrorist and ISIS and
Radical Islamic terrorism attack a
Mosque. Leaving holes in a wall
That faces Makkah.
And under the lights on a football
Field some men kneel. Their heads
Bowed. With the word ungrateful
Wrapping around their necks like
Snakes. Or other men. Kneeling
In a church. Who pray and use
Words like our manifest destiny
And this Christian nation.
Across the fields. Where berries
Grow. But no one comes to pick
Them. No one comes. Because
They are scared of ICE and the
Roundups. How the fields are
Littered with overripe berries
And land mines made out of
The word illegal and rapist or
Drug dealing murderer. And in
The lakes. In the rivers. Which
Are drying up. Where fish and
Bacteria die. In the warm ocean.
How the word fake floats.
Over neighborhoods where every
Day is a day of guns and bullets
And broken dead bodies. Over
The schools. The schools that
Have been lucky. Where there
Has not been a mass shooting.
Where a man with an assault rifle
Has not forced his way in and shot
All the children dead. Over these
Schools. And over the schools that
Were not lucky. How the words.
The words thoughts and prayers
Are falling down from the sky.
And in this driveway I am holding
My husband’s hand. Because his
Car is buried. Buried deep under
The word unpatriotic. And he is.
He is shaking his head in disbelief.
Saying how. How he loves this
Country. Went to war for it. How
He would go again and again or
How I tell him I know. Because
The words liberal elite gather
At my feet. A ring of socialists
Like land mines sunk into the
Ground.
And my youngest son. Who has
A disability. Who cannot vocalize
A lot of words. He is running under
The words as they fall from the sky.
And he is laughing. As if the words
Are fireflies. His hands flying up. Into
The air to catch them. Or how we
Are chasing after him. But he reaches
And grabs the words in his fist. And
I am still running. Calling to him or
Saying to him no and no. How those
Words are not for you. The words
Burden on the system which are
Caught in his hands like fireflies.
How I am peeling his hands open.
And my husband is saying please.
To our son. And give them to me.
Or our oldest son. How he is telling
His brother. Saying over and over.
How none of those words are true.
And I use my hands to dismantle it.
A phrase that is not. Not for him.
And I am jumbling all of the letters.
Sweeping some away. And making
New words. Words like bud or stem.
Things that grow.
And I make the word bee.
How I hand it to him. Hand him bee.
And I am kneeling in dirt next to him.
My son. Who is holding a bee. And
I am telling him about pollination.
How the bees are pollinators. How
They pollinate flowers and plants
And crops. And how we need them.
How our existence depends on the
Bees. Because without the bees
I say. Things would collapse. And
I reach my hand out. Touch his cheek.
And I say bee. How this word
The one that the world needs.
How this word is for you.
Lady Bird’s Pain
There’s an odd narrative thread in Greta Gerwig’s 2017 Lady Bird. The titular hero lives out her senior year of high school against the backdrop of the Iraq War. Characters watch the war’s escalation on televisions while debating boyfriends, mothers, friends, school plays, and sex. But the war has no direct bearing on the narrative—it is static to lower-middle class economic desperation in the aughts United States; a violent echo, a joke and a punch line, like the posters around Lady Bird’s school encouraging students to remember 9/11.
Except for one scene.
Lady Bird loses her virginity to a boy who reads Howard Zinn, hates Dave Matthews, and rolls his own cigarettes. All the tics of suburban aughtian “rebellion.” She is under the impression that he is a virgin too. Afterwards, he lets her know this wasn’t his first time. She gets upset. He can’t understand. “I just wanted it to be special,” she says. “Why?” he asks. “You’re going to have so much unspecial sex.” He then gets upset when she gets even more upset. “Do you know how many innocent civilians have been killed today?” he asks, pointing to the television and news of the Iraq invasion.
“Different things can be sad,” she says. “It’s not all war.”
War has a way of negating the particular. When used rhetorically, extreme violence shuts down conversation, or, worse, turns it into an endless series of self-justifying repetitions. It does not clarify; it excuses. Politicians point to military sacrifice as often as they can for a reason. Partisan advocates on Facebook wax hysterical about the suffering of our fighting forces for a reason. To point to mass violence distorts particular violence, makes it absurd—trivial and sentimental. Impossible.
But the particular is everything.
The boy Lady Bird sleeps with hates anything mainstream. Lady Bird also tries to separate herself from her peers and family. Not only does she take on a pretentious name, but she wants to leave California, to escape the horrors of suburban Sacramento, her given life, for something else, anything and anyone else other than the here and the now, this present.
Her boyfriend’s father is dying of cancer. Lady Bird’s father is dying of poverty. Her priest is dying of grief. The larger sweeps of history, these violent abstractions, weigh down on the details of experience. Make them silly. Banal. Sacramento rather than a sacrament.
Greek tragedians assumed pain brought wisdom or spiritual growth (pathei mathos). This is not necessarily true. Suffering can also make it impossible to think clearly about the relationships around us—it can pervert rationality, turn us into monsters possessed by the infinite and incapable of loving the finite. Worse, when we reference pain that is not ours—greater pain, greater suffering, bigger wars, bigger genocides—we risk excusing the specific pain we ourselves give on a daily basis.
“O Reason not the need,” King Lear begs his daughters. “Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous./Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.”
Confronted by his daughters’ irrefutable logic, Shakespeare’s Lear warns that if we abandon ourselves to mathematical logic, if we insist on necessity, on reducing our experience to the quantifiable, proportion out our pain and empathy, we become blind to what we are, what makes us different than everything else that is. Deprived of particular wants, desires, and love, our human life becomes “as cheap as a beast’s.”
Lady Bird takes increasingly stupid risks to escape her life. She sabotages her mother’s love by insistently pointing out her mother and father’s failure as parents, their inability to meet the economic expectations of American “success.” As she does her name, she denies the life she has been given. But, in the end, Lady Bird discovers a mysterious opening in the curves of her hometown roads, the lives lived there, the memories living there. She stops setting up a false contrast, what the rhetoricians call an either/or fallacy. She takes her given name. She accepts the “isness” of experience. She is able to say thank you. To be grateful for existence.
“You’re going to have so much unspecial sex in your life,” her boyfriend says.
This is true, but it misses the point.
In the last few month’s allegations of sexual assault have dominated the headlines. Many in the United States are waking up to the particular pain silently endured by many for decades. This is a positive development. But the counterassault will soon come. Propagandists and their media teams will point to the big and the broad and the violent. They will talk much of the real world, of the truth, of people suffering in the Middle East and Middle America. They will scream about the big picture, about men in positions of power making hard decisions. They will tell us many stories about War, of missile-button pushing and beaches stormed. They will teach us about History. They will preach Necessity.
They will say you don’t know how good you have it.
Many of the accusers will begin to doubt the validity of their own pain. The victims will begin to wonder if they were selfish to be hurt in a world where people die in horrible ways and suffer so many horrible wrongs. How can their pain be special when there is so much pain? How can these violations mean anything in a world defined by greater violence? Greater violations?
But this misses the point. Pain is not quantifiable. And those who attempt to do so should wonder why they feel the need to do so, what they want to celebrate and what they want to excuse.
Like King Lear, Lady Bird, this confused suburban teenage girl, is a fool. She knows she is a fool and she persists in making a fool of herself because she cannot see any other way out (I was often reminded of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, another story of American youth finding a dangerous self in a wilderness of media, poverty, and self-loathing). And she wants out. The other characters—the priests, the nuns, her mom, her father, her brother—endure great pain, great tragedy. She dances on, this fool, knowing nothing of death, of civilians dying halfway across the world, of the suicides in her midst, thinking only of herself and her pain and her escape.
But is her dance foolish? Are her trials necessarily lesser, less substantial, than those who deal out and insist on pain because they see the world as so much pain? Should her agony be measured out, meted, compared, excused and denied by the pompous ineluctability of History and War? Don’t her experiences, the extremity of her definite emotions, contain the radical possibility of all that is singular and incomparable? Can different things be sad? Is it all war?
Lady Bird begins with the very last line of John Steinbeck’s TheGrapes of Wrath—“she put her lips together and smiled mysteriously.” In the novel, Rose of Sharon’s baby has just died. She feeds a dying man with her breast milk. Her lips. Her breast. Her smile.
Faced with the immensity of history, the refuge of the particular is not escapism. It is the thing itself. And so too this satisfying movie. It is the thing itself. Life.
Interview with Jay Baron Nicorvo
Jay Baron Nicorvo’s novel, The Standard Grand (St. Martin’s Press), was picked for IndieBound’s Indie Next List, Library Journal‘s Spring 2017 Debut Novels Great First Acts, and named “New and Noteworthy” by Poets & Writers. He’s published a poetry collection, Deadbeat (Four Way), and his nonfiction can be found in The Baffler, The Iowa Review, and The Believer. You can find out more about Jay at www.nicorvo.net.
Interviewer:
We must first start with the sentences.
Some samples from your opening (check out more here):
“Specialist Smith gunned the gas and popped the clutch in the early Ozark morning. Her Dodge yelped, slid to one side in the blue dark, then shot fishtailing forward. The rear tires burned a loud ten meters of smoking, skunky rubber out front of the stucco ranch house on Tidal Road.”
“She sped out of the hotdamn Ozarks through the Mark Twain National Forest. She threw her ringing phone—Travy—out the window and into the parched summer. It smithereened in the rearview. She used her teeth to pull off her wedding band and engagement ring. Spat them into her hand and shoved them into the trash-crammed ashtray, mall-bought diamond solitaire be damned.”
T. Geronimo Johnson, author of Hold It Till It Hurts and Welcome to Braggsville, once argued that writers should consider the paragraph a sentence rather than limit themselves to movement between two individual periods (my rough–very rough—paraphrase). Your novel sparks from the first clause to the last, and each paragraph feels carefully crafted, as if itself a sentence. Can you give us some perspective on your syntactical choices?
Nicorvo:
Thanks, and I couldn’t agree more with you and Mr. Johnson. I’ve got zero patience for shoddy craftsmanship. The neat masonry of reading in English, left to right, row after row, is a bit like brickwork. And writing is little more than masonry. Stacking, unstacking, restacking. If the basic building block is the word, than the syllable — where we’re able to isolate the music, the meter, of each word — is my mortar. Sounds of words reverberating off one another, that holds my sentences together. The syntactical choices I make are often musical. If a word doesn’t sound right, even if it has the right meaning, it’s got to go.
And it sounds fussy, but I’m not satisfied with the perfectly uniform bricks you get at the big box stores. I like a flaw. Give me those old terracotta bricks cut by hand, no two alike. They’ve got a warmth, a life, a history and a heft you can feel in the hand. Sure, they’re more brittle and difficult to work with — they smithereen — but that’s part of the satisfaction. Each sentence, like each brick, should be radiant, alive, tell a story and have its own weight. No two alike. And so, too, each paragraph. That’s how you get — ultimately and after interminable years — to the place where you’ve built, brick by brick, not just a whole novel but a whole world. But that thing I said earlier? That writing is little more than masonry? That’s some bullshit right there.
Interviewer:
Your novel is one of the first to directly connect the experience of two American wars—Vietnam and Afghanistan/Iraq—both through the lens of establishment outsiders and post-traumatic stress disorder. Not coincidentally, anxiety runs through each page and each word, and the reader is often rewarded with poignant paragraphs like the following:
“She loved being on the road, when the road wasn’t going to explode beneath her. She gave it more gas. Milt leaned back as the van accelerated—slowly, surely—and reached the speed limit, 55. There she coasted. She was driving like an old lady. What’s state motto was Live Free or Die? Freedom was like war that way: if it didn’t make you nervous, you weren’t truly engaged in it. Driving, she felt anxious, she felt alive.”
What drew you to this subject and these points of view?
Nicorvo:
Well, I suppose I’m an outsider and I consider myself anti-establishment. I’m a civilian who wrote a war novel — though it’s really a post-war novel — so my perspective has to be farther from the frontline. This has its drawbacks. Harder for my point of view to have the immediacy — never mind the moral authority — of Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, Elliot Ackerman’s Green on Blue, or Matt Gallagher’s Youngblood. These are breathtaking novels by novelists who’ve had fingers on combat-weight triggers, and their stories are close-quarters. But every position has its disadvantages. The trick is to be aware of them, and then use that difference to possible advantage.
As an outsider, maybe I’m more inclined toward the long view, from the homeland, but also historically. I can’t help but see the invasion of Iraq — Afghanistan is different — through the warped lens of Vietnam, but through, too, as many other conflicts as I’m able. Civilians should feel obliged to read more about war, and some of them to try to write war. The author of the Iliad was a blind man. The Red Badge of Courage was written by a reporter. A Farewell to Arms is the work of an ambulance driver. Tree of Smoke was conceived by a hippy burnout. The Sympathizer came from an academic.
The late Tom Hayden is a bit of an easy target, a peacenik Freedom Rider and the second of Jane Fonda’s three husbands, but there’s a quote of his I think about a lot: “If you conduct a war, you shouldn’t be in charge of narrating it.” I take this to mean that those who conduct our wars should be doing the narrating, but not all of the narrating, and I don’t believe anyone should be in charge of who gets to tell a story. We’ve got no shortage of soldier writers. Oddly enough, though, they’re mostly dudes in my demographic: white working-class. I say oddly. One of the most beautiful things about the American military is how the institution takes in all kinds — though it likes the poor kind best — and puts them on firm but equal footing. I can’t think of a more meritocratic American institution — for men, at least, though the women are securing their rightful place — and in my mind that makes it ideally American (even if the real America is about how best to subtly tip the scales in your favor).
So I’m an outsider in some ways, not in others. I’m right up there on the emotional frontlines, for one. I was diagnosed with PTSD about a month before my agent sold the damn novel. I like to joke that novel writing — and trying to publish a novel — caused my traumatic stress. But the hard truth is that I’ve suffered from anxiety overload (as you so perfectly put it) all throughout my adulthood, induced by my childhood sexual abuse, something I kept largely secret for 35 years. Phil Klay’s got a killer essay, “After War, a Failure of the Imagination,” that closes the gap between traumas. A funny thing about trauma — haha. The experience of it is absolutely singular. No two alike. You can never know my trauma. But the after-the-fact symptoms of trauma are all shared. That tourniquet chest. Those quick sipping breaths. The feeling like you’ve been here before and will, for fucking ever, be here again. Our emotional fallout is communal. You can’t know my trauma, but you can share my anxiety, because anxiety is contagious. Once I can overcome my anxiety — which is not the same as having no anxiety — then I can tell you the story of my trauma. In my experience, that’s one of the hardest things a person can learn to do, never mind do well.
Interviewer:
Irish novelist John Banville once said, “the world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.” D.H. Lawrence famously wrote at length about the dramatic divide between the didactic and art. Yet, with a novel like yours, I feel “reality” and “language,” are not necessarily mutually exclusive (or the former the product of the latter exclusively). Further, you have written powerful non-fiction about the United States Code of Military Justice, Bowe Bergdhal, Trump, and the history of democracy. Particular political wrongs and historical injustices seem to motivate your writing. What, then, are your thoughts on the relationship between politics and art?
Nicorvo:
I don’t really recognize those dichotomies: reality, language; art, politics. In my fiction, I’m trying to make a recognizable reality using language. I’m doing the opposite in my nonfiction: trying to make reality recognizable using language. I’m not someone who believes all art is political, all politics is artistry. Music can be apolitical, I think. But writing, as an art form, has to be political. There’s no way around it; it’s guilt by association. They both traffic in the same medium: words. Novels and laws require nouns and verbs. The US Constitution isn’t a piano concerto or saxophone solo.
Maybe because I grew up poor — sometimes on welfare, sometimes off — I’ve long thought the system was rigged. But one thing I learned pretty early was that command of language is a way to overcome some of the trappings of that system. Because our language shapes our reality. This, in part, determines the resistance to political correctness. When people try to shape our language, it quickly comes to feel like mind control. It’s authoritarian. What Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief” required for immersion into a good story might more accurately be classified as a willing surrender to authority.
Reading is submission to mind control. And some people can’t take it. The reader gives up his inner self for a time — in what should be understood, in this egocentric age, as nothing short of heroism. When you read, you allow the writer, in this case me, to take up residence in your head. While you read this, your thoughts don’t exist apart from mine, as I’ve here expressed them. This is, in part, what gives the word of God, as captured in the Bible, its control. Most of us have only a tentative grasp on the extent of this power — here’s where politics comes in — but all of us feel its sway.
In my writing, what I’m aiming to do is to honor the trust you’ve given me — the leap of faith you’re willing to take — by choosing to read what I’ve written. The way I best know how to hold up my end of this bargain is by making the effort to write about our most difficult issues — the wrongs and injustices — in a way that doesn’t try to put them in a good light or a bad light but in a true light. If I do, you can tell, because the light hums.
Interviewer:
A lengthy author’s note in the back of The Standard Grand lists a wide variety of source material. Your epigraph includes a quote from a Josh Ritter, a contemporary country singer. You have told me that particular television shows like Rectify inspired moments in The Standard Grand. Not all artists are comfortable acknowledging the collaborative nature of an artistic project. Some would resist lumping different mediums together into fiction. Obviously, you have no anxiety of influence. How did you come to this expansive (and refreshing!) view of the art of the novel?
Nicorvo:
Failure. I’m a firm believer in failure. And debt. One of the dumbest things F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote, in The Last Tycoon, was that “there are no second acts in American lives.” That reflects the backwards thinking of someone born into excessive privilege, where there’s no where to go but down. Look no further than the White House. America, where our pariahs become president. I’ve found that there’s nothing more expansive than failure if, ultimately, it’s overcome. And a debt repaid offers significant gratification. But if you succumb to your failings, if you’re overwhelmed by your debts, well, there’s nothing more isolating and suffocating. An awful feeling, getting choked out by the world. Failure imparts humility. Hopefully, it’s balanced out by a dram or two of success now and then. Otherwise, you’re reduced to sniveling, that or the tortured thinking of the conspiracy theorist or the lone gunman. If you’re lucky and stubborn enough to meet some eventual success after multiple failures — The Standard Grand, my first published novel, is the fourth one I’ve finished — I think you’re instilled with an increased capacity for gratitude. Because I have a great deal of influence anxiety — maybe more than my fair share — but it’s overshadowed by my gratitude. We vastly overestimate our independence. Especially in this country. And among writers, it’s no big secret that we take a great deal, knowingly and unknowingly, from everyone and everything around us, in order to finish what me make. I wanted to go on record acknowledging that I am not owed. I owe.
New Poetry by J. Scott Price
Captain Who?
That gut-black October night, a security patrol set out:
a platoon of Afghans
and two of us. They,
cloaked in toughness; we,
in mountains of gear, humped
an unseen base plate of irony
that chuckled, unheard.
Since the first tribes found common ground
with naming a common foe
and Allies first align side-by-side,
the dog sniff test begins— the unuttered,
unmetered tango that discretely discerns
the order on the Totem of Men.
Let’s see what they can do, the closemouthed metronome
for the mission first cadence thrummed on the drums-of-tough.
Respect doled only
to those standing
when the pounding is complete.
Our security objective below, the key terrain far too far above,
we must sweep the elevated ridgeline for threats.
Afghan comrades lead us up
and up
and up
that mountain until we
could take no more. Wheezing
far from the top, we stop, defeated,
conceding victory in this unavowed war.
They smirked in the dark, unseen. We, it seemed,
were merely piles of panted breath,
exhaling vanquished pride.
At this critical point of concession, something suspicious up ahead in the dark.
Few mutual words to discern the threat, only frantic mimicry
of Charades-Gone-Bad to help:
but we all agree,
my NODs are needed now.
Leaning forward to green-light detect, I find no threat. But
with strained abdominals abused
and glutes pulling up the rear too loose
we are all ambushed by the unexpected—
a jarring, yet-almost-polite, puny
poof.
Not a valley rumbling show of force that loosens all inside
but a dry, mundane-almost-nothingness
that takes the Afghans by surprise.
The Lion of Ghazni
they dubbed one of my friends
in awe of his courage and his heart,
and I secured my place on their Totem
as the anointed
Captain Fart.
B Hut
“Brand Vision: Making the best air conditioner in the world.
Brand Mission: Making life better.”
Chigo Air Conditioning Co., LTD
Chigo heats, Chigo cools
with labored breath that soothes
ambient air despite never taming
the beastly space inside the plywood shell
where 12 guys retreat from the daily 15 hour duties
that composes their yearlong song with
just one more mundane or horrifying measure.
There are melodies of boredom and harmonies of fear
and it serenades to unrestful-sleep the
12 guys crammed into their plywood shell,
smaller than a suburbanite’s play room.
There’s plenty of opportunity to partake
in olfactory unease, and plenty of opportunity
to never really be at ease.
Stacked high and hard against the walls, poncho liner
privacy offers only illusions of solitude
and enough space to retreat into that illusion
just to be somewhere else during sleep.
Steadfast Chigo, their toolbox-sized comrade
high on the wall remains unnoticed
unless deemed malingering.
Chigo will usually be abandoned ,
unthought-of when the song is done.
But one fated Chigo has a terminal task to perform,
never envisioned during engineering,
nor tested during production, for
aimed with a rock and Allah’s will,
released with a wind up clock,
a discarded Soviet rocket rains
through plywood
and Chigo braces, unmoved
to shear off a detonator
that would have ended the song
in cacophony instead of a story that begins,
“You ain’t gonna believe this shit…”
New Fiction: Excerpt from Jay Baron Nicorvo’s The Standard Grand
The veterans of the Standard had been back from their wars for some time, trying to figure out how to live lives in the face of newfound civilian freedoms. No one barking orders but their girlfriends, wives, and mothers. Fuck them. The vets could do anything they wanted anytime—they were Americans in America—though what they wanted wasn’t what they needed.
They had good cause to bolt home and wind up straggling in the streets of New York City, where they couldn’t qualify for hud/vash benefits, having exhausted the good graces of the dom program, unable to uncover any information on Project Torch, given the run around by the administrators of Operation Home. They had multiple DUIs, student loans for what the GI Bill 2.0 didn’t cover to attend the University of Phoenix, credit cards with 20 percent interest rates. They were drug addicts, closeted queers, amputees, alcoholics. They were Born Again. They were Black Muslim. They were violent offenders and ethical vegetarians. They’d done short time in county lockups, charged with violating restraining orders, lewd and lascivious conduct, six counts of animal cruelty for selling a litter of kittens with pierced ears over the internet. To say they all expressed both the loss of physical integrity and a response to an event that involved terror and helplessness—the hurting-for-certain hallmarks of PTSD—would’ve been too easy. The harder truth was that they were men unmanned. More than the sum of the bullet points in the revised DSM-5, they were the very reasons for some of the revisions. They were outliers. They hadn’t fallen through cracks. The ground opened up and they dove in face first—hooah! But they could only live like beasts for so long, so they’d gone with Milt, who gave order to their days, even if his orders were crazy.
The vets mustered at the center of the Alpine village. Over their secondhand camos bought in bulk from Liberty Military PX, they wore full alpaca pelts fastened with lengths of catgut. The pelts, worn casually, were their uniforms, part of Milt’s psyop campaign to ward off trespassers while keeping alive the legend of the Catskills Sasquatch.
They called their hides ghillie suits, except for Stotts-Dupree, who called his a yowie, which was how they referred to them at Camp Robinson, Army National Guard Sniper School, where Stotts-Dupree flunked out after contracting a bad case of the yips.
Most of the vets were accustomed to the notion that in uniform they looked like Germanic shepherds being retributively raped from behind by a herd of lanky sheep. Come winter, they’d again be grateful for the warmth the pelts provided. But here it was, end of a scalding, droughty summer, and they were in furs. They were uncomfortable and irritable.
Their routine had been busted. They hadn’t eaten lunch. Midday Simon Says—part military drill, part camaraderie builder—had been canceled, the daily briefing pushed back to evening. All so Milt could make one of his weekly milk runs.
Scratching their beards of varying lengths, the Standard vets stood at a remove from the old fountain pool they used to contain their cook fire. The two Marines of the company climbed in, kicked over the sewer grate that served as a grill, and stomped out the coals. Smoke tumbled up around them. They sought to settle a grudge and, despite the disruption, the entire company was glad for a diversion from their standing orders—split wood; set snares; see to the meat rabbits, chickens, and alpaca; gather their droppings to age, mash up, and water down to fertilize the three-acre garden after they tilled; weed endlessly, harvest, seed the fall crops, on and on. Readying for winter was a nine-month means they got a break from only while trying to survive its end. This unrelenting work distracted them from their real-world guilt over the families they’d abandoned, and from the certain knowledge that these families were, to a one, easier off for their absences.
For most of them, the Standard was their last potshot at a decent life. Once they left, they’d be on their own, and most of them wouldn’t make it alone.
Like Luce, who will leave in the middle of a biblical plague of bats to bum his way out to Greenport toward the end of the North Fork of Long Island. There, he begs his ex-wife, on a Tuesday, on his knees, on her sunken front stoop, to let him in, and when she does, as soon as the door closes behind them, he’s back to begging her, back on his knees. He wants to get her off with his stump. She can’t believe it, and against her bad judgment, she undresses and lets him. Despite her reservations and the ugly, unsanitary look of the thing, she appreciates it, enjoys it even, the bizarre behavioral therapy. Trying to turn loss into love. This alone gets them through the first month, but it doesn’t erase her suspicions. In month two, she catches him picking up Asian men on Craigslist, using her computer, and she throws him out. He rents a room in Riverhead at the Peconic Inn, next door to a pizza parlor, a long commute to Greenport for a job crewing aboard the Shelter Island ferry. Before work, he buys a fifth of the cheapest vodka at the closest package store. Nipping from the plastic bottle, he walks to the Riverhead train station. Moments after a train passes, he can be seen, on his knees, as if in prayer, resting one cheekbone, then the other, against the tracks. The vibrations jostle, warm, and loosen the mucus in his sinuses, the tracks heated on the iciest days by steel wheels worn to a mirror shine. For a few seconds, his head clears. He can go about his day crossing and re-crossing Peconic Bay.
One blustery winter morning, he rises off the track lightheaded and chases after an unloaded freight train picking up speed. He heaves himself aboard with his good hand, his only hand, and settles into an empty unlocked stock-car, its floor covered in frozen manure. There, he eases into the long, windy ride, sub-zero, kept company by a fifth of Kasser’s Kavkaski, and twenty-four hours later he’s found dead, no ID, his one hand rigor stiff and curled through an opening in the steel slats. The responding firemen and medical workers are confronted with the choice of cutting through the steel wall of the cattle car or breaking the poor hobo’s wrist to free his body. An EMT tries a forearm massage to loosen up the hand. Nothing. Guy’s hard as rebar. After a call to Anacostia Rail Holdings Company, they decide against cutting the cattle car. With a hair dryer, they take turns thawing the wrist and fingers, the freight train outrageously late by the time John Doe lets go.
Disrespecting the Troops
Sitting in front of my computer one evening, scrolling idly through Facebook items, a long post catches my eye. As a novelist, I’m sympathetic to fellow writers who can’t fit their thoughts into tidy soundbites, who need space to express their concerns. So I click “read more,” hoping someone will give me valuable food for thought in a simplified world.
Alas, I have made a mistake:
Hey, real quick. For all y’all big ole football players who want to take a knee during the national anthem I just want to say “go ahead.” That’s right biggun’, take that knee. The 1% got it. They will continue to embrace the suck for minimum wage in a country where you can’t even begin to understand the various civil liberties that are violated. …When the day is done and you take off your pads, have your interviews, sign your lucrative cereal box deal, and fly home to your castle, the 1% will clear their weapon, take a cold shower in the hopes of cleaning off their best friends blood and brains that covered their face and flag. They will eat yet another MRE before laying on a ragged cot only to wake up, put a round in the chamber and walk the streets in the hope of providing just 1/10 of the lifestyle you kneel in protest against.
I feel myself thinking, for the billionth time since last year’s election: What the hell is this?
Why is protest seen by some sectors of US society as disrespectful to the troops? Photo by Britta Hansen
Right off, there are some things I can recognize: the Fox News sneer, oddly colloquial hostility, and chummy racism. Why do these conservative op-eds always feel like being advanced upon by an irate stranger in a grocery-store parking lot?
Instead of slamming my computer shut, for some reason, I want to understand this. I want to get to the bottom of why this person is so very, very angry, and what it is about men kneeling at football games that makes him so, and what on earth that has to do with the poor guy sleeping on the cot in some unnamed country.
So I read the post again. And I can start to see it: that familiar bitterness, rage even, toward any non-white person who’s ruffling the status quo. Somehow, this anger is “justified” through the righteous defense of veterans.
Wait, hold up, what? What have veterans got to do with it?
The answer, I believe, is very little. But an idea of veterans, and of the American military as a whole, is being cultivated by American conservatives, with striking confidence and vehemence, to justify the right-wing platform–one that now more than ever imagines the US as white, masculine, and authoritarian.
My Facebook rhetorician’s name is “Todd”, but I don’t know Todd personally. The post was shared by a female acquaintance of mine, whom I happen to know is neither a military spouse nor a veteran. What could appeal to her in this message?
The 1% got it. They will continue to embrace the suck for minimum wage in a country where you can’t even begin to understand the various civil liberties that are violated.
“Embrace the suck” – interesting. Is “Todd” a veteran? Vietnam, maybe? An impersonator? Or, more generously, someone who’s simply channeling a pro-military self-righteousness that utilizes whatever slang he’s picked up?
Now I want to know: What are the various civil liberties I can’t even begin to imagine are being violated? Aren’t “I,” in the alternate universe of this folksy polemic, somehow partly the big guy kneeling to protest violated civil liberties which I have not only imagined but to which I have likely borne witness?
Now, when the day is done and you take off your pads, have your interviews, sign your lucrative cereal box deal, and fly home to your castle, the 1% will clear their weapon, take a cold shower in the hopes of cleaning off their best friends blood and brains that covered their face and flag. They will eat yet another MRE before laying on a ragged cot only to wake up, put a round in the chamber and walk the streets in the hope of providing just 1/10 of the lifestyle you kneel in protest against.
This is ramping things up significantly. There’s not only a cultural-disgust element to this wee jeremiad, but a high emotional pitch, too. And emotion is why the post is being shared among the conservative underbelly of my friends-set, and agreed upon with such relief and gratitude (“THANK YOU!” “I’m so glad someone said it!” “I knew this would speak to YOUR family, X.”).
Because here we are: this is about loving the veterans. This homegrown Pericles is offering his support to the veteran, defending what he imagines is his life of harsh privation – interestingly, not something to be protested against but something in which to encourage pride, around which to rally.
Other than the offensive casual racism of the author’s viewpoint to begin with, that pride is what worries me most. The conception of modern soldiers as thralls on an endless treadmill of violence and sacrifice. The author’s hypothetical soldier seems to have had the worst day of his entire military career, and yet it’s described as almost run-of-the-mill. Certainly, days like that, or worse, have taken place for countless soldiers since the wars on terror began: days when they lost limbs, or friends; were lonely or depressed or at the least very physically uncomfortable. But, thirteen years after the 2nd Battle of Fallujah, is this really what civilians think a full “one percent” of the American population continues to do daily—to literally wipe their best friend’s blood and brains off their faces every night before sleeping in a “ragged cot?” To live the same sort of horrific, numbing day over and over again into infinity, for “minimum wage,” in a country that apparently can’t respect them?
And if so, why the hell would they be okay with that?
*
Much of what happens on social media today is the equivalent of watching someone throw a flaming dog turd into a swimming pool, then sitting back to see who paddles delightedly toward it and who thrashes away. But it can be a useful vehicle for recognizing patterns in human thought and behavior, and like many members of military families I can’t help notice the constant contrast that’s being drawn between veterans and, most immediately, the NFL protestors, who’ve undertaken the very American act of regular, meaningful, and visible protest. From the conservative corners of the newsmedia, in conversation, and across the lightning-fast interwebs, I’ve seen veterans contrasted with virtually anyone conservatives don’t like: all those spoiled, whiny millennials, for example, or immigrants, who apparently should be grateful to get through the day without seeing the inside of a holding cell. It’s like constantly being lectured at the dinner table by a crabby, work-exhausted dad in khakis who (although he didn’t serve, but his father did) answers your every complaint by telling you to shut up, because men died for this country and you’ve had everything handed to you on a silver platter.
Less than 0.5 percent of Americans currently serve in the military. This is the “military-civilian” divide we’ve all heard about, though exactly what can be done is still up in the air. Overwhelmingly, the divide is referenced by veterans and their family members, because (and this is part of the problem) they are the ones most concerned with it. The veteran-artists who bravely write, talk, act, or make art and music about their experiences do so for a wide range of reasons, but for many, stripping away a romanticized notion of war and military service is part of what they hope to accomplish through their work.
Meanwhile, the American public bears witness to a bizarre lovefest for the American military, predominantly (but not exclusively) from conservatives. This is more than just supporting the troops. This is the first time your ex-boyfriend got suddenly, really weird. It’s as if conservatives are channeling some kind of political and cultural fantasy into the notion of military service, using it to justify their beliefs, their prejudices, their vision for an America that not only does not now exist but maybe never has.
This is what I think of as “the American military in the modern conservative imagination.” Or, the way my friend Peter Molin put it in an e-mail, conservatives have mentally constructed a military that is white, masculine, and “safe” in the sense that it defends all that the right holds dear. Conservatives seem to hope this vision will reflect back onto the nation as a whole, giving them the whiter, manlier, safer America they desire. But you make the military out of the people who live in America; you don’t somehow make America out of your idea of the military.
And the only way to craft a fantasy out of a differing or even opposite reality is through force.
*
I’m watching a series of old GOP attack ads made during the Obama-McCain election in 2008.
Here’s one narrated by a disapproving-sounding woman; she’s the worst secretary you ever had to wait with in the principal’s office. As she addresses her conservative demographic, I can tell this woman would like to spit in my little liberal whore face. The ad scans over a filmstrip of images (alarming explosions, fighter jets, a waving flag, a smiling and very young male soldier with all of innocent Caucasiamerica in his blue eyes) and she warns of alleged liberal attempts to “cut off funding for our active troops, endangering their lives,” as if liberals would like to rip the weapons from their hands, leaving them encircled by slathering Taliban. The camera zeroes in on a triumphant-looking picture of Obama flanked by that estrogen devil herself, Nancy Pelosi on one side, and on the other an almost absurdly-thrilled-looking black politician I don’t recognize who has his hands flung upward, fingers pointed in a double V-for-Victory, as if, at last, the domination of white America by minorities is finally complete.
The camera goes back to that young white soldier, his life, paradoxically, in our very hands. “Obama and Congressional liberals,” says the angry-sounding woman. “Too risky for America.”
Alright, so this is par for the course when it comes to political ads. They’re the equivalent of those Facebook posts I mentioned earlier, except the flaming dog turd has been traded for an actual human shit with sparklers sticking out the top. Anyway. While I find them irritating, it’s neither the existence, nor the tenor, of these ads that particularly troubles me.
It’s the fact that Obama’s skin has been deliberately darkened in almost every single one of them.
A Stanford University study analyzed more than 100 of the videos and found the difference in his skin tone between the ad images, and the same images in their original forms or publications. Furthermore, “[Obama] appeared especially dark-skinned in Republican attack ads that aired closer to election day. Meanwhile, McCain’s skin appeared gradually lighter over time in the same ads.”
While you’re wondering how America possibly possesses the technology to make McCain’s skin even whiter than it already was (was he translucent?), consider this: the article’s conclusion, put forth in an understated way: “The study… suggests that the images could have been intended to tap into possible racial biases of some viewers.”
I’ve just watched a visual implication that the very fact of a black President might be harmful to American troops.
*
No matter what the political far-right would like to believe, the American military has never upheld its regressive dreams. Forty percent of active-duty service members are people of color, with African-Americans and Native Americans represented in higher proportion than their actual population percentage in the United States. According to a Pew study, racial intermarriage is also “typically more common among people in the military than among civilians.”
The desegregation of the U.S. military took place in 1948, sixteen years before Brown v. Board of Education made segregation illegal here at home in 1964. Even so, desegregation was seen as particularly dangerous for the troops. The Army was not an “experiment,” claimed Army Secretary Kenneth Royall to Harry Truman, adding, “It is a well-known fact that close personal association with Negroes is distasteful to a large percentage of Southern whites.” Secretary Royall’s warning has been echoed with strange fidelity by conservatives in the many years since, over everything from women in combat to the presence of LGBTQ+ troops. “The U.S. Armed forces aren’t some social experiment,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel in 1999 when asked about the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; and over a decade later, former Marine Corps Lt. Col. Oliver North said the same thing, with a little of the righteous indignation we now expect to accompany political statements: soldiers “deserve better than to be treated like lab rats in Mr. Obama’s radical social experiment.”
In all seriousness, as a military wife, I have to ask these affronted and obstinate politicians: When do we not treat our military like some kind of giant experiment? Any time we send men and women overseas, every time we commit them to action in Vietnam or Korea or Somalia or Iraq or Afghanistan, every time they’re sent to meet with tribal leaders or walk through the streets, or to (in the case of female service members) form FET teams and enter Afghan womens’ homes, it is all part of some big experimentor another, all of which are far less predictable, with more immediate and potentially dangerous outcomes, than the possibility (or, “threat” as North & Co. call it) of compassionate social progress.
Maybe we should take greater care with the lives of our fellow citizens than to hazard them trying to prove that people in the Middle East prefer our form of representative democracy, or the notion that given enough money thrown at them, feudalists or tribalists will suddenly become responsible middle class citizens.
And if we really want to stop “experimenting” on our troops, maybe we should stop doing things like sending them out on caravans in under-armored Humvees, or deliberately exposing them to chemical weapons and psychoactive agents the way the U.S. Army Chemical Corps did at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland for twenty years, or making them tend burn pits in the toxic fumes of everything from scorching rubber and plastic to unexploded ordnance to human and medical waste.
Or would the political right like to think of this, too, as a strange mark of pride? Does military service mean that anything can be done to you, to your body? Is that what you signed up for? As a female service member, if you are raped or assaulted during your service, should we all, like Trump, simply wonder, “Well, what did they expect to happen?” If you spend, as in that original Facebook post, every single day in discomfort and loneliness, away from your family, wiping brains off your cheeks, is that just what you signed up for?
I can’t help but feel that part this fantasy about the American military that it’s both the seat of rule and order, but also a lawless place where anything can happen. It’s HBO in a sitcom world, where men are sheriffs or cocksuckers and women are angels or hookers. In this masculine dream, let men do what they are gonna do; just don’t try to improve them, or make them think. Save that for the lab rats.
*
I’m attending the memorial service of a veteran here in town. He was a Vietnam vet, twenty-year career. He and his wife had no children, and she feared she’d be alone at the memorial, so the local VFW has put out a call for people to attend the service and show their support.
I’ve dressed the kids in their best; they’ve made cards with rainbows and hearts for the red-eyed, exhausted widow, who seems genuinely touched by them. My husband, like the other active-duty service members present, is in uniform. We marvel at the hundreds of people who’ve shown up: whole legions of bikers in bandannas and black leather, smoking and chatting and already sipping beer at the bar; a serious and highly-decorated African-American Marine who waits in line behind us; cars full of Air Force cadets, so bright and shiny in their blue uniforms that the mom in me wants to remind them to wear their seatbelts.
Standing in front of us in the long line, which winds through the VFW with its many coffee pots and posters and plaques and ancient dark-green carpeting, is a young man in a burgundy leather jacket, holding his toddler son. “I brought him ‘cause I want him to grow up to have respect,” the young man says. “Kids don’t have respect these days.” I tell him I think it’s nice that he’s there. He keeps talking about respect. He’s so earnest about this, he’s almost excited. His face shines with nervous sweat. His son, far too young to understand what’s going on or certainly remember it, plays with the lapel of his dad’s jacket.
Typically demanding training in austere conditions is why people think of the military with respect (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. R.J. Biermann)
As we walk back to the car, my high heels clicking, my kids trailing behind me, my husband in uniform, we spot the young man again, buckling his toddler into his car seat. The child babbles something and the dad says, “That’s ‘yes, sir!’ You gotta have respect. You say, ‘yes, sir.’”
We pass bumper sticker after bumper sticker: “Hillary for Prison 2016.” “Hillary Lied, People Died.” “Proud to Be Everything a Liberal HATES.” “The Lefties Are Coming! LOCK AND LOAD.” I peer at who’s climbing into these trucks. Overwhelmingly, they are not the service members in uniform, but civilians who’ve been drawn to the service out of a sense of patriotism and a desire to support the troops. Minutes before, they were, quite warmly, shaking my husband’s hand.
*
It’s a very gray November morning, and I’m drifting through a Facebook page called “FuckColinKaepernick,” maintained by a man who makes the not-so-comforting claim of being in law enforcement. I don’t really want to be here, and I feel anxious that my surfing, however research-motivated, is being catalogued by some demon algorithm and will come back to publicly haunt me. But I suck it up in the interest of trying to understand why Kaepernick’s protest in particular has instigated so much conservative ire, and whoever devotes himself to the cultural abscess known as “FuckColinKaepernick” is giving me some clues.
The page features the sort of intellectual gems you’d expect: photo after photo of—who else– soldiers and Marines and policemen honoring their flag; images of Kapernick paired with captions like, “I Only Take a Knee When I’m Blowing Someone for a Job”; “ISIS Signs Free-Agent Kaepernick to 1-Year Deal.” One commenter, “ColinKaeperdick,” mentions enthusiastically that he’d like to see the football player dead.
Through this disgust for the First Amendment-as-expressed-by-nonwhite-people runs a familiar vein of support for authority, for force, for the smackdown. Don’t put up with that SHIT, is what every post seems to yell. You are the authority. You are strong. The defiance of other races, the simpering of women—you are above that shit. The conservative loathing of crybabies seems to extend even to actual babies, I learn a few minutes later, as I come across an unexpected image on the “FuckColin Kaepernick” Facebook page: a stock photo of a mother cradling a crying child. The mother appears sympathetic and tender, but a bigger issue is resonating with FuckColinKaepernick as he posts the meme:
“When you touched a hot stove, what was your parents’ reaction, A or B?”
A) [illustrated by the picture of the mom comforting the child.]
B) “Bet you won’t do that shit again huh?’”
This meme gives me pause. It’s been given some “likes” and a few laughing-face emoji in response. And, sure, while the thought of this mom snapping something so harsh at her cute child is a little off-putting, it’s hardly shocking after the garbage I’ve been scanning for the last fifteen minutes. I’ve seen similar on the Facebook pages of conservative friends.
Still, it seems part and parcel of what’s troubling me. I remember, from our time stationed in Virginia, an approach touted by many of my friends: the “Biblical Approach to Spanking.” A little while later I’m looking for the official word from Focus on the Family, a conservative, evangelical organization that puts out 4 million pieces of mail a week and is so prominent it has its own zip code. On its web site, a man named Chip gives step-by-step pointers on how exactly to spank your child:
Have the child lean over his bed and make sure you apply the discipline with a quick flick of the wrist to the fatty tissue of the buttocks, where a sting can occur without doing any damage to the body. You want to be calm, in control, and focused as you firmly spank your child, being very careful to respect his body.
I won’t get into the merits or demerits of corporal punishment here, and I am very familiar with the myriad frustrations of parenting, but I do find it telling a few paragraphs later when Chip writes, “For my part, some of the most intimate, touching moments I ever had with my kids were right after exercising discipline.”
*
Perhaps one of the most startling revelations of the 2016 Presidential Election was the almost-surreal enthusiasm of conservatives for the modern Russian state and especially its bullish head honcho, Vladimir Putin. It shouldn’t have been so surprising. The conservative love affair with Putin, cultivated steadily through Obama’s presidency, has spawned fawning articles by the likes of Pat Buchanan and Matt Drudge of The Drudge Report. In “What Trump’s Putin Love Reveals About Conservatives,” Neal Gabler points out that, quite simply, “authoritarians love authoritarianism,” and that “the Russian state does appear to be the conservative paradigm: white, highly nationalistic, militaristic…nostalgic for a lost past.”
American conservatives share something even more specific with Putin, and that’s his almost monomaniacal hatred of homosexuals. “They should be banned from donating blood, sperm,” he has said, “And their hearts, in case of the automobile accident, should be buried in the ground or burned as unsuitable for the continuation of life.”
No wonder that the military is where conservatives try to police homosexuality first, where they hope they’ll have the most success. Again, I can only comfort myself with the certainty that they can’t make the America of their dreams simply by tweaking the military to their specifications; it simply won’t happen.
But still, these are the people in power, in America, in 2017. And they love the troops so much that they aim for its conservative perfection, for it to give them—when America itself sometimes can’t—that perfect dream of a white, white, masculine world – a world where, if people do dare to step outside the lines, we simply will not put up with that shit.
*
Despite my aversion to being lumped in with the authoritarians of the world simply because of my husband’s military service, I can’t ignore the fact that many conservatives do genuinely wish our veterans well. When people thank my husband for his service, which always embarrasses him somewhat, I don’t think they are being insincere. And if the greatest gift you can give someone is paying attention to them, well, conservatives are. They may be paying a myopic attention, but it’s there.
The troops sacrifice physically and emotionally during training and operations, so that citizens can express different opinions without fighting. Kneel away!
The military is a complicated beast, and I feel it every time I’m at a social gathering: at a little girl’s birthday party, for instance, where, amidst a cheerful Pinterest explosion of tissue-paper flowers and tea-party hats, the parents’ discussion somehow veers into a brief Colin Kaepernick Disgust, making both my husband and I squirm (and I’m sure I see in his eyes the pleading, Woman, please do not announce you are writing an essay on this!). Everyone there is white. At that moment, can I say that the conservative idea of the military is false?
Or: While watching a friend’s children this weekend so she can run some errands, she returns with the report that she’s gotten a phone call: her husband’s battalion has had their first K.I.A., just weeks into a 7-month deployment. “Oh, shit,” I say. “No, no.” The deaths of these men are our nightmares. Her husband is Special Forces, and his experience may be as close to that Facebook poster’s imagined lifestyle as any active-duty service member’s can get. Just because it is, at this moment, rare doesn’t make it less real; conservatives do understand this.
Downstairs, my own husband’s heavy uniform is tumbling around in the dryer. My friend and I are squinting to talk in the fall sun. Funeral arrangements, childcare, meal trains: the brisk, terrible, simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of these things. The sun is bright and beautiful over the mountains. There’s a new widow somewhere here in our temporary town, and our nation is still, still, still at war.
*
As a woman, I’m used to watching the way men imagine us. The male imagination, with its prominence in film, art, sports, politics—everything– has obvious and obsessive ideas of what women are, so intense at times that you can’t tell what part of you even came first, what part of you was naturally feminine, or what part developed that way as a coping mechanism or simply so you wouldn’t rock the boat.
Now, I see veterans put in a similar situation, a similar discomfort. They didn’t, perhaps, enjoy the violence of war, but they’re coming home to an increasingly violent and divided country. They are a diverse group, quite often thoughtful, often (if this is still the minority) liberal, but they’re supposed to pretend that they’re not.
They are black service members who see, time and again, as people of color are beaten or shot by police who get off nearly scot-free. They are women who’ve served their country and come home to a president who jokes about grabbing ‘em by the pussy. They are the many, deeply caring parents of children with disabilities, using the Exceptional Family Member Program to get the best care for their kids while they watch their president boggle his eyes and jerk spastically on the TV screen, mocking a disabled reporter. They are soldiers from Puerto Rico watching their president leave their American islands nearly for dead and complain about providing even basic aid. They are combat veterans who watch as a civilian with more weaponry than they maybe ever handled in-country guns down 500 people at a country music concert, of all things, and how do they not feel like, what the fuck is this, what the fuck were they fighting for?
It may take force to make a fantasy out of a reality, but somehow, in America in 2017, the far-right pulled this off. It still feels like a sleight of hand, a magic trick. A joke. Sometimes I wonder if, for Donald Trump, those moments of conquest were when he felt closest to America, to his people. If the authoritarian pleasure is in domination, then we’ve all been royally had.
This essay is solely the work of the author and is not intended to represent the Department of Defense. All opinions are the author’s own.
