Can you hear that? The oppressive quiet of an autumn morning as the lull of artillery settles like fog across the pitted landscape that was once Western France. The quiet came on a Monday, November 11, over one hundred and seven years ago. Yet it was a silence that would ultimately betray the men who returned home, alive but disfigured and broken from the grim horror of trench warfare, a horror so brilliantly portrayed in Erich Marie Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the seminal novel of life – and death – on the frontlines of the Great War (the very concept of a “World War One“ would not enter the global lexicon for another two decades).

Although Remarque’s sympathetic protagonist, Paul Baumer, never came home in the wake of the book title’s tragically ironic communique, the author, a veteran of the war himself, nevertheless attempted to build on the international acclaim and success of his war novel by highlighting the plight of the survivors. Hence, his subsequent novel, The Road Back, focused on veterans in the post-war reintegration era. While commercially successful, the result was rather disappointing as a work of literature, especially when compared to his earlier, career-defining masterpiece. Remarque’s raw and stunted narrative style suited All Quiet to perfection. In The Road Back, the approach only served to highlight the need for more emotional depth.

Such literary drawbacks are notably absent in Jim Beane’s debut novel, The Deadening, which features the return from war-torn Europe of American soldier Harrell Hickman. Like so many young veterans during this time, the euphoria of victory parades came and went in an instant. Now, shot through with laudanum and whiskey, Hickman flees the Baltimore hospital where he was being “treated” for the grossly misunderstood condition of “Shell Shock.” Hickman wanders across the Midwest, in search of relief from the incredible trauma he witnessed and suffered, seeking not only quiet, but the quiet of peace. And while the veteran carries no physical wounds, the torment and waking nightmares he endures only intensify the longer he is without drugs and the ever elusive solitude.

Through most of the early chapters, Hickman stumbles into the role of a vagabond with a haunted past, riding the rails and encountering other veterans in similar straits – and more black market laudanum. Throughout, he displays the classic signs of what is today known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Temperamental and fatigued, a constant posture of threat assessment permeates his every move. And although violence seems inevitable in nearly all of Hickman’s encounters, he manages to avoid (or stall) such outcomes by hastily retreating. No job is permanent for Hickman, no handout beneath him (or his resentment), no livery stable too filthy for a fitful night’s sleep.

Along the way, Hickman offers glimpses of his experiences in France, despite his efforts to suppress the memories.  And it is this reflection that is crucial to his development as a sympathetic, but doomed character.  And nowhere is it as stark as when his wandering takes him into Nebraska and the town of Wisdom where he is befriended by a fellow veteran, Willem Redd, a shopkeeper who also happens to be the town’s sheriff. Redd lost an arm and an eye in the war, but nonetheless leads a productive life and has seemingly reintegrated into society. With work as scarce there as the other nameless towns Hickman rolled through or avoided, he manages to land a job mending fences for a local rancher named Conover. But there will be no lasting comfort in the work. Despite the vast prairie stretching to the horizon in every direction, it’s clear that Hickman is at the end of the line.

Ruthlessly mocked by fellow ranch hands, in particular by the rancher’s young son, Hickman once again struggles against the urge to retaliate, a fight he ultimately will lose as the drugs and whiskey ebb. His grip on sanity weakens to the point where his mind becomes more unhinged and fantastical, his escape all the more twisted and illogical and ultimately impossible.  This doom spiral is artfully rendered by Beane who leads the reader – and Hickman — into the inevitable violence, not only for Hickman, but even for fellow veterans like Redd whose efforts to intervene and help seem as doomed as Hickman’s realization of any true sense of solitude and peace.

One striking aspect of Hickman’s characterization is his unwavering seriousness. Beane manages to imbue in Hickman a sense of moral weight and age. One easily forgets that this is a young man, barely into his twenties, who has in essence been drained of his youthfulness and wonder. Remarque summed up these young soldiers returning from the war with the simple description “…youth no longer.” Beane masterfully shows us this reality without bogging the story down with verbose or unnecessary exposition.

Beane’s sparseness in the narrative delivery is most impactful when we see Hickman through Redd’s eyes. Even when Hickman is right in front of him, Redd still presents the vision as if from an impenetrable distance. In one scene, Redd watches as Hickman, his reluctant guest at that point, as he

“…stoked the fire left burning in the woodstove overnight and sat beside it to chase the chill of the night spent freezing in his shack. Redd never questioned his guest; he didn’t have to. He’d known doughboys like Hickman, young men who went to war to become heroes. Men like himself. Men who knew nothing of war or the deadening effect it had on one’s soul. Redd knew many men like Hickman, he had been one of them.”

Beane’s novel is certainly worthy of comparison to All Quiet on the Western Front in its straight-forward, emotive style – what some call third-person dramatic point-of-view — but also puts one in mind of Cormac McCarthy and his blend of suddenly tense dialogue set in the backdrop of Western noir. It’s this quiet intensity and deepening nightmarish tone that keeps the reader clutched in the novel’s grip.

The Deadening is a fast read in that it homes in on dialogue and action to provide almost all the inference a reader needs to suspend disbelief and see the narrative unfold. That said, the book is also not a quiet read. Rather, it takes us to that silence that we must all hear and address and answer for. And perhaps, ultimately, find the true quiet and elusive lull of peace.

Purchase Jim Beane’s The Deadening (Mandel Vilar Press, 2024) here.

As a reserve unit we had a different family dynamic than the regular army. Since there were only three platoons in our company, the commander wanted to even out the women per platoon. My best friend and I were only two of ten females in our company. She was purposefully assigned to my squad. As a squad leader, this put me in an awkward position. Not only did Caitlin assume she’d receive special treatment in getting out of guard duty, but our friendship had been teetering since Matt proposed to me two months prior. He was young, dumb, and full of cum, but I loved him. These were my people; Caitlin with her buzz cut blonde hair and tall athletic frame and Matt with his dark skin, black hair, and very large…muscles.

March 19, 2003, I watched the bombings on CNN and on MSNBC I watched a Maintenance Company become prisoners of war. I heard President Bush declare cease fire on the radio. All of this happened while my army reserve unit waited in Fort Lewis, Washington. We missed the kickoff to the big game.

I arrived in Kuwait with 130 transportation soldiers on April 20^th. We should have been in Turkey, but their country wouldn’t let us infill to Iraq from their southern border alongside the Kurdish Christians. Instead, we were attached to 4^th Infantry Division in southern Iraq. Once in country, 4th ID never heard of us, didn’t need us – didn’t want us. We were assigned to provide convoy security and transportation of supplies to the other unwanted bastard children of Dick Cheney’s oil war: Czechia, Poland, Spain, El Salvador, and Mongolia.

Every day soldiers were killed in Iraq and convoys were the number one targets. Our enemy wasn’t the Iraqi Army nor was it ever the Iraqi people. Once Saddam Hussein was captured on December 13, 2003, insurgents traveled from Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran to flood Iraq with the opportunity to join the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda so they could attack US targets without needing a plane ticket or pilot’s license.  The enemy used these so-called “snipers.” They were untrained men with AK47s hiding behind a berm 200 meters from the road. Some used RPGs to penetrate armor. Others used IEDs. The first six months they would throw sandbags stuffed with car batteries from overpasses until they realized batteries don’t explode on their own. Once cellphone service was brought to Iraq at the end of 2003, explosive technology advanced rapidly. Dead animals were stuffed with mines and initiators while being placed on the side of our main supply routes and detonated by someone standing close enough for a cell signal. Up until this point I had only seen goats stiff with rigor mortis and unexploded mortar shells protruding out their ass.

A mission came down for twenty-four cargo trucks, three humvees, and a maintenance wrecker. It required sixty-one of our soldiers. Caitlin and Matt were also going. The mission was scheduled to leave in two days. We were picking up equipment in Kuwait and dropping it off at Al Taqaddum Airport, an airbase west of Baghdad that was referred to as TQ. Our two passenger cargo trucks were enormous. They could self load and offload connex boxes from a palletized load system. Ten tires, as high as my chin, pushed this beast over every terrain possible. When standing outside the turret manning a machine gun my torso would be eight feet off the ground. None of our vehicles had been uparmored yet. All of our humvees had soft tops like a convertible Corvette. My soldiers mounted plywood over each cabin and ratchet strapped tripods so we could attach a .50 caliber machine gun or M19 and call them gun trucks.

Seven of us rolled out Monday morning to pick up broken down humvees in Camp New York, Kuwait, a remote makeshift base ten miles south of the Iraq border. A captain there warned us that the unit we were supporting would ask us to take the equipment further north, but to leave it in TQ. The rest of our convoy picked up connexes in Camp New Jersey and we met up at Nav Star. This was a fuel point on the northern Kuwait border. It’s also a check point for convoy commanders and the MPs to give safety briefings. All sergeants and officers went to the briefing. I packed into the small trailer with other leaders and stared at the map on the wall. Due to the large size of our convoy, we had two clowns leading us. Manny from first platoon and Toro from third platoon. They were both platoon commanders and lieutenants, but didn’t command enough respect to be addressed by rank.

We listened to the speech heard many times before. “Wear the proper uniform. No driving in the dark. Do not pull over unless at a check point or for ten minutes for maintenance emergencies. Lock in a magazine, but don’t chamber a round. Watch out for black BMWs, red sedans, and white suburbans. No passing out food or water. Do not stop for children. Keep a look out for IEDs.”

Then the MPs gave their security brief of the area west of Baghdad. The MP pointed to the map as she explained recent attacks in each town we would pass. “Nav Star to Scania is amber alert. Most attacks are on civilian supply trucks and are from 21:00 – 06:00. Your main threat will be getting caught in the crossfire as MPs protect civilians. From Scania to Baghdad is red alert with most hits from 18:00 – 09:00 targeting military convoys. An intersection of the two supply routes MSR Jackson and ASR Tampa, just south of Baghdad International Airport, is the latest location of the majority of fatalities. From Baghdad to Fallujah red alert is also in effect. The only difference is that the insurgents don’t care what time of day it is. They don’t want us there and they will use all force to keep us from coming back.”

The MP warned us to stay alert because we need to be ready to get out of every situation. She reminded us to go over our recovery procedures because we “will” lose trucks. Everyone in the room laughed, not out of disbelief, but nervousness. This meeting could have only lasted five seconds and been summed up in just two words, “You’re fucked.”

The sun had set so we couldn’t leave until morning. A berm surrounded the compound in a bowl of dust and diesel. Our vehicles were staged in convoy order at the center. Fifty meters away, a line of engines rumbled, waiting to quench their thirst at the fuel point. I wiped a muddy mixture of dirt and sweat from my chin. The 115° heat cooled to 95°. Across the lot, behind rows of blue port-o-johns, Burger King staked their land, monopolizing soldiers’ hunger for home.

I went back to my truck to find Matt. I climbed on top of the warm cab and thought about what I’d say. Darkness descended beyond blaring stadium lights. The stars hid and the moon refused to shine. As I thought about what the MP said, I got scared. I didn’t want to die out here. I didn’t want anything to happen to Caitlin or Matt. What would I do if they were hit? How could I protect them? How could I stop them from bleeding out? I wanted their trucks right in front of me so I could see them at all times.

Frustrated with his absence, I got off my truck, walked up and down the lines of our convoy and found Matt hunched over a steering wheel, sleeping. I was so scared about what could happen that I got angry with him. I blamed him for not being there to panic with me. I apologized and explained what came out of the briefing. We slept on top of a connex together. Every night before we went to sleep, we prayed. It was my turn to pray, but I couldn’t. The Old Testament was written across the very sand I stood. They say there are no atheists in war, but the longer I stayed in Iraq the further I wanted to distance myself from a god who came from this land.

***

We rolled over the border at 06:00, Tuesday. Manny led the convoy in a gun truck with Caitlin standing outside the back manning a .50 cal. I drove first shift as Rodríguez, my driving partner, stood outside the turret and manned our SAW. I named our truck “George” and our SAW, “Jorge.” I don’t know why we always named our equipment. Perhaps personifying them made them a reliable member of our team?

We stopped at a check point in Talil for fuel. This is next to Ur, which is the birthplace of Abraham, the patriarch of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. Toro was in the humvee behind me.  As we waited for everyone to finish fueling, I walked back to talk.  We could see Matt six trucks back standing about 10 feet off the road. Toro asked me what I’d do if Matt stepped on a land mine. He’s always full of drama. He made a smartass remark and said I’d just flip through my little black book and say “next.”

I looked at Matt, then at Toro and said, “I wouldn’t be with anyone. All of you guys are idiots.”

***

We continued north on MSR Jackson and pulled over so one of the trucks could change a tire. Everyone got out to pull security. Toward the end of the convoy an Iraqi civilian walked up to a soldier and tried to take his weapon. The call came over the radio, so I alerted Manny in the lead vehicle. I asked the soldiers if they shot the Iraqi and they said no. When Manny arrived to assess the situation, the Iraqi was pinned to the ground and his ankles were duct taped together. As Manny tried to take over, the man kept trying to grab his rifle and knife. His valiant act turned to sobbing and rubbing sand in his face and mouth. We heard shots in the distance, but couldn’t tell if they were being fired at. Manny had us move the convoy five miles up the road as he took care of the Iraqi. Caitlin later told me that Manny looked scared and she thought he was going to crap his pants. He told them to get the humvee ready as Iraqi police were taking over. Manny jumped off the man and into the humvee and sped off.

Our speed picked up to 50 MPH. This time I manned Jorge while Rodríguez drove. I knew the intersection of MSR Jackson and ASR Tampa was coming up. I kept lookout as we passed through layers of overpasses, on ramps, off ramps, and underpasses, like a pretzel. The sides had ditches that could easily be used as fighting positions. The road had craters and patches of burnt metal. Most of the dividers were crushed. Once we got through, there was a convoy of marines guarding the other side, waiting for the first bullet to fly, but it never came.

It only took us another fifteen minutes to get to Baghdad International. Just outside the gate we stopped due to traffic. I sat on top of George and looked at a small boy standing next to our truck. He was about four, wearing a long white robe without shoes. In his arms he carried peanuts, soda, and candy that others had thrown to him in passing convoys. He looked up at me and said “water, water.”

I had a stack next to me so I tossed him a liter. He placed all the junk food into his robe and folded it up like a basket. Then he picked up the water and stumbled off. I looked at him and thought, my children would never have to beg for food or water. They would never be without shoes. Does this little boy know what toys are? Does he have someone that hugs him and tells him he is loved?

We didn’t want to risk driving at night, so we stayed in BIAP. Toro convinced Manny that we should leave at 04:30, drive to the edge of Fallujah, wait on the side of the road until the sun came up, then drive as fast as we could through town. We all knew that the sun comes up at 06:30. We also knew that TQ was only 50 miles away. The logic was not working for any of us.

***

The next morning, we rolled out of BIAP at 04:30. As I manned Jorge, I turned on my night vision goggles. There was no moon, so vision was limited. All I could see was barren farm land. Both Matt and Caitlin were in front of me, so I could keep an eye on them. We pulled over as planned. All lights and engines were off. Everyone dismounted and pulled security. I stayed on top of George for a better view. No one spoke.

Caitlin broke the silence and whispered, “Hey Sergeant Schick. Are Manny and Toro writing a book?”

“About what,” I asked.

“Ten Ways to Get Killed in Iraq. Let’s review what we’re doing wrong. We’re driving in the dark at prime ambush hours. We’re now sitting targets on the side of the road. As we sit here, each vehicle that drives by can warn Fallujah that we’re on our way.”

All we could do is laugh. I suppose that’s what soldiers do, laugh in the face of adversity. A group of three white suburbans passed.

At day break we moved forward, into Fallujah. On the right were gorgeous condos two stories high with balconies. Trees lined the front of the buildings. On the left were run down apartments, street vendors, and shops. We drove down the four-lane road with no traffic. Men stood along the street glaring at us. I looked from side to side expecting someone to jump out and say “boo!” but the only sound was engines rumbling. The men remained still. They didn’t walk. They didn’t talk. They didn’t shake their fists. They stood there as if someone had snapped their fingers and time froze.

I wanted to take a picture of the beautiful mosque in the center of town, but I was afraid they might snap out of it and decide to shoot. There was a mural in the middle of the road of Saddam. His face had been scraped off and spray painted black. Someone pasted a poster of Saddam’s head on top of it. A bridge crossing the Euphrates River was in sight. Shortly after, our maintenance wrecker called over the radio, the last truck had made it through. That’s it? We did it! No RPGs, no shots fired.

As we entered TQ airbase, four Apaches flew by. They patrolled the base all day. All the trucks offloaded except our seven from Camp New York. My cargo wasn’t supposed to be left there. Instead, it belonged to a base ten miles north on the other side of RPG Alley. We waited around for hours while Manny did everything to have our load dropped here instead of at the next camp. We parked next to a building painted with twenty black silhouettes. We didn’t know what it was used for, but it looked like a firing line. The field next to us was filled with broken down MiG fighter jets. They had been dug up months earlier when someone found them buried in the desert. Their long, angular fuselage, painted in a dull, radar-deflecting gray, could cut through the air like a blade. One of the jets had a penis drawn on the cockpit glass covered in grime. This product of the Cold War’s arms race had a sleek and menacing silhouette. I was amazed that some of the most powerful jets in the world were sitting there, useless.

Manny directed us to drive over to the airstrip and drop our load. Rodríguez stood behind our truck signaling as I lowered the equipment to the dirt. A bright light flashed in my mirror. Then – boom. Our truck shook and I looked out the window to see a huge fireball turn into a thirty-foot tall mushroom cloud  next to the We never found out what caused the explosion, but one thing’s for sure, we weren’t in it.

We dropped our load and joined the rest of the convoy. There was plenty of sunlight and we had a long drive back to base camp, yet Manny insisted we stay here for the night. It didn’t make sense. We wanted to get the hell out of there. Later we found out that we weren’t supposed to drive through Fallujah. The town was off limits. Instead, the MPs could guide us through an alternate route connecting to MSR Jackson. The problem was the MPs weren’t going to take us for two more days.

Manny didn’t want to sit around, so he decided we’d leave in the morning at daybreak and drive through Fallujah. With the sun directly above us we wanted to get it over with now, but Manny stood his ground and we stayed. TQ sits on top of a hill with Habbaniah Lake on one side and Fallujah on the other. As I looked out over the city, gun shots erupted. Another convoy had left ten minutes ago and now they were fighting for their lives. The shots went on till 02:00 the next morning. Matt and I continued with our nightly prayer. We prayed for the protection of the other convoys leaving, for our safety as we slept, and thanked God that we didn’t leave. Matt pointed out that the flares looked cool, like fireworks, but there wasn’t anything to celebrate. Someone could have been dying.

***

05:00 wake up was silent. No more shots. No more flares. As we got ready to leave, I put my arms around Matt and held him for five minutes. We didn’t say a word, yet in our silence we told each other things words can’t describe. I gave him a kiss and climbed into the turret. Rodríguez drove again. As we lined up our trucks I put on my bullet proof vest. The 200-round drum that holds ammo for Jorge was busted open. I didn’t have any way to strap the additional SAW ammo to me, so I pulled it out in rows of 100 links and strapped it across my chest like Rambo. I looked ridiculous, but if I had to jump out of my truck, I would have plenty of ammo.

I grabbed a Red Bull out of the cooler and passed one to Rodríguez. It’s the closest thing to a beer we were allowed to drink. I sat on top of George and sipped. On our right was a convoy of tanks parked in the dirt. The soldiers looked at us as we got ready to leave. They stared at me with my links of ammo around my chest. I know what they were thinking, but I had no way of conveying my ammo carrying situation, so I took the stares, the pointing, and the laughs.

We left the gate and the guards waved goodbye to each of us with fake smiles and a “give them hell” fist in the air. I stood outside the turret with Jorge clenched in my fists. I looked down at my hand and realized I was losing circulation in my arm. I loosened my grip and tried to relax. I flicked off the safety and pointed the barrel toward the ground.

I squinted at the wind then adjusted the bandana across my face to keep debris and bugs from tearing into my skin. Caitlin stood in back of the humvee in front of me manning the .50 cal, with her blank stare toward the horizon. I knew what she was thinking and feeling.

My mind started racing. I wanted to snap my fingers, freeze time, put us in Kuwait, and feel safe again. Cars zoomed by, going against traffic parallel to us with their hazard lights flashing. I imagined them warning the town of our arrival. Staring at Caitlin caused tears to well up in my eyes. Then I finally snapped out of it. What’s wrong with me? I don’t panic. I don’t cry. I am always in charge. God has taken care of us through every foolish situation we’ve gotten ourselves into. Why would He stop now at the end of our mission? I quickly prayed, “God protect us and don’t leave us now.”

We came to the bridge over the Euphrates. The sun was rising and a beautiful orange sparkle reflected off the water. Mist was in the air, engines roared, the wind blew harder, our wheels raced, and a Christmas song was stuck in my head. Our trucks were so loud I knew no one could hear me, so I went ahead and sang the chorus to “O Holy Night:”

“Fall on your knees.

O hear the angels voices.

O night divine.

O night when Christ was born.”

It felt odd singing this Christian song, by someone who didn’t want to be a Christian, in a nation that didn’t celebrate Christmas.  As we entered town, I took off my bandana to show my face and I pulled my hair out of its bun to show my long blonde hair. The insurgents hate women who show their face, so I wanted to make sure they knew I was a woman as I looked them straight in the eyes.

Just as before, the men froze next to the road. My eyes panned up and down each building. Every window was empty, each balcony vacant. I could see Matt had already made it to MSR Jackson and was out of the town. Another 500 meters and it would be over for me. A man stood at the very end of the town with his hands behind his back. He wore blue oil-stained pants and a filthy white shirt. The hate in his eyes beamed past his rugged beard. Our eyes locked onto each other as our convoy slowed for the turn. I stayed focused, waiting for him to make the first move. He stood there, watching, as I exited town.

Free at last I looked back counting each truck that turned onto MSR Jackson. As the last gun truck made its way into the turn a man threw a rock at the driver and hit him in the neck. Toro laughed loudly and teased, “Dude, you got stoned in Fallujah!”

***

We made it back to base. The guys couldn’t wait to joke around and share the near misses with death. Outside every tent you could hear shouts:

“Oh my god!”

“What the hell?”

“How is that possible?”

Scott found the videotapes in his garage and brought them into the kitchen. We stacked the VHS in a wine box and the little Hi8 tapes in a gray shoebox for a pair of boots that belonged to his wife Tiffany. The wine box was mine. I’d given him the last three bottles—a syrah, a cabernet, and a red blend. Party gifts I meant to give away to others but didn’t for reason I couldn’t remember.

We could have labeled the boxes “before” and “after.” Before the end of childhood and after. When Doug was around and after he was gone.

I folded the flaps of the wine box one over the other until they made a big plus sign and carried the boxes across the brown front lawn to my car. Then we played Uno in the kitchen, gossiping about a friend we don’t see any more but rarely reach out to either. Call it one of those things.

~

I learned how to digitize videotapes after my dad died. He had bins full of them—Super Bowls, old HBO films, an odd double feature of Full Metal Jacket and The Piano, midnight docs on alien conspiracies and mystery tapes with no labels at all; jarring cuts in the middle of Mad About You to an episode of The X-Files, the artifacts of someone who didn’t want to spend money or time buying a new tape. I bought a VCR and all the cables and software and learned the procedures. I figured saving the media would preserve him in some small way and trashing them just seemed wrong in the moment somehow. I don’t know.

I must have digitized three dozen tapes. It took weeks, but it wasn’t all-consuming. Just put a tape in, start the recording on a laptop connected to the player, and let it work in the background. I’m not sure I would have finished it otherwise. I threw out the tapes afterward but kept the double feature. I remembered the tape from the shelves in the den of his California duplex where I lived before I met Scott and Doug. It’s sitting in my closet unwatched.

~

There were five of us: Scott, Billy, me, David, and Doug. I met Doug in English class at the start of my junior year of high school. He had black hair and mild acne. My memory pulls up a wardrobe of grays and browns over standard-issue jeans, but old pictures show him in white t-shirts or in cheap ball caps. Such is memory. He was fit, but by no means a jock. He liked science fiction and computers and comics, but you’d never know it at first glance. He hid his personality behind taciturn walls—emotionless and rigid, projecting a subtle air of disinterest or even mild annoyance. But sometimes the mortar would crumble and a light would emerge from his eyes as his voice warmed into questions about one thing or another—maybe about Star Wars or an old war film he’d recently watched, or into some casual observation about a girl in class he liked punctuated with meek laughter uttered as a hiss through his teeth, his eyes narrowing and cheeks erupting red as if he just told a secret and had become instantly embarrassed by it.

Doug’s dad was a career soldier who always seemed to be elsewhere. He missed his dad and spoke about him with a kind of pride mixed with subtle despair, as if his absence was causing unsaid wrongs to go on being wrong. He had a brother who lived with an uncle in Pennsylvania. There was a story there somewhere, maybe even a scandal—my guess was always shoplifting—but he never elaborated. He talked to me about his mother only once. She had died in Korea when they were little. He lived with his stepmother when I met him, a woman with dirty-blonde hair who smoked cigarettes from a La-Z-Boy in their living room. She had a daughter from a previous marriage. A popular girl. A cheerleader. I had a crush on her briefly, but I knew better.

I met Scott through Doug one Saturday night in October. Doug invited me to a laser-tag place behind the mall. After we blew our money, he phoned Scott from a payphone for a ride home. I remember a lot of begging, lots of “Come on, man,” his trademark sighs whispered into the black phone handset. Scott pulled up about ten minutes later in his ’88 four-banger Mustang complaining about all the rides he was giving out. He had the double-edged fortune of being the only one of us with a car and Doug had apparently blown through a lot of favors. To his credit, Scott had a hard time saying no.

I called shotgun and was surprised no one complained. I never considered the possibility Doug might have wanted the front seat or was at least owed it by virtue of knowing Scott, who I didn’t know at all. It was a decision made subconsciously. Call it a flex of teenage arrogance, or a lack of manners. But Doug never said a word either. He seemed was resigned to it, or even expected it, the manifestation of a lack of confidence, an unwillingness to take up his own space, embarrassed by the notion.

My friendship with Scott had formed on its own terms by New Years and I found myself with him more often. Call it a polarity shift. I rode to school and back with Scott for the rest of high school, always up front. We didn’t always know how Doug got home. We often stopped to pick him up if we saw him walking home. When we parked in front of his house he’d trudge to the front door with a tense mouth and sad eyes, slipping through the front door to prevent his stepmom’s Pomeranian from bolting into the fresh air from the secondhand smoke of their living room. We joked that the dog was begging us, anyone, to set it free. Sometimes Doug laughed; more often he didn’t. Other times he insisted with a flat voice, the walls up strong, that he wanted to walk home alone.

~

The earliest recording on Scott’s VHS tapes is of a birthday party at a Showbiz Pizza Place, a kitschy arcade and pizza parlor. The camcorder timestamp reads July 6, 1989, but who could ever remember how to set those things? Scott looks to be about ten or eleven. He has the cherubic face of a kid who’d fit perfectly in a spinoff to The Goonies.

The next recording was much later. New Year’s Eve 1996. Our first one. Scott always brought out the camera on New Year’s. For him the holiday seemed like a moment in time when some rare magic in the night might shift our world in grand ways and he wanted to capture it as it happened. I suppose I could say I felt the same. I miss that optimism. I find footage of at least a half-dozen New Year’s Eve parties; I’m in most of them. I haven’t seen the footage in over a decade or more but remember that first one well. I recognize the soft living room of Scott’s mothers’ house in the suburbs. That Christmas tree. Those green couches. His parents were divorced by then, his sister off to college. I see myself on the couch—sixteen and skinny, a narrow chin, a thick mop of dark brown hair, a slouching awkwardness and dark eyes. Billy is there too. Round eyeglasses. Braces. A reedy voice that hadn’t quite broken into adulthood yet. A prep school wardrobe that hid his future in the arts. Billy is the friend we gossiped about later, the one we don’t see much of anymore.

Shawn arrives but doesn’t stay long. A class ahead of us, it always felt like Shawn had a foot aimed at a better party elsewhere. I suppose that’s probably true. Scott and I were stunningly tame teenagers. We had no vices. Shawn would get us banned from the local mall for three months after yelling profanity at the employees of the Disney Store as a prank. Bored suburban cops and mall security surrounded us like we were soldiers of some local gang they’d spun themselves into believing was real. We joke about it now. Some years ago, I called mall security to get the Polaroid mugshots they took of us. The call didn’t last long.

JoAnn and Katie appear in the video a little later. Friends of Scott and Billy, though I think Scott had something more in mind with JoAnn—a crush he was too shy or scared to act on. Their hair was almost identical: blonde, straight, and cut to bobs just above their shoulder. This was the mid-90s, the era of “The Rachel.” Katie was the softer of the two, more thoughtful. JoAnn could be blunt and impetuous, as if it was JoAnn’s world and we were all just living in it. Esotropia canted her left eye toward the bridge of her nose. I was always amazed by how little it seemed to matter to her, though I know now that couldn’t possibly have been true. In the video they sit together and watch some concert for one song while No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” plays on the stereo. Billy mouths the lyrics from a bean bag chair nearby until JoAnn kills the music to listen to the television. No one has the guts to complain. Their friendship with JoAnn wouldn’t last the summer, dying on some petty teenage vine.

And there’s Doug. See the slightly baggy polo shirt. The striped one with the browns and greens locked in my memory. He seems happy at first, almost manic. He arm-wrestles Billy with one hand while eating a Rice Krispie treat with the other. But he drifts into melancholy sometime later, after we had counted down the last seconds of the year; his eyes aimed at the floor as if caught by some old inner criticism made new. Watching him, I remember the mornings at school where he’d stand waiting for the bell dead center in a mob of kids who were strangers to him, his eyes aimed at the floor in the same way. Scott or I would try to coax him to join us, his friends, but he wouldn’t. Eventually, we rolled our eyes and called it Doug being Doug. We stopped trying.

The tape ends. I put in another.

~

I have to admit this: Sometimes we didn’t stop at all if one of us spotted Doug trudging hopelessly toward home after school. “There’s Doug,” one of us might say. But we would tool past anyway and leave the sentiment lingering unsaid, his eyes unacknowledged in the sideview mirror, his depression unbearable.

~

Scott, David and I had dinner at a bougie burger place the night before I picked up his tapes. David wasn’t in the first video, but he would appear in many others. We called him Spock back then, his high school haircut not far from the Star Trek character. He has long hair and a thick beard and about twenty pounds of added muscle now, but we still call him Spock occasionally.

We don’t get together or even talk as much as we used to. I live in New York; David and Scott live outside Atlanta. Even though they live relatively close to each other, they both have careers and wives and so little time, becoming comfortable with the general home-body inertia of their 40s. It’s probably why we don’t talk to Billy much anymore. Or maybe why he doesn’t talk to us.

Whenever Doug arrives in conversation, which he invariably does, we talk about him as if blowing on the embers of a fading campfire. Twenty-five years have passed since we last saw him, and yet we’re still trying to examine the channels of his life, of what we know and remember of it, of what we were incapable of seeing then. Such is the hold he has. But memory is fickle and time is cruel. Sitting at Bob’s Burger Bar, what we remember about of Doug’s life, the fading impressions of a teenage boy’s troubled inner self, has been attritted by the passage of our own stories. We try to apply the wisdom we didn’t have then to memories we barely retain now.

We speculate that—

He suffered from depression but had no means of identifying or treating it compassionately.

He blamed himself for every perceived rejection.

He treated love as if it was a gift purchased through conformity. I tell them that Doug once told me he wanted to be a doctor, then later a lawyer, two fields he expressed no real interest in. “But that’s what people want,” he said bitterly.

He had no space to learn about himself without judgement.

His stepmother treated him like the unwanted spare child and his father wasn’t around enough to provide a balancing force.

He lived in a house where he felt very alone.

Scott tells us he visited a psychic some years back where he showed her a picture of Doug while offering no context. She looked at the photo a moment and seemed troubled by it.

“This person is very angry,” he said she said. “He keeps saying ‘why did he marry that woman.’”

David and I don’t know what else to say.

~

Along with the tapes, Scott gave me a few dusty albums filled with photos of us from our teens to our early twenties, stopping abruptly around 2002 or so. Wondering why we stopped taking photos, we immediately blamed it on the evolution of digital media superseding the physical. But even then, none of us have folders of photos of us on hard drives anywhere. I explained maybe we stopped seeing our lives as novel and worthy of capturing. I also wonder if maybe a jadedness didn’t take hold, but this feels precious.

In the albums, I find a photo of the last time I saw Doug—New Year’s Eve of 1998. Another party. I was in a Marine private first class by then. Doug was an ROTC cadet at North Georgia College. In the picture, I’m carrying him across my shoulders in a fireman’s carry like I might carry a wounded comrade. I apply special meaning to the photo, a final tribute. But I realize later it’s not the last time I had seen Doug. That had happened at a lake trip the following summer; I find evidence of it in Scott’s albums. I can only dig out vague memories of the trip—a humid weekend where I had managed to flee the Marines for a few days. I can’t remember a thing that was said between us, there aren’t enough photos, but I know it’s in there somewhere. Maybe if I only stare at them hard enough.

~

I bought an old Hi8 camcorder to digitize the second box of tapes. Footage of Doug’s final New Year’s Eve, Y2K, was on one of them. I sifted through lots of birthdays and road trips to Florida and Scott’s college girlfriend Sonja. I was in a lot of it, shy and foul-mouthed in equal measure. It was hard to watch myself.

Doug’s appearance in Scott’s videos diminishes over time. I suppose we could judge ourselves for the distancing, but that only works in the context of what comes. We could not predict the future. We could not see inside Doug’s heart, the perceptions he must have felt of being unworthy of acceptance. Where does our responsibility to a friend begin? Where does it end? I think it’s fair to say we were leaving him behind. Maybe he felt he didn’t know how to keep up.

I find the party footage. I wasn’t there; I spent that night drunk on a pier in Naples, Italy. But Doug is there. I watch him drift around the edges in a white t-shirt and holding a blue Solo cup. He doesn’t interact with anyone, nor does he acknowledge it when Scott lingers on him with the camera. There’s a finality to his expression, but it’s one I recognize only after-the-fact, as if I believe he’s already accepted the ugly narrative within him which none of us are capable or brave enough to challenge.

Later, on the green couch in his mothers’ living room, Scott records a year-in-review with David and his girlfriend Alicia. Silly riffing as nineteen- and twenty-year-olds reached for unearned introspection. Doug’s last recorded words are there, but even then he remained unknowable, uninspired, his voice soft and powerless behind the walls. I had to tilt my head to the speaker to hear him.

Scott: What do you have to say?

Doug: Ninety-nine was… I learned a lot.

Scott: Such as?

Doug: Stuff. 2000… Just another year.

Scott: Expectations for next year?

Doug: Same… It’ll be just the same, really.

He sits back and crosses his arms, finished. Spock asks him if he’s going to finally get his license this year. Even Spock knew of Doug’s endless need for rides. But Doug doesn’t respond and the scene ends. The walls would allow us nothing more.

~

David learned about it first three weeks later. He was a freshman at Georgia Tech. A high school acquaintance attending North Georgia College with Doug reached out by email to say that Doug was dead. David called Scott right away. Scott tells me later that he broke down on the phone.

David emailed me the news. I was at sea, steaming for Crete from Naples. At first I thought it was a dumb prank, but David wasn’t one for jokes. At least none that crass. I printed the email and called David from a bank of phones just off the mess deck.

David doesn’t remember this conversation, which briefly makes me doubt my own memory, but I know it happened. I remember the obnoxious delay in the call where I’d have to pause to let his responses reach me before asking another question, otherwise the call would fall out of sync and we’d step on each other’s sentences.

After the call, I went to the ship’s smoking area, a long ramp that led from the hangar bay to the lower storage bay. The hangar smelled like grease and exhaust. It was night; the ramp was lit with a dim red light. I sat on the rough black ramp with my knees up and my boots out in front of me and smoked myself hoarse. Eventually, I learned Doug had gotten into some hazy minor trouble with the ROTC cadre, then his grades slipped and the National Guard pulled his scholarship. With no means to pay for college, at least any means known to him, he was staring down the prospect of returning to his stepmother’s house and the embarrassment of failure.

On January 12, a college friend asked him to go skeet shooting. On the way, they stopped at a Wal Mart in town and his friend went inside. Doug remained behind with the shotgun. Rejection and helplessness intersected rotten opportunity.

~

I returned home in March just after my twentieth birthday. I rolled into town after sunset and drove straight to Scott’s house, spinning donuts in the cul-de-sac and honking the horn until he came out. There’s no video of it, but I so wish there was. I was happy to be home.

Scott took me to the cemetery near the interstate. He told me he was angry over not being asked to be a pall bearer. “They got a bunch of strangers to do it; they never even bother to ask us. It should have been us. We were his friends.” He said he found his stepsisters’ tears disgusting. Unfair or not, it was how he felt. He’s still angry. “They treated him like shit,” he said over his burger years later.

I went back to the cemetery one sunny day a few days later. Something propelled me that direction. Call it a need to speak unheard. I touched the grass and spoke to the headstone. Confusion and grief converted into shallow anger and disgust and bravado. I called him a coward. “What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked. I’m not sure I like who I was then, but I’m not sure I was wrong either. It’s something I wrestle with even now. Perhaps it was wrong of me to have berated his choice as an act of cowardice, especially considering the cold brutal calculus he made in that moment in a car outside a Wal Mart in winter rural Georgia. I suppose in the moment I figured the cowardice lived in not facing himself directly. I suppose that despite all the rides he bummed, he couldn’t ask for the ride that mattered, the one that offered a way out. Going through Scott’s tapes, though, I’m scared there’s a scene where he asked for it between the lines. I hope I never find it. I’m scared of what it might mean if he had and we were just too cowardly to answer.

~

I finished transferring the tapes about a week after the New Year’s 2025. The tapes run from late 1996 to about 2005 or 2006, maybe a little after, but not by much. I see a lot of bad cuts, the places where Scott had replaced one moment with another, too cheap or broke or just too rushed to buy a new tape. I see an old girlfriend, a lot of dark bars. Before I went through them, I joked that I’d probably find most of it cringy. I wasn’t wrong. I do. Some of it, anyway. Mainly I see myself now in contrast to who I was then. I want to tell myself to be different, but I’m not sure in what way. I’m hard on myself. I want to hide from the flaws I see in the gaps of my clumsy late teens and early twenties. I haven’t watched them since.

I put all the tapes into the wine box and mailed them back. I shared a link to a cloud folder with the files with Scott and David. Scott told me he got them; David didn’t respond, but I wasn’t surprised. He isn’t much for nostalgia, and I’m still not sure anyone wants to see how young we were. I don’t have an email for Billy. I asked Scott, but he didn’t have one either. I thought about finding an email for Doug’s stepmother or stepsister and sending them some of the videos, the ones that matter. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t done it. I won’t.

I won’t.

One of the first things I published on Wrath-Bearing Tree was a negative review of the movie Fury, based entirely on its two minute preview. How early in the publication’s history was the review published? I refer to WBT as a blog.

The negative review I can say with the benefit hindsight is average as negative reviews go; not as witty as I thought I was being at the time, insightful but only on a superficial level (there being different levels of insight). I wasn’t being edgy for clicks, I wasn’t trying to do something noble, I just figured out based on the sort of war movie I’d seen before that Fury was going to be a particular type of film, and it ended up being that film, about exactly as I’d called it. So what! Big deal.

A lot of people who like the sort of movie Fury was supposed to be seem to have enjoyed Fury. No surprise there. Few of them probably appreciated my too-clever-by-half review. Nevertheless it remains one of the most-read pieces on the site, year in and year out, because — and this is key — as I based the review on a two minute preview, it was one of the first reviews published about the movie, and therefore established itself via SEO (and lord knows what else goes on deep in the caverns of Alphabet/Google) as one of the foremost reviews on the subject. It’s also probably one of the few negative reviews about the movie extant, so viewers who are not inclined to watch the movie or have a bad reaction to it likely end up gravitating to what I wrote.

Should you read this negative review of Fury? No, I don’t recommend it. Not my finest work. Not bad, but not funny or clever enough to spend a few minutes of your precious time on earth with it. If you’re in the market for a funny negative review of a movie, check out Christopher Orr’s review of The Happening instead.

What a tiresome prelude! What could this possibly be building up to. Well, folks, I saw another tank movie set in WWII recently. I enjoyed it. I want to recommend it. It confirms what I wrote at the end of my mediocre review of Fury, which was that to produce a truly original, extraordinary, and truly anti-war movie about WWII, one would need to make a film about the Wehrmacht and from their perspective. Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Tank, available online. In the end, Hollywood didn’t have the guts to make it. The Germans (emerging for better or for worse from their decades long pacifist slumber) did.

In the opening minutes, you take the perspective of a Tiger tank crew on the eastern front during the Wehrmacht’s retreat from Stalingrad. This scene is remarkable and unpleasant and will probably deceive war movie aficionados into drawing conclusions about the rest of the film. This Tiger crew is precisely what you’d expect — disciplined, skilled, and ruthless. They mow down Soviet troops by the dozen. They are fired upon by antitank guns and T-34s, and they knock out each of their adversaries with yells of “fire!” and “Jawhoel!” You root for them. You want to see them valiantly and bravely defending the retreat of their comrades, while dispatching the wicked enemy. This is the camera’s perspective, the film’s perspective, and one adopts it with little trouble — trouble offered by the fact that it is, in fact, not an American tank with American soldiers inside, but a Nazi Tiger tank, the apex predator in the WWII tank world.

Based on this opening most sensible viewers will be tempted to give up on the movie immediately. No point watching Nazi propaganda. Especially now, in this fraught age. I was curious so I continued — not because I enjoy Nazi propaganda, but because I wanted to know if the Germans, who had made their own Band of Brothers (it’s called Generation War in English) and made Babylon Berlin and generally appeared to be moving into a kind of renaissance of viewing WWII in rosier terms than we’re used to had actually just gone for it and made their own version of Fury.

No spoilers here: they didn’t. They made their own tank movie all right, but it’s also not a tank movie at all; it has more in common with Dead Man than Das Boot. It’s really quite good; evocative, melodramatic (do I need to write melodramatic? This is a German film). It’s surreal, it’s horrific, it manages to give Ukrainians agency in a way no movie outside Ukraine has even attempted, as far as I’m aware. It’s an eastern and central European ghost story, a story about the witching hour — and a story about a tank; the folks who crew it, and (most importantly) its commander.

More than anything else, The Tank is about the total and complete ruin of Germany; its destruction, its defeat, its moral collapse. It is also about the impossibility of forgiveness for certain crimes — the impossibility of redemption. The tank commander reminds his troops about what they’re fighting for — their families, their homes. Throughout the movie, the audience learns that the crewmembers have nothing left to fight for — their own families and homes have been destroyed in Allied bombing raids. They themselves are nothing, they stand for nothing, and they have nothing. Imagine such a film. Only the Germans could have made it, because they were Nazis, and they lost WWII in spectacular fashion.

This is the sort of movie I think Fury (a perfectly decent war film. I’ll shut up about it after this review) probably thought it was going to be. Where or how it got lost along the way, who knows. Nazis make such contemptible and attractive foes. You can’t kill too many of them. I think that’s likely where Fury went wrong — it became so intent on killing Nazis that it had trouble coming right out and declaring its protagonists villains — that these men were not different from the Nazis save by chance. It stars Brad Pitt. There was too much at stake, Fury could never take the kind of risks it needed to be the kind of tank movie or war movie I would have wanted it to be — the movie it could have been. A war movie with protagonists who were going to hell.

The Tank on the other hand delivers. The sort of person who enjoyed watching Fury will I feel confident enjoy The Tank as well, especially veterans who have experience with tanks. The sort of person who didn’t enjoy Fury will also probably enjoy (or at least appreciate) The Tank — this is the measure of a good movie, one that’s enjoyed by different sorts of viewers.

I did end up watching Fury in the theaters in late 2014. After the review I’d written it felt like the right thing to do. It was a rainy night, and the movie was part of a dinner and movie date with a woman I’d met online, a nurse at the VA. The date went well, and we made plans to see each other again. I realized, when I returned to my car, that I’d lost my cell phone and had to drive 20 minutes back to the theater. The cinema’s employees were cleaning the theaters and preparing to close, and let me look around. I was in luck. My phone was there, beneath my seat. It had fallen out of my pocket. The next day I had a fever, and ended up developing pneumonia that had me bedridden for weeks. I never saw the VA nurse again. Fury had taken its revenge. Probably, I deserved it.

I remember the smell of the plastic blue gym mats under my face as I grappled another Marine in the hanger bay of the USS Boxer. What felt like a youth indoor football field, except grey non-skid instead of turf, two huge accordion sliding doors which opened up to the elevators to take aircraft to the top deck of the ship. In reality, in our day to day the doors just let in all the weather from outside into the bay. Today, the humidity was somewhere between eighty percent and Satan’s asshole and our polyester-blend uniforms did absolutely fuck-all to absorb the sweat—no one even bothered to wear skivvy shirts anymore because all it did was create more laundry.

I was training for my Green Belt in MCMAP (Marine Corps Martial Arts Program). I was a two-year Corporal and had been on leave when our grey belt class was offered, so now I was working back-to-back courses to avoid getting left behind on the Marine Corps standard.

Today, the Staff Sergeant (SSgt) running the program thought it would be funny to pair me with the fat-fuck LCpl. LCpl Cox outweighed me by easily 50 pounds—you were supposed to be partnered with people similar in stature in order to do body weight exercises and carries with your partner. Instead, I had a SSgt with a grudge against me for being the office clerk and not just a “gun bunny” (artilleryman) who decided today was the day he’d screw me over.

We’d been training for about an hour and a half, covered in sweat and face stuck on the mat. My Direct Report came running into the hangar bay and told me that First Sergeant (1stSgt) was looking for me. Having been the Battery Clerk for some time now, this was not an unusual request because my job was to generate reports for him. In fact, I had been training Stueland, my LCpl, to be my replacement, but it seemed he liked spending less time in the Battery Office than I did, and I would frequently get calls from the 1stSgt asking me where the hell his clerks were.

“Did he say what he wanted,” I asked.

Stueland just shook his head and said, “All the Brass are up there though.”

Great. I thought as I walked through the ship. There was nothing like an ass-chewing from everybody. First Sergeant knew I was in MCMAP—he had insisted upon it—so he wouldn’t send for me unless something was wrong.

I walked through the mess hall, down the passageway, up a flight of stairs, and took a right at the exercise bikes. I paused in front of the flimsy, white door of the Battery Office, took a deep breath and entered.

When I opened my mouth to say good morning to 1stSgt, I was eye to eye with Chaps.

Chaps was the Battalion Chaplain, who, in an earlier life was a college football player. He now stood in front of me, large shoulders slumped, fidgeting with his wedding ring as he did when he thought. He looked down and quietly told me to shut the door. A SSgt from beside me slid a chair into the back of my legs.

“Sit, please,” Chaps said. I did. As I sat down it started to dawn on me what was about to happen. It also dawned on me how many men were standing in the smallest company office I’d ever been in.

The Navy provided offices for the Battalion around the ship’s gym. Each infantry company had an office and then all the attachments, like our artillery battery, got the smaller rooms. Inside the small room was my CO, XO, my LT, 1stSgt, my Gunny, Company Gunny, my Platoon Sgt, and HQ Platoon Sgt all off to the sides of the office, and Chaps in front of me on a little metal chair. Ten grown men in a 10×10 room furnished with desks on both sides and two filling cabinets shoving us all into an even smaller, more uncomfortable 8×8 foot space to talk about whatever bad news Chaps was about to lay on me.

That’s when he picked it up off the desk. The red folder. Two things in the military come in red folders: Secret Material and Red Cross messages. Chaps wouldn’t be here to deliver an Intel brief—I may be a Marine, but I’m not a complete fucking moron.

“We received word today that your grandmother passed away.” Chaps said slowly.

“Which one?”

“Uh…” He fumbled the folder open again and looked, “uh…both, I’m afraid.”

“Both.” I repeated. “So, Nancy and Marylynn?”

Chaps looked again, wanting to make sure he got this right.

“Yes, I’m afraid,” he repeated his salve.

“When?”

“Marylynn on the 24th and Nancy…” he checked the record, “The 11th.”

I took it all in for a moment. God love her, but Nancy—my mom’s mom—was kind but in a depressive state for most of my life and we never had much of a relationship.

But Marylynn; she was a third parent. She had my sisters and me over for sleepovers, holiday weekends, and birthdays all the way until we were in our teens. She did all the grandma things: She let us stay up late and watch movies, order pizza, eat too much ice cream, play pool in the basement, and in the winters, would always have my grandpa make a fire for us to roast marshmallows for s’mores.

My sisters and I would read books or magazines, play with new toys, or play Chinese checkers with my grandma in the living room. Grandpa would sit in his chair at the back of the room and Grandma would take her time-outs to have a cigarette and let us continue to play.

She would often tell me I had a beautiful smile. She’d just watch me laugh and play with my sisters, never commenting on if a joke I said was funny or if a story I told was interesting—she had no mind for the substance of our adolescent prattle—but she would stare at us; happy to see our smiles. A form of currency, as a grandparent, to know you’re fostering happy moments in your grandchildren, a confirmation of love.

The last time I can remember her commenting on my smile was when I stopped by my grandparent’s house on my 10-day post bootcamp leave. I had graduated some ten pounds lighter than when I left and, according to her, hadn’t had ten pounds to lose in the first place.

I had worn my uniform to church and then driven over to her house to say hello and check in after being away three months. She smoked her GPCs at the kitchen table and greeted me with a turn of her shoulder and an, “Oooh hiiii,” as I knocked and walked in the door.

“Hi Gram,” I said as though no time passed.

“Look at you! Looking sharp. Say, what a nice uniform.”

“Thanks, Gram.”

“Oh, there you are,” she said as the smile had broken across my face. “So handsome.”

I was hoping the compliments would die down before my grandpa heard and came into the room. He had been in the Army, my dad had been in the Army, they all were in the Army. So, me being in the Marines was a point of needling for my grandpa.

“So those are your dress blues,” he said, entering the kitchen from the living room.

“Yes.”

“Look pretty sharp,” he said with his subtle inflection that let me know he was a little proud.

“But remember,” he changed to a would-be serious tone, “You ain’t shit unless you’re Airborne,” he chuckled.

I laughed and felt at ease knowing I was still just their grandson. I wasn’t a warrior, a devil dog, a hard charger, Jarhead, Killer, Hero, or any other bullshit name given to Marines. I was just a kid.

***

But now I wasn’t at ease. Nor was I laughing or smiling. Nine men avoided eye contact with me. One man, Chaps, who had been like an uncle to me since I moved to this Battalion and started going to church regularly, stumbled through the details, out of love and empathy of course, but nonetheless, there I was sitting like a fool, getting factoids from inside a fishbowl. Alongside men I didn’t want to drink a beer with let alone be completely torn open; none of these men knew me, none of them cared. We’d shared nothing more than pleasantries in two and a half years and now I sat in a cold room, on a metal chair, sweat freezing against my body, as my blood congealed inside me and my mind reeled from the idea that when I do get to finally go home, the woman who had made my family a family was no longer there. No more drawn out “hi’s” when I walked through the door, no more soft hugs, and no more holidays in her house where the petty family squabbles died, because she said so, and we just got to be a family and enjoy the food and decorations she made.

Now, looking up, and seeing them look back at me, that was worse. Everyone looking for me to react, waiting with vacant faces for me to tell them it was okay and that they could go back to their own lives and fuck off about my own issues. My tongue felt fat and heavy in my mouth. My mind was screaming at me to just say something and get out of there.

“Can I… go?” I asked. I felt like a child asking for a snack, but what the hell else was I to say.

“Sure.” Said Chaps, “But before you go…” I felt whatever energy I had that was trying to lift me off my seat, slump back down again.

“Let’s pray quickly”

Fuck. Me. Hard. The thought screaming in my head. Chaps, buddy, as much as I appreciated this gentle gesture, I just needed to leave.

But he prayed. He prayed that they be at peace and other such things. I’m sure it was sweet. He was being so kind. But until he said, Amen, I didn’t hear a word of it. I was biting my lips and repeating, Do. Not. Cry. in my head until he finished.

“Thank you,” I said clumsily after the prayer was over. As I stood up to leave, I finally made real eye contact with my LT and Platoon Sgt who were both nodding their heads slowly in an attempt to be consoling, but only looking stiff and uncomfortable as their weight shifted, brushing against one another. I gave them a nod back and opened the door and closed it with a crack.

I was back into the gym next to the empty exercise bikes, walked forward only a few paces, before my favorite Sgt appeared,

“Did you hear if we were going out tonight?” he said to me.

I didn’t hear him. I didn’t understand the words until later when I was back at my rack with the shades pulled. But at that moment, I reached out to hug him and he hugged me back. And I cried. I cried hard. In total the hug probably lasted 15 seconds. But it felt like an hour. When we separated, he asked me if I was okay. I didn’t respond directly or even to him. I simply straightened up, wiped my tears, and said aloud that I was sorry.

I was sorry I wasn’t with my family. I was sorry for crying on a grown man. I was sorry for getting myself stuck out here in the middle of the ocean, so I couldn’t go home. There was a great deal I was feeling sorry for—not least of which was being there for my grandma. Not holding her hand, sitting in a hospital room, trying to ease the pain by telling her a joke. I have thought many times that, had I been home, maybe I could have made her laugh and maybe even myself laugh, and we would be sharing, “I love you’s,” and making a final memory with laughter.

Or perhaps it could be some other happy cliché I could have on replay inside my memory bank like saying goodnight and turning the lights off for her to pass blissfully in her sleep. But that doesn’t happen in real life. There are no perfect hospital-scene endings. No holding her hand while the music fades and the lights go out. No whispering a final message into her casket.

It’s been fifteen years since then, and I haven’t smiled the same way since. Oh, I can laugh. Some days, I can feel truly happy. But it never seems to feel the same and I find it’s an all-too-common practice to remind myself: Smile. There you are.

Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire. Chicago: Bridge Books, 2024.

The 4-day 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit in Chicago, held from spring into the summer of 2023, coinciding with the 20^th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, was held in various venues in Chicago. A variety of exhibitions at such venues as Newberry Library, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Cultural Center, featured the work of over fifty artists. Surviving the Long Wars developed out of the summit and the exhibitions.

The editorial collective which oversaw the book, Aaron Hughes, Ronak Kapadia, Therese Quinn, Meranda Roberts, and Amber Zora, reflects various perspectives: veteran, non-veteran, feminist, Indigenous, and queer. They have put together an expansive volume that highlights the “profound connections between the two most protracted military conflicts in US history: the ‘American Indian Wars’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the twenty-first century’s ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT)” (1).

The roughly sixty contributors, vets and non-vets, are represented with photographs, installations, paintings, essays, poetry, and performance. There are also historical artifacts which illustrate the connections between the two “long wars.” The book gives broad exposure to writers and artists who may be unfamiliar to the general reader.

There are four major sections in the book, each with a brief introduction, a poem, essays and related artwork. “Residues and Rebellions,” for example, includes contemporary work by Monte Little and Miridith Campbell, among others, that are paired with selections from Akwesasne Notes and The Black Panther newspapers from the 1970’s and with Kiowa and Black Horse ledger drawings from the late 1800’s. The visual correlations are made explicit with a Black Horse ledger drawing displayed with a photograph from Notes, gouaches by Pakistani-American Mahwish Chishty, and a 2022 ledger drawing, “Enlistment,” by Marine Corps vet Darrell Wayne Fair. “Enlistment” is one panel in a series of ledger drawings depicting key events in his life. Also included in this section (and in later sections) are Miridith Campbell and Melissa Doud’s contemporary take on traditional dresses. Campbell’s Marine Corps Dress—Southern Style (2022) integrates items such as vintage Marine service buttons on tanned buckskin. Campbell served in three branches of the military and the dress reflects her service and Kiowa heritage. Her Counting Coup (2002) uses a Civil War cavalry coat with “Kiowa-style beadwork” replacing the epaulets. Similarly, Melissa Doud, an Army vet, created Bullet Dress (2016), placing 365 bullet casings on a dress made from an Army uniform. The casings replace the jingles on a powwow dance dress. (Likewise, Monty Little’s poem from his chapbook Overhang of Cumulus reveals hidden similarities between apparent disparate images through juxtaposition, thus creating unexpected connections:

Bullet shells drop on splintered
floors to mother’s
cadence in her jingle dress).

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ essay, “Why is the United States the Most Militaristic State in History,” takes a long view of American wars, while Meranda Roberts takes a close look at the major works in the exhibition.

These interrelationships are further explored in “Reckon and Reimagine,” the second section. Rijin Sahakian’s essay “Embedded Horizons” focuses on the Iraq War and the work of Iraqi artists Ali Eyal and Sajjad Abbas in particular. She is critical of the barriers to the broader exposure of Iraqi art in the West. She writes that “The works of Eyal and Abbas are acts of defiance against conditions designed to force surrender.  . . . But will the art world, informed by and participating with war’s image making and financial structures ever take the risk of remaking the rules of engagement?” (134). Amber Zora’s essay “Disrupting Business as Usual: Transforming Bureaucracy into Art” surveys the ways that artists “have utilized the detritus of the military machine—the mountains of bureaucratic paperwork, the ephemera, the piles of surveillance materials—to illuminate dark and forgotten aspects of militarism” (137). The artworks in “Reckon and Reimagine” exemplify her view. Gerald Sheffield, an Army vet, uses pages from the Army Field Manual to create fm-05.301 (2016), which exposes “the underlying machinery of psychological warfare” (141). Other works in the section include Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani’s Index of the Disappeared: Parasitic Archive (2014) and Hanaa Malallah’s She/He Has No Picture (2019-20). The former is an installation with a huge filing cabinet behind a desk, suggesting impersonality, where everyone is just a card among thousands or millions of other cards. The latter memorializes the hundreds of victims of the bombing of the Al Amirayah shelter in 1991 by “featuring portraits of the victims crafted from burnt canvases” (142).

The third section, “Unlikely Entanglements,” focuses on “visual parallels [which] surface between artworks by civilians impacted by the US long wars and BIPOC veterans critiquing the military they once served in” (154). Laleh Khalili’s essay “Tomahawks, Chinooks, and Geronimo: Settler-Colonial Fantasies of US Navy Seals” analyzes the ways that Navy Seals, and the military generally, have adopted in various forms the names and symbols of Indigenous people. Junaid Rana’s “Life During War on Terror Time” discuss both individual artists and the ways that art sees “things anew when before they were unseen” (209). The strength of the section lies in the art. At first glance Bassim Al Shaker’s series Moment of Silence (2022) appears to depict the creation of the cosmos. However, a closer look reveals “an unfamiliar sky in the minutes of silence following explosions” (159) that Al Shaker survived. “‘I saw body parts in the sky. The paintings show what the sky looked like at that time. The works describe death and loss, but also a new life after a loss’” (159). Ruth Kaneko’s Sutured (2023) uses remnants of her time in the Army to cover a box that connotes a sense of the futility of war. Army vet Rodney Ewing’s “Faded,” from a series on silk-screened ledger paper, Planned Obsolescence (2022), takes an image of Black prison laborers and superimposes an outline of wheels and gears, suggesting how the machinery of society abuses and exploits Blacks. A work from another series from 2022, Come the Mean Times, depicts a Black man with arms raised on the top part of the canvas; superimposed on the figure is an outline of a biplane with a naming of parts, like “elevator flap” and “right aileron.” On the bottom half of the canvas, upside down, like a mirror image, is a Native figure holding a child. Superimposed on this lower part is a map of the Trail of Tears. In this series “Ewing creates a dialogue about the harm done to Indigenous and African American peoples by the interconnected histories of colonialism and white supremacy” (186).

The first part of the fourth section, “Surviving the Long Wars Summit,” is comprised of numerous photographs of the various exhibitions, workshops, discussions, and performances that were part of the summit. There is also documentation of the Iraq War Memorial Activation, in which participants lay flowers into the waters of Lake Michigan. The section concludes with a short essay, “A Sweeter Future,” two longer essays, “’When Black People Are Free, All People Will Be Free’: Black Freedom, Indigenous Sovereignty, and the Limits of Reparations Discourse,” and “The Summit: Then and Now,” and a conversation between Army vets Kevin Basl and Anthony Torres. Torres curated the performances in Triennial, and as he explains to Basl, his “vision was to create collaborative opportunities among performers and attendees and help build a community that would exist beyond the Triennial” (286).

Aaron Hughes’ essay in the Conclusion, “Sowing Seeds of Resistance,” discusses the life and work of White Mountain Apache artist Frederick Gokliz as a springboard to a broader consideration of the work of contemporary artists such as Monty Little, Mariam Ghani, Ruth Kaneko, and Darrell Wayne Fair. Hughes sees in these and other artists “a web of interconnected exploitation” (313). He follows this up later in the essay when he writes: “However, I believe that when veterans move away from identities solely rooted in military service and American exceptionalism and instead embrace solidarity grounded in shared experiences of exploitation, new possibilities emerge” (321). His comment reflects the theses in some of the other essays, which call for the creation of new communities.

The concluding section, “Afterword,” includes an essay by Ronak K. Kapadia, “Afterword: Meditations on Survival and Rebellion,” which examines “three defining moments” during the three years of planning for the Triennial: the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the continuing U.S. role in the Palestinian War, and the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell in protest of that war. For Kapadia these events are intertwined and “prompt a deeper meditation on the concept of ‘surviving the long wars.’” The compelling writers and artists in the Triennial, along with dozens, if not hundreds of others in the U.S. and throughout the world, such as Indigenous artist Richard Ray Whitman and Afghanistan War veteran Henrik Andersen of Denmark, are instrumental in prompting this meditation.

Harold Bloom writes of the anxiety of influence that has afflicted writers going back, in the Western tradition, to Homer. We could stretch the metaphor to include not just writers, or artists, but all classes of people. For military leaders, for example, one recalls Plutarch’s anecdote of a middle-aged Julius Caesar weeping when confronted by a statue of Alexander the Great in the province of Spain. “He had conquered the world by the age of 27. I am 32 and have done nothing!” he said. Alexander himself, during his destruction of the rebellious city of Thebes before launching the invasion of Persia, ordered that only the house of the poet Pindar to be spared the flames. After crossing the Hellespont into Asia he then paid homage to the grave mound of Achilles (his ancestor!) at Troy. Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd century A.D. writes of Greco-Roman tourists visiting the birthplaces of philosophers like Zeno and Epicurus. He also mentions streams of pilgrims to the site in Cappadocia where the thaumaturge Apollonius of Tyana ascended bodily to heaven. Likewise, Suetonius notes that Virgil’s Mantua home or just north to Catullus’ Lake Garda palace were itineraries growing in popularity with well-to-do Romans. Petrarch’s frescoed house in the Euganean Hills near Padua has been visited by poetic disciples since the early Renaissance (I took my students on a school trip two years ago). All this is to say that pilgrimage is not for religious journeys alone, but for any act of traveling that takes us to a place of special cultural significance.

I myself have walked the ancient trail of the Camino de Santiago, visited the holy sites of Jerusalem, and been half a dozen times to Rome, all charged with numinous spiritual energy. Moreover, I have looked upon battlefields dating from the sack of Troy itself, to the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, the Punic wars, to the more modern Napoleonic wars, American Revolution, American Civil War, Italian wars of Independence, and dozens of sites from both World Wars (to say nothing of the two years I myself spent in Afghanistan). Rambling around a Gettysburg, or Waterloo, or the Normandy beaches (not to mention an ancient Thermopylae or Lake Trasimeno) evokes sentiment of strong collective memory and tragic action, but such sites nevertheless remain anonymously hallowed grounds that center around no single individual. Napoleon himself comes closest to a lone evocative “hero” who overpowers the masses of nameless men buried wherever he went, and whose legacy is ubiquitous across Europe and beyond. Seemingly everywhere I go, from Spain, to Egypt and Israel, to Russia, to the Northern Italian plain where I live, Napoleon has walked the ground and left traces to be followed and remembered. I once slept fitfully on the floor of a dilapidated villa over Lake Como which housed a billiard table once played on by the Corsican. Religious pilgrimage, battle and bloodshed, Caesar and Napoleon, these things hold our imagination and compel us to pay respect, even when given begrudgingly. For it can become a respect that is too big, too weighty, almost inhuman. The things that touch us more are the remnants and relics we glimpse of our forebears who were fallible, down-to-earth humans, not deities. Artists, whether writers, painters, musicians, whether giants or geniuses, and of certain kinds and to varying degrees, are all-too-human, and thus allow us to walk in their footsteps, to see ourselves more clearly through them, to be inspired and influenced, even enriched and blessed, by them.

Shakespeare, setting aside Homer, is Bloom’s quintessential artist who was himself uniquely free from the anxiety of influence, while simultaneously creating it in every subsequent writer. Such was not necessarily the case for his earthly estate—his famous Tudor-style birth house in Stratford-Upon-Avon only became a protected property and tourist destination in the mid-19th century due to the efforts of Charles Dickens. It was in fact during this Victorian period when modern tourism at cultural destinations became increasingly popular for the upper classes, and which accelerated again after the end of the First World War for the middle classes. Today, Shakespeare’s house could be considered a model of the overpriced commodification of culture that lacks artistic authenticity. Authenticity is the crucial word here, because it is this that this gives power to the places we seek out, or discover by accident, on our various pilgrimages. I would exchange a simple artifact, or monument, or plaque freely situated in loco for any expensive entrance fee crowded amongst tourists who are often more in search of a momentary escape from boredom than an authentic intellectual experience and its accompanying reverence.

In Venice, for example, there were times during a single day-trip when I wandered without purpose down narrow lanes, away from the sardine-packed tourist routes, haunted by the past, in search of nothing in particular, but open to whatever may come. I glanced up at various times to notice humble marble plaques adorning old buildings: an old palazzo in Cannaregio where Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent a frustrated year as French ambassador; a statue of Carlo Goldoni outside the palace where he was born; another noble palace (which later became the official Casinò of Venice) where Richard Wagner had died. This last contains a poetic inscription written by Gabriele d’Annunzio, who consciously designed his own living tomb and memorial at a sprawling villa over Lake Garda, which serves as both a site for school trips and an ongoing site d’hommage for fascist Mitläufer. In Florence, I once glanced up to find a plaque on the house that Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot while in self-imposed exile after his release from a Siberian prison colony. In Milan, likewise, I espied a plaque outside the old Red Cross hospital near the Ambrosiana where Hemingway recovered from his shrapnel wound, inspiring A Farewell to Arms.

Hemingway deserves his own paragraph, for it is he as much as any other modern writer who has left a solid geographical legacy whence tourists can easily follow. Italy, Spain, France, Cuba, not to mention Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, or Idaho—there are a plethora of houses, bars, and various monuments and specious museums once haunted by Hemingway. His statue is outside the bullring in Pamplona, where one arrives after running with the bulls; Harry’s Bar in Venice charges outrageous prices (and enforces a strict dress code, which is why I was denied entrance) just for visitors to say they drank at the bar where Hemingway sipped copious Bellinis; in Paris there is more than one bar that tries to do the same to cash in on his ‘Lost Generation’ years there; even the town where I work, Bassano del Grappa, has a dedicated Hemingway Museum in the old villa along the Brenta River where his Red Cross ambulance unit was based at the end of the war. His larger-than-life persona (even if this was as much about marketing as reality), and international adventures (big-game safaris, deep-water fishing, multiple wars corresponding, multiple wives left in his wake…) make him a household name and an easily accessible target for mass tourism.

The writer who most warmed to the idea of literary pilgrimage for its own sake is Max Sebald. His novels often consist in his retracing the footsteps of various literary forebears, and investigating the palimpsest of intellectual and architectural history that abounds below the surface of our cities and our lives. In his novel Vertigo, especially, he makes a trip from Venice to Verona, around Lake Garda, and back to Germany. Along the way he writes about the connection to each place of writers like Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka. In the final section, he reluctantly returns to his tiny hometown of Wertach, where he shares nothing in common with the ignorant villagers. Despite that, playing on the growing fame of Sebald, someone today has newly created a “Sebald path” through the nearby countryside. One of my friends who appreciates Sebald even more than I has made this pilgrimage and confirmed its strange existence.

In both Trieste and Dublin, visitors can follow in the footsteps of James Joyce’s life and works, though I’d wager that very few who do so have ever read anything by Joyce. In fact, there is a statue of Joyce along the Grand Canal in Trieste, near the old Berlitz school where Joyce taught English for 15 years, including to the writer Italo Svevo (who has his own statue). In Duino, near Trieste, there is a romantic castle that once hosted the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and inspired his Duino Elegies. There is a beautiful walking path along the cliffs named after him because of his own typical walks overlooking the Gulf of Trieste. On a hill above Bolzano I once found a path where Freud used to take daily walks during his summer visits, when it was still part of the Austrian empire. In Greece, I stayed in a village with a small beach-side cottage that Nikos Kazantzakis lived in for two years (1917-18) with the real-life Georgios Zorbas. The pair tried to establish a nearby coal mine, which became the basis for the later character of Alexis Zorba of the famous novel (and film). Just outside Geneva, one can visit a chateau built by Voltaire in a town now named after the genius philosopher (genius especially for his unique ability amongst philosophers to make himself rich in order to guarantee his own financial, and thus political, freedom).

If we enter Geneva, in the cemetery precisely, we can find the final magically realist resting place of the Argentinian (but Old World in spirit) Jorge Luis Borges. Indeed, it is in cemeteries in general where we often find and reflect on great lives lived. One of their upsides is that they are free of charge, and generally free of tourists (two things I value more than over-priced and over-crowded), not to mention authentic. What could be more authentic than the final physical remains of a once living spirit who lived, created an artistic legacy, and died. Thus does the Pantheon in Rome become more powerful by containing the incongruous tomb of Raphael (for it is only he and the first two kings of Italy who are interred in the Augustan edifice). The most famous cemetery of all is no doubt Père Lachaise in Paris, where one can find the resting place of scores of famous artists of all stripes, from Balzac to Oscar Wilde. Here you can find surely the most touristed tombs in the world, those of Chopin and Jim Morrison, and yet the lingering presence of the monstrous dictator Trujillo desecrates all around him. In Venice, the island cemetery of San Michele is a place for respectful rumination that is not as populous, but just as evocative as its Parisian cousin. Then to Nafplio, in the Peloponnese, we find the final resting place of that most infamous Doge of Venice, Francesco Morosini, who was responsible for the reconquest of Greece from the Ottomans, at the expense of the destruction of the Acropolis on his orders. Back to Kazantzakis, his own tomb is situated on the Venetian ramparts outside Heraklion, Crete, because his excommunication by the Church meant that he could not be buried in a cemetery. The epitaph reads “Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβάμαι τίποτα. Είμαι ελεύθερος (‘I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free’).”

In Vicenza, where I lived for many years, there is a plaque on a building on the main piazza commemorating one single night that Giuseppe Garibaldi slept there. It was in 1867 after Venice was finally captured from Austria in the Third War of Italian Independence, and when Garibaldi was very likely the most famous and admired person in Europe. The plaque merely reads “Garibaldi, who cried ‘Rome or Death’, stayed here.” Likewise in Torbole, a windy town washed by the northern tip of Lake Garda, there is a low arch equipped with a fountain and a plaque recounting one single night that Johann Wolfgang Goethe slept there in 1786, on the trip that inspired his memorable Italian Journey. A few blocks away in this same small town there is a memorial to Colonel William O. Darby, a US Army Ranger commander who was killed by German artillery on this spot on April 30, 1945. This was the same day Hitler killed himself, and almost the last day of the war in Europe. This same commander gave his name to the infamous obstacle course, the ‘Darby Queen’, that all candidates at Ranger School in Fort Benning will forever remember.

Nearby Vicenza, and Bassano del Grappa, is the picturesque hill town of Asolo, which was where the British adventurer and travel writer Freya Stark made her home until dying there at the age of 100. Stark was one of the first westerners, and certainly the first woman, to travel alone across the Arabian Desert, and recounted some of her earlier adventures in excellent The Valley of the Assassins. Murals about her life can be seen in the town, and one can also visit her tomb, which happens to be next to the tomb of Eleonora Duse, Gabriele d’Annunzio’s muse and lover, and the greatest actress of her day. Further down the Italian peninsula to the Tuscan hills near Siena, we can find the scenic country estate of Gregor von Rezzori, a German-Romanian post-war writer of the memoirs The Snows of Yesteryear. This estate still hosts a retreat for writers including the likes of Bruce Chatwin and Michael Ondaatje. In nearby Orsigna, an Apennine village near the ancient tree-lined border of Tuscany and Emilia, we can visit the home of Italian journalist and travel writer Tiziano Terzani, whose Letters Against the War greatly influenced my thinking during my own participation in the War on Terror. A film was made there based on his last book, The End is My Beginning. Further down the peninsula in Ravello, overlooking the beautiful Amalfi coast, we can visit the Villa Rondinaia, where the great American writer Gore Vidal lived and worked for decades. And yet another nearby villa on the island of Capri is tucked away near the many villas of the emperor Tiberius, a modernist design that was the residence of the WWII-era Italian writer Curzio Malaparte. This setting is so unique and memorable that Jean-Luc Godard chose it for his film Le Mépris (Contempt).

On Corfu, one can dine at an expensive restaurant called the White House that used to be the residence of Lawrence Durrell, where he wrote his many travel books, and part of his underrated masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet. It was also here that his good friend Henry Miller spent one year, which inspired The Colossus of Maroussi, his favorite (and mine) among his own novels. Further down on Corfu, there is a palace called the Achilleion which was built for the Austrian Empress Sissi, and was later purchased by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who spent much of his post-war exile there, engaging in his passion for hunting (apparently he had not caused enough death already in the first war) and archaeology. The Empress Sissi also left her mark in Merano, where an incredible castle with beautiful gardens markets itself to visitors today as ‘Sissi’s Castle’, even though she only stayed there for one month.

Back to Napoleon, on Elba Island there is a small palace where the former Emperor “ruled” the island during the nine-months of his first exile, and designed the golden-bee flag of Elba (which was itself a version of the old Medici flag of Tuscany). Back to Garibaldi, there is a small island north of Sardinia that was privately owned by the great general himself, and where he spent his self-imposed retirement and exile after single-handedly conquering the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and gifting it to the new King of Italy, sine ulle conditione. Back to Venice, one finds a palazzo looking out over the lagoon’s northern expanse where Nietzsche resided for seven of his most productive literary years. Then to Turin, we can look around the Piazza Carignano where Nietzsche witnessed a violent horse flogging and desperately went to embrace the horse, his final lucid moment before the final 11 years of syphilis-induced madness and death. If we continue down the Italian coast to La Spezia, we find the beautiful and aptly-named Gulf of Poets, which was famously visited by Byron and the Shelleys. D.H. Lawrence, who loved Italy (Sardinia in particular), as well as Henry James, also visited this Gulf. Back to Venice (for all literary roads lead not to Rome, but to Venice), one can visit the chamber in the Palazzo Barbaro where Henry James lodged and wrote several works, including The Aspern Papers. Moving to Rome, we find another room near the Aventine hill that hosted James while writing Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. Back to Greece, we can visit a memorial to Lord Byron, whose poetic heart remains interred at Missolonghi where he died of fever while fighting in the Greek War of Independence. Further south in the Mani peninsula of the Peloponnese, we find the charming sea-side villa of the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who fought in the Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation in Crete.

Back to my home of Vicenza once more, there is a little-known plaque on a certain palace near Corso Palladio that reveals it to be the birthplace of Luigi da Porto, the little-known original author of the old story of Romeo and Juliet that inspired Shakespeare. And so we end where we began—with the divine Bard. Guided by him, we can let our anxieties rest and our inspirations lead us where they will, rambling amongst cultural artifacts and collective memory, part of a rich history and an infinite world where giants have always walked.

You wrote and published a version of THE SURGE in 2019. I read and enjoyed it, but didn’t go back to reread and compare with the 2025 edition. What was the thought process behind that, and what changes did you make in the intervening years?

Publishing the second edition of THE SURGE happened somewhat by accident. I knew Jerry Brennan, publisher of Tortoise Books, had read the novel not long after it debuted and liked it. Few years back, on Veterans Day, he and I were posting on social media about what I can’t remember and I shot him a DM basically daring him to republish the book. And, to my surprise, he thought that was a great idea and now here we are. I’d reread my novel a few times after first publication, mainly to see if I’d made a mess of it. But did I think about changes, jot down notes about revisions? No. I never imagined it’d ever be republished. Aside from minor, stylistic and editorial tweaks throughout, very little is different from the 2019 edition published by Engine Books. That’s not to say readers shouldn’t check out the reboot, which in my opinion is stronger and more meaningful, largely due to Jerry’s deft editing. I started writing this novel as my MFA thesis at Northwestern University. One of my advisors was John Keene–he’s a real smart guy–and he told me the goal wasn’t to simply write the best book about the Iraq War, but to write the best book about any war, ever. So that’s what I did. I sat down and attempted to write The Great American War Novel. I wouldn’t have sent the manuscript out on submission if I didn’t think I’d come as close as I was able to actually accomplishing that.

In my review I wrote about The Surge (both the book and the campaign) as central events in post-9/11 America. Do you view that year-plus as definitive, impactful, important? Do you think America achieved success due to The Surge? Despite of it? Not at all?

A journalist interviewed me on the day of the so-called fall of Afghanistan and asked a similar question. We almost got into a heated argument before steering the conversation back on topic. Did the surge make a difference? Short term, based on the stated objectives, I think so. Although being a part of it felt batshit crazy and bizarre at the time. I arrived in Iraq in 2007, a few months after the campaign kicked off and soldiers already downrange described the country, insurgent activity, as “quiet.” I also took part in the early months of Afghanistan’s version of the surge in 2008-2009, but can’t speak to whether it had any success. Like OIF, every sector in OEF was different. But, personally, while submerged in those moments, I truly thought we–America–stood a real chance of turning things around in both theaters. For lack of a better word, you could say I believed in the mission. But THE SURGE is simply the title of a work of fiction that happens to be set in a fixed point in time largely because the story needed it to be. This really isn’t a book about the surge offensive, the Iraq War, or even a war novel at all. When trying to decide on a title, I went back and forth between The Listening Post and For a Piece of Colored Ribbon. But my agent, Kevin O’Connor–he’s great–recommended THE SURGE, and I didn’t hate it and also didn’t want him to think his new client was a diva. In hindsight, if I’d titled the novel something like, The Grocery Store Owner’s Foster Son, it might’ve been a bestseller.

In reading THE SURGE, I saw what felt like a lot of allusions and references. Is that me imagining them, or was that deliberate? (One I’m particularly interested in: the scene with Gibson, Vogel, Witkowski, and the Widow Makers having their “party” – felt like something out of PLATOON or APOCALYPSE NOW.)

I’m not sure anyone returns from a deployment without having done, seen or heard about some weird shit, inside or outside the wire. And I feel the wartime experience tends to mirror those preceding it, both in reality and works of art. Example: I know I’m not the only vet who’s heard a wounded soldier say to the medic, “Tell my wife, I love her.” Yup. That’s straight outta the movies. And there’s a logical, psychological explanation for why that phenomenon occurs. But everything in THE SURGE is deliberate. I tried not to have a single scene, line of dialogue, word, or even punctuation mark that wasn’t there for a purpose. It’s one of the reasons the novel has such a short length. Which I feel is a good thing, despite what big publishing thinks. Best I can say is that there’s meaning and intent everywhere in THE SURGE that might not immediately or consciously manifest itself on the page. Another reason why calling it a war novel, to me, feels just a tad inaccurate. Gonna name drop again but I was fortunate enough to take a writing workshop at Northwestern taught by Stuart Dybek. I’m paraphrasing, but I’ll never forget when he said the job of the writer, and the only job of the writer, is to create compelling characters and then navigate those characters through plot points A, B, C and D, until the story reaches a satisfying conclusion for the reader. Everything else: theme, imagery, what the story’s even about? That’s for the English professors.

For me, the strength of war stories comes in large part from the “supporting cast.” Two that stand out to me here: Sergeant Parker and First Sergeant Flowers. They both had depth, added a lot to the story and Chandler’s characterization, and just felt “real” to me. How do you go about populating a story with one main character but lots of others, some of whom we only see briefly?

Absolutely. One of the hallmarks of all great combat novels is the prevalence of what I can only describe as ensemble acting. James Jones was great at it. There’s a whole infantry company populating The Thin Red Line and some characters appear more often or carry more weight than others. There’s those essential to advancing the story and unlucky others bumped off in the early pages. It boils down to making tough choices, which is easier if the writer understands why the character even exists in the story at all. In THE SURGE, everyone’s on the page for a reason. Tricky part, for me, when developing these characters, was to try to push back against or perhaps more deeply examine what it means to be a hero. Of military service. Or even being an American. I used to spend a lot of time in the chow hall, eavesdropping. What fascinated me most were the men and women who’d been previously wounded and still volunteered for another tour. Why? That’s something THE SURGE attempts to explore. I can’t say most service members I encountered were motivated by patriotism–it was like everyone had an agenda. And that’s what I mean when I sometimes say THE SURGE is more accurately a novel about greed. Why the characters are all somewhat loathsome. They’re con artists, bigots, misogynists, fanatics and even child molesters. As for Parker and Flowers? Well, they’re the only two characters into which I intentionally injected aspects of myself.

Also, was Flowers “right” when he said “We’ll never leave. The army might pack it up and roll out in a few years, but America? We’re not going anywhere. Not all the way.”

Shrug emoji.

Do you think literature “from” our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ever see the resurgence in interest given to Vietnam War literature?

No. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see that happening at all. I’m fairly certain if all the authors who’ve published contemporary war books in the past decade got together and commiserated about our sales numbers, it’d be a pretty sad affair with a massive bar tab. THE SURGE received dozens of rejections. Among them was a note from an editor who said they enjoyed the manuscript but were an imprint of [big publisher] and since they’d already published [awesome book] were unable to acquire similar titles. I also recall one of my pieces being workshopped while working on my MFA and a classmate commenting about how it was difficult to find sympathy for the main character because they were an “invader.” Another didn’t like an early version of THE SURGE because it was “genre fiction,” not literature. And in the past year, I even read a social-media post where [respected-literary author] essentially accused [respected-veteran author] of only writing about the war to sell books and get famous. Look, I’m all about breaching the civilian-military divide. And the last person you’ll ever hear screaming, “Thank me for my service.” But from a publishing standpoint, I detect very little interest among the reading public in our Forever Wars, and the industry clearly knows this, too. And no, I don’t feel the so-called literary establishment has fully accepted veteran writers and poets into the club. Perhaps all that’ll change in later years but for now, I can only quote Hemingway. “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

What are your other writing endeavors? Anything more in the “war lit” scene? How does working outside of it help you write inside the war?

Despite essentially being told I’ll never publish another book, I’m still at it. Too stubborn and I need an outlet for the goofy stories roaming in my head. I’ve written a crime/mystery novel I’m really proud of–probably better than THE SURGE–that’s been shopped to death and still doesn’t have a home. I also wrote a clever but very short science-fiction/horror novel I truly think would be a great fit for several presses. But both of those markets are tough rackets. Loaded with talent. What’s crazy is I’ve found unexpected success recently writing adventures for science-fiction tabletop role-playing games. I even launched my own publishing imprint: Boondock RPG Adventures. It’s been a lot of fun developing characters, starships and short scenarios that there’s a market for and people seem to enjoy. I’m grateful for all the interest and support. And I still get to use the craft techniques I learned while pursuing my MFA. It’s very similar to writing flash fiction, but imagine combining it with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, with other outcomes influenced by a roll of the dice. Will I ever write another war novel? Highly doubtful. I never intended to write about the Forever War in the first place. I’m even uncomfortable with the term, “veteran author.” After I was wounded, I tried to bury my deployments to Panama, Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan. But the nightmares make that impossible. So, it’s not that I wanted to write THE SURGE. The story wouldn’t let me walk away.

Whether we wanted it or not, America was – up until this very moment, perhaps – truly the indispensable nation. Put another way, from the end of World War II to the point we reelected a man bent on dismantling everything, the United States of America served as a sort of nexus; hardly anything happened in the early part of the 21st century without America exerting influence on it, for good or bad. If that’s the case, then our decision to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003 was the fulcrum on which our credibility balanced. And the pivotal moment (really, a series of moments a year and a half long) of the Iraq War would be the Surge.

The simple name, the complex problem and series of problems it sought to solve, the half-effected solution: the Surge colors everything before and after, just as the war itself inflects pre- and post-2003 America. Books written or set before the Surge prefigure and foreshadow what’s to come; those written and set after exist only in the shadow of what was achieved or what failed to happen.

The Surge was large enough to exert pressure even on a young officer in the Navy. My first deployment on USS Princeton changed overnight, our carrier strike group no longer headed to Palau and Australia but now to the waters off Iraq, the airplanes from the USS Nimitz now tasked with supporting soldiers and Marines on the ground in places like Anbar, Diyala, and Muqdadiyah. My first novel is set in the events of the Surge, the men of a real but deactivated infantry battalion likewise caught up in the vortex that sucked in the past, present, and future.

I lay all this out not to brag, boast, or establish credentials, but to set the scene of Adam Kovac’s The Surge, a novel that, upon reading, I realize is the nexus novel of the nexus event of the nexus war of the nexus country. A republished version of his previous work that caught my attention in 2019, I did not compare this edition to its previous iteration. How could I? For those soldiers and others who deployed to Iraq more than once, how could they compare the first to the second (or third, fourth, ad nauseum)? Instead, I embarked on this reading with the intent to review…which itself changed the way I read it.

How could it not?

Larry Chandler is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, sent through a series of unfortunate events to lead National Guardsmen in an almost-forgotten corner of the Iraq War. The specifics of the story ring true to someone with vicarious and informed knowledge of what happened, but like any good war story the technical minutiae neither bog down the reader nor distract from the real purpose. The events are told largely chronologically, flashbacks to Afghanistan notwithstanding, but the bigger picture and key details emerge slowly, deliberately, and at times shockingly.

And that’s the real rub. There are enough things in here that caught my attention as I read, jotting down things like “Lemon from The Things They Carried,” “inverted identities,” “Groundhog Day but deadly,” and “catharsis, in a way.” I underlined “the brilliance of another boy’s phony universe,” “the sleep he couldn’t fight,” and this exchange:

“People need their heroes.”

“It’s a sham,” Chandler said.

“It’s a war.”

“Still a sham.”

There are echoes of the Vietnam War and its literature, turns of phrase like “Cool as the other side of the pillow” that would ring as true coming from the mouth of a draftee as it does a Midwestern National Guardsmen. There are echoes of Tim O’Brien and Joseph Heller (“You’d sleep in a dead person’s bed?”), Band of Brothers and Shawshank Redemption, prefigurations of The Militia House from John Milas, and parallels to contemporaneous accounts like Matt Gallagher’s novel Daybreak and the film Warfare.

Indra’s net, as remembered from a summer writing program I attended in 2016 and verified on Wikipedia, is a metaphor illustrating the interconnectedness of all things, a net with a jewel at each vertex that reflects every other jewel. Taking the figurative literally, that reduces complexity to meaninglessness; if everything reflects everything else, so what? Taking the figurative figuratively, though, it’s only in examining the reflections and considering their import that we can start to travel the strands of the net, sussing out the connections without deviating from the paths.

Kovac clearly knows how to conserve and employ words. Nothing is wasted here, everything written to maximize utility and impact. The sentences and context amount to more than what’s on the page often enough that I started looking for meaning and finding it everywhere. A casual mention of the Detroit Red Wings evoked curiosity; was the author seeking to invoke Operation Red Wings, a similarly influential nexus event of the Afghanistan War (sufficient to generate movies, memoirs, and a book about demons haunting survivors)? Chandler’s experience at Michigan State reminded me of another Army vet writer who studied there; the protagonist’s very surname is the same as an Air Force vet poet. The Chuck Norris meme – historic in the year 2025, very much of the moment in 2007 – makes an appearance in a port-a-john, and portable shitters have been memorialized even on the walls of the Pentagon. “Fucking Fobbit” = David Abrams. Camp Victory…that’s where I lived for a year. Al Faw Palace…

“Pathetic monument that won’t stand the test of time.”

I wrote that in the margin. I asked myself in blue ink if any of our camps (Camp Tucson, Camp Cleveland, Camp Atlanta) if any of those names have survived. Alexander conquered worlds and cities named for him still exist, even where he never marched; our names have likely been wiped away already.

But a book like The Surge – that might stand the test of our time, at least, if enough people read it. I want people to read it. They need to read it. How can I make them read it?

I mentioned the movie Warfare, which I haven’t seen and don’t intend to. From all accounts it’s an accurate, blow-by-blow, nearly real-time account of an actual event. Great. So what?

The combat at the end of this novel might not have happened, but it happened all over Iraq, it’s happening in Ukraine, and it could happen here. I hope it doesn’t happen here. If enough people read Kovac’s work, it might not. Who knows.

In addition to Indra’s net, the searing and lingering image left to me after reading The Surge is “cyclical and crescendo,” another scribble in the margin calling forth a widening gyre, a dynamic feedback loop that, for now, is out of control but not all-consuming.

One last quote from Kovac, not from me: “The surge, it changed all the rules.”

Excerpted from ALIVE DAY. Copyright © 2025 by Karie Fugett. Used with permission of The Dial Press, New York. All rights reserved.

Chapter 5: Alive Day

March 13, 2006

Dillon crawled in circles on the carpet, the TV behind him glowing with reports of destruction and death. Though it had been only days since the boys left, it felt much longer.

“Three people died in Iraq yesterday,” Brittany said as she watched the news and flipped through a People magazine, her gaze switching from page to screen and back. “I wonder how long it takes them to call the families.”

“How can you watch that shit?” I asked as I passed through the room.

“If I don’t know what’s actually happening, my brain just makes stuff up and that’s always worse. Oh no!” Brittany jumped out of her chair and ran to her son. “That’s not for you, baby boy.” She took a picture frame from his hand, then picked him up over her head to sniff his diaper. She kissed him on the cheek and placed him in his playpen.

“You just haven’t found good enough distractions,” I said. Cleve’s unit had been sent to fight the Battle of Ramadi. It was dangerous: fighting in the streets, virtually no law and order. Cleve called it the most hostile place in Iraq. His unit’s job was to secure the city center, and it was very likely that someone would die or be wounded. “Cannon fodder,” I once heard someone call units like Cleve’s. The units that were young. Uneducated. Replaceable. Expendable. The idea that these men were simply pawns, meant only to put a barrier between the enemy and the higher-ranking Marines who were considered more valuable, made me sick. I was starting to wonder if this had been part of our country’s plan all along: let poor people struggle to survive so that when the time comes, they can be lured into the military by the promise of food and healthcare and shelter in exchange for using their bodies to protect the rich and powerful.

Watching the news was like watching the sun set: the result was inevitable. Someone in Cleve’s unit was going to get hurt. Someone would die. The news reported seven service members had died in Iraq since the day our husbands deployed. I knew because Brittany was keeping me updated. Watching all the world’s pain and suffering on a tiny screen from the safety of my home has always been difficult for me, a reminder of how small I am, of how little power I have. There was nothing I could do about any of it. If something was going to happen to Cleve, something was going to happen to Cleve. For my own sanity, I needed to focus on things I could control.

I sat down at the computer Brittany kept in her bedroom and wiggled the mouse. The screen came to life. Firefox still had all the tabs I’d pulled up the day before: Monster.com, Coastal Carolina Community College, a list of things to do in the area. I had even looked up guitar lessons. I’d wanted to learn to play since childhood. Lessons were too expensive, but a girl could dream.

“How are those distractions working out for you?” Brittany asked that night with a smirk on her face. She was sitting across the dining room table from me, eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Brittany had tried to avoid thinking about the war during her husband’s first deployment, but it didn’t work. She wasn’t convinced I’d be any more successful at it than she’d been.

“Shut up,” I said. “How long before they can contact us, though, for real?”

“Last time, it was sometime in the second week. They’ll probably have computers. I’m not sure if they’ll have Myspace, but they had AIM last time.”

While I waited, I wrote Cleve letters. I mailed him a letter every day so that once they started arriving, he’d have something each night to cheer him up. I printed off pictures of him and placed them around my room, including one under my pillow. At night, I would pull it out and stare at it, wondering where he was, what he was doing, and if he was okay. Boredom and loneliness have a way of making time stretch. Com- bine the two, and you might be stuck in a single moment forever. This deployment had only just begun, and it already felt unbearable. On the fifth day, he finally called.

“It’s not pretty out here,” he said. “I sure miss those pretty eyes of yours.”

“I miss you, too. Are you okay?” I could hear voices in the background.

There was a long pause before he answered. “Yeah, I’m fine. Y’all doin’ all right?”

“Yeah. I think there’s a lag. Something’s wonky. Our power got turned off a couple days ago, but we—”

“Yeah. It’s always like that,” he interrupted. “Ah. That sucks.”

“What, your power was turned off?” he said.

“The lag is so annoying.” I laughed uncomfortably. “But yeah, the power’s fine now. We figured it out.”

There was another long pause, then Cleve said, “Okay, good. We’ll get paid soon. It’ll be more ’cause I’m deployed. Help Brittany with bills or whatever you need.” He’d given me access to his bank account before he left, and because we chose not to live in on-base housing, he had some extra money from getting married that he insisted I use while he was gone. We’d talk about money again when he got back.

I waited a second until I was sure he was done.

“Thanks, babe. I applied to a bunch of jobs, too. I also applied to the dental hygiene program. Then I’ll be the moneymaker taking care of you.”

Pause. “You goin’ to be my sugar mama?” Pause. “I can be your sugar mama.”

Pause. “Hey. Gotta run,” he said. “I love you. I’ll try to call ev . . .” “Oh, okay. I . . . damn it, this lag. I love you, too.”

Pause. Cleve laughed. “Bye, baby.”

Cleve called every day at first, sometimes multiple times a day, and he always seemed relieved when I answered. I learned to keep my phone on me so I didn’t miss him. When I slept, my cellphone sat next to my pillow with the volume turned all the way up. By the end of the second week, Cleve called less, and when he did, he didn’t say much.

“I’m just busy s’all,” he said when he called for the first time in four days. I’d asked him if anything was wrong. His answer made sense—of course he was busy—but it didn’t explain the shift in tone. There was a heaviness I couldn’t pinpoint. Something was being left unsaid. He’s at war, I told myself. 7is isn’t about you. But I couldn’t help feeling like something else was going on. The way we’d gotten married left me feeling insecure. I’d wondered from the moment he proposed whether he’d felt obligated to do it because I was living in my car. I wondered if he regretted making such a huge decision so hastily. I heard an explosion in the background, but he didn’t react.

“Well, I love you,” I said, and he said it back. “When will you call again?”

“I dunno,” he said, and that was that.

When I told Brittany I was feeling insecure, she was careful but honest.

“You need to take care of you,” she said. We were drinking beers on her bed. We’d just put Dillon to sleep. “I know him, and he’s going to take care of himself.”

When I asked her what she meant, she shrugged and shook her head. “I didn’t expect to be close to both of you. I just want you both to be happy.”

Brittany and I had become inseparable in the few months since we’d met. We did everything together. We did each other’s laundry. We cooked each other food. We cried and laughed together almost every night over bottles of wine. She was the closest friend I’d had in years. But despite our budding relationship, she’d known Cleve longer than me. She was conflicted about who she should be most loyal to.

“I need you to promise me you won’t say anything to him,” Brittany said quietly.

“I won’t,” I promised.

“Well, you aren’t the first girl he’s brought here.” “What do you mean?” My heart was starting to race.

She sighed and took a swig of her beer. “He proposed to his ex like six months before you two got together. She said no and they broke up, or maybe they weren’t even actually together, the story changed a few times, but I’m pretty sure they keep in touch. That’s all I know for sure,” Brittany said. She exhaled. “You okay?”

When I tried to respond, I just cried. Cleve hadn’t mentioned this ex before, even though he’d asked her to marry him not long before he messaged me on Myspace. I was already afraid he’d only wanted to marry me because he felt bad that I was living in my car, and now I wondered if he was looking for any wife at all to get the extra benefits from the military. I wondered if he even loved me. Was I just a rebound? “I know he loves you. It’s not that,” Brittany said. “I don’t know what

it is, really. He’s just . . . Kinsey. You know how guys are.”

I knew how guys were. I thought about the twenty-year-old who took my virginity when I was sixteen; the shadowy figure who molested me when I was six; the Tampa men; the married pilots who were always trying to hook up with the young flight attendants. Now Cleve was keeping secrets from me, possibly even using me as a rebound. What is this game I’m playing? I wondered. Where is the rule book?

“What do I do?” I asked, but I already knew what I would do if I had to.

I could feel the instinct I’d learned from my parents kicking in: I wanted to run. I was already going over escape plans in my mind before Brittany could answer. But I didn’t have a lot of options. Cleve was financially supporting me until I could find a job.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ll help no matter what you decide.” Two days later, the phone rang. When I picked up, silence. “Hellooo?” I said a second time.

“I just don’t know what I’m doin’ in this life anymore,” Cleve said finally.

A knot grew in my chest. It was happening, I thought. He could have been talking about anything, but I knew in my gut he was gearing up to say getting married had been a mistake. He’d been so quiet with me, and now the news about his ex. Something just wasn’t right. Unsure of how to respond, I waited to see if he’d say anything else. When he didn’t, I asked if he was okay.

“Some days I feel like this is it, ya know? Like, maybe I’m not comin’ back this time. This is my destiny or some shit,” he said.

That was not what I’d expected. I’d been so distracted by what Brittany had told me and by how quiet he’d been that I almost forgot where he was. I grappled with asking about the other girl. Who is she? Do you call her, too? I wanted answers, but I decided to wait. He needed me to comfort him.

“Please don’t say that,” I said. “Just get through the next few months. Then you’ll be home with me, and this will be behind you. I’ll take care of you,” I said. “I love you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m just all in my head. It’s fucked-up out here.” “What can I do?” I asked.

“Just somethin’ I have to deal with on my own,” he said. There was a prolonged pause and a deep sigh, and then, “I don’t think I can keep doin’ this relationship.”

There it was. So quiet. A whisper, almost. Infuriatingly quick and straightforward.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Please don’t say that.”

“We shouldn’t have gotten married, Karie,” he said. “I messed up.”

I begged him to take it back. It was the war, I tried to convince him, something in that hot, foreign place, something temporary that was clouding his judgment.

I pleaded. I begged. All he could say was sorry. I cried into the phone for too long, then heard a sigh and a click. I spent the rest of the day in bed, crying and cursing at pictures of him. What was it about me that made me so easy to leave?

When I woke up the next morning, I decided I wouldn’t let the sadness

keep me from being productive. If there was one thing I’d learned from moving so frequently as a child, it was how to adapt quickly. I pulled myself together and began planning my next move. Brittany said I could live with her no matter what happened with Cleve, and I was grateful. I had some interviews lined up, and to my surprise, I’d been accepted to the dental hygiene program at the local community college. The plan seemed solid. I could breathe now.

“What a mess,” Brittany said one night as we sat on our back porch, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. “The boys changed in Iraq last time. Who knows what will happen with Nick and me.” Nick was Carson’s first name. Everyone except for spouses called the guys by their last names. Brittany shook her head, rolled her eyes, and took a sip of wine. “He hardly even pays attention to his son. It’s probably because I had him when he was deployed. There’s no connection there. Nick left when I didn’t look pregnant at all, then boom, he comes back to a baby screaming in the back room.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I’d gotten the sense that she felt stuck. I knew what that was like. I had felt that way for most of my life. “I’m glad we found each other.”

She raised her wineglass. “It’s hard not to be bitter sometimes. I was dragged out here for love, then left in the dust of war.” She took a drag of her cigarette. “You know Nick and I met in high school? He chased me. I kept saying no, but finally I gave in. I fell hard after that. Life is crazy. Now it’s two years later, I have a baby, and I’m the one waiting.” I thought about Brittany—the way her shoulders slumped, the way her hair hung stick-straight at her shoulders, her calming voice, her half

smile. She was only twenty years old and already so tired, so resigned. “You think this is a phase?” I asked. “Maybe they’ll go back to nor-

mal after they get out?”

She shook her head, her hair glowing the color of wheat under the porch light, june bugs winding in the air and slamming their bodies into the sliding glass door as if they’d been drinking, too—clink, clink . . . clink.

“Who knows? The best thing we can do is look out for ourselves and each other and hope they get their shit together.”

I nodded. “Cheers to that.”

Cleve called back, apologizing. He still wouldn’t promise anything about the future of our marriage, but he did say he loved me. There was a lot of silence, then he said, “Burns shot himself in a porta-john yesterday.”

Suddenly the space between us seemed infinite. “My God. Cleve. I’m sorry.” I felt like such an asshole for acting like my own issues were life-or-death when he was across the world fighting a war. “I wish I could hug you.”

“I . . .” he gasped. “I had to clean out his fuckin’ body. I had to put him in a . . . I had to put him in a fuckin’ body bag,” he sobbed.

Helplessly, I listened as Cleve’s sobs turned to wet, heavy breaths, then to silence. And then he had to go.

Cleve was a big dude: six foot three and 225 pounds. I’m not sure I had ever seen a man cry, so it was difficult for me to imagine his eyes producing tears, his large male body heaving as he fought to catch his breath.

Over the next three days, Cleve called at least twice daily, always ending with I love you. This time, I tried not to overanalyze the conversations despite my insecurities. Meanwhile, Brittany and I made care packages for Cleve and Carson. We filled two boxes with snacks, socks, drinks, and anything else we could think of that might cheer them up, including Listerine bottles filled with whiskey.

“Military wives’ trick,” Brittany said. “You don’t think someone’ll notice?” “They didn’t last time . . .”

It was April Fools’ Day when I got a message on Myspace from Cleve’s brother, Nathan. He was the only person in his family who knew Cleve and I had gotten married, but we rarely spoke, so I knew something was up. The message was quick and to the point: Cleve’s hurt. if you don’t know, call me.

The nausea was immediate. I yelled for Brittany to come as I dialed the same number I’d memorized in high school. She pushed the door open with Dillon on her hip.

“What’s going on?”

The phone was still ringing. I put my hand over it and whispered, “Cleve’s hurt.”

“Oh my God! Hurt hurt or is he . . .”

I waved my hand at Brittany and mouthed, Hold on! Hold on! Someone was picking up the phone. It was Nathan, thank God, but he didn’t have much information. The military was looking for me because I hadn’t had an address or phone number to give them when we submitted paperwork for my military ID. Cleve was alive, but his foot was hurt bad enough that he might lose it. A bomb, Nathan thought. While his parents were mostly scared for their son, they were also upset about the marriage. They had only found out about it when the Marine liaison called them trying to find me. They didn’t want to talk to me. I was okay with that.

I stayed up through the night smoking cigarettes and telling stories about Cleve with Brittany as if he’d died. The military liaison officer called me the next day. He didn’t give me much information. He confirmed Cleve was alive and well. An improvised explosive device had hit his Humvee, and his foot was severely injured. He was in Germany, getting ready to be flown to the States. He’d be at Bethesda Naval Hospital in less than twenty-four hours. He gave me an address and a phone number.

“Is there anything else I should know?” I asked. “Sorry, ma’am, that’s all the information I have.” “Will I have a place to stay in Bethesda?”

“Yes, ma’am. Someone will meet you at the hospital with all that information.”

“And I just call that number when I know I’m coming?”

“Yes, ma’am, so they can meet you. We have someone there all hours.”

“Well.” I paused to be certain I had no more questions, biting at my thumb’s cuticle as I thought. I couldn’t think of any. “Okay, then. Thanks so much.”

“Very welcome.”

I closed my phone, tucked it into my back pocket, turned to Brittany, and shrugged. She’d been standing next to me, listening to the phone call.

“That’s it?” she said. “Thaaaat’s it.”

“It’s really just his foot?”

“I guess so? I’m not sure that guy really knew what happened.

Sounded like he was passing on info from a piece of paper.” “Damn. This is crazy town.”

“Right? Cleve was hit by a bomb. At war. After only three weeks. I mean . . .” I shook my head, mouth agape.

“Well, I can drive you so you don’t have to fly,” she said. “I want to see him, anyway.”

“Can I hug you?” I asked.

She looked at me like, Well, obviously, and opened her arms.

Cleve called during our drive to Maryland. It was quick. He’d been flown from Ramadi to Baghdad, then Baghdad to Germany. In Germany, doctors performed surgery on his leg to stabilize him for the flight back to the States. He said he’d be in Maryland a few hours before me.

“I’m okay,” he said. “They got me, but I’m okay. I love you.”

That should have confirmed that he expected and wanted me to come be with him, but I couldn’t shake the words I can’t do this anymore. I wondered whether he felt obligated to call: wounded men are supposed to call their wives. It didn’t matter now. Whether he liked it or not, I was coming. I’m gonna love the shit out of you until you love me back, I thought.

Brittany and I arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital sometime after midnight. The hospital was asleep except for the liaison officer who waited for us, his office a fluorescent sore in an otherwise low-lit and shadowy space. I was delirious from lack of sleep, too many energy drinks, and the anticipation of seeing Cleve again. The liaison officer— who introduced himself as Addair—was just a little older than me, in his early to mid-twenties. He was tall and thin with piercing hazel eyes, a sarcastic attitude, and a subtle limp. I wondered if he always worked in the middle of the night or if he was only there for me. He handed me a stack of paperwork to fill out. I’d had a headache for hours now, and the brightness of the paper, the tiny words covering each page, made me feel like my head might pop. Brittany sat patiently in the corner, holding Dillon, who’d fallen asleep on the ride over.

“What’s all this for?” I asked, gesturing to the forms.

“Just some red tape,” he said. “Non-medical attendant pay, info we’ll give to the Navy Lodge where you’ll be staying, stuff like that.”

The military would pay one non-medical attendant, or a primary caregiver, just under two thousand dollars a month as long as the patient had to be away from their duty station (in our case, Camp Lejeune) while receiving treatment. I got stuck on the word month. The dental hygiene program started in four months. I wondered for a moment if I’d still be able to go, then shooed the thought away. Cleve. I’ve got to get to Cleve.

When I finished, Addair told us the baby wasn’t allowed in Cleve’s room. Because he’d just gotten back from Iraq, he could be contaminated with who knows what, and it wasn’t safe.

“I don’t mind waiting,” Brittany said. She kissed Dillon on the head. “As long as he’s asleep, I’m fine.”

Though I hadn’t known Brittany long, she’d shown me a kind of friendship—one of kindness, patience, and selflessness—that I hadn’t found in many people before. I put my hand on her shoulder, careful not to wake Dillon. “Thank you. Seriously.”

Addair’s and my footsteps echoed in the hospital lobby as we made our way to the elevator. When we reached Cleve’s room, Addair instructed me to put on a yellow paper gown, a mask, and gloves. I opened the door. A lamp in the far corner draped the room in soft light. Cleve was in the bed closest to the door. At first, I thought he was asleep. I was afraid to walk toward him, afraid of what he would say when he realized I was there. But then, he moved. His eyes opened, and he turned to look at me. For a split second, his face was blank, and I swore he was mad and would tell me to leave. But then, he smiled.

“There she is.” He reached out his good arm—the other had been hit by shrapnel and was being held by a giant piece of foam that looked like Swiss cheese—for a hug, and my uncertainty melted away. “Come here. I missed those freckles of yours.”

I walked over to him and kissed him on the forehead. “What the hell did you let them do to you? I told you to be safe,” I said.

He looked down at his leg. “War takes what it wants, I guess. I was just along for the ride.”

It was apparent he was high on pain meds. His movements were a little too fluid, his words slurred.

“Can I see it?”

“Sure. They got me good,” he said, lifting the sheet from his left leg. It looked like something you might find at a butcher shop, a large chunk of bloody meat wrapped in what looked like cellophane. I gasped.

“They said your foot. That’s your whole damn leg.”

“Oh, yeah. The whole damn thing. They put rods in my thigh before I left Germany. The bottom half ’s goin’ to take a little more time to figure out, but they said I should keep it.”

Addair walked into the room.

“I hate to break this reunion up, but it’s well past curfew, and I need to get you and your friend checked in to your hotel room. Visiting hours start at eight in the morning. You can continue catching up then.” “Aw, come on, Addair. You can’t give a broken man some time with

his wife?” Cleve said.

I smiled.

“Trust me, you’ll have plenty of time together in the next few months,” Addair said. There was that word again. Months.

“Will we be going back at all before then? Are people usually here that long?” I asked.

“It depends on the injury,” he said. He looked at Cleve and made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I’m no doctor, but I’d get comfortable if I were you.”

I sighed. I would have to forget about college, at least for now. “Okay,” I said, nodding. “I’ll get comfortable, then.”

As Addair left the room, he tapped his hand on the wall and said, “Happy Alive Day, man,” over his shoulder. Later, Cleve would tell me that every wounded service member celebrated what they called an alive day. It was the day they almost died at war but survived—the day they were given a second chance. I wondered what Cleve’s alive day meant for me.

I was first introduced to Karie Fugett through her gorgeous, heart-wrenching 2019 Washington Post article “Love and War,” where she detailed her husband Cleve’s injury in Iraq, which ultimately led to an amputation, addiction to his prescribed painkillers, and multiple overdoses—including one that ended his life. Karie was widowed at age 24. I was taken with her story, her vulnerability in laying her grief bare, and also with her willingness to call out the institutions that failed Cleve as a wounded veteran and her as a full-time caregiver.

After several years spent writing and advocating (and navigating a pandemic and a few other things), Karie published her memoir, Alive Day, this spring with The Dial Press. She was gracious enough to speak with me from the airport on the way to a book event. We chatted about military life, caregiving, writing, parenting, politics, pandemics, the fickle publishing industry, and, of course, her marvelous book.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Congratulations, first of all! Huge accomplishment. It’s been a long time coming for you, right? This has been in the pipeline for quite a while.

Karie Fugett: It has been. I haven’t been writing it, like, every day since I started thinking about it or anything, but I did start thinking about it pretty seriously in like 2012. I didn’t know what I was doing, and at that point I was just kind of trying to record memories and practicing putting memories into scenes and just learning how to do creative writing. And then from there it started to get bigger and bigger.

Lauren Kay Johnson: What was it initially that got you started writing? It sounds like you were doing some blogging during Cleve’s experiences. Did that kind of naturally transition into just writing to process?

Karie Fugett: Yes, I hadn’t really written before that other than, like, moody middle school poetry. Nothing serious. Just emotions. And then when I was in the hospital, I met some other caregivers. A couple of them were writing blogs. We were able to keep in touch that way, and keep tabs with what each of us were going through. So I jumped on that bandwagon and very quickly found that it was a really great outlet for a lot of the things that I was feeling, because being in the hospital was really isolating. And even when I met other caregivers they would be moved to different hospitals, sometimes they’d be sent back home for a while, would be moved to different bases. So it wasn’t like we saw each other every single day, and this was kind of a way for us to keep in touch. And also to just feel like we were being heard, because we were in this weird situation that I had never heard of. All these things I was seeing. I was like, Oh, my God! I didn’t know that people lived like this. This is crazy to me. It kind of helped me blow off some steam. Keep in touch with people. When I didn’t have therapy, it was kind of my therapy.

Lauren Kay Johnson: So was there a moment where you realized—You were kind of writing for yourself, and then there was a shift to Hey, there’s something here beyond me, whether as a means of sharing information or finding human connection, getting your voice out in the world. Was that a cognitive shift for you?

Karie Fugett: When I first started writing it was just kind of a diary-type thing honestly, and the only people who were reading it were other caregivers, people that I knew. But after a few months, it was crazy; I would get up to 10,000 views a day. I was getting all these followers and emails. This was after a year or two. It just kind of blew up. And then there was a military spouses’ website [that] offered to feature my blog on their website along with a few other military wives. And I was like, Oh, people are interested in what’s happening here!

I wasn’t familiar with essays, op-eds, whatever. I just immediately was like, maybe I should write a book about it. But I really didn’t know what I was doing or take it that seriously. [I] just noticed people were paying attention, and that there might be something to the story.

Lauren Kay Johnson: The gestation period for a book is much longer than the gestation period for a baby.

Karie Fugett: For sure. I mean for me, anyway. I feel like I have some friends that are like, “Book idea!” And then a few months later they’re turning in a manuscript. But I’m not like that.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Oh, I hate those people.

Karie Fugett: I do too. I really do.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Mine was 12 years. And same thing: not, like, actively working on it eight hours a day every day, but the thinking about it, and the writing, and the rewriting, and the submitting, and then the rewriting again, and then submitting and rewriting, and then the crying and banging my head against the wall and wondering what I’m doing with my life.

Karie Fugett: Right. There was a lot of existential dread, staring at walls, not doing anything productive. Probably more of that than writing If I’m being honest.

Lauren Kay Johnson: So how does it feel now that it’s out in the world? How is this first—not even a month. It’s still really new for you. How has it been?

Karie Fugett: It feels like a relief at this point. There’s so many unknowns. How are people going to respond? Especially with a memoir—is someone I write about going to recognize themselves, even though I changed all these details, and are they going to be upset? Which did happen once already, but I survived it, and it was fine. So now, a month out, people generally are responding well to it. And even the ones who don’t; it’s fine. We’re continuing on with our lives. It’s really not that big of a deal.

I guess for a long time it was like that was the peak for me. It just felt like this really, really big deal, which also came with a lot of stress. And also I was unsure if I was even going to be able to finish it. There were points where I was like, Nope, not happening. I cannot do this. I’m burning it all. I’m gonna go be a flower farmer and hide in the country somewhere. But I did it! So, I’m proud of myself. I feel relieved.

Right now I’m just kind of giving myself permission to relax for a minute. Because, too, after writing this, it became very clear to me that I haven’t had a lot of time to relax in my life, and part of that, especially recently, is self-imposed. So I’m like, you don’t always have to be productive, Karie! You don’t always have to be proving yourself. I’m taking a lot of naps right now and trying to spend time with my daughter. Thinking about where I want to live, maybe a business that I want to own.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Good for you. You have earned that, absolutely. Not that anyone needs to earn the right to take care of themselves and sleep. You mentioned that there were points where you felt like, Ahhh! And I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I imagine—I mean, this is such emotionally wrought content that you’re writing about. And living it was such a huge part of your life—physically, mentally, emotionally. And then in writing it, you have to go back there in so many ways. Can you talk a little about what that process was like? You discovered I have this book thing, and then you got into the writing of it. What did that feel like once you actually kind of comprehended what that meant

Karie Fugett: It depended on the chapter or the story that I was writing. Sometimes it was a lot of fun. The parts in the book that are funnier or sillier or weirder I really enjoyed. The moments of joy between me and my husband I enjoyed thinking about in writing, because it felt like there wasn’t that much of it in the story, because all this other stuff was going on. And learning how to write creatively was really cool to me. I love turning memories into scenes and writing characters.

But then there was a lot for me, especially from my childhood and when I was younger, that I realized I was still carrying a lot of shame over. Decisions I made that I blamed myself for; I just really wasn’t letting go of those things. I think it forced me to really look at those things again and think about them in a way that I hadn’t really. I’d been pushing it away and just too afraid to look at it. That was one of the reasons why it took so long, because there were certain parts of my life that I felt very stuck and wasn’t sure how to go there again. Luckily the end result—once I was able to do that, get it on paper and get past it—was actually very healing. I was able to forgive myself. I think I was able to visualize this—the word journey kind of makes me cringe—but in this journey that I went on and have a better understanding of why I made the choices that I made. And also it helped me remember I was a kid. I was so young. I think, as adults, sometimes we remember our past decisions. We hold on to them because that’s still who we are, still a decision we would make, and we carry that shame with us.

Overall I think it’s been good for me. It’s helped me forgive myself, view myself with more compassion, and let go, which has helped a lot with this compounded trauma from over my life.

Lauren Kay Johnson: I always talk about memoir as, like, a really long, in-depth self-therapy session. It’s often not comfortable to go back into those spaces and dig through the skeletons in your closet. But if you can do that effectively, not only does it make for compelling writing, vulnerable writing; it also can have that catharsis. And it sounds like it had that effect on you, too?

Karie Fugett: It did. And what’s funny is that when I went to the MFA program—I think, when nonfiction writers, memoir writers, especially once you’ve been doing it for years, they really want to emphasize the craft of it. And as soon as you start talking about how it can be therapeutic, they get a little weird about that conversation for some reason. But I really think that’s a huge part of the process. Because if you’re going to access what you need to access for it to be a story that connects with people, you’re going to have to dig into some things that otherwise you could have ignored for the rest of your life. And that does something to you. That can change you if you’re honest with yourself and are willing to look at those things square in the face and analyze them and try to figure out what happened and try to understand yourself and the people around you, beyond the action.

And that was the other thing—looking at people in my life that maybe upset me in the past and really sitting down and thinking: Why were they acting the way they were? What was going on in their life that caused them to treat me the way they did.

Lauren Kay Johnson: You mentioned you were so young. You and Cleve both were in your early twenties going through this horrific experience, and an experience that put so much weight on both of your shoulders to just kind of, like the military says, suck it up and deal with it, figure it out. You carried this expectation that it was your job to be a caretaker, and you were doing your duty. You were doing your service to this country in taking care of Cleve, and he was doing his duty fighting, getting injured in the line of duty, and then focusing on recovery. Can you talk more about that that dynamic, and particularly what that meant, being so young and feeling the weight of that, and being in this community where everybody was trying to do this impossible thing?

Karie Fugett: I was 20 when he was wounded. So, I’d only been an adult for a couple of years. And then I find myself in this situation—because of decisions that I made, but in this situation that is still just what I did not expect. And at that point, because I was married to him, it felt less like decisions I was making, and I was just sort of being told what to do. Which in some ways at that age, because I didn’t know what I was doing anyway, was a relief. I’m like, just tell me where to go! I don’t know what I’m doing right now. Then I would end up in these situations, though, because I was just sort of blindly following.

You know how you hear stories about people following a GPS into a lake? How did you not see the lake? That’s how it felt. Like: go right, go left, go backwards. And you’re just trying to please these people that are kind of scary and intimidating and control your paycheck and your housing and everything in your life and just seem way smarter than you. So, why would you ever question what they’re saying? But months go by, and suddenly you’re looking around, and you’re like, something is not right. How did I get here? And not having the brain—literally not having the brain cells—to figure out how to get back out of it. Who to ask, what to ask. Especially when it came down to PTSD, TBI, and addiction. Where does one end and one begin, and how do you fix it? How do you even have time to think about it when you’re worrying about a leg that is infected or being amputated. It was just . . . it was a lot.

I think at the time I was just kind of following my orders. And then, by the time I was thinking something’s wrong, I was so in it that I just kept following. It really took a couple of years before I started getting angry, but at that point it was kind of too late. He was overdosing. At that point I was like, He’s going to die. He almost died. What is going on?

Lauren Kay Johnson: That’s in so many ways representative of the way that the military operates. It’s this “We’re gonna tell you what to do!” You’re joining the community; your life is dictated by us, and there’s not a lot of encouragement of free will. They set it up in this environment and then if you get into uncharted territory—like you were in relatively early in the post-9/11 conflicts—there’s not a manual for how to handle that. There’s resources available, but it requires proactivity to seek them out and advocates to help connect you with the right resources, and that all just sounds like it wasn’t there in any kind of accessible manner for you.

Karie Fugett: I don’t know if it’s still the case, but there was this sort of underlying assumption that if you told them too much was wrong, you could get in trouble, and it was hard to know where the line was. Like, if you say you’re addicted—What kind of details can I give you before you start saying it’s my fault? There was this underlying thing that we kind of knew they were there to help us—mostly. But if we said the wrong thing they could absolutely ruin our lives. So it was scary to really be open and vulnerable and really talk about how bad things felt.

Also, you just want to prove yourself. You want to prove that you’re strong enough, capable. At least that’s how I felt. My husband did, too. He wanted to prove he’s a Marine. He joined the Marine Corps. He can handle it. He’s fine. He wasn’t fine, nor was I, and by the time we realized neither of us were fine it was an absolute chaotic mess.

Lauren Kay Johnson: One of the things I loved about your book is we get all of that raw emotion, and the sense of overwhelm, and also the call to do your duty and to support this person that you love however you can. It’s heavy stuff, but you do have these moments of levity. And a lot of that is based around really beautiful relationships that you’ve had in your life, the kind of transient life that you’ve led through childhood and the military. Not in the traditional military sense; you weren’t moving around from base to base, but you were hospital to hospital, in kind of these micro communities. Can you talk about the role that that friendship has played in your life, particularly your healing process?

Karie Fugett: It was huge. Not just friendships, but mentorship later on. Really, when I think about the moments in my life where I saw a beam of light, hope that I could get out of this darkness that I was in, it always involved someone being in my corner helping me out of it. I don’t think there’s any point where I saved myself on my own. I’m not going to discredit myself and say that I didn’t make decisions and work hard and all of that. But all along the way, I just got so freaking lucky with human beings who were just dropped into my life and were exactly what I needed in that moment. Everything from during the deployment—The wife that I lived with while they were deployed, she was just exactly who I needed to help get my feet wet in this military wife life. Even though it was only a couple of months, all the things that you hear about military wives, how they’ll drop everything for each other, how they bond so quickly—it’s all true, at least with her. As soon as we started connecting, it was like, this is my best friend; we’d do anything for each other. I’m helping raise her baby while our husbands are overseas. It just happened so quickly, and she, without question, packed her baby in the car and drove me to DC [to be with Cleve in the hospital].

I’ve needed to crash on people’s couches because I just could not do the basic things it takes to survive for periods of time. And I just needed someone to take care of me for a little bit. The [military] widows—They came into my life right when I needed them. I needed to feel less alone. I needed to see other people doing things that I was afraid to do. It’s all been relationships.

Even once I got to college, it was the teacher who was the mentor and said that she saw something in my writing. I really just saw myself as a high school dropout. I felt like a wannabe. I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to do this, and I could tell that she was serious. That was huge for me.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Reading the book it felt like, in a lot of ways, where the military in an ideal world was supposed to be there to support you, it was these relationships that were meeting that need. And also you give a big shout out to nonprofits that have historically really filled that gap in care and support, both financially and emotionally.

Karie Fugett: Yes, those nonprofits keep people alive. End of story. There’s a point in the book where I’m talking to someone about moving. And he’s like, “Oh, you might as well just go through the nonprofit because it’s gonna take longer if you go through the military.” I wrote that casually. People bring that up so much now, though; they’re like, “I cannot believe they were like, let’s just dump it on the nonprofit!” But everything did take really long. And a nonprofit, they’d be like, what do you need? Sign your name on this piece of paper, and we’ll process it in a couple of days. They understood that there were real urgencies and they were really quick to respond. They, at least back then, really didn’t ask a lot of questions. They just wanted to help, and it was huge.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Particularly thinking about the moment that we’re in right now, where people are in need of extra support in a lot of ways. If folks read your book and they’re like, “I want to do something!”—What is your call-to-action for them? Is there a nonprofit that you would direct them to? Somewhere where they can get informed and provide support?

Karie Fugett: I actually think that the smaller nonprofits I prefer, the local nonprofits. Especially these days when it feels like there’s so much going on, it feels very big and hard to know how to help. For me, personally, what I’ve realized is when you’re trying to question how you can make a difference, you should look at your own community. There’s veterans everywhere. There’s probably a nonprofit in your community, or a VA, VFW, something like that. Reach out to them and see what they need and start there. None of us can fix everything, but it’s those community-level things that I think individuals can make the biggest difference at. And they’re the ones who really need that help.

Lauren Kay Johnson: I’ve been following you for a while, since the Washington Post piece. One of the things that I connected to on your journey, because it paralleled mine in a lot of ways, is thinking about writing a memoir, writing about your life, when your life is still very much being lived and comes with these big shifts in external things and personal things that inevitably change your perspective—like becoming a parent and going through a global pandemic. All these big things. Did you feel that as you were writing? Since this has been a pretty long haul for you, did you have an experience where you felt like, I want to maintain the original rawness of this, but now I have this older, wiser perspective where I can reflect back. Were there things you changed, things you added?

Karie Fugett: I definitely did probably feel the biggest shift during COVID, partly because of the pandemic, but also because I was pregnant with my first and only child. So those were two sort of monumental things. I was in Oregon. We were isolating. My kid’s dad—we had a farm, I had to stay in an apartment 45 minutes away. We weren’t able to be together a lot. So I literally isolated by myself for days and days and days at times.

It was weird. My baby shower was via zoom. It was all weird. So, I wasn’t writing. I was just sitting around thinking, I’m never going to write this because it felt like my brain was changing. It just felt like there was no way my brain was going to be able to do it ever again. And then I came out the other side, and I was changed, and having to continue writing this thing.

Interestingly enough, though, once I was able to get back to it and I realized, oh, my brain can make sentences again, and I started to get into the groove, it was actually easier. I don’t know if it was that I had been sitting around by myself obsessing over this for two whole years—because at that point I had already sold it, too. I sold it February 25th or something, 2020, and then I went to Kenya March 4^th, and then everything started to shut down while I was overseas, and it was terrifying. But then I came back and was talking to movie producers, and everything was this big, cool, exciting thing. Then everything started to shut down, and then I got pregnant, and then I got depressed, and then I was just like, Do you want your money back? Because I’m not going to write this book. There’s no way I can do this. It just felt so impossible.

But my editor was like, No, just take two years off. There’s a pandemic, and the whole industry is completely fucked right now. It’ll be fine. So I did that, and worried the whole time. And then when I came out the other end, it was actually easier to write some of it. What I was saying earlier about how writing it helped me forgive myself in a lot of ways, let go of a lot of shame—I think having a daughter also helped with that. I looked at her, and I was like, Oh, my God! I was a baby once. I started to think about all the mistakes she’s going to make, and all of the things that she’s going to regret at some point. And it was just like, I’m still going to love you unconditionally. Nothing you could do could ever make me stop loving you. And then I realized, why can’t I give myself that? All of us deserve that. So that took some of the weight off and allowed me to write some of the things that felt really hard before that to even just admit and put on paper.

I will say, too, at that point, because I was a mom, I wasn’t overthinking it, either. I was just like, I’m breastfeeding, and I’m writing a book, and there’s a pandemic. Take it or leave it. I sent it to my editor. She ended up loving it, and I was like, Are you sure? So yeah, having a kid will definitely change you. So will a pandemic, apparently.

Lauren Kay Johnson: I feel like we should get a panel together of people who have had a book project interrupted by the pandemic and having kids. That’s two major, epic universal shifts. It’s weird.

Karie Fugett: It is. Even the way it affected my book publication. When it was originally sold, they were like, this is the next Educated. This is the next Wild. They were really blowing it up, and it went to auction with 15 editors. It got a huge advance for what it is. It made no sense to me, but they were really blowing it up. Producers were calling. It felt like this really big thing. The pandemic just squashed the shit out of it. And part of it is because memoir kind of just fell in popularity and was replaced with things like romance, fantasy.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Because life sucks! Nobody wants to read about real life!

Karir Fugett: Right? Who wants to read about my depressing-ass life when they could be reading about fairies having sex? That’s basically what it came down to. And I think, too, TikTok really blew up and that started to shape the industry in a way that nobody expected. So, just that timeline—selling it and then publishing it five years later and seeing how the book industry can morph in a matter of years based on politics and pandemics and social media.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Yes, the political realm is a whole other layer of that too. There’s so much pummeling us all the time. It’s so hard to rise above the noise. There was a bit of a buffer time for you to kind of recalibrate your expectations, and also you had a few other things going on in your life, like raising a small human. Are you happy with how things turned out? Do you wish those producers would call you back?

Karie Fugett: I mean, I do. You know, everybody’s motivated by something. Some people are motivated by money. Some people are motivated by popularity. For me, I think I’m motivated by feeling like I was successful at doing whatever I did. The problem with that, though, is my idea of success is, like, best-of-the-best-of-the-best, which is ridiculous. I’ve never been able to be the best of the best, and to hold myself to that standard is insane. But it’s just hard for me to accept less than that, always, even though it’s easier now that I’m getting older, because I know it’s ridiculous.

But yeah, there was definitely a moment I could see what was happening in the industry. The publishing industry pushes books, right? They choose what’s going to be the next big thing, at least to an extent. They’re going to put all their resources behind certain books and not others. I could tell that mine was being bumped down on the list, and it hurt. I was like, Oh, God, I probably wrote it wrong! I’m a shitty writer. I knew it! I started to beat myself up. I ended up talking to my agent and editor about it, and they helped me understand that the industry is different. And this is just how things are now. Wild and Wrangled, that cowboy romance series—That’s the hot shit at our press now, and that’s fine. That’s what people want.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Is that your next project, in that realm?

Karie Fugett: I’m not saying that I didn’t think about it. I was like, Well, how much money do you all get for that? Sounds really fun. Well, not fun—I would be totally awkward with it. But, like, low stakes. You just write it and have a nice sleep that night. That’s not my experience with the memoir.

I will say, though, after a month or so I am happy with it. I mean, did I expect it to be more successful? Do I get bummed when I go into a bookstore and it’s not there? Sure. However, I have gotten so many messages from people saying how much it meant to them, for all different reasons. And even just saying, like, this is my favorite book this year. What more could I ask for? That’s such a huge deal to me, even if it’s just a couple of people. I’m also trying to remind myself where I came from, and none of this was anything within the realm of possibility for me at one point. Mostly I just feel really lucky.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Is there a particular message or element of your story that you hope people will latch onto or take away from reading your book?

Karie Fugett: I’m thinking about how we might be going war again soon. And the way that there tends to be very specific views on what a soldier is or what a soldier’s wife is, and [people] kind of put them in this box. I hope that the people who read this, especially the ones who have never been in the military, when they think about going to war, that they are now thinking about who is being sent. That it’s a very specific population in our country. And of course that’s not everybody, but it is true that recruiters go into poorer towns. They go into places with military bases. They go into places where they have a higher chance of recruiting people, and you’ll have a higher chance of recruiting people if they need things like healthcare and housing and livable wage, because then they don’t have access to that otherwise.

If we do end up going to war, I just hope people remember that it’s just kids. It’s these kids that often didn’t have other options. And they’re trusting their government to take care of them and then sending them to these bullshit wars. And their only options are to either do it or to say fuck you, and then go back to where they came from, where they didn’t have any options. That’s what I’m thinking about a lot right now. I’m angry about it. I’m sad. I hope that people who read it humanize the people fighting.

Lauren Kay Johnson: One of the lines that that really stuck with me is: “Cleve had to sign up for war to get the things he needed to live.” That just says so much. It was fascinating to me—fascinating in a horrible way. It’s a cyclical thing: You look at people who join the military, and they’re much more likely to join if they have a relative who served as well. Parents and siblings. While you didn’t fit that exact mold, your dad was in the military as well.

Karie Fugett: And my grandfather.

Lauren Kay Johnson: And your grandfather! And part of the motivation was to be able to support a family. But then it also ended up not being compatible with family life. So, there’s this weird push-and-pull dynamic that happens in there too.

Karie Fugett: Yes, there is. And that’s actually something I didn’t even really recognize until I started getting closer to the end of the book and started really probing, like, what am I trying to get across? Because I had a lot of things that I was like, You need to hear this! You need to know this! I need to say this! But then I was trying to distill exactly why I needed people to hear this, and I started doing more research and looking at the history of this war and the history of the military. I didn’t know that there are certain communities where recruiters don’t go. I just thought they went everywhere. They were at my school, so I just assumed they’re in all the schools. It’s not true. Some schools, kids never see a recruiter. It’s just not part of their life. That blew my mind. And then things like the ASVAB [military aptitude test]—certain schools make kids think that they have to take it, even though they don’t. I have a lot of friends who went to schools like that, where they were like, “Everyone, go to the cafeteria and take the ASVAB!” And they thought they just had to.

That’s another example of the major difference between the haves and have-nots—people who have access to all the things they need to survive pretty easily and then people who know growing up their whole life, I’m not going to be able to get that unless I make the right decision. That could lead individuals down paths that they otherwise never would have had to go down. That’s one of the things I learned about myself when I was writing the book, too. I was like, Okay, what decisions could I have made? And I’m thinking of the other decisions, and those very easily could have just ended up down some other crappy path. You’ve got these kids that are like, here’s three options that all suck, pick one.

Lauren Kay Johnson: Or maybe you don’t know the extent of the suck of them. You’re making decisions based on the knowledge that you have at that particular time of your life—which as a 17-year-old is not generally a ton of worldly knowledge. Especially when the story that you’re getting is from a recruiter or from a particular news channel. The value of stories like yours is in presenting another perspective and a rounder picture of what that means. I consider myself fairly informed when it comes to military and veterans’ issues, and I learned a ton from your book. I just want to say how much I appreciate all that you shared, being willing to be vulnerable. It blows my mind some of the things, like having to fight for the disability rating. I knew on some level that is a fight for a lot of people, but Cleve’s in particular. It just seems so asinine that you had to justify that these were service-connected things. I was getting so angry reading it, and I think that’s a good thing. I want people to get angry.

Karie Fugett: Yeah, I do, too. I think one of the best moments that I’ve had since writing it is the first reader who wrote me, like: I don’t know anyone in the military. I have no experience with the military. I’m not connected to the military at all. And I picked this up for XYZ reason, and I wasn’t really even sure if I’d like it. But she was like, I have a whole new perspective on people who serve. I have new respect for them. I didn’t realize how privileged I was to be completely detached from it. That “why” that I was searching for—this is why, so that people like this can have access to this world and have a better understanding of the military industrial complex, the way certain groups of people just kind of get sucked into it. And how, in my opinion, that’s all part of a bigger plan. They know what they’re doing. If everyone had healthcare, if everyone had enough money to live, if everyone had a beautiful home, who the fuck would join the military? Very few people.

Lauren Kay Johnson: We wouldn’t need a warrior class.

Karie Fugett: No, especially not grunts. Cannon fodder, honestly. They know that these are people with no education. Their purpose is to have a gun, be a body on the ground. They need as many of those as possible that aren’t going to ask a lot of questions and are just going to do as they’re told and hopefully even feel excited about it. And proud of it. It takes a certain sort of person from a certain background. That’s depressing. I started to get so depressed the more I researched it. I was so clueless when I was in it.

Lauren Kay Johnson: It is depressing, and it’s kind of one of those unspoken secrets of America. You reveal that in such an emotional—and just human—way. And then also the because the carryover of that into the promises that are made when people make this commitment to be that cannon fodder that are then not always upheld. There’s barriers in the way of getting access to benefits.

Karie Fugett: Fucking take care of them well, without them having to beg for it.

Lauren Kay Johnson: I don’t think that this was explicitly mentioned in your book, or if it was in an article, but you can’t get remarried and maintain your survivor’s benefits. Is that correct?

Karie Fugett: Correct. And now that I have a daughter, too, it just puts me in a weirder position. Because it’s a lot of money. [It’s] one of the things that me and another widow were talking about, how fucked up it is. People have argued with us like, well, why would they keep giving you money if you get remarried? There’s a lot of different reasons I just don’t think that it should depend on whether or not you’ve got another man in your life. It just feels very sexist, because widows are more often than not women. So that’s usually who it’s affecting. But not just that; these are women who very often are widowed so young, and during that time that they were adults, they were focusing their lives around their husband’s work.

I just had military wife, very young, at a reading come up to me, and she was like, “How do you prioritize yourself when you’re a military wife?” I didn’t really have an answer, because I also just feel like that’s something that women in general struggle with, especially once you become a mother and you’ve got all these other things going on and it’s so easy to prioritize literally everything but yourself. So, you have to constantly just choose it, I guess.

But anyway, you’ve got these women who are that young. Their whole life has been about supporting their husband, and then their husband died. Their sense of purpose, everything went with it. And now they are starting from square one. Do they go to school? Do they start a business? Do they, whatever? But how many years does it take for them to do that? And then you add in the grief and any trauma that was involved. Therapy costs money! Even with health insurance, it costs money. And I guess in my opinion, as long as I have to be in therapy for the shit I went through. Y’all can pay me.

Lauren Kay Johnson: I mean, that’s a significant chunk of your life and your soul that was dedicated to the military.

Karie Fugett: And it takes a long time to get back on your feet. I would argue that just now I’m starting to feel normal-ish, or like my own person. I found my own path. But it took so much work to get to this point, to where I feel stable enough. I finally feel like I think I’m gonna be okay.

Reading Sheila Dietz’s The Berry and the Bee is like biting into a delicious pie of luscious words, imagery, and pregnant subtext. The chapbook explores enduring themes of joy, loss, health, and more, through an expert handle on the use of line, word choice, and imagery.

Her poetry is rarely sentimental or wildly emotional, but rather steady, wise, and quietly observational. Even when writing about a near sexual assault by a stranger while hitchhiking as young girls in “Desert Stargaze (1970),” Dietz takes the approach by narrating the scene rather than delving into the emotional and psychological impact of the experience – a distance that broadens a space for the reader to have their own experience while reading the poem. And yet, when one begins to really sit with the poems, one begins to realize that the calm cadence and measured unfurling of details actually belie a turbulent, violent, and tragic world. In “Ecosystem Disruption – as a haibun,” Dietz writes about how a new building irrevocably changes the natural landscape she has grown quite familiar with, describing the “Styrofoam cup, some soggy matchsticks,” and how the water “bleeds” out into the sea.

Dietz’s poems call us to ponder the magic in the everyday, such as in her poem “Hidden Shoes,” which beautifully paints an image familiar to many of us – “A shaft of sunlight angled low crawls/across a wooden ledge that holds/a house sparrow nest” where a pair of shoes are found during a home repair project. Dietz muses on the origins of these shoes in a playful unraveling of thoughts, ending with – “who knows whether these shoes dance at night./I think they might.” Such musings are much needed in a time when information enters our attention at a lightning speed, barely allowing us to register what is right in front of us.

The Berry and The Bee is a jaunt through the mind of a writer for whom place and objects vibrate with meaning, and this reader thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to reconnect with the world through this lens.

Purchase a copy at Itasca Books.

Vietnam: The War That Keeps on Giving . . . and Taking

Because: A CIA Coverup and A Son’s Odyssey to Find the Father He Never Knew, by James B. Wells, Milspeak Books, 2025. Hardcover and paperback.

On September 27, 1965, Jack Wells, a World War II Pacific Theatre veteran, Army captain in Vietnam (“MAAG Counter-Insurgency Expert and Battalion Weapons Advisor with the 24^th Civil Guard Battalion, III Corps, Vietnam”), and senior advisor in the Public Safety Division of USAID, with two tours in Vietnam in 1962-63 and 1965, was killed in a crash of an Air America twin-engined Beech C-45 as the plane approached a small airstrip in Bao Trai. Wells was on his way to implement a pilot program to “improve security and reduce corruption in the U.S.-funded Refugee Processing Program.” He was 39 years old at the time of his death, and left a wife, Betty and three children, Ora, Kathleen, and the youngest, nine-year old James.

From the outset, there were some details about the crash that didn’t add up. There were supposed to be just two pilots and Wells in the plane, but there is evidence that there were two additional, last-minute passengers. Government officials who arrived at the Wells’ home in Georgia the day after the crash told the family that the plane was shot down by enemy small-arms fire. However, there is proof that the shooting originated inside the plane. Further, it was officially noted that seven South Vietnamese policemen were killed by Viet Cong while trying to help the casualties escape the wreckage. Yet there is no documentation, or recollections from villagers whom Wells interviewed, that anyone was killed on the ground.

The effect of the death on the family, especially Betty, was devastating, but it might have been viewed as just another tragedy in the fog of war, except for James’s discovery in 1991 of some 400 letters from Jack to Betty during his time in Vietnam.

The letters trigger the desire, which became an obsession, to find the truth about his father’s death, and form the centerpiece of the narrative. The book interweaves the personal story of James Wells’s search for the truth of his father’s death and thereby obtain a sense of peace, the family story centered on the life and legacy of Jack Wells, and the national story of the war that seems never ending. James Wells’s desire to uncover the truth leads him to research in seven archives in the U.S. and two in Vietnam and multiple interviews with Jack Wells’s supervisors and colleagues in USAID, CIA operatives, Air America pilots, and Vietnamese on both sides of the conflict. While the archival research discloses “factual” material, Wells also utilizes what he calls “triangulated research” to create “evidence-based imagined scenes . . . so even when an event or conversation is imagined, it is emotionally true.” However, he provides copious notes and sources for these scenes and they read seamlessly. Nothing seems false or forced in his telling.

The letters recount such mundane events as lodgings and dinners, Wells’ day-to-day activities and travels in Vietnam, and his interactions with both American officials and Vietnamese allies and villagers, and, understandably, they express the longing to be back home with his wife and family. But the letters are also quite pointed about the corruption he witnesses in his travels. As early as June of 1962, Wells writes, “the government here is not the best in fact a dam police state, with a R.C.  . . . heading it, corruption you’ve never seen the half.”

The situation did not change by 1965. In a July letter written from Hau Nghia, about two months before his death, Wells again talks about his daily activities and hopes that when he gets to Saigon he can have a better place to live. He also gently chastises his son James: “Now it is your turn James are you keeping the trash emptied and picked up around the outside. If not Why, Ha.” At the same time there is the concern, and anger, about corruption. He writes, “There are as many dam crooks in this country as before I am not sure we are not training them. Ha. If not we sure a allowing them to grow and multiply. Every one but every one has his hand in some ones pocket . . . ”

In another letter dated August 28, 1965, Wells wrote his wife: “Didn’t accomplish a dam thing. Perhaps another day. Oh Well, try I must, mad I do get however I told an American Lt. Col and a VN Major they weren’t worth a dam and they were giving the VC more service by not doing their job than if they were real VC.”

By all accounts, Wells maintained a high standard of honesty and morality for himself and expected others to follow that standard. His ethical commitment was evident early in his military career. After serving in the Pacific theatre, at 21 years old he acted as a “provost sergeant in charge of a special confinement unit at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg.” In letters written from Germany from 1946 to 1948 he indicates that American soldiers were selling contraband to prisoners. He turned them in. In an episode in Vietnam recounted by James Wells, Jack suspected that an ARVN captain was illegally transporting ammo and C-rations through a checkpoint, most likely for delivery and sale to VC. An armed standoff occurred but was de-escalated; Jack decided that the lives of his policemen were more important than stopping every suspect vehicle at the checkpoint. As a result, however, his father was called in by his supervisor, John Kesler, to discuss some recent reports. The upshot was that Kesler wanted the reports to be rewritten to falsify events and eliminate criticism. Jack’s response was that he would not be silenced.

James Wells’ search for the truth takes him to Vietnam in 2017, over fifty years after his father’s death, with the hope that he will find the site of the 1965 crash. Through a series of coincidences (which may not have been coincidences) he meets a number of Vietnamese people who remember, as children, the day in 1965. He talks with “a top-ranking communist official” at the time of the crash who “contradicted what the U.S. authorities told us. . . . I started to feel vindicated, knowing that a tiny hunch, a slight suspicion my mother had years ago, had grown exponentially into what looked more and more like a coverup and conspiracy.” After some false starts he finds the location of the crash, and on March 6, 2017, James and his siblings have a resurrection service. He connects his personal story to the family story to the national, really international, story of the war: “I thought of all those lost in this war and those that preceded it, who may have suffered and died here, perhaps even near this very spot we were standing in.”

The penultimate chapters take the reader further into the spiritual nature of James’ search for truth and closure, and raise issues that are relevant to anyone seeking a sense of peace after the unresolved death of a loved one. His tentative realization is that “‘Like Odysseus and Telemachus, my father and I have been searching to find each other to complete each other’s lives.’” There are echoes here of Hamlet’s search for the father cut off in the prime of life under circumstances that are purported to be true but are actually false. Hamlet’s quest is to find the truth and thus put his father finally at ease.

In a recent essay, “How Photography from the Vietnam War Changed America,” Damien Cave notes that “Long after wars cease, the happiest ending you can hope for is survival and the continued search for understanding. As Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Vietnamese American author, wrote: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.’” In James Wells’ decades-long odyssey seeking the truth about his father’s death, and to come to some sort of understanding about both his and his father’s lives, perhaps the best he can hope for is psychological survival with the understanding that there will never be a final absolute truth.

Larry Abbott talks with James Wells

LA: What was the genesis of the book?

JW: The book began when I found approximately 400 of my father’s letters, 26 years after his death, back in 1991. Since I was only nine years old when he was killed, and had been gone on a year-long tour prior to that when I was five, I didn’t know the man, so of course I began to study the letters to learn as any son would want to know about their father.

LA: What was the basic content of the letters?

JW: Incredibly, the letters are a timeline of mid-20^th century U.S. history, since the first letters are from a 17-year-old runaway delinquent infatuated with the most intelligent girl in school prior to joining the Army in WWII, and the last letter is from a 39-year-old warrior turned humanitarian the day before he is killed in Vietnam.

At first, I thought I would just publish the letters since they were so interesting and revealing of my father’s character. Granted, many of the letters are love letters, but what was most telling was that it came across that he was a very moral, righteous, and religious man, obsessed with the truth, and highly critical of those around him who did not perform their roles as they should. As a criminologist and familiar with whistleblowing, I suspected, and later confirmed, that his actions and words did meet the definition of a whistleblower.

In addition to often expressing his love of God, family, and country so eloquently, my father had a unique gift of writing to my mother as if she were sitting across the table from him as he spoke to her. Just like we engage in multiple conversations with our loved ones each day, he would continuously share his thoughts with her throughout the day, starting before breakfast, then at midday, then at night, and sometimes after waking in the middle of the night. Although they were polar opposites, I don’t believe a couple more in love ever existed.

I got caught up in that, feeling like he is communicating with me. The ring I wear—the same ring that belonged to the hand that wrote those letters, and that I scraped the burnt flesh off of when I found it in his personal effects—and whose inscription inside its diameter contains the title of my book, adds to the impact his letters have on me as I read them.

In my book, I describe how, through counseling, I learned how my story parallels Homer’s Odyssey. Like the Odyssey, mine doesn’t begin with the exploits of our fathers; instead, it starts with Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, who, like me, is languishing in pain and grieving for his father’s return. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, or perhaps in another realm, our fathers are struggling and battling to return home to reconnect with their sons.

I want to remind you and the reading audience that, initially, my siblings and I generally believed what we were told about our father’s death. However, his letters prompted me to question what really happened to him and inspired me to embark on a quest for the truth through archival and field research across two continents, and as a consequence, reveal a CIA coverup. I consider that a miracle.

This wasn’t the only miracle I experienced. While in Vietnam, my siblings and I encountered countless wonders that left us in awe. I write about several of these miraculous events in the book. With respect to what drove me to write and finish the book, what initially drove me was simply wanting to get to know my father. Over time, and after counseling, I came to realize that it was about both of us getting to know each other and finding peace with what we learned and may never know. Keep in mind the CIA sent me a response this past April, eight years after my appeal of their 2017 denial, saying they will continue to withhold information due to national security, foreign policy, and personal privacy concerns. I’ve appealed again, but my siblings are now 75, 73, and I’m 69. We may not even be around when we hear from the CIA again. To tell you the truth, I now suspect it will remain forever classified. I think I’ll eventually be okay with that, since I write in my book about what I believe really happened, and what it will take for my father and I to find peace.

LA: What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

JW: Researching and writing faced many obstacles and challenges. In addition to the countless hours and expense of the research, traveling across the U.S. and Vietnam, the most significant challenge was the toll it took on my family, especially my spouse, Brenda. Ever since finding the letters in 1991, I’ve been obsessed with them. In addition to interpreting, transcribing, digitizing, and uploading them to an archivist website, I’ve spent years studying them to better understand my father’s actions and how they may have led to his death. On top of that, I spent a few years taking private writing classes, and after that, decided to get an MFA in Creative Writing, my fifth university degree. At least once during each of those years, my wife confronted me with that obsession that has taken so much time away from her. It has taken a toll on our marriage; I write about that in the book. For obvious reasons, the book is dedicated to her.

LA: How did you come up with the title?

JW: My father closed and signed many of his letters with simply the word “because.” I found out that it was a popular love and wedding song for much of the 20th century [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Because_(Guy_d%27Hardelot_and_Edward_Teschemacher_song].

My mother told me it was their song, ever since they were a couple. That, combined with the fact that my father’s wedding band contains the word “because” as part of its inscription, is another reason I discuss in the book. I devote part of a chapter to that discussion, and close it with what I think the word means to them.

In addition to Because being my parent’s song from high school, its single word communicates something much deeper and more revealing than just love. Though difficult to explain, it is a word that attempts to answer whatever questions its recipient might have had, no matter how emotional, sensitive, complex, and difficult they might be. No explanation or reason was needed. It was simply … “because.”

LA: Why do you think the CIA has refused your FOIA requests, especially after appeals and nearly 60 years after your father’s death?

JW: On one hand, I suspect that the CIA may not even know exactly what happened, and they are embarrassed about it, which is why the crash investigation report remains classified. As readers will discover, I confidently confirm that there was a coverup and a false narrative surrounding his death. In some respects, I may know more than they do. Unlike them, I had the opportunity to interview former NLF guerrillas and their leaders, who all insisted they had nothing to do with the plane’s crash. They were just as puzzled as everyone else about why it happened.

In addition, there is substantial evidence indicating that corrupt officials with a history of misconduct, including murder, particularly related to the refugee processing program and its coverup, may have been involved in his death. On the day he was killed, he was actively pursuing his initiative to reduce corruption within that program. We also know that the U.S. military often tolerated corruption because those often involved were competent military commanders who could assist U.S. forces. Ask almost any veteran of the recent wars we’ve been involved in in the Middle East and they will tell you this is a common occurrence with our allies.

As I mention in the preface of my book, I informed the CIA of my research agenda in May 2015 and initiated a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information related to the crash investigation of the Air America C-45 in which my father died. Nearly two and a half years later, in October 2017, the CIA responded, denying my FOIA request. After appealing the decision in December 2017 and seeking support from five different congressional representatives, I have seen no progress until now.

In fact, just recently, eight years after my appeal and 60 years after my father’s death, I received a final response from the CIA. They stated that information about the crash investigation of the Air America C-45 will continue to be withheld under FOIA exemptions b1, information kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy, b3, protection of information prohibited by laws other than the FOIA, and b6, withholding information that would constitute a clear unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

Through my study of President Obama’s Executive Order 13526, I learned that classified information over 50 years old should be declassified. However, “extraordinary circumstances” can justify maintaining classification beyond that time frame. My investigative memoir outlines those extraordinary circumstances for the reader.

Believe it or not, I have been anticipating this news from the CIA, which further validates my story.

One appealing aspect of the book is its whodunit nature, which allows readers to formulate their own theories about what might have happened to him and why.

LA: You are quite clear that there has been and continues to be some sort of coverup. Do you think there will be any type of retaliation for writing this book?

JW: Ha! Thats the question I get asked most often. I now joke about it and respond, “Well, if I were found dead one morning with a 22-caliber bullet in the back of the head, that would really increase book sales.” But no, I don’t fear retaliation, especially now since the book is out. The story about me writing it has been public for over a decade, with probably thousands of social media posts by me and reposts by others. I’ve personally notified veterans from all sides of the war, and the U.S. Army, the State Department, the CIA, and even Congress are aware of my actions and desire to write a book. If somebody wanted to retaliate, they would have done it before the book went to press. What would it accomplish now? Nothing!

James Wells has had a prolific career. He’s written or co-written over 65 books, chapters, and essays, and has authored some 150 reports for local, state, and federal agencies. His work has appeared in Military Experience and the Arts, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors. In addition to his writing, he was a corrections officer in a maximum-security prison and later assisted architects in prison design. He holds an M.S. degree in Criminal Justice, a Ph. D. in Research, and a creative writing M.F.A. He is a retired criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Further information on his career and current activities can found at: jamesbwells.com.

Letters are copyrighted by James Wells and used by permission.

Genre-wise, there’s a lot at play here. I would call it a coming-of-age novel, but also kind of an “anti-bildungsroman,” in that Simon doesn’t so much find himself as quite literally lose himself. There are also science-fiction elements as well as horror ones. How would you break it down? What are some of your inspirations, in this vein? Do you think it’s horror and science-fiction—or is this just our lives at this point?

I’ve described the book as a “speculative Philly noir,” because I think it captures the vibe, sounds intriguing, and people tend to like compact descriptions like that. That being said, I don’t know what it is beyond a novel. To your point, I think writing about technology requires the tools of (at least) science fiction and horror. It helps that I’m drawn to writers who intentionally blur the lines between genres, so it felt natural for me to try to do the same.

Early on in the writing I was leaning into science fiction, reading stuff like Neuromancer and the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also read a handful of Raymond Chandler books, like The Big Sleep and The High Window, because I knew that I wanted there to be this simmering tension, a kind of uncertainty about HYPR and its intentions, and Chandler is the master of that. I’m also very cognizant of the reader’s experience—I’m terrified of boring someone—and all of those books are really engaging texts that make you keep turning the page.

I don’t know how much those books are reflected in the text, but I like assigning myself potentially inspirational reading while I’m working on a project because I like to believe the moves of these great works find their way into my brain, even if I’m not totally conscious of it. If nothing else, it’s fun.

Philadelphia seems like a perfect setting. It’s trite to phrase it this way, I know, but the city feels like a “character.” It also feels like a ripe setting for a particular kind of juxtaposition (between old and new, perhaps) you draw in the novel. Why do you think that is? What are some of these tensions? Why is this novel set in Philly and not in, say, New York or Los Angeles?

I lived in Philly as an adult for 12 years, right out of college into my early 30s. I grew up in South Jersey, about 20 minutes outside the city. It was close enough that I went to high school in Philly rather than Jersey.

I started writing the novel almost immediately after moving from Philly to California, back in August 2022. I was pretty homesick, I think, maybe a bit culture-shocked, and found that writing about the city was a good way to process a big life change. So, I think that’s the most immediate answer: I was trying to figure out where I was by exploring the place I’d left behind.

I also just think it’s a beautiful city, despite all its problems. I lived in the house at 8th and Washington where Simon lives and, because I was in my early 20s when I did, I was enamored with the possibility of the city, in spite of the sidewalks being lined with trash and something in the air always smelling like shit. It felt alive, you know? Like you’d sit down on the stoop and it’s mostly just cars passing by, but you still feel like you’re taking in this beautiful scene. I guess maybe that’s a lot of cities, but Philly was my city for so long, so it felt right for me.

But, to your question about bigger cities, Philly is decidedly not New York or Los Angeles. People in Philly don’t want it to be New York or Los Angeles. Unlike other major American cities, it’s still possible for normal people to have respectable lives with modest jobs in Philly. My wife and I were both teachers and were able to buy a house in the city by 31. As far as I can tell, that’s not possible in New York or L.A.

So, I think that aspect made the story feel more realistic: Someone really could make rent doing rideshare in Philly. It wouldn’t be easy, but it could be possible. If FREELANCE were set in New York, Simon would have to live in, like, Newark.

The flow of passengers in Simon’s Subaru (a good alternate title) is a very effective narrative “vehicle.” I notice the voice—his voice—has a particular penchant for classifying customers into “types” and judging them based on certain sociocultural markers. What do you make of this kind of reduction? Is it something a social-media-fueled service economy does to us?

The internet classifies its content as well as its users. Whether you use social media or Google or almost any other popular piece of the modern internet, your keystrokes are being collected and used to frame your experience. Your data is your identity. So, the short of it is: The internet classifies us in the same way Simon classifies his passengers.

I thought of Simon, and a number of other characters in the book, as someone who’s been taught to view the world through data and metadata, because I think we’re all being taught to do the same.

Simultaneously I’m drawn to and repulsed by the Dylan character. He seemed to embody an important symbol, or carry an important frequency. I didn’t find him particularly redeeming; in fact, he seemed to be the target of a good deal of venom. He represented to me a historic truth: that often disaffected privileged people take up the battles of the working class, whether earnestly, symbolically, as a means to virtue, or as some kind of aesthetic or intellectual exercise or game (“Catan” is a symbol of this). In a way, though, he feels like the novel’s villain but also its truth-teller. I’m reminded of his line: “we’re accepting the machine’s warped versions of ourselves!” What is at the heart of that contradiction, that venom? Are we all bourgeois at this point?

Dylan was a fun character to write because I think he’s a very contemporary, very real type-of-guy, at least in certain parts of the country. He is an avowed socialist, yet can’t help talking over working class people. He has read a lot of theory on intersectional solidarity, but is still just a loud know-it-all. He’s interested in labor issues, though he’s never seen working.

I don’t think he’s a villain, necessarily, because as you pointed out, he actually makes some good points about HYPR, technology, and surveillance. He’s not an idiot, even if he’s annoying. And I think almost everyone in their early 20s talking about politics, and I include my 20-something self here, is insufferable.

Overall, though, Dylan’s worst trait is not that different from the American Left’s: he has great ideas but dogshit delivery. So, no, he’s not a villain exactly, but I definitely aimed to make him a foil for Simon. Not that Simon is a hero. Both of them are just younger dudes trying to figure out their place in the world. Their pasts are what cause them to do that in such different ways.

This novel feels particularly interested in thematic concepts of “SEO” and the ambiguity of whether, when algorithms are involved, anything is actually “chance.” I’m thinking of when the algorithm puts Cassie in Simon’s car (a rich allegory for dating apps).  I’m drawn to the line on page 74: “It wasn’t that robots were spying on humans; it was that humans were just glorified robots.” What was the inspiration here; how far has it gone; and to what extent do you think it’s true, that we’re essentially pre-programmed for robothood?

I was working for an SEO-focused website when I started writing the book and was amazed at how it changed my perception of the internet. I quickly realized how much of Google’s search results were just shoddy, recycled (often imprecise and sometimes outright incorrect) information tailored to rank high on the page and earn clicks. Once you learned a few things the algorithm was rewarding, you could quickly rejigger a page with some keywords, new-fangled headers, and a few lines of code to make it jump to the top of the results. It didn’t have to be good, it just had to match what Google had deemed “good.”

SEO is now in sort-of a death spiral thanks to AI. But AI is being fed millions of web pages that were written explicitly for SEO—the same pages that were constructed from recycled, shoddy information.

So, the information isn’t any better, but people assume it is because it has the appearance of authority. It’s AI! But that’s just not true. Unfortunately, that might not matter. The more people defer to the internet/AI for answers, the more they begin to see the world in the way the internet/AI sees or wants them to see the world.

Am I rambling? Maybe.

Probably stating the obvious here, but Google (and most popular websites/apps) are collecting massive amounts of data and then using it to spit content back at you. Apple recently paid $95M in a lawsuit related to Siri listening to user conversations. Years ago, people who said their phones were spying on them were seen as paranoid. Now, we’re aware that all these things are happening, but we passively accept them as the cost of having such amazing technology.

But it’s still disappointing, for me at least, when I realize that I can be pinned down so easily. It’s pathetic that I’m such a clean marketing demographic, you know? Not that I’m a particularly unique person, but it’s depressing to know that what I perceive as the complexity of my brain, past experiences, desires, and interests can be categorized so easily by an algorithm.

I take solace in the fact that there’s still a lot of things I do offline. I don’t track my exercise, I listen to a lot of physical media, and I almost never rate things I consume. The YouTube algorithm is mostly serving me live Ween videos, so I think that’s probably a good sign.

I love Simon’s parents. What is it about Gen X parents that begets this kind of depiction—at once kind but something also naïve about them? Can we talk about this?

Thanks for saying that.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a parent, but I can imagine it must be really difficult to watch your child seemingly become someone you don’t recognize. I taught high school for 10 years and got to know lots of parents like Simon’s. Good, decent people trying to get a handle on why their kid was suddenly failing out of school. Earnest, well-meaning parents just trying to get through the work week and feeling frustrated that their teenagers were making that so difficult.

And I think people, parents and non-parents alike, often look for easy answers for complex problems—and the internet is happy to provide those for them.

The image of the unseen damage Cassie is accruing over years of standing next to an X Ray is a particularly affecting image, especially when coupled with that she says software will eventually do it, and all that matters materially is the paycheck. Would you call this novel “anti-work?”

No, I wouldn’t, but that’s mainly because I’m leery of classifications like that. In general, I get uneasy categorizing anything I write as explicitly political. I’m interested in storytelling above all else. I don’t pursue a narrative to execute a theme or an agenda. A lot of times I’m not even concerned with having “a point.” I just want to follow a story and see where it goes.

Of course, some people might say, “Okay, but pursuing that story is really just delving into your unconscious, which is filled with the signs and symbols of your belief system.” (They might say it exactly like that.) And that’s fair. It’d be disingenuous for me to say that the book doesn’t comment on work. It does. It pretty clearly criticizes work that aims to dehumanize people, in ways both overt and subtle. So, I don’t know if it’s “anti-work” but it’s definitely “pro-human.”

There are people in the novel, mostly poor or working class, who are outside of its ire. The bearded man with the capped tooth (until he’s revealed to be a plant from a rival ride-share app) functions as a kind of Diogenes the Cynic. Cassie’s daughter, Maya, seems to get it, when she says, when asked what she wants to do when she grows up, is just “be Maya.” What is the way out, in your opinion, beyond smashing our phones?

I think Simon proves that smashing your phone won’t fix the problem. The boring answer is that the tech industry needs to be regulated. It won’t fix the deeper problems, but it’s a start. And it’s one of the few bipartisan wins in this country.

But on a personal level, I don’t think there is an easy way out. I think the real answer is you need to go the other way—you need to change your mind. If you believe that tech is intentionally trying to rewire your brain, then that should frame everything you read on a device. Why was this fed to me? And what is it trying to make me feel?

I’m glad the scene with Maya resonated with you. That’s kind of the crux of the book, I think. I left teaching after the pandemic and struggled a little with that departure: for so much of my life, I had thought of myself as “a teacher” and assumed that signified things about my values, my identity, and how I treat others. Suddenly, when I no longer had that shorthand (“I’m a teacher!”), I was left wondering…well, am I still someone with values, an identity? Do I still treat others well? Was I ever that person? And I had to try and prove that to myself, outside of a readymade job title. It was difficult but ultimately really healthy; it forced me to confront who I am versus who I say I am.

Around that time, my wife and I were babysitting our nieces, and I helped the older one with her bedtime routine. When she went to brush her teeth, she was so focused on the task at hand. It seemed like there was nothing else floating through her mind—she wasn’t worried about the next day’s tasks or regretting something she’d said earlier. She was fully present for this totally mundane activity in a way that a lot of woo-woo adults wish they could be. And I found that really beautiful. She’s not caught up in her professional identity or even her social one. She’s just there. She’s just herself. It’s something I’m striving for every day.

The trails in Coopers Rock State Park range from wide and flat to narrow and steep. My eyes scan the path just in front of me to make sure the ground is clear of any tripping hazards. I’m four laps into a five-lap race, a 50k put on by the Robin Ames Foundation. And as it stands right now, I’m not just winning the race, I’m on pace to break the course record.

It’s late October, a beautiful time to be outside in West Virginia. Massive moss-covered boulders surround the winding dirt path. The trees are somewhere between green and brown and yellow and red. Fog lingers, reflecting the sunlight and keeping the air cool and thick. I almost never look around and enjoy scenes like this when I’m racing because my mind is totally committed to the task at hand. Have I eaten enough calories this hour? Should I stop and change into dry socks? Have I been drinking enough electrolytes and water? Am I maintaining my pace? There are so many things to consider that by the time I think to look beyond the two or three feet in front of me, I’ve run another five miles.

The fact that I hardly ever stop to admire the scenery makes me wonder why I’m so drawn to long runs in pretty areas. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars registering for races across the country—races in National Parks, races along massive rivers, races that loop around mountains. For the most part, I don’t remember any of the scenery because I was too busy looking at the ground right in front of me.

I’ve heard other ultrarunners talk about how grateful they are that their bodies can do things like this—propel them along beautiful trails through remarkable scenery. I sometimes hear them chatting with each other after the race, talking about views they stopped to photograph with their phones. They show off the photos and describe an overwhelming sense of clarity found on the trail—one that brought them to laughter, and then tears, all in a matter of minutes. I can understand feeling grateful for the opportunity to exist in these beautiful areas, even if I don’t stop to take photos of the scenery. But I’m not sure I’ve ever felt grateful for my body.

I’ve always been critical of it, though.

Every ounce of fat and every acne scar and duck-footed step is logged in my mind. My critiquing of my body is constant, but it does die down a bit when I’m out on the trail. Again, probably because I’m too busy looking at the path in front of me.

In Coopers Rock State Park, I bound from spot to spot on the way down a massive hill, taking care to avoid the rocks and roots trying to trip me. I reach the bottom of the incline and suddenly I’m running on a flat piece of trail next to a creek. I let myself look up and admire the woods around me. It’s taken me a really, really long time, but I think I’m finally starting to see what all those other runners are talking about.

It all started at the dinner table when I was nine years old. My mom,dad, and sister had just finished dinner. My parents told my sister to go play. They told me to stay.

We need to talk to you, they said. They sat side-by-side and put their arms on the table and cupped their hands together in unison.

Your dad isn’t your real dad, my mom told me.

My dad, “Ron” now, kept his eyes down. I looked down at the floor too. I don’t remember why, exactly. I might have felt ashamed. I might also have wanted to mirror Ron, as if to say “No, you’re wrong, he’s definitely my dad, look at how we’re both looking at the floor at the same time.”

Ron would like to adopt you so you could have his last name, my mom said. I looked up to see my mom staring straight at me. Ron was still staring at the floor.

I thought “Eidson” was my last name already.

Would you like that? Would you like it if Ron adopted you and gave you his last name?

I picked at the bits of food still on my plate and took them up on the offer. It was the only name I’d ever known, after all. Somewhere in my little brain, “food” and “comfort” latched onto one another gently. Over the years the bond would grow stronger, more entrenched. There would come a time when I wouldn’t be able to distinguish between physical hunger and emotional hunger. There would come a time when I’d have to stop and listen to hear if my stomach was growling, so I could determine whether or not I needed that extra slice of pizza.

The evolution didn’t happen overnight. It was slow and subtle. An extra cookie here, another plateful there. My body grew taller and wider. At nine years old I was skinny—a string bean, a noodle. By the time I got to Junior High, I was obese.

The 50k race is a 10k-distance loop repeated five times. Each loop is roughly 6.2 miles and has about 687 feet of elevation gain. The main climb, the last few miles before you reach the start/finish line, has an average grade of 3.4 percent and 429 feet of gain. After completing four loops, my body is screaming at me. One more lap, I tell it. Suck it up, we got this. I look down at the path and focus and get to work.

The first few miles of the loop follow a well-maintained trail that runs alongside the main road into the park. I pass a couple aid stations where friendly volunteers offer high-fives and water and snacks, like bananas and oranges. They recognize me by now and yell out encouragement: keep it up and you’re CRUSHING it and great job man. Eventually the course hangs a hard left and starts a slight decline deeper into the park. The trail seems to never let you fully embrace a long incline or decline; it wavers back and forth mile after mile. At least it’s a well-marked path, which isn’t rare exactly, but it’s not a given.

During my first 50k, in Minnesota, one other runner and I found ourselves ahead of the pack, but due to a bad trail marking, we ended up running two miles in the wrong direction. We went from first and second to seventh and eighth. When we realized the mistake, we had opposite reactions. He slowed down, changing from the “I could win this thing” mindset to the “just finishing would be cool” mindset. I got pissed off and knuckled down. I pushed my body, keeping my eyes on the trail just ahead of me, ignoring the aid stations and refusing to eat for the entire 33-or-so miles of the race, and only stopping for water once or twice. I ended up in third place. For the next two weeks, I could barely walk, let alone run.

When you do the math and drop the two extra miles I ran, I could have taken first. I think about that often. Not for egotistical reasons though. I think about it because on that Minnesota run, for the first time, I realized my body was more than a decoration for praise and admiration. It was also capable of doing incredible things. Years later, running in Coopers Rock and about to take first, I don’t mind the mistake I made years ago. I embrace it; it lit a fire in me.

I first shoved my index finger down my throat when I was a teenager. This was after my best friend, Jake, joined the wrestling team and lost a bunch of weight. Before he got rid of his love handles and gut and the extra-puffy skin below his jawline, we used to joke about our fatness. We owned it. We were fat, sure, but we were funnier than all the fit boys. That was why they kept us around, because we were so funny. Or Jake was funny, anyway. And I was Jake’s best friend. So, I could hang around too.

We still played football like all the other boys in our tiny hometown. Most of the kids seemed to love it. To me though, it felt like a requirement. In my mind, Jake and I stood just outside the typical high school experience. We accepted that things like sex and love were not afforded to us in our small town. We were the jesters, the comedic relief. We were the chubby,  goofy, acne-scared teenagers who made the fit and smart boys laugh alongside their girlfriends. We couldn’t earn attention with our bodies, so we did it with our jokes.

In college we would shine, though. That’s how I imagined it, anyway. But then Jake and I got busy and didn’t talk to each other for a few months. The next time I saw him, he was skinny and dating a beautiful girl from one town over. I was still fat and alone.

Soon after I saw Jake’s skinny body, I binged more food more quickly than I ever had before (and I’d binged plenty of times). I snuck upstairs, went into the pantry, and took two of everything—Pop Tarts and Chewy Granola Bars and Ding Dongs and Little Debbie Brownies and those sugary little cakes in the shape of Christmas trees. I washed down thousands of calories with Dr. Pepper and pinched the fat rolls on my stomach harder with every bite, imagining a smaller body. I was a nice kid, I reasoned. A good kid. I didn’t have the best grades, and I wasn’t good at football, and I didn’t enjoy hunting or working on cars. But I didn’t deserve this body, this appendage latched to a brain that only had space for movies and pop punk music.

I don’t know if I cried in my room that night. But I do know that something in me snapped. I snuck back upstairs and locked the bathroom door behind me. Kneeling in front of the toilet in my boxers, I shoved my finger into my mouth. My fingernail scraped the back of my throat, drawing blood. The muscles in my throat lurched and throbbed and tried to push my finger away. I didn’t budge. My stomach turned over and promised me it would rid itself of the garbage inside. I pulled my finger out just as thousands of calories launched into the toilet. I cried and puked, snot pouring from my nose. I emptied my stomach until hot, black stomach bile had thoroughly acid-washed my tastebuds. I flushed the toilet and wiped my face. For probably the first time in my life, I felt I was in control.

Months passed and I ate only what I needed to survive. Like Jake, I joined the wrestling team. Each practice started with a 30-minute run. I would shuffle up and down the hallways leading to the high school gymnasium, bent over and sweaty and breathing heavy, while all the skinny fit boys flew by me, their backs straight while they talked and laughed with each other. I learned not to make eye contact. Something about the lack of effort or concern in their eyes rubbed me the wrong way. I’d keep my head down and keep my eyes to the ground.

I wasn’t good at wrestling, but I was good at losing weight. And losing matches. Still, I found that losing weight brought me things I’d never had much of before: attention, compliments, praise. The smaller my body got, the more people could see me.

I became addicted.

More months passed and the number on the scale crept lower. I started at 240 pounds and gradually dropped to 215. Then 200. Then 190. Eventually I was wrestling and losing matches at 189. By the time the season ended, I was as skinny as I’d ever been. And I had a real girlfriend for the first time. I still didn’t love running, but I understood it as a thing to give me the body and praise I craved. I could keep up with the skinny boys during our 30-minute run. I could even beat them sometimes. I learned that if I starved myself until an hour or so before practice, I’d have just enough energy to run with the fit kids.

Running wasn’t just a way to earn attention with a smaller body, it was a way to earn attention through action. Plus, I didn’t have to try to be funny all the time.

Years later, I decided to kick off the 50k in the Coopers Rock State Park differently than any race I’d ever run. On a fun little trail race a month before—the Run Wild 20-Miler in Barboursville, West Virginia—I figured out that a strength of mine was maintaining a consistent and quick pace for long periods, no matter how tired or worn out I felt. For the Coopers Rock 50k, my plan was to push as hard as I could for the first half lap and then settle into a steady pace, the idea being that I’d destroy any chance the other runners might have in overtaking me.

I took off faster than usual. But there was a wrinkle in the plan right away—someone else seemed to have the same goal.

I took off at a fast-for-me clip of 7:20-7:30 pace per mile, hoping I’d be propelled right to the front. Instead, I found myself in the dust of a young woman who was easily running 6:50-7:00 PPM. She was booking it. Seeing my chance at finally winning a race slip through my fingers, I quickly considered my options.

Her pace—my pace, even—was not sustainable for a 50k. Not unless you’re an elite runner with sponsors. The chances were good that she’d have to slow down eventually. And while I couldn’t match her pace on flat ground, I knew I could at least keep her in eyesight. Then, when we hit an incline, I’d break out another ability I discovered at the Run Wild 20-Miler—I’d run, not hike, the inclines.

Most runners choose to conserve their energy and start hiking when the grade shoots up. I figured out that I could overtake a lot of runners by fighting that urge. No matter how worn out I was when I reached the top, I could will myself to keep running.

When we hit the first incline in Coopers Rock, I made my move and sped up when the young woman began hiking. I overtook her. I ran all the way to the top and then kept running. I’d pulled it off. I had a little celebration in my head and then settled back into my 7:20-7:30 PPM. But I couldn’t enjoy the victory for long. The next thing I knew, the young woman was right on my tail.

In trail running, the paths are usually narrow. Passing another runner can be tricky. But one of my favorite aspects of trail running is the comradery and respect. Yes, we’re competitive, but we’re not assholes. Any trail runner in my position could easily keep their pace and block the path. But to the vast majority of trail runners—every runner I’ve ever met—that thought wouldn’t even occur. As the young woman caught back up to me, it didn’t occur to me either. I side-stepped off the trail and let her pass. Thanks, she said. Good work, I replied.

For the next couple miles, longer than I planned, I fought like hell to keep the young woman in sight, hoping she’d get tired and slow down. Sometimes I’d pass her, but then she’d quickly pass me. We were both getting tired. I got the feeling, though, that she, like me, would rather pass out on the trail than lose the friendly back-and-forth. I could also tell she was more experienced than me. So, I did the math—I had meant to go faster than usual, for longer than usual, but not like this. This young woman, whoever she was, had whooped my ass as far as I was concerned. I started to settle back into the pace I had originally planned. Good work, I thought, as I watched her widen the gap between us. Then I realized something: This young woman wasn’t wearing a pack. Which meant she wasn’t carrying snacks and electrolytes and water. If you’re running the full distance, that’s not sustainable. (Not to most, anyway.) Was she just a total badass, more than I already commended her for, or was she…

Shit, I thought. She’s part of a relay team.

Part of the Robin Ames Foundation 50k was a 50k relay. In other words, you and however many friends you wanted to bring along could split the distance and run sections individually. This young woman was basically sprinting the first 6.2-mile loop because that was likely all she had planned for the day. I had nearly exhausted myself on the first of five loops trying to overtake someone I wasn’t even competing against.

I laughed quietly to myself. You dork, I thought. Calm down and run your race. As the young woman left my eyesight, still going strong, I grinned and shook my head. “Goddamn,” I said out loud. “Good work.”

Toward the end of my junior year in high school, I began to receive compliments and praise from women other than my girlfriend. My body was smaller, trim, tan. It garnered attention like a delicate ornament on a Christmas tree. I broke up with my girlfriend and began binging sex and love.

Somewhere along the line, “sex” and “intimacy” unlinked in my head. Sex was a performance, a chance to show off the body I’d beaten and starved. Intimacy required feeling vulnerable in front of another person. The last time I had felt vulnerable in front of other people was at nine years old at a dinner table. And in that moment, food had been the comfort. Not people.

I didn’t need intimacy; I learned how to replace that. Sex, on the other hand, was hard-earned validation, a compliment to my body.

The routine was to go on a date or two with someone new, have sex, and feel like everything was going just fine. It lasted for years—from high school to well into my thirties. At 36 I met a pretty stranger at a brewery with two shots already in me. She was nervous and sweet. She wore a long, flowery skirt and a black tank top. Her hair had streaks of gray because she’d decided to embrace it, not try to hide it with color. I liked that about her. We hit it off right away. We talked about music and the difference between a lager and an ale and what’s actually at the center of a black hole. We watched people sing karaoke. I told her my song would be Taking Back Sunday’s Cute Without The ‘E’ and she tried to get me to sing it and I said I didn’t like the stage. We had sex that night and made plans to hang out again soon. But as the second date got closer, staying the path got harder.

As with many women, I started to feel nervous or stressed or upset about something. The second I start getting nervous or stressed or upset, I crave food. Sugar in particular. I knew I’d fight the urge but eventually lose, binging thousands of calories in minutes. Then I’d be ashamed of myself, my lack of will, my body. Then I’d punish myself. Sometimes by eating until my stomach was so full I would throw up, sometimes by punching or slapping myself across the face, sometimes by adding miles to my run the next day. But always, always by canceling the date I had planned.

The last third of the loop at Cooper’s Rock, the incline is brutal. Rocks and roots and slippery logs cover the path. I jump carefully. The last thing I need is to land on a slippery log and face-dive into the ground. Eventually I reach what will become my favorite section of the race: Rock City.

Out of nowhere, a sign points downward from the dirt path to a narrow passage that can best be described as a crevasse, with steep rock walls on either side. The trail drops 30-40 feet, widening out to three yards at most. At the bottom, it’s an entirely different world. I look up beyond the few feet in front of me and try to take it all in.

A thick layer of autumn leaves blankets the ground. A few trees have managed to sprout along the path and reach skyward, and massive rocks pile up along the path. I pass little stone hallways to my right and left and find myself wishing I wasn’t in the middle of a race, so I could explore the area. The sun slips in through the tree branches, creating slices of orange light across the ground, and fog still hangs in the air. It’s like I’ve slipped off the path and into a fantasy novel—now I’m on a quest to toss a ring into the fiery depths of Mordor. Rock City is no more than 80 yards long, but it’s enough to distract me from the pain in my legs and keep me going.

A few years earlier, while the pandemic was in full swing, I would wake up at 4 a.m. for my morning run through the streets of Kansas City. I’d gotten into the habit of rolling off my cot the second the alarm went off, not allowing myself the opportunity to fall back asleep. I would stand up and stretch and imagine how my stomach might look in the mirror. Sometimes the sight of my body disappointed me, sometimes it didn’t. Keeping my eyes down to avoid the mirror, I would walk into the bathroom to take a piss—imagining that emptying my bladder would shave off a few millimeters. I didn’t want the sight of my piss-bloated stomach tainting the first glance of how my body actually looked. I’d pee and go over the previous night’s numbers in my head—at 6’1” and 194.2 pounds and 33 years old, my body mass index was at the top end of “Average.” I knew I could do better. There were still little bulges of fat hanging just above my hip bones. After pissing, when I was confident I’d be at my lowest possible weight, I would step onto the scale—192.5 pounds. Better, but not there yet. Only then would I look into the mirror. And whether the sight of my body disappointed me that morning or not dictated how much I’d eat that day—or if I would even eat at all.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 192.5 pounds is considered “Overweight” for my height. That’s why my long-term goal was 180 pounds—that would just barely put me in the “Healthy Weight” category. But according to the CDC’s body mass index calculation, I could drop down to 140 pounds before I’d cross the threshold from “Healthy Weight” to “Underweight.”

As I write this today—years after Kansas City and the 50k in Coopers Rock State Park—people say I’m skinny at 180 pounds and that I should eat more. “140” is a number that would terrify them if I ever mentioned it. So, I keep it to myself.

Five years before my 4 a.m. runs in Kansas City, I was in the Marine Corps—lifting twice a day and avoiding running at all costs. I left the Corps a bulky 232.1 pounds. My final physical told me I had high cholesterol and high blood pressure. So, when I moved to begin college I started running every day and avoided eating meat. A few months later, someone said I looked really good, thin. I ran more and started skipping meals.

When I’d finally face the mirror in my apartment in Kansas City and examine my body, I was almost always disappointed. I’d put my hands on my sides and push through to the sharp hipbone underneath. The mushy pulp between my hands and the bone had to go. I’d grab it and squeeze and stretch it out, pinching and bruising the area, punishing it for existing. Sometimes I’d imagine that compressing the areas of fat would break apart the tissue and allow it to dissolve into my body. In my downtime, I would knead the fat to a pulp.

In front of the mirror, I’d turn to the right and check my side profile. I’d force myself to relax, so I could get an honest sense of how far my gut stuck out. The bulge between my chest and waistline needed to go too. I’d angle my body slightly, observing my love handles—the bubbles of fat dripping off my hipbones and bulging just above my ass. I had a long way to go. Every morning I’d tell myself that today was the day I’d achieve perfection with my diet and exercise routine. No mistakes. Follow the plan exactly.

The thing about demanding perfection, though, is that when you trip up even a little bit, the day feels ruined. Countless times I’d stray from my diet one millimeter—a candy bar, a cheeseburger, a glass of milk—and end up calling the day a waste and punishing myself by eating twelve donuts or two boxes of cereal. It’s like I was walking on the side of a cliff with a bag of M&Ms, testing my resolve by promising myself that I’d hurl my body into the void if I even thought about eating one of those little pieces of chocolate. Staying on the cliff takes incredible focus—eyes down, no mistakes, don’t fuck up.

I had to earn every calorie I consumed. At the time I ate mostly salads and limited my dairy intake to shredded cheese. I only ate complex carbs like whole grains because they break down more slowly in the stomach, making you feel fuller longer. I’d only eat between noon and 8 p.m. because of intermittent fasting. The desire to avoid food until noon was so deeply ingrained that my stomach didn’t even grumble until midday.

Sometimes I’d tighten my eating window to 2-6 p.m. Sometimes though, I’d test my resolve and only eat dinner. Sometimes I didn’t eat at all. Once I didn’t eat for three days. They say it’s good for you, fasting. Supposedly there’s anti-aging benefits; when you starve your body, you force it to attack the older cells and generate new ones. I’d never spoken to a nutritionist about any of that, though. I still haven’t.

When I avoided food, I’d sometimes stare at my body and tell myself the second I ate or drank water, I would no longer be as skinny as I was right then. With every bite and every sip, my mind would weigh the calories and calculate my stomach expansion to determine the number of miles I’d need to run or the amount of pull ups I’d need to complete to rid myself of the food. I’d finish the equation and process the thoughts and motivate myself to run.

Time on the trail is slow time, and the Coopers Rock 50k is no different. There are long stretches when everything’s clicking and there’s nothing to occupy your mind. In those minutes, sometimes hours, your mind has a tendency to ruminate on anything and everything.

I keep my eyes on the trail in front of me and sink into my memory.

I joined the Marine Corps when I was 20 years old. All my friends had gone to college, but I didn’t have the grades for it, so I got a job at a factory instead. When I got fired, I had to call my mom to ask for rent money. She cried on the phone and said okay. I hung up and drove to the recruiting office. A couple months later I was on my way to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, California.

The Marine Corps loves running. Over the course of my seven-and-a-half-year career, men with more rank and power than me would relish in lining me and my fellow junior Marines into formations and running us for miles while singing cadences about Marine Corps history and killing people. I despised it. Running was a power flex for officers. My buddies and I rebelled by hitting the weight room and spending hundreds of dollars on Bodybuilding dot com, lifting heavier and heavier while we drank protein shakes and pre-workout and popped multivitamins and creatine and pills meant to increase your testosterone.

Lifting was another way to hyper-focus on my body. My body weight increased with the amount I could lift. In what felt like no time, I weighed approximately 230 pounds. I could bench press 305 pounds, deadlift over 400 pounds, and squat nearly 500 pounds. To maintain strength and size like that means eating. A lot. I ate thousands of calories a day—pretty much whatever I wanted—and lifted heavy and scoffed at officers with their trim runners’ bodies. Then I got out of the military and went to college.

For nearly eight years I was in a field where I was well-trained and disciplined. I held a job that prompted respect from folks I had never met—thank you for your service. Then suddenly, I was 27 years old, surrounded by 19-year-old young adults who, though nice enough, had totally different perspectives than mine. I didn’t fit in, and there weren’t many people I could relate to. I quickly felt othered, ostracized. I grew depressed and anxious. I felt like I was a failure who couldn’t make it in the real world.

I also dragged around a not-yet-realized PTSD diagnosis. Eventually I’d see a therapist and start to heal, but I didn’t feel like I had that option at the time because I was drowning in comparative suffering. In my mind, I wasn’t allowed to have PTSD or depression or anxiety because I had several friends who’d gone through so much worse than me. What would they think if I claimed to have PTSD? In my mind, they’d call me a faker—a phony, looking for some extra disability money every month. So, I did what I always did when I was depressed and frustrated: I took it out on my body.

I got out of the Marine Corps in 2015. By 2018, I was running for 30 minutes a day and still lifting. Soon after that, I was running for an hour every day and fitting in a lifting session when I felt like it. By the time I ran my first 50k in Minnesota, I had stopped lifting altogether.

Running was a way to occupy my body so I could process the thoughts plaguing me. It was a way to leave people and responsibility behind and enjoy some peace and quiet. It was a way to keep my weight in check while I began binging again. It was also a way to rebel against my Marine Corps identity, which I had grown to hate. I didn’t want to be seen as a Marine anymore; I just wanted to be another guy nobody looked twice at. So I ran off the size and strength and grew my hair out—the calling cards of my military self, left in a puddle of sweat somewhere behind me.

On the Coopers Rock trail, I trip and catch myself before I fall, pulling myself out of my thoughts. I check my gear and look around quicky to get my bearings. Refocused, I put my eyes down again and keep running.

After I left Kansas City, I moved into an apartment in Grand Forks, North Dakota across the street from an 8.6-mile loop called the Greenway. I ran the loop once or twice every morning without eating any food or drinking any water. (I ran early in the morning, which wasn’t in my eating window, after all.) I’d take off after my 4 a.m. wake-up, then I’d shower, pack my lunch, and walk one block to the brewery where I worked. I wouldn’t even think about touching food until noon. Stay the course, eyes down, focus.

Around this time, I began to consider bumping up from marathons to ultramarathons. I’d completed four or five marathons, mostly without eating or drinking anything the entire 26.2 miles. I realized I would never be fast enough to run a sub-three-hour marathon, which had been my goal. But I knew I could maintain a decent pace for a long period. I began to research what it took to run an ultra. One of the first things you learn when looking into running 30+ miles is that runners eat while they’re running. And not just gel packs and gummies. Some of them eat whole meals.

Fasting as an ultrarunner is almost unheard of. When you’re on the trail for 30 or 50 or even 100 miles, the body depletes its glycogen stores quickly. You have to eat a lot while you’re running to replace it, otherwise you’ll “bonk”—a silly word for “hit the wall,” when your body exhausts all of its glycogen and has to shift from burning the sugary fuel to burning fat. And fat breaks down much, much slower than glycogen. If you want to keep going the distance, you have to give your body simple sugars while you’re running. Which presented a unique dilemma for me, and my body.

I avoided sweets because even one cookie or ice cream cone would derail my carefully planned diet. One taste of something I “shouldn’t” have would lead to me binging over 10,000 calories in a matter of minutes. But now, if I wanted to be good at ultrarunning, I’d have to address my eating habits head on. I’d have to live with food I considered “bad,” not avoid it.

I started slowly, buying what I considered to be healthier versions of sugary snacks. I’d take off for long runs and tuck the snacks into a tiny storage belt I bought from the local running store. When I’d get close to 30 minutes on the trail, I’d pull out a snack and tell myself it’s okay, you need this, it’s okay and take careful bites. I began thinking of those snacks as fuel, not sweet treats that cheated my diet. Because I now needed these things, I didn’t feel the urge to binge like I had before. Before long, running wasn’t just a way to check out from the noise in my head—it was a way to eat really good food without feeling guilty or feeling the need to punish my body.

During the 50k at Coopers Rock State Park, I reach the base of an impossibly steep hill—the last segment. The path swoops left and right to lessen the grade, but it’s still steep enough to slow my run down to an open-stride hike. The rocks and roots are damp and slippery, so I keep my head down and my eyes peeled. After surviving four clean laps, it would be a real shame to have to drop from the race for a stupid fall only minutes from the finish line.

I check my watch—I’ve been running for just over four hours. I need to eat something every 30 minutes. I reach into one of the pockets of my Black Diamond running pack and pull out a blueberry Nature’s Bakery Fig Bar. The tiny snack is perfect for ultrarunners. It’s 200 calories, 38 grams of which are carbs, and it fits in the palm of your hand. I rip open the pack and start eating the bar.

When choosing the right running snacks, carbs are the name of the game. Your body needs simple sugars that break down into fuel quickly. I’ve always looked for snacks that have the highest number of carbs per calories.

Eating on the run is a science. Since you’re chewing, it’s tough to breathe through your mouth. You have to run slow enough to breathe through your nose—but not so slow that you’re no longer competitive. On top of that, your mouth is usually super dry because you’re constantly on the verge of dehydration. So, you have to sip water or electrolytes. My pack has holsters for two 16-ounce collapsible water bottles on my chest. Between chewing I crane my neck down so I can take a sip of orange Gatorade—80 calories and 22 grams of carbs per scoop, three scoops of powder mixed between two water bottles.

I finish the fig bar, stuff the trash into a pouch in my pack, and keep hiking up the incline.

After years of on-and-off dating and failed relationships, I finally met my wife, Becca, a Physician Assistant in Pittsburgh. When she was in her mid-twenties, Becca had become pregnant while working as a hairdresser in Nashville. She decided that she wanted more for her son, so she went back to school and got her degree. Then she got into a PA degree plan, a highly competitive, two-year program that only allows its students to miss two days of class. Through two degrees, she endured the judgmental stares of fellow students whose eyes would linger on her tattoos as they passed by her in the halls, on the little boy in her arms with toys to occupy him while she sat through college lectures.

To say I love and respect and admire my wife doesn’t even scratch the surface. She’s everything to me. She’s the only person I’ve ever been completely honest with when it comes to my disordered eating and body image issues.

And one of the many, many things she loves to do is cook.

Many nights I stand with her in the kitchen and offer to help. She always gives me a small task—quartering potatoes, washing rice, stirring sauce. Cooking is relaxing for her. She’s calm and confident as she spins from the oven to the sink and back in our tiny kitchen. She mixes and slices and samples the food, piecing together the puzzle step-by-step. Sometimes she stops to give the food a taste test. If it needs something, she’ll wrinkle her nose. If it’s perfect, she does a little dance in celebration. I watch and laugh and learn from her. She likes having me there, and I like witnessing food as a form of love and meditation.

Before I met Becca, I always managed to hide my food issues behind a veil by telling friends and family I was just eating healthy, or on a diet. It made sense to them; I’ve been an active and competitive person for years, so it stands to reason that I’d be careful about what I eat. But I always hid the struggle behind the supposed control. My disordered eating was the thing I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk about. And because I didn’t talk about it, it would disrupt my relationships with family and friends and potential lovers. But that all stopped when I met Becca.

As much abuse as I level against my body, I’ve learned to trust it when it comes to other people. Your body reacts when you meet someone new. We call it “instinct” or a “gut reaction,” but it all means the same thing. Your mind tells a story; your body tells the truth.

Becca and I hit it off right away. As we grew closer, I found myself being honest—insisting to myself that I be honest—when I’d have an eating episode. I started slowly by just being truthful about my disordered eating and addressing her questions or concerns. Then I’d tell her if I binged. She’d ask the right questions, questions that required vulnerability on my part, like, what were you feeling or thinking about when you started binging?

One night we were in her kitchen, playing around, when I made a joke about my weight in high school. I don’t remember what I said. I probably called myself a “fat boy” or something. But the joke flipped a switch in Becca. Her face went from happy and playful to concerned. What do you mean by that? she asked. I told her everything. I watched her heart break from the other side of the kitchen. These things I’d been carrying were dense and scary. But I was so used to them that it didn’t occur to me how awful they were. It took seeing Becca’s reaction to realize how entrenched the negative thoughts about my body had become. It was as if I’d been running for years through a treacherous crevasse, my eyes and attention wholly-focused on the two-or-three feet ahead of me. And it wasn’t until I found Becca that I thought to look up and marvel at the beauty around me.

The last one hundred yards of the last Coopers Rock loop is finally in sight. A stone and log staircase, with a sign that says, “Stairway to (Almost) Heaven,” is the last obstacle before the finish line comes into view. I’m not ashamed to walk up these stairs, head down and eyes scanning for any last-minute roots trying to snag me on the homestretch. I widen my stride and give the muscles in my calves a break. When I hit the top of the stairs, I bend over, take in a huge breath, and push on to the finish line. People cheer and wave me in and say things like hey man good job and you got the course record and congrats. I’m too tired to respond to them, but I’m grateful for their praise. I’m grateful that a few friends came to meet me at the finish line. And I’m grateful that the race is finally over.

I catch my breath and rub my stomach, imagining only for a moment how flat it must be after so much exertion. I grin from ear to ear, take a look around, and soak it all up. There are no mirrors out here, no scales to tell me how much I weigh, and no urge to punish my body—no urge to punish myself. Because my body is not an appendage separate from my mind, or a thing to focus my frustrations on. It’s the greatest instrument I’ll ever have, and it’s capable of extraordinary things. In this moment, I’m truly grateful for it.

I walk over to a table serving free burrito bowls to runners. One with everything, I say pleasantly. They load up a bowl with beef and cheese and lettuce and sour cream and salsa. I stop them right before they try to add the last ingredient though—crushed up Doritos. No thanks, I think to myself. I don’t eat that shit.

I was floating through the Milky Way when a cat jumped on my lap. Slammed back to earth—in this case, the backyard of a modest adobe home a few kilometers outside San Pedro de Atacama, Chile—I had to concede that at least I’d gotten my daily allotment of awe. For the previous hour, I’d watched the arc of shooting stars piercing Orion’s belt and skittering through the perpendicular lattice of the Southern Cross; after a short time, the shooting stars had been too numerous to count, an extraordinary thing considering that where I live spotting any shooting star at all is virtually impossible. When I go camping a few hours west of my home, if I see one shooting star I consider myself lucky. But I am in the Atacama Desert, staring straight up until my neck protests.

Here, time compresses. Not just the millions of years it’s taken to create this landscape. But my own eye-blink personal history, too. Here, I can bring a foundational evening from some forty-five years ago to precise recall: the smell of the summer night, a certain softness in the breeze. My father has woken me from deep sleep. There’s a meteor shower, he tells me. As he carries me to the open window, I ask him what that means. He points skyward in response. A flash of blue, and then another, reddish, then yellow. A night sky was black with little points of white. I hadn’t known until then that there were colored things there, too, nor things that streaked across the sky. Nor the fact that the sky is curved. I have never seen enough of it to know these things. We watch, silent, counting, thrilling. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

It’s hard to define, awe. But certainly we know when we feel it. It’s a rare thing, buried under the onslaught of daily routine and the indignities of, say, a red traffic light when we’re late for work. Our ego—that most human of qualities—screams at us: “I am the universe. The universe is me.” How dare an obstacle be thrown at my plans? Awe, ironically, slingshots us to the polar opposite sentiment which, it turns out, has precisely the same endpoint: I am the universe. The universe is me. But this time, such as in this place, with a cat burrowing into my lap as I turn my gaze from the sky, it’s an acknowledgement of my own insignificance even as I know that I am part of this great cosmos, made up of the same stuff: me, star, cat. We are all of a piece, denoting our limitlessness while also reinforcing our infinitesimal nature, both at once.

I am two months removed from my fiftieth birthday. I have endured a difficult year and so for this milestone birthday, I’ve requested of my family only one thing: time and space to explore on my own, to drop myself in one of earth’s most forbidding landscapes to allow it to subsume all that ails me. I want to know that my problems are very small. I want to return home a gentler person. I want to stand on a precipice or plop myself into the sand and gaze out over the millennia, to listen to the sound of the desert silence, to be changed. I want to stare into a sky unobstructed by light and cloud and humidity and see the heavens, just as I did that night so many years ago.

*          *          *

This part of the world demands superlatives, true, but it also, perhaps inevitably, invites cliché. Otherworldly, alien, lunar: these are the easy and ready-made adjectives for the Atacama. It is here, after all, where NASA tested its Mars rover, reckoning there was no better place on earth to replicate the Martian surface. We never outrun what troubles us, yes, though one imagines Mars an effective distance to try. I can’t survive on Mars, though. The Atacama is easier. Still, while traversing a place that defies easy description, the pull toward the overused becomes great. I am not immune to this and I find myself spouting such unimaginative phrases before I even touch the ground. Staring out the plane window on the flight from Santiago to Calama, my eye follows the forbidding brown and tinges of orange as they ripple toward the far horizon, a haziness in the air that I will soon come to understand is from the constant churning of dead sand whipped into funnels and sheets by the ever-present wind. Indeed, I’ll spend most of my days here clogged to the hilt, my inhalations a rhythmic whistling.

From the air, Calama is uninviting, an impression that doesn’t change much upon landing at its tiny airport. The moment I walk outside to my rental car, I can feel that there’s literally something in the air. The dust and wind, yes, but also a sensation as if I am little more than an ant desperately fleeing a cosmic magnifying glass, held without mercy by an unseen hand shifting its concentrated laser to bore into me no matter how scattershot my movements.

The drive to San Pedro only reinforces the feeling that I’ve landed on some other planet. Just outside the city, the horizon is studded with gargantuan turbines, looming creatures piercing the sky in slow, ominous turns—dozens of them, so close to the road you can see the lettering stenciling their columns. Coupled with the trajectory and speed of my car, the effect is to completely disorient. But this is a mere warm up to the disorientation from the vast bowl of desert that awaits: it’s almost impossible to make out distance and direction between here and San Pedro. Several times I’m convinced that my car is dying and only after panic do I realize I’m steeply climbing in altitude. A waypoint on the horizon, a beacon to measure progress, appears to stay fixed no matter how long one drives. Then it disappears into a shimmer of white, seemingly sucked into the sky, or the desert floor, and I become acutely aware of my own smallness, before it magically reappears and I try to reorient myself. But all the mechanisms for doing so, second nature back home, are obliterated here. I’m in a different universe. It’s thrilling, and terrifying, all at once.

After I arrive at the house where I’ll stay during my time in the Atacama, I immediately set out again. I get on Ruta 27, connecting this part of Chile with the pass at Jama into Argentina. The road climbs. The air thins. I haven’t seen anyone else for some time. I’m unsure how long; I haven’t yet made a habit of gauging how long a wait it might be before someone comes along should my rental car break down. I don’t yet realize that it’s not wise to simply consign myself to the terrible fate that awaits one dependent upon machine first, fellow human second, and then, ultimately, the cold indifference of the stars.

Eventually, I do see other people. But they’re inside a white van with a tour company logo emblazoned on it. And this van, I can’t help but note, has multiple, full-sized spare tires and is carrying containers on its roof: no doubt extra food, water, and other necessities should things go wrong. Should they, the driver most likely has the capability of calling co-workers for rescue. I, on the other hand, am armed only with a flip phone in a place that pulls no reception anyway. But this is all part of that awe thing again: throw yourself out there, give in to the grand places, breathe in a limitless sky. Easy in theory. In reality, in the Atacama, it’s not easy. I’ve come here precisely to feel insignificant, to be subsumed by vastness and emptiness. I’ve gotten that. But I’ve gotten it to such a degree that it’s terrifying, and I have to wonder now at my own recklessness.

Nevertheless, I pull off the paved road for the unpaved, drawn by the “Bolivia” sign and the fact that straight up, at 14,700 feet, in the shadow of snow-capped volcanoes, sits the border. I turn off my engine and step out. The ground crunches below my boots. I pick up a handful of pebbles and listen to the wind and the sand and the space between. My ears sting with the cold while my face burns from the sun. I walk. I am the only human on the planet. I am part of this and yet completely apart. I look up, see the snow on the tops of the volcanos, while the valley below blisters at almost one hundred degrees and so thoroughly desiccates the landscape that nothing grows or lives. And yet where I stand, there is life, the altiplano studded with tufts of grass, herds of vicuñas wandering the plain. Vicuñas have comically cute faces but can appear arrogant in their unthinking and unblinking adaptability. The searing heat, the thin air, the blinding cold; these elements are little to these animals, and their loping away from my car in vast herds is sweet and wonderful but a stark reminder of their utter indifference to any plight I might have to endure.

I know the mechanics of this. The snow up there is no different from the snow I get at home. Intellectually, I get that. But here intellectualism is a lodgepole at the back of my brain, a thing that gets in the way. Here, I live in the real, the actual, a liminal space usually inhabited only by infants and animals. Here, I absorb. I do not intellectualize. But I cannot help myself: it is snow. I know snow. Its miraculous wonders remain in my earliest memories: of stilled cities, of mundane shapes—car hoods and winter-denuded bushes. But I sit in a desert. I have thrown myself into elements before: ocean, jungle, banks of snow and driving rain. Each reminds you that you are a visitor, a granule to be buffeted. You steady yourself, try not to impose, let your body move with the rhythms of elements much bigger and stronger. You ask permission. All here, too. But this is different. I try to meld myself with this sere landscape. I gleefully allow its passage into my pockets and ear canals and nasal passages. But it remains elusive: how can this place host two such opposables simultaneously?

Some of my favorite memories involve days of damp and cool fog in sodden, gray places; the Vigeland sculpture garden in Oslo, for instance: nude gray figures in various tormented poses speckled with rain and snow. Or the Place Royale in Brussels, in muted colors, the sky the color of a battleship’s hull and the cobbles beneath my feet offering variation only in their pockets of accumulated rain; the way they reflect barely perceptible shading in the slithering sheet of cloud. Or a rock beach on the North Sea when everyone wears sweaters and the wind whips and the sky and sea are the same slate color, rendering it impossible to discern where one ends and the other begins. Why do these appeal to me so much? I realize now, here in the Atacama, that those places carried life in their wind and skies—literally. Distended clouds and air swollen with moisture hold fecundity. We seek life, obviously and understandably, in the most rudimentary way. Deep within us, embedded by thousands of years of evolutionary thrust. But it is psychological and emotional as well: we respond to the laughter of a child and the bullhorn yellow of a flower asserting itself from a sliver of cracked cement. So why then my attraction to the barren Atacama? Back home, if I were to plunge my fingers into cool soil and drop a seed, the black earth set deeply beneath my fingernails, the elements will cohere and life will come. Here, amidst air with no moisture, on sand with nothing but more of itself, there will be none of that. It has taken millions of years to transform this place to what it is now. Everything here suggests it will still be like this in another million years. We look to life, for life. We look to transformation. But when there is none? Just maybe that, ironically, is the most life-affirming thing imaginable.

I trace my finger in the rocks and sand, carving my name. No different than scratching in wet cement: an impress to prove that I was here, some highly ineffectual shot at immortality. But then I watch as my name sweeps away in a gust. I am small. Here, I simply am. There is no reckoning. No figuring things out, I tell myself. The mind goes empty. Time disappears. I want to stay, perhaps never leave.

There are times and places when pulling away, giving it up, feel almost impossible—the embrace of a first love or the lap of waves replicating our first sentience; the womb itself. We get so few of these moments, so we cling to them, and it’s why the decision to leave is such a difficult one. It’s an acknowledgement that all things—beauty, comfort, excitement, love—are fleeting. I don’t know how many minutes or hours have elapsed when I float back to my car and make my way again.

The next day, staring at 10,000-year-old petroglyphs, it’s the same thing, and also very different. Yes, I am fleeting. We all are. And yet the record exists. This is another way the Atacama both strips and preserves. What ekes its way here can remain—a bleached bone, perhaps, or a preserved mummy or, in the case of the petroglyphs at Yerbas Buenas, a canvas of art and message: alpaca, llama, flamingo, monkey (despite there being no monkeys in this area; never have been). Back home, water will oxidize and transform and traces will be obliterated in short time. Here, the picture stays just as it was when it was created, a span as inconceivable as the beginning of time and yet as near to me as the first night I looked into the sky and saw what was really there.

Yerbas Buenas is reached after a forty-minute drive from the main road on an aggressively unpaved one. A steady climb above 11,000 feet. Luckily for me, the growling machine that has taken me to Yerbas Buenas has done its work, allowing me to beat back the lingering fear that the engine, hammered by unrelenting sun, taxed by high altitude and dizzying inclines, jarred and rattled by roads seared into undulating chunks of cement, will simply quit. There’s the matter of the brakes, too: after white-knuckling straight up a mountain or volcano, eventually I plateau and that means coming down the other side—narrow, curving roads where one wrong turn can send me hurtling out of control. I have to mash those brakes hard and I’m assuming all that coursing adrenaline is somehow felt by this car to the point where it, too, shaken and terrified, decides it will simply give it all up and conk out.

But to my immense relief, I’ve made it, just as the Atacamenos who created these glorious petroglyphs had been here, back sometime around 8,000 B.C. Again, I tell myself: I don’t matter in the face of this, and that is a good thing. If I don’t matter, what then of the problems that have pushed me to seek solace here? There is no invisible barrier in the desert to keep them out. It’s just that this austere and limitless place acts as a sort of shrinking serum, taking those problems and troubles and squeezing them into something much smaller and concentrated, as opposed to living, breathing elements that back home expand to fill every corner of one’s familiar life and surroundings. Just as I had discovered earlier at the confluence of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, here, too, I am the wind. I am the sand. And I am, ultimately, the stars as well.

I will leave. Here. Chile. Earth. I’ll be gone. And that is fine.

In the expanse of a lifetime, you show up, you leave an impress of some kind (or hope to, like the makers of this art I gape at now) and then you exit.

It’s what happens in between in that very finite space that defines whether we are simply screaming into a void, mere vibrations that dissipate without ever reaching another’s ears or heart or soul. Or, if we are lucky, our utterances find a landing spot, no matter how fleeting. Next to a carving of a very pregnant llama, a deep cream-colored groove of line hewn into the red rock, I speak a wish into the wind, unsure if it will reach the ears of another, shuttled across this red earth along the icy breeze. The weather dictates all in these parts: heat, cold, wind—all the unrelenting elements that carve this landscape, and I think yet again about my internal landscape, also carved and sculpted by forces that still feel larger than I am but that are shrinking by the moment.

But now, back in my rented space outside San Pedro, as I prepare my dinner with all the windows open, I’m not sure I can feel more profoundly grateful and content to be in this place at this time. The wind rattles through, slaying the last remnants of daytime heat. I’m pleasantly buzzed from a bottle of Chilean red, product of one of the vineyards I passed through just a few days earlier from Santiago to the coastal city of Valparaiso. After a satisfying meal, and the temperature dropping considerably, it’s a return to the backyard to take in the overhead light show. But it’s not nearly as spectacular this evening. Orion’s belt still shines from its prominent position, but to the west, the wash of reds and oranges of the Milky Way appears smudged. I wonder if the periodic flashes of light on the far horizon are in some way related. Unless I’m going mad, they look very much like lightning flashes. But is such a thing possible here, in the driest place on earth? I know that the Licancabur Volcano, stretching just shy of 20,000 feet elevation and straight ahead to where I’m staring, is snow-capped just about all year. But these flashes look like the product of a serious rainstorm.

It’s the next day, when I investigate, that I find out that what I had been seeing were in fact lightning flashes, residue of massive storms originating from the humid exhalations of the Amazon, sent sweeping over La Paz and Sucre to here, yanked toward the line of the Andes and the coast by the Humboldt Pacific current to thrash against the snow-capped cones and burn themselves out in torrents. In most years, the volcanic stretch of the northern Andes keeps its formidable line intact and renders these storms little more than the flashing I’ve observed. Indeed, a mere forty miles away, lifetime precipitation has been measured in millimeters, with only three years in the last half century measuring any precipitation at all. In some years, however, the storms manage to snake their way over the line of demarcation near San Pedro and pour their contents into the valley, making mud of the sand and filling homes with water. But it’s never long before the dust devils are active again, choking the otherwise crystalline sky with fine particulates that embed their way into every crack and crevice.

*          *          *

The next night, I head into San Pedro and walk the dusty streets to Las Delicias de Carmen, a small restaurant off the main drag: low-slung, whitewashed adobe buildings melding in a long view with the valleys and volcanoes that ring it. I know when I enter that I’m in good hands: a woman at the stove, a crescent of black sweat-soaked hair adhered to her forehead—Carmen, I am guessing. She looks like every mother everywhere: a woman who sustains, who does it from recipes handed down through generations. I am venerating a stereotype, I know, and yet in this one is something every human being, stripped to the essentials, needs to harbor in some deep recess. She is nourishment incarnate.

I order choclo, a mishmash of seemingly incongruous ingredients in a crock—corn pudding, chunks of chicken and pork, an egg cooked to a hard yolk, a single black olive. The food is so perfect, as is the cool breeze shooting through the rafters, setting the stuffed vicuñas hanging from the ceiling to sway, underscored by the indigenous music piping through the speakers. It’s a meal I will never forget. I need not tell myself that I was here, for I am here. Right now. And I cannot forget that. It’s a gift.

I can’t resurrect being five years old, looking into the night sky for the first time while my father holds me. I realize now that I don’t need to. I have this meal. I have this place. I can go back home.

Yes, I am small, and in that smallness, I am the universe.

About four years ago I first encountered Kyle Seibel’s work while volunteering with this publication (Wrath-Bearing Tree). He submitted a poignant animated story, “Lovebirds,” which surprised and delighted me. It is unusual to experience surprise let alone delight at my age when encountering new fiction. This was during COVID. A vignette that didn’t beat you over the head with meaning, the story unfolded in a way that allowed the reader to experience the ups and the downs (the hope and the heartbreak) without judgement. I enjoyed it greatly.

So it was that I became greatly excited when Kyle announced that it was part of a book and that the book, Hey You Assholes, had a publisher. That was a couple years later, maybe 2022 or 2023. I bought five copies. The publisher shuttered and I got no books.

Fast forward to early March of this year, when between solicitations for money for progressive and reactionary causes I found an email from Kyle telling me that the book had found a new home and in fact was out in paperback.

I’m glad that there are still some honorable (and wise!) publishers out there, and that Kyle found one. Kyle sent me a copy of Hey You Assholes, which I read with such pleasure that I was moved to write this review. If some day he ever finds the address of the publisher who stiffed him and me, I only hope that he lets me know and has a seat in the car for when we go on an appropriately misbegotten but emotionally necessary mission of vengeance.

Kyle’s stories have that thing every writer hopes for: a voice, a distinct identity, and a message. Some of the stories in Hey You Assholes are very short, no more than a couple pages, snapshots of some weird or messed up situation. Others are proper short stories with a beginning, middle and end. All of them bang.

He writes the kind of story I prefer in short fiction; snapshots of an emotion or a situation. Usually the situation is confused and involves a professional or personal relationship; someone wants something that another person can’t or won’t give. Ambition and love thwarted. Few of the stories are, like “Lovebirds,” optimistic or encouraging; most of them follow people who derail themselves or who find themselves betrayed. Many of Seibel’s protagonists remind me of the main character and narrator in Denis Johnson’s Jesus Son who just keeps fucking up, no matter how hard he wants to succeed and improve. But they don’t give up.

Why would I review this for WBT? Have we turned into another literary magazine, adrift from our original purpose and mission? Absolutely not; Hey You Assholes was written by a veteran (Seibel was in the Navy) and is full of stories set on ships and in garrison; many characters and interactions are informed by the mechanical logic of the service, which is a time-honored fabric by which to weave the tapestry that is a person’s experience of life. Reading about life on a boat, or on the west coast of California, one cannot help but think that these stories would be just at home in Carthage or Athens; different settings for the wandering, weird life one encounters while navigating a wandering and weird world.

It took me the better part of a Sunday to read Hey You Assholes, and if you like books the way I do, you won’t regret it. If you’re strapped for time, keep it by your bedside and read a story or two before going to bed. It will make you laugh, and it will make you think. It will also support a good publisher, which apparently is an increasingly rare thing in this crazy world. In case you need more reasons to buy an awesome book.

Black and White Noah

Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures (PR&DC) is unafraid to be funny about serious subjects. Can you tell us some of the books that inspired you to write something as unsettling and wry as PR&DC? Or do you see it as a unique book in the history of military literature? Or is “military literature” even a genre of literature?

The humour of PR&DC has been one of the hardest things to pitch – the cover looks like a conventional war story; the back cover makes it sound like a surrealistic thriller. And it is those things. But it’s also a profoundly satirical book. All of the officer class is lampooned. I’m pretty sure the Colonels merge in a blur of light, transforming into a four-headed snake, which slithers up a vent. The pranks, the teasing, the playful barbs: we had to make war funny to survive it. Naturally, the humour darkens until it feels like violence. Naturally, the laughing makes us ache and feel like grabbing a shower after. Naturally, this was a thing we all needed to undo when we got home, so that sacred things could become sacred again.

One of my inspirations here is Slaughterhouse V, where Vonnegut uses the device of “getting unstuck in time” to undermine the chronology. Once he even erases the war altogether, briefly. This makes perfect sense to me. Our psyches circle traumatic experiences like unflushable turds whirling. You’re figuring out which brand of smoked tofu you prefer when your body decides it’s back in the war, seizes up; everyone’s too close; you can club your way past six or seven civvies easy, using a jug of maple syrup for a mace, leap the checkout and dodge the police by scurrying up a tree. Right there in that hippie organic supermarket, your breathing has gone apeshit and your heart is hammering out of your chest. So yeah, trauma is your very own fucking time machine so why not put one into the story, in the interest of telling the truth?

Naturally, I could point to Catch 22 as the classic military satire, again with its loops and loops. The bureaucracy forever pushing the yardsticks back. There’s one scene in PR&DC, an interrogation, which is basically an homage to Catch 22, though I don’t have the patience to circle around so much as Heller circled, and I inverted the logic: the main character Yossarian doesn’t want to embark on another bombing run since he wants to be free of the fear of death. Jones, in my book, fears death (the rocket attacks, the Taser Rapist, the Shit Beast) but not as much as he fears killing. Both Yossarian and Jones are pulled inexorably into deeper complicity with the war, and so lose their agency to the bureaucratic mechanisms that give the war its shape.

All that to say PR&DC is part of a longer humanist conversation about war, which will and must continue so long as war distorts us. So, forever.

PR&DC is uncannily prescient when it comes to our current fitness moment, to somehow appreciate its outsize role on military installations and Global War on Terror (GWOT) culture. What role do you see physical fitness playing in this novel? How does this connect to your own experiences with mental health?

On one hand there’s the Army conditioning, exemplified by the “Herculean abs” of the General himself, who promotes fitness as the means to better, saner, stronger soldiers, who can work longer hours, with worse food and less sleep. Others train to boost personal power, dominate others, never feel like a victim again. Another lifts because he feels like his head is cracking apart, to numb and exhaust the body, to sleep without dreams. There’s a lot of moving pieces in war – a lot of force flowing. The civilians and soldiers both get swept up into the momentum, become part of the mechanism, or its output. So we train to feel in control of something even if our dominion extends no farther than our grasp. One problem with the War On Terror is we often felt we were fighting shadows. No wonder we needed to lift literal concrete.

Ask my comrades who killed themselves how inextricable fitness is from mental health. It still isn’t enough, naturally, but even the most testosterone-poisoned soldier, girded with fantasies of invincibility, permits himself to train the body. Meanwhile he scoffs imperiously at therapy, believing the mind is the only muscle born strong. Nagging feelings follow after the war – he drinks. To avoid his rages, his wife takes the kids away. Alone, he drinks harder – life becomes a wheel of grinding mirrors. He takes a long long bath and stuffs the shotgun in his mouth.

In a distant forest, we hear the recoil of our comrade’s death – birds leap from their branches. So I started to train with the fallen logs. No matter the cascade of bark chips and centipedes. Lunge and circle the maple with a knobby trunk on the shoulder – squat a stump. I lined the logs up side by side like fallen soldiers. Other veterans started to join me on these workouts, and so the log gym was born, a shrine.

Why do you think so much military fiction tends to be strictly realistic or tend toward realism?

Because military service prunes creativity. That explains why my students at the École Militaire are trying to develop it so hard – a necessary skill for high leadership, but scandalous for underlings. If the purpose of art is to create emotions, than who is less qualified than the soldier, whose culture demands swift emotional amputation, often self-administered? They worked hard to make us machines. The problem is it doesn’t always take, or the life force cracks the sidewalk, like a stubborn flower. This is why the war-poet is a rare thing: the soldier who insisted on remaining whole.

I can expand further: you can describe horrors in detail but only the ones who’ve also seen horrors know how it feels. Naturally, in describing the emotions too obviously the writing gets heavy-handed, showing. If you want to tell a story with larger-than-life emotions, than you may have to break the rules. And how boring, anyway, to create a world entirely from your mind, like a book, and bind yourself in the same constraints as our tedious earth. Imagination is for breaking cages. That’s one of the ways we took ourselves out of the war, by living it half in our heads. So, in my book I wanted the reader to be always wondering, “is this the real part or made up?”

You remember that scene in Full Metal Jacket where the soldiers, so callously, dress up (and even name) one of the fallen enemies? Soldiers often engage in this type of macabre puppetry, yet the war-writer wants to work with a bit more respect and self-awareness than this. All this realism makes things feel more solemn, more like Hemingway. But soldiers aren’t solemn.

The current American vice president dismissed the role of other, non-U.S. countries in GWOT. The current American president dismisses Canada as a sovereign nation. How do you see PR&DC as part of this conversation? Or do you?

Once upon a time, America was the light. You intervened all over the world and stood against dictators, mashed democracy down throats because, ironically, freedom mattered. We forgave you that part of the American dream where you all wanted to be idiot billionaires who lived without consequence – there’s always someone else to blame. Now I slap anyone who cracks a 51^st state joke. Nobody’s fucking laughing. My people went to war when the planes struck the towers and America called on us. I fought alongside my American brothers in Afghanistan – fully integrated into an international force. I sent helicopters to pick up your wounded.

The news never reached Vance that other countries fought in your wars, despite the fucking Wikipedia article. Or pick up a copy of my book if you want to feel it. Make America Curious Again – you can start by learning who lost legs when those roadside bombs burst. How we lost friends and it cracked our minds like overpriced eggs. How, when we watered the desert with our blood for more than ten years, we killed for you over and over. And we died again and again.

America has suffered history’s greatest con – only the idiot billionaires will escape consequence – the rest will pay the price. The meeting with President Zelensky showed the world that Trump is Putin’s ass-puppet. Only the dimmest refuse to see this. Meanwhile, that great light that once lit the world has guttered.

I know American veterans still cling to honour. The world sorely needs your leadership to overthrow your ludicrous pirate-king, who so gleefully sold your country to Russia. Meanwhile, the idiot-billionaire class divvies the spoils, and, in a climax of irony, calls the working people “parasites.”

Ask any Canadian, particularly the veterans who fought in your wars, how they feel.

It’s quite simple. You betrayed us.

I especially enjoyed how PR&DC captures the sense that we already know what is going to happen in a war story, but knowledge of the event beforehand doesn’t make it any less surprising. It also is stuck on one of the central facts of war: We kill people in them. Why do you think this is difficult for people to get their head around? What does it say about people? Should we celebrate our willful ignorance or condemn it?

Yes, the killing isn’t the surprise. It’s what happens after the killing, when the killed don’t stay properly dead. We developed all these tools so that we wouldn’t feel the grief: they weren’t even humans, just blurry, pixelated blobs. So sure, foreshadow is one of the tricks up the sleeve, but I wanted a proper haunting, rainbow handkerchiefs for miles, a ghost that plagues the story and the point of telling. The killing isn’t the surprise at all. The grief is the surprise.

I remember when I came back from Afghanistan and went back to school for my MA. Many of my colleagues in peaceful Ottawa questioned my service, like there was no way military service of any sort could be honourable, even to aid a then-staunch ally. “What’s the point of having a military?” they wondered. “The US will protect us.” Some bleated that they believed in peace. I shake my head – no one wants peace harder than a soldier.

Now our old protector is gone and Canada eats the bitter pill of its own weakness. I personally don’t believe in war but I went to make tough choices that only a feeling human could navigate, not a killbot. After, I helped create training modules for officers on the ethics of drone war.

Certainly, wars for oil or precious minerals are an abomination of morality. Afghanistan, though? After 9/11, overthrowing the (ruthless, backward) Taliban for sheltering Al-Qaeda was justified. Only after a year or two in the war did things start to get fucked up, when the war became a bizarre act of post-colonial nation-building. We should have left that place long ago. Or stayed forever.

All that to say, keeping your hands clean in life is a tremendous privilege. Everyone who has a problem with my service can go fuck his hat.

We noticed a lot of word play and fascination with naming throughout. Can you expand on the importance of nick names and naming in art and the military? Why did you choose to include boxes that include the definitions of words not usually defined in military manuals?

The book functions as a sort of geometric proof on the theme of dehumanization. So when the narrator meets Noah, the “monster,” the steps towards shared humanity are small: first, gender. Second, name. Third, an exchange of stories. And so forth, in little nibbles, until Jones must accept Noah’s humanity (and indeed, friendship).

The honourable Major, concerned that killing is becoming “too easy,” insists that all “targets” be given human names. At the beginning, the name-game achieves its purpose, with semi-plausible names chosen for the drone-strike victims. But soon these names devolve into the names of famous betrayers, and eventually, in the hyper-sexualized language of the killing, the targets are all given “fuckable” names, like pornstars.

Your pirate king, Putin’s ass-puppet, plays the name-game very well. He knows the power of the cruel, undermining nickname, or the facetious sub-title, savage soundbytes. The bully’s oldest trick: these names plant seeds in people’s minds.

You may also notice the fun I have with my own name. For the last decade, this shitty, ubiquitous name has done me no favours getting traction as a writer. Indeed, it’s hard to compete on Google with Matt Jones, NFL quarterback or Matt Jones, cancer researcher or Matt Jones, homicidal madman. So I had to own it, in the book – my common-ass name becomes a way for me to speak for an experience beyond myself. We are everyone. We are legion.

I enjoyed writing those little flash-fiction boxes, allowing me to unpack complex issues like “rules of engagement” or “escalation of force” for a civilian reader in a way that appeared, visually, bureaucratic, like a military memo. I also appreciate that my readers, like me, have an attention span of twelve seconds so those formal interruptions give the mind a pause, and allow me to dodge a boring info-dump. Finally, this also became a place I could subvert – the boxes, through edits, became wildly poetic spaces, sometimes confessional, meta-narrative critiques, and/or zones of play.

Monsters play a large role in PR&DC, different kinds of monsters, robotic, human, and monster monsters. Where did this interest in the monstrous come from? Do you see it as an allegory or as part of a certain literary tradition? Why Sasquatch?

I think it’s a bit too tidy to reduce my Sasquatch to an allegory or hallucination – Noah needs to be all these things and also more. One of my most enjoyable games I played writing this book was to prolong this debate as long as possible: is he real?

The funny thing is – none of the characters in books are real. I made everyone up; even the Jones character is a composite of better, gentler humans, with a slice of a younger Matt thrown in. I took the Major’s beauty from a friend who killed herself; her drive from a soldier I admired; her ethics from another officer. Literally every character in every novel is a word-puppet dancing on sentence strings, so let’s not get it twisted.

The danger of a non-human character is naturally that it will break the suspension of disbelief and readers will pop out of the book with sour looks on their faces like they smelled a fart. I say, if you want to write a character that doesn’t seem real you have to double, nay triple, your efforts to make them real. Noah has a voice, a history, a mythology, a minutely described body.

And indeed, without him, it would just be a grizzly war story with scene after scene of heartbreaking ultraviolence. It’s not the kind of book I’d like to read and I doubt I would have survived writing it. I wrote Noah to tell the story honestly. I wrote Noah because he’s real.

Hold onto your asses: Jung writes about “the shadow” as the part of our own psyche that we frantically repress. So, as dudes we might repress our weakness or our cowardice or our kinks, or anything else culture said was wrong. Our efforts to hide our terrible qualities backfire; the things we flushed into the poo pond resurface; Guantanamo Bay lurks just over the horizon.

You might say the post-colonial legacy is a shadow of America. You might say Canada’s is a smug, sanctimonious pacifism. You might say the fact they got conned is a shadow of MAGA. Noah takes it one step further – his shadow threatens to overwhelm him constantly, but this is simply life. That is me writing this and you reading this. Individual level but also our nations and institutions.

It’s the denial of the shadow that fucks us up. It’s the successful integration that indicates we’ve grown wise and let me argue this is the challenge of veterans everywhere. Our massive shadows, that deep world-weariness, the cynicism, the black humour, the contempt for softness: it’s nearly impossible to integrate. That’s why coming home is so hard.

The deployment no-fraternization policy plays a large role in PR&DC. So does sex. Why have there been so few military books concerned with sex? Or willing to talk about it in the honest ways that PR&DC does?

“Killing was quotidian, but touch was taboo.” Killing was right and just and true, something that “made a difference.” Meanwhile, even married couples, deployed together, were expected to maintain professional distance, Kevlar chastity belts. Not even allowed to soothe each other.

Science says monkeys fed from bottles dangling from wire frames will always prefer the metal skeleton wrapped in fur over bare steel. History says every time we dam the life-impulse it explodes into something nastier – the chastity of some infamous Catholic priests.

When I wrote PR&DC, it was under the working title “Drones.” On one hand, yeah, I was nodding to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. On the other, it was to us – the humans – who weren’t actually bees or ants in a hive, not controlled by the hive queen’s megamind. A drone follows orders; a soldier, often, doesn’t. A drone can kill without grief; a soldier, can’t.

Military culture strives to silence those empathy-producing nodes in our minds that inhibit the killing. A human being is more than a bundle of memorized processes that make murder easy. We are more than complex weapons, speaking in a sanitized language, feeling nothing. That’s how lovemaking became a radical act. How it became sacred.

PR&DC makes use of glossaries and helpfully defines military terms throughout, but also seems to be caught on an essential failure to communicate on the part of all the characters, maybe starting with the drones themselves. Everyone often feels very lonely even though they are together all the time. Why? How come many veterans tend to remember deployments as moments when they were not lonely?

Some soldiers can’t get enough of war. They keep running back to it, like a rat to electrified cheese. Perhaps because the civilian world is constantly screaming at soldiers to expose their emotional worlds, and by the time the soldier has a tour or two under his belt there’s a whole iceberg of pain under the surface. But one can continue to incubate in the cocoon of the war, surrounded by other numbed-out dudes, and so feel nothing forever. Or this is the fantasy, until the soldier’s personal life finally intrudes on his working life, the family stands in for the shadow, embodying the repressed parts of self, and spills into the waking world.

Or I’m projecting the loneliness thing. Maybe I was lonely in war because I was an empath who got lost, took the wrong plane, and ended up on Afghanistan by mistake. So naturally, being surrounded by shut-down humans is lonely. Or maybe I was lonely in war because I spent most of my twenties physically enormous and so loneliness is a wound I carry everywhere. Or blame the no-fraternization policy and the way we starved for touch for no reason. The walls they set up between us. Or maybe I worked the night shift, so the day-worker infrastructure didn’t accommodate. Or maybe the most acceptable pastimes – video games, drinking, gambling, porn – are profoundly numbing and disconnecting.

I always feel stupid saying “trigger warning” as I promote this book, since there’s a freakin’ drone on the cover, but there is also non-sacred sex: a brutal predator who preys on men. There’s one character who seems to go willingly into this situation, showing up a certain place and time, Stockholm syndrome. That probably seems impossible until you take a good look at America as the idiot billionaires busily dismantle the protections for the working class. I saw on the news last week they shut down the Department of Education. Because the stupefaction of the people was only mostly complete, so I guess you needed a little shove. The MAGAs are right on the cusp now of realizing they’ve been duped, but look how they cum so obligingly, and beg for a second and then a third round, and shout down anyone who tries to intervene in their ongoing rape.

Did I mention Canada has no interest in joining your idiocracy?

I too have been haunted by the image of blurry bodies running away from our drones on Tactical Operation Centre (TOC) screens. Thank you for having the courage to see through this story of one person on the far side of the screen. It couldn’t have been easy to write something as human and delightfully strange as PR&DC after a deployment experience you yourself describe as “an empty lake with jagged edges where nothing grows.” Do you have any words of advice for any writers just starting out on this journey? Whether back from a war long ago or at the front line (or screen) of one right now?

For veterans who want to write: any new craft takes seven years for mastery – there are no shortcuts. I don’t give two shits if your Commanding Officer praised your Progress Evaluation Reports, or your boss gave you a hundred attaboys for your incisive memos. Attend workshops (mine is monthly, international, by-donation) and read books on craft. Bounce your ideas off other writers and take their feedback. Go back to school. Read every book in your genre. Stop flexing in the mirror and try to look yourself in the eyes. Maybe you keep sliding away from yourself. Maybe along the path you became an emotional cripple, too. Water your withered wit with therapy, meditation, time in nature.

The goal, at some point, is to transition from being a veteran who writes, into a writer who veterans. Somewhere along the path you’ll find that writing, like any form of creativity, is one of the paths to protect and foster your mental health, too. You’ll get so used to working through the knots in your mind that when you finally sack up and sit in front of the therapist, you’ll chunder a spray of trauma, half-digested hotdog, and pure healing. I used that last oxford comma because I’m still pissed off at America.

You don’t go into war with just a grenade, or just a sniper rifle – you want the best tool for the situation. Grammar is the same. Read “Eats Shoots and Leaves” and master the whole grammar toolbox; thank me after. Stab yourself in the leg with a ballpoint pen whenever you stumble into a comma splice, or let a lazy double hyphen replace a dash. When you read a book let a part of your mind hang loose, watching, observing, noting, and carefully stealing twigs. Soon you will discover all of life is a book and a sneaky magpie within builds a nest.

I mentioned Noah, in PR&DC, is the only character who’s real. He’s also one of the main storytellers. Finally, he suffers enough and gives up the craft. He throws a soggy, severed arm at the narrator and growls: “Stories don’t bring people back to life.”

If you’ve lost some friends to war or suicide or whatever else, let me repeat that it doesn’t matter how good you get in craft – those friends are gone. “But I just want to see them one more time,” you say. Fine, do whatever the fuck you want. I know from experience you’ll be lonelier after. Maybe you gotta dig your friend up a few hundred times and bury them over and over to accept they’re gone. Maybe you need to make a shrine like I did.

Don’t let your writing give you an excuse not to heal. Stories don’t bring people back to life.

Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures is available for purchase on Amazon.

Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
Thomas Wolfe

Part One

Helen

The temperature on this Tuesday morning in Grants Pass, Oregon, is edging up to ninety degrees as Helen Cruz and Justin Wallace enter the J Street Camp. The cloudless sky is a glazed, pale blue. Not surprising weather for late August, Helen knows. She pulls a black wagon carrying sixty sack lunches and a shopping bag of plums provided by the St. Vincent de Paul Society, where she volunteers once a week to distribute food to the homeless people quartered here. Justin, a tall, corpulent forty-year-old with a shaved head, carries himself with the muscular stride that hints of his high school sports years, before his first psychotic episode. He takes a handful of sacks from the wagon and offers them to whomever he sees, squinting against a dust-laden wind blowing across the camp. Want a sandwich? he says in a nasal tone. Helen watches him. They were both homeless when they met in 2020 outside the BottleDrop, a recycling center frequented by homeless people on Rogue River Highway, across the street from where they live at a Pentecostal church, the Bethel Christian Center. The BottleDrop processes only 350 aluminum cans or bottles from any one person per day. That afternoon, Justin had many more than that. He recycled what he was allowed and then asked Helen to redeem the rest. When she came out, she handed him his money and they began to hang out.

She feels proud of him today. Normally, he doesn’t like to leave their room. Helen can’t imagine being in his head and dealing with whatever crazy thoughts are there. When they were homeless together, Justin would just walk and never stop until the soles of his shoes wore off, his feet bloody. He heard voices and strange sounds, saw faces he thought were ghosts. The meds he takes now have reduced the hallucinations but they knock him out and increase his appetite. He weighs more than 200 pounds. His lethargy drives her to distraction. She works cleaning houses and barely makes enough to support herself. She can’t continue providing for him and his cousin, thirty-four-year-old Jessica, who lives with them and their two dogs. Jessica doesn’t work, but she helps around the church and sometimes goes out with Helen to clean houses.

A woman shouts Helen’s name. Hi, hon, Helen yells back in a scratchy, sandpaper voice. She has a determined stride despite her bad knees. The wind tosses her thick brown hair. Her eyes sweep the camp. She notices the wire fence surrounding it. Only one way in. Isn’t that a fire hazard? she wonders. A lone police camera atop a pole surveys everything beneath it. Sun-bleached tents pitched on dead grass and stony ground rise above a turmoil of blankets, empty plastic water bottles, buckets, crates, bicycles, plastic bags, and whining puppies—the chaos of untethered lives holding onto scraps. Bits of burnt aluminum from fentanyl users. A dog nicknamed Fenty licks a scrap. A tall, lean man carefully rakes the ground outside his tent, a task he once might have taken for granted in the yard of a house he owned.

Helen notices that most of the tents stand against the fence. She gets that. A lot of these people have been in prison. They don’t want to be exposed and have someone walk up behind them. The fence covers their back. When she lived on the street she knew whom to be with, whom to trust, absolutely. Word of mouth. She knew. She approaches a man wearing a dusty pair of blue jeans slung low on his hips. No shirt, a patchwork of beard along his jaw and chin. Lean, deeply tanned, ribs showing. His fingers a roadmap of tobacco stains.

Are you guys hungry? I got sack lunches, Helen tells him. Ham and cheese.

Of course, thank you.

You’re very welcome. Got some plums here.

Heat hasn’t changed.

Supposed to cool off tomorrow, Helen says.

You know what we’re calling this place?

What?

The JCC. The J Street Concentration Camp.

Helen smirks. One of the wagon tires sinks into a hole and she jerks it forward. She wonders where she would pitch a tent here. By the fence like everyone else. She never wants to find out, but after this morning who knows? A blank slate of a man—a big dude with short hair and glasses—blew a hole in her day. He spoke to her in a steady, reedy voicethat revealed nothing more than the words coming out of his mouth, none of them good. Told her that she, Justin, and Jessica had to leave the church where they have worked as live-in caretakers for almost three years, and find other accommodations. The man, an overseer with the Pentecostal Church of God headquarters in Drain, Oregon, more than an hour north of Grants Pass, said church bylaws do not allow anyone other than the pastor to live on the property. The pastor, Thomas Moore, had made an error allowing them to stay, the man said. A hint of annoyance crept into his voice. Before he left, he told Helen to clear out an old stove and assorted plastic containers outside her room that Pastor Moore himself had asked her to put out for garbage pickup.

Helen watched the man drive off. She always understood that she, Justin, and Jessica couldn’t live in the church forever. Sooner or later she knew they’d have to leave, especially after Pastor Moore left to live with his new wife in her house fifty miles outside of town. They had met at the church earlier that summer. She sings in the choir. Neither one youngsters. Pastor Moore is seventy-three years old and his new wife is close to that. A widow, and then she met him. Married quick aware that at their age they had nothing to gain by waiting. Grinning and laughing all the time now like kids. A little too preoccupied, Helen imagines, to worry about her, Justin, and Jessica.

She doesn’t know what to do. Jessica has no one but a bunch of ex-boyfriends worth no more than the air they breathe. Justin has three daughters; one of them lives in an apartment near the church. One thousand dollars a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Her husband works, and she has a part time job. Car payments. Electricity and gas. It’s hard. They earn too much to receive food stamps but not enough to get by. They rely on the food bank. Maybe they’d take Justin in. Grants Pass has been home since Helen was a child but she can sense a change, and it sure feels like the city and now even the churches want the homeless out.

Situated in Josephine County in southern Oregon, Grants Pass is an eclectic mix of flag-waving conservatives and Black Lives Matter lawn-sign liberals. The lumber industry collapsed in the 1980s, and Grants Pass turned itself into a tourist destination for backpackers, anglers, and boating enthusiasts drawn to the Rogue River, a 215-mile waterway that cuts through town and is known for its salmon runs, whitewater rafting, and rugged scenery. Antique stores, coffee shops, fashionable clothing outlets, and trendy restaurants occupy refurbished brick buildings in the eighteen square blocks of the historic downtown.

Prosperity has come at a cost. According to Oregon Housing & Community Services, nearly twenty-nine percent of renters in Grants Pass spend over half of their income on housing, a situation classified as “severely rent-burdened.” A lack of affordable housing has contributed to the town’s homeless population, estimated to be about six hundred souls.

The relationship between Grants Pass and homeless people has seldom been better than strained. For years, residents complained of people sleeping on the street and, more recently, in the town’s seven parks. The drug addicted, in particular, intimidated families and made them feel unsafe in the parks. Compounding the problem, the city had no homeless shelter other than one faith-based program that prohibited nicotine, alcohol, and other drugs. In response to residents’ concerns, the City Council passed ordinances prohibiting people from sleeping outside in public using a blanket, pillow, or even a sheet of cardboard. The fine for a first offense was $295, which increased to $537.60 if not paid on time. Repeat violations could result in penalties of up to $1,200 and thirty days in jail.  Other sanctions included temporarily banning repeat offenders from the parks and a maximum of thirty days in jail for further violations.

In 2018, a lawyer representing a group of homeless people sued the city, asserting that the ordinances criminalized homelessness.  A federal judge found in favor of the plaintiffs, in part because the city had no shelter. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, relying on its ruling in an Idaho case from 2018 that held that “the Eighth Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter.” It affirmed part of the trial judge’s ruling and remanded the case. The city then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In June 2024, the justices reversed the lower courts. In a 6-3 decision divided along ideological lines, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the Eighth Amendment “serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges” to “dictate this nation’s homelessness policy.”

Two months after that ruling, the Grants Pass City Council established two fenced sites for homeless people: a half-acre lot downtown near the police station and a one-acre parcel on J Street in an industrial section of the city slated for a water treatment plant. At first, the homeless were only allowed to stay at either camp for three days at a time but eventually that was extended to one week. Now the homeless rotate between the two camps every seven days for no stated reason other than to remind them, as if they needed reminding, that nothing permanent exists in their lives.

Neither site provides social services or any kind of supervision or support staff for the homeless residents, most of whom suffer from drug addiction, mental and physical disabilities, and other problems. If a homeless person doesn’t have a tent, they do without shelter.

Water? a man asks Helen.

She shakes her head.

I wish I had water. Grab some plums. They have water in them.

Thank you.

Helen hears the sound of unzipping tent flaps and sees tousled heads of hair emerge above worn, lined faces. Foam trays and cups being brushed aside. Eyes squinting in the bright light. Hands hauling out shoes from beneath heaps of dirty clothes. Dogs raising their heads, barking. Men and women stumbling past. Throats dry, fingers caressing crushed cigarettes to eke out one more puff. The sound of a porta potty door slamming shut. More dogs barking. Coughing, clearing of throats. Beyond the camp, a freeway emerges from a thinning haze, the swell of traffic, the moan of engines at rush hour. Angry words filled with condemnations issue forth through open car windows, get swept up in the backdraft, and descend faintly but fiercely: Find a fucking job!

Helen cocks her head, shrugs off their damning, pulls her wagon. A woman fusses among the tumult of discarded plastic bottles behind her tent, for what she can’t say. Something, she mutters. Helen offers her a sack lunch. The woman looks at her, the paper bag suspended between them like an offering, and starts to cry. Helen sets the bag down and holds her.

I know honey, she says. We’ll figure it out.

The woman sniffs, holds the sack against her chest. Helen walks on. The wagon wobbles on the uneven ground past tents and listing wheelchairs. She offers an elderly man a sandwich. He swipes at strands of thinning hair plastered against his forehead

If we tie our tents to the fence we’re in violation, he says.

Violation of what?

The rules, I guess. We’ll get cited. Can’t have anything attached to or on the fence.

Take some plums, sweetheart.

Helen moves on to the next tent and the next and the next, emptying the wagon. Justin walks up to her and takes the few remaining plums and offers them to anyone who catches his eye.

What do you have left? a man asks Helen.

Nothing. Justin is taking plums around.

I don’t know him.

Helen points in Justin’s direction.

There’s me, my girlfriend, and two kids, and I only got two sack lunches.

I’m sorry.

We stayed in the parks. My question is: Who would want kids here in this place?

There is no shade, no water, no nothing.

Yeah, Helen says. No tables to sit down at. Not enough bathrooms for all these people.

The man shakes his head. Justin walks over and offers him two plums. After the man takes them, Justin turns his palms up.

I have nothing more, he tells Helen.

Brock

Brock Spurgeon parks his green Jeep near the entrance to the J Street Camp, shuts off the ignition, and steps out.  Lean, muscular. Tile contractor. Owns his own business. His gray hair tied back in a short ponytail. Trim goatee. Straight posture. He considers the homeless people hanging out in cars outside the entrance. Men and women in the front and back seats amid a jumble of clothes. Smoking, watching Brock. He walks through the gate glancing down at the rock-strewn ground. He passes two porta potties. Clothes dry on the fence in violation of camp rules.  The woman who wept in Helen’s arms sorts through pants outside her tent. She talks as people walk around her, still conversing with herself but open for anyone to join in. A black-and-white dog with curly hair lies beside her panting. With every breath its ribs are visible. Tongue lolling, it observes Brock.

The trash, the needles, the pipes, the woman says. I’m a fenty but I clean up after myself. If my dog swallows one of those needles I’m going to kill somebody. I’ll go to prison over my dog dying.

She gives Brock a harried look, fingers her pants like she is searching for something.

This one kid—he’s gone now—he would just drop his needles.

One of the reasons I’m here. I’m looking for my son, Brock says.

Name?

Jack. Jack Spurgeon.

She shakes her head.

No, I have not seen Jack. I have not. Does he look like you?

Ah, maybe a little bit.

She faces Brock and studies his face.

I think I may have seen him. I didn’t know his name but I may have seen him once or twice.

They call him Drifter, Brock says. He’s thirty-nine.

Drifter, OK, I gotcha.

He’s got a girlfriend, so he has a place. If they’re not fighting, he’s with her.

Gotcha.

Brock has always seen homeless people in Grants Pass but he remembers seeing many more of them starting in 2021. He used to walk through the parks and find tinfoil and needles all over the ground. The same shit he’d find in Jack’s room. In or out of the house, Brock’s life was surrounded by this crap. He started collecting what he found in large, black trash bags because no one believed him. Needles just lying in the grass. City workers cleaned the parks but when Brock followed trails down to the Rogue River or walked under bridges—places a little kid might want to explore—he’d find drug paraphernalia everywhere. He spoke at City Council meetings but didn’t think anyone listened even when he showed them his bag of discarded drug gear. He got on Facebook and expressed his concerns. Brock bought a small body camera, positioned it above his left ear and walked through the parks among homeless people. Hey, how’s it going? he’d say, and take footage of drug use. He posted the videos on social media. Got a lot of traction. Brock developed a following that evolved into Park Watch, a volunteer group that began cleaning and patrolling the parks every Sunday. Park Watch also held rallies. Its members waved signs, Take Back Our Parks. Drivers honked, signaling their support. Now that the parks have been cleared, Brock thinks the city needs to distinguish the drug addicts from the homeless people who have problems unrelated to addiction. Got to help both groups but in two different ways. Addicts need treatment. The other homeless need a place to live and a job. He hopes this woman with the dog gets the assistance she needs.

Even though we’re in such close quarters and we can watch our stuff, people aren’t leaving their tents because people are so used to having to stay with their stuff so it doesn’t get stolen, she says. And that’s the problem now. People are in that rut of sitting with their things and not leaving to take care of business.

My son won’t put a Coke down in our house when he comes by even if he’s falling asleep.

Afraid someone will take it?

Yeah, Brock says. That’s why he sometimes sleeps standing up.

I don’t sleep a lot. I’m afraid someone will take my dog.

He looks at her kneeling on the ground surrounded by the ruin of her life.

Take care, he tells her.

He walks deeper into the camp. The sun bears down. He shakes his head at the lack of shade and no water. That’s crazy. The town has been so pissed off for so long about the homeless that they don’t want to give them anything. Why have anything for these people? Camps with shade and water? Hell, why don’t we just get them out of town?

You got to realize, Brock tells them, that many of the people who were in the parks are not bad people. They have mental health problems; some of them are veterans. How do you say they don’t deserve shade, water, and a place to stay? Brock once wanted people out of the parks just like most everyone else, but he doesn’t hate them. He feels he has flipped to the other side and become an advocate for the homeless. He’s like, Cool your jets, man. We got to treat people the way we want to be treated. Brock has a motto: Beat the drug, love the user.

He doubts Jack would stay at J Street. Maybe come by to see if anyone’s dealing but not stay. Jack has been doing drugs for almost twenty years. Brock hasn’t spoken to him in at least five months. They go through cycles. Brock and his wife try to help him. Then they feel they’re enabling him and pull back, and Jack gets mad and they stop talking to one another. But Brock knows Jack is out here. Somewhere.

A woman walks past Brock, gives him a hard look.

Oh, it’s you. Bully time, she says.

He doesn’t recognize her but assumes she has seen him in one of the parks. Perhaps he caught her on his camera or she saw him picking up trash and jotting down observations in his notebook. He chuckles, dismissing the comment. He has been called worse, a lot worse. He knows Park Watch makes addicts feel bad, embarrassed. He has no problem with that. They were in a public park doing drugs. Some people have accused Park Watch of being a vigilante group. Brock wrote a mission statement and gave it to the police chief to review. He had no problem with it. The chief introduced him to nonprofit groups that assisted the homeless. Brock installed a tile floor for one organization. He’s not against anyone. He and his wife have taken in many homeless people over the years; the average stay is about five months. Help them find a job and a place and move on. At one time they had a family of five. They were old friends and had moved to Grants Pass without a place to stay.

Brock wants to help people, but he also wants drugs off the street. He believes the two are not mutually exclusive. He believes unemployment and drugs drive people into homelessness and not necessarily in that order. He tells people, My son is homeless. He lives on the streets. But in a strict sense, he’s not homeless. He can return home anytime if he enters a drug program. He’d have a room and a full-time job with me tomorrow if he wanted it. Brock has given him work before. On paydays, Brock would give Jack fifty bucks and hold the rest so he wouldn’t blow it. But he always needed money. He could never wait two weeks for his check. Brock worried that if he paid him in full he’d never see him again. A contractor caught Jack nodding out one day. I can’t have him here, he told Brock.

Brock has allowed Jack back home a few times since he moved out at nineteen, but he always screws up. Police have removed him on several occasions because he got crazy. Did too many drugs, stayed up too many nights, lost his mind. Turned his room into a drug den. He had fifty bags full of garbage. Brock asked him, Why don’t you throw this crap away? There might be something good in them, Dad. Or, I lost something and it might be in one of the bags. But he was too messed up to sort through them. After he kicked Jack out, Brock cleaned his room in half an hour and found nothing worth keeping.

He sees guys walking around like zombies and wonders how many other fathers and mothers suffer like him and his wife. How many people on the street would have a home if they stopped using? Parents contact him through Facebook and ask him to look for their kids. They think they might be in Grants Pass. They send him photos of smiling, good-looking kids—images from another time. Please, let us know. He found one young woman. Her parents were thrilled she was alive. He knows that feeling.

Jack doesn’t want to quit using drugs or can’t. Get some rehab, Brock tells him. Ain’t going to happen, Dad. Fentanyl, meth, alcohol, Jack uses all of it.  Benzodiazepine, an antidepressant, affected him worse than anything else he tried. Just wiped him out. Brock can’t deal with him when uses that.

Brocks wipes his forehead. The din of heavy machinery from Copeland Sand & Gravel, a paving company next door, interrupts the noise of freeway traffic, and a man from R&M Lumber Sales across the street shouts at someone driving into the business’s lot, their possessions piled on the car’s roof, You can’t park here! A Home Depot stands on a hill above the camp and customers amble in and out oblivious of the men and women below. Mountains covered with fir trees rise behind it like a painting on a postcard. Brock watches a man kneeling outside an orange tent sorting through a shoulder pack. He recognizes him as someone who has attended City Council meetings. During public comments, this man urged the council members to visit the camps and meet the people staying there to understand their problems. Brock approaches him.

Good morning, Brock says. I’ve seen you at City Hall.

The man glances at him.

Get a job! someone yells from the freeway.

The man turns in the direction of the shout and then turns back to Brock.

We deal with that all day long, the man says. People screaming obscenities.

He stands and brushes his hands against his red plaid shirt and blue jeans. He has a goatee tied into a braid. His hair falls to his shoulders.

My son is out here, Brock says. They call him Drifter. And he told me once how much it hurts, the insults. Junkie and other names.

More shouting from the freeway, the words indistinguishable.

Water off a duck’s back, the man says. Takes a toll on some folks. I’ve had a bunch of death threats. So that’s why I don’t share my name. I go by a street name, Lion Heart.

Brock nods. Dogs start barking and two people scream at them to shut up. Men and women sitting outside their tents follow the commotion.

At the beginning, Brock says, everyone was pissed off. Now that we’ve cleared the parks, we should see how we can help. We can’t disappear people. Drugs get in you, it’s like a little devil in their head. It tells them they don’t need rehab. My son, the only time he comes close to stopping is when he’s been in jail one month to three months.

Lion Heart doesn’t comment. Brock hopes Jack will get hauled into jail again. He becomes a different person then. Coherent. Gets released and tries to stay straight. Brock can work him eight hours a day but not twenty-four hours. When Jack gets time on his hands, that’s it.

There’s nothing to distract my son after work, Brock says. I’m a tile contractor.

Cool, Lion Heart says, I worked in the trades. A lot of years.

Keeps me out of trouble, Brock says. I know the allure. I did drugs.

I didn’t, Lion Heart says.  I had cancer for ten years. Chemo.

Better now?

Still living with it.

Brock looks at the haggard faces peering at him and Lion Heart from nearby tents. As a boy, Jack hung out with about half a dozen kids who experimented with OxyContin. They got torn up on it and went straight to heroin when the original Oxy formulation was taken off the market. High school friends. All of them went off the rails.

They came out of the shadows when they came to the parks. Creepy people and nice people. Addicts and nonaddicts.  People like my son, he’s choosing this life. I have a full-time job for him and a home if he goes to rehab.

Lion Heart looks at the ground, tugs at his goatee. He offers Brock an enigmatic smile.

Begs the question doesn’t it? he says. Choosing. Delve deep enough, you might find something that happened.

Helen

Helen and Justin leave the J Street Camp in her battered, blue Toyota Corolla. Pastor Moore gave it to her when they moved into the church in 2021. She owned a Mitsubishi Eclipse at the time, small as a Smart car that a former employer had given to her. It had no functioning brakes other than the handbrake. When she and Justin were homeless, Pastor Moore let her park at the church because the registration had expired, and Helen worried the car would get towed if she left it on the street. You can’t be driving that, Pastor Moore told her after he saw its condition. He insisted she take the Corolla. He preferred driving his pickup and didn’t need it. The Corolla wasn’t in much better shape than the Eclipse, but the brakes worked.

Helen and Justin camped behind the church with half a dozen other homeless people Pastor Moore had allowed to stay on the property. Garbage began to accumulate: discarded cans, bottles, fast-food cartons, and soiled clothes. Helen and Justin took it upon themselves to clean it up. They carted five loads of trash to the dump. Tired of the mess, Pastor Moore asked everyone but Helen and Justin to leave. He offered them the use of a small room in back of the church in exchange for maintaining the property. He didn’t object when Jessica moved in. The cramped quarters barely contain the three of them and the dogs. Helen and Justin share a bed; Jessica sleeps on a cot by the door among a loosely organized pile of clothes, coats, shoulder packs, fans, sleeping bags, and bathroom supplies.

When Helen was homeless she acquired what people discarded: shirts, sweaters, shoes. Each little thing had its uses. If not for her, for someone else she knew. Even though she has a place to stay and enough clothes, she has trouble restraining herself from picking up odds and ends. Can I use this? Yeah, yeah, I can use it and at the same time she thinks, No, no, I don’t need it. Old habits, survival instincts, Helen doesn’t know the reason but she continues to collect stuff.

Justin

As a boy, Justin suffered a lot of head injuries, the first one when he was four years old. He ran out of a mobile home through a door where there were no steps and smacked his head on the concrete. His mishaps didn’t stop him from playing sports. Baseball, wrestling, football. Justin could do them all. He especially loved baseball. He was a left-handed pitcher, a southpaw, but then his mind snapped. At sixteen he suffered a panic attack at a carnival. He saw dragons rising out of the sky and freaked out. Doctors diagnosed him with agoraphobia, schizophrenia, bipolar and paranoid personality disorders. Medications helped but often left him feeling apathetic and somnolent.

He dropped out of school and didn’t do anything for about two years until he met a girl and got her pregnant. He earned his GED and attended Rogue Community College but didn’t graduate. He drank, used meth, and sold pot. He split up with his girlfriend, started seeing another woman and got married. They had two daughters but they divorced over his drug use. His family didn’t tolerate it either, and he began couch surfing from party house to party house. He was in and out of jail for drugs and parole violations. After he met Helen, he joined her on Devil’s Slide, a mountain on the outskirts of town above G Street. They shared a two-room tent. No one messed with them. Justin maintained the camp. He still used drugs but not as much. He built an outhouse, an accomplishment he still takes pride in. He had purpose on the mountain; there was always something to do. He doesn’t have purpose now. Maybe it’s the meds. He prefers to be left alone.

He has considered applying for a job at a gas station. Self-service gas pumps are not universal in Oregon. Pumping gas isn’t hard and he wouldn’t have to talk to people much. He should receive disability but he can’t figure out the paperwork. Even his doctor says he’s eligible. Justin thinks he should help him. He knows he gets on Helen’s nerves and feels bad about it. His brain tells him to help her around the church, but his body doesn’t respond. He lies on their bed like a turtle on its back with no desire to get up. He understands a man told Helen they have to move. He knows he has to do something.

Helen

Before they began staying at the church, Helen and Justin lived in Morrison Park, a few blocks away by some tennis courts. A city ordinance allowed camping in one spot for up to seventy-two hours in public spaces. Violators were ticketed. Helen figures she has close to $5,000 in fines. She has received letters threatening her with jail if she doesn’t pay. No way she can come up with that kind of money. She earns about $800 a month cleaning houses. Her pay varies from week to week depending on the number of houses she cleans. One elderly woman, Miss Sandy, pays her fifty dollars for two hours of work every other week. She has another client who pays her about $120 for four hours of work twice a week. This client owns a big house, more like a farm, really, that’s home to five German shepherds, two alpacas, five tortoises, five chickens, and one sheep. It amazes Helen how people spend their money, but the woman always has work. Yeah, come over, Helen, she’ll say. I got this, this and this to be done. Helen enjoys cleaning. She’s good at it. Doesn’t pay much but she doesn’t need much living at the church. She was never one of those nine-to-five people, and she doesn’t want to be an average person doing an average job that they hate. Not a burger flipper, for sure. She couldn’t even work for her mother, an assistant manager at a Wendy’s restaurant back in the day. Helen took orders at the drive-through window but she didn’t have the temperament for rude people, and when someone gave her grief she returned it in kind. Her mother fired her.

That’s it, Helen, she said. Go home.

Helen wants her own house. Maybe when Grants Pass builds affordable housing. Yeah, right. She can dream. Pastor Moore will vouch for her with the church hierarchy, she feels sure. Maybe they’ll change their minds and let her stay. Pastor Moore loves her cooking. She caught him in the kitchen one night eating black-eyed peas and Vienna sausages from a frying pan and still hasn’t gotten over the shock. Oh my God, that’s not going to happen, she said. You gotta eat better’n that. She made him a camp breakfast and now he wants it all the time. Nothing complicated: Bacon or sausage mixed with onions, tomatoes, and potatoes. Fry it all up in a cast iron pan, crack two or three eggs on top of it and mix. Her friend, Miss Colleen, used to make it every Fourth of July. They’ve known each other for years. Helen attended the same school as Jesse Firestone, the older of Miss Colleen’s two sons. She was a dietary cook at an old folks home for the longest time and can be a real kick in the pants. Helen first met her when she was hanging out with Jesse and his friends after school. Don’t call me mom, aunt, or grandma because you’re not kin, she told Helen. OK, Miss Colleen, Helen said, and to this day she has never called her anything else.

Miss Colleen’s husband, Howard, worked as a logger. Helen would help him clean around the house after work. He had a heart attack about three years back. Helen found him slumped in his recliner, car keys in hand, holding the phone, a 911 operator on the other end, but he couldn’t talk. Helen shouted, He needs an ambulance. Howard rolled out of the chair to the floor. Helen started CPR, then watched the light go out of his eyes. An ambulance arrived forty-five minutes after he died.

If she must move, Helen knows Miss Colleen would help her. She stayed with her before when she needed a break from the streets. Miss Colleen has her own life, and Helen doesn’t want to impose more than she already has. But what about Justin and Jessica? Where would they live?

Laura

Laura parks outside the gate of the J Street Camp and reaches for her cane. She has lived in her 2012 Subaru in Riverside Park in the heart of the city since her husband, Michael, died in 2021 of a pulmonary embolism. They met over a pool game. Laura can play some pool.

As long as she remains in her Subaru and doesn’t camp, the police don’t bother her.  She parks near a boat ramp. It’s hot enough today that she might float on the river in an inner tube. Hate to do it alone. Last time she floated, she stayed in the water until eight o’clock at night. Started at Hog Creek and got out before she reached Cove Creek. Rough water after that. Class II, III rapids.

A disorganized mass of clothes and boxes fills her vehicle, cartons of photos and old jewelry she collected over the years too. Whatever memories she has left from living in a house are buried somewhere in the backseat.

She gets out of the Subaru. Her knees ache. She wears a sweat-stained floor-length, tan dress. Her hair is pulled back in an uneven ponytail. Sandals on her swollen feet. She leans heavily on the cane, shuffles forward, moving inches at a time. The gravel does not make for easy walking. Volunteers with the Mobile Integrative Navigation Team, a nonprofit that assists the homeless,  have collected in the center of the camp to serve coffee and scrambled eggs. Boxes of fruit and bread sit on the tailgate of a pickup for people to sort through.

Hi Laura, says a woman serving coffee and juice.

I know you, Laura says. Eileen?

Right. How’s everything?

OK.

Yeah?

Up and down on the normal homeless rollercoaster.

What can I get you?

Coffee and a little bit of juice.

Okey dokey.

Laura points to a can of V8 juice and Eileen gives it to her with a cup of coffee. The other night Laura had wondered, What can I do for dinner? She had bruschetta from the food bank. She drove to Safeway and got one bell pepper, one onion, one tomato, and a packet of provolone cheese. She diced and sautéed the onions and peppers with a big chunk of provolone cheese and cooked it all up until it was crispy. Took hoagy rolls and put some butter and Italian seasoning and parmesan cheese and grilled them on a Coleman stove. Put some canned meat over that. Not supposed to cook outside. One girl blew up her tent with propane. Laura was terrified she might get caught, but it was a good meal.

She steps away from the coffee line for the egg line. She looks over the heads of the men and women, listens to the noise coming off the freeway. Grants Pass has changed dramatically since she was a child. It was much more rural then. She couldn’t ride her bicycle on her family’s gravel driveway. Couldn’t roller skate or use a skateboard except on the road because there were no sidewalks where she lived.

She was born in Sonoma, California, to parents who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Two families they knew moved to Grants Pass when she was a toddler. One night her father came home and said to her mother, Come on Barbara, get the kids, we’re going for a drive. Dick, where are we going? her mother asked. He didn’t answer, or at least Laura didn’t hear him. They got in the car and drove until dark. They stopped at a McDonald’s for dinner and continued driving. More than five hours later they arrived in Grants Pass and stayed with one of the families that had moved before them. They remained for the weekend, just long for her parents to find a house, and then returned to Sonoma. They sold their home and settled in Grants Pass. Her father started a roofing business. When jobs became scarce he would return to California and work with his brother at Cascade Natural Gas Company, a job he had held before.

Laura used to think she had a terrible life. Because of her parents’ religious beliefs, they did not celebrate birthdays or most holidays. Oh, if only her life now was so simple that those things were her only disappointments. She and Michael had been married almost twenty-eight years. He could be pretty self-involved. He was a carpenter and obsessed about work. He fixated on his truck and his tools. Laura should have died before him. Overweight, a smoker, high blood pressure, diabetes. Michael was healthy. She had been a stay-at-home mom, taking care of the three children, two of whom had different fathers from previous relationships. The kids grew up, moved out, and the plan had been for Laura and Michael to focus on themselves. Their marriage was off-and-on rocky like any couple after decades of being together, but nobody lives with someone as long as she lived with Michael and not remain in love with them in some way. They never fought, raised their voices or disagreed in the first years of their marriage but drugs got in the way. Michael used meth and liked to drink. He also gambled. Laura gambled too, playing pool, and they both lost money.

Despite their problems she assumed they’d grow old and sit on the porch and watch the cars go by. She never thought he’d die and she would need to support herself. Laura has looked for work but suffers from anxiety and depression and a host of health issues. When doctors diagnosed her with diabetes, they took her off the anti-inflammatory drugs she used to dull the pain in her knees. She spent two months in a hospital with pneumonia and upper GI problems. When a potential employer sees her with a cane or a walker, they question her abilities. Can you sweep this facility, mop the floor? She knows little about computers and doesn’t type. Makes finding a job tough.

Would you like scrambled eggs? a woman asks Laura.

Yes, please.

Salsa on the eggs?

Yes, please.

Good idea to bring salsa, a man says behind her. Sometimes she has avocado.

I know, Laura says and smiles. Once I get money, I’ll get ice and an ice chest. Keep what I don’t finish covered with foil and ice. I buy ice every day when I can.

That sounds right, the man says.

The woman fills a clear plastic cup with scrambled eggs, tops it off with salsa, and gives it to Laura. She stuffs a plastic bag with two loaves of bread, fresh peaches, and a box of cereal. Laura reaches for that with her free hand. She holds the cup of eggs in her other hand and begins the long, slow shuffle back to her car, leaning on her cane, the bag dangling at her side, bouncing off her left leg as she moves.

After Michael died, Laura had no place to live. The house they shared belonged to his grandmother. She had left the house to his brother, Steven, when she died. As long as Michael was alive, Steven never laid claim to the house. He was unemployed and Michael provided for him. But when Michael died, Steven told Laura to pack her things and move out. Her parents wanted nothing to do with her because she smoked and gambled. She found refuge in her car.

Her three grown children know she lives on the street. Jeez, mom, her oldest daughter told her, I’ve been down and out too. Get over it. Just find a job. That stung. She ran into a friend of Michael’s the other day, Merl. They had worked together. Merl married and divorced. Now he’s dating his ex-wife again. Go figure. After Michael died, Merl told Laura, If you need anything just call. She thinks he doesn’t understand her circumstances, or if he does he has chosen not to ask questions. Friends treat her like a leper. She avoids people she once knew.

Laura reaches her car and leans on the hood to catch her breath. Her knees pulse with pain. She opens the door and backs in plopping down in the driver’s seat. Swings one leg in and then the other. She places the cup of eggs on the dashboard and hefts the bag onto the littered passenger seat. As she closes the door, she notices a skinny young woman in a torn yellow blouse and blue jeans, her dirty blond hair sprouting off her head like a fern.

Hi Baby Girl, How are you? How’s your mom?

Baby Girl turns, scrutinizes Laura and then smiles, exposing a row of fragmented teeth.

Hey, Momma Bear. I haven’t talked to her.

Young people call Laura by the nickname Momma Bear. She provides for them. She gives them food and offers bandages for their cuts and scrapes. She carries Narcan in case one of them OD’s.

Well, if you do see her, say I said hello.

Laura used to babysit Baby Girl. Laura had attended school with Baby Girl’s mother, who had mental health problems that weren’t recognized when Laura knew her. Bipolar, schizophrenia, something like that. Laura isn’t entirely sure, just remembers her being a little off. And then about twelve months ago, maybe longer, she ran into Baby Girl. Addicted to fentanyl. Used to be three times her current size. Lost a baby, Laura isn’t sure when. Just thirty-four years old. Has mental health issues like her mother, like ninety-nine percent of the people out here. Like herself.

Are you staying here? Laura asks.

I don’t stay here, fuck that, Baby Girl says. Things have to change in this town. It’s a prison here.

A police cruiser passes them and parks outside the camp.

There’s a cop, Laura says. I can’t have him see me behind the wheel. My driver’s license expired. I have to take the test again.

Baby Girl watches the cop get out of his vehicle and walk into the camp.

I got to go, Baby Girl says.

OK, honey. Me too.

Laura starts the car. She wants to live on her own again. She wants a kitchen and a bathroom and a bedroom. Not being able to cook, not having responsibility and pride in her own home drives her to distraction. Too reliant on strangers for everything. Being homeless isn’t living on your own.

Part Two

Helen

Helen parks at the church. Shadows extend down the walls as the day settles into afternoon. A placard above the front door reads, Expect a Miracle. She opens a gate, drives through, stops and closes the gate. Justin gets out and goes to their room. Helen walks to the kitchen to see what she has to make pizza for dinner. Justin complains about his weight and blames her for cooking too much fattening food. Well, don’t eat it, she tells him.

She checks the refrigerator. Pork sausage, mushrooms. Good pizza toppings. She pours a glass of water and looks out the window. Hot as it is doesn’t make her forget winter will be along soon.  When it snows, the mountains will turn white as sheets. Wait five minutes, and the snow will become rain. No telling how long winter will last. She has seen it snow in July. Crazy weather.

The snow can be so wet and heavy it collapses tents. Very, very cold, a penetrating cold, but when she was homeless Helen figured out a way to stay warm. Take a roll of toilet paper, soak it with rubbing alcohol, set it in a coffee can, light it, and it’s a heater. Cops caught on and that too became illegal. Anyone found burning anything received a ticket.

She learned to survive as a child. She was born in Granada Hills, California, and grew up with two siblings, an older sister, Dawn, and a younger brother, John. Dawn had guts. Or maybe just  a mind of her own. She’d sneak out of the house, and didn’t care about the consequences—and there were consequences. Their father didn’t think anything of smacking them around if they got out of line. Helen ran into Dawn three weeks ago. She had an opportunity to stay at the church but she was on fentanyl and not interested.

Their mother supported the family. She worked, fed them, kept money coming in, and made sure they had what was necessary. Her father held jobs here and there as kind of a shade tree  mechanic. He took work when it came to him but didn’t break a sweat looking for it. He didn’t like to pay rent and he would pack his family up before the landlord came to collect. Helen always knew it was moving time when her father backed the station wagon up to the front door. Time to go. He handled the stereo and his collection of Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Waylon Jennings albums, in addition to at least 500 other records. Her mother stuffed bags with clothes.

Both parents drank. A kid’s birthday party provided an opportunity for the grownups to get drunk and fight. A birthday cake, balloons, and a knock-down-drag-out. Helen, Dawn, John, and their friends would flee to the bedroom. One time her father fell against the door and it collapsed on top of them. The next morning, they crept out to survey the damage. Will today be like yesterday? they wondered. They cleaned up broken glass and chairs and ignored the bruised faces of their parents.

One morning after a night of drinking, Helen’s mother and father picked up where they had left off and laid into each other with all the hungover fury they could summon. Her father stormed outside to the car, swiping glasses off of a table and against a wall on his way out. Shards of glass struck Helen’s mother. When she realized she was bleeding, she started screaming. Helen’s father heard her and got out of the car without applying the parking brake. The car rolled against the house breaking the porch. That was in Van Nuys, California.

Helen never roused her parents after they passed out, but she broke up their fights. They’d be thick in the middle of it, and she had to decide which parent to block, pissing them off even more. Who’s side are you on? Oh, you’re daddy’s little girl? Oh, you’re your momma’s girl? Fine, you go with your momma. Fine, you go with your daddy. Helen didn’t want to go with either one of them. She didn’t want to go anywhere. She just wanted them to stop fighting.

She learned that “I don’t know” was not an acceptable answer to a question. It resulted in a slap to the mouth. Why didn’t you put the dishes away? I don’t know. Slap. Where’re my shoes? I don’t know. Slap. What did you say? I don’t know. Slap.

When Helen was four, they left California for good and headed north to Grants Pass where Helen’s mother had family. Only 14,000 people lived there in those days. Friendly. No one locked their doors. Helen liked to ride her bike to Rogue Community College and wander around the campus. Her father and mother told her not to go that far but she didn’t listen. One night, her father took her bike and threw it on the roof. When she really pissed him off, he’d grab by her hair.

The first time she slept with a boy, Helen got pregnant. Her sweet sixteen birthday party was a baby shower. She gave birth to a son, Michael. Her father at the time had been busted for burglary and other charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. After his conviction, the family lost their rental and Helen lived with her mother in a trailer on Redwood Highway. In 1997, her mother was struck by a car walking home from a bar, the Pine Tree Tavern, and died. Helen was twenty-three. Her world crashed. The loss of her mother unmoored her. She had been the foundation of the family. Helen blamed her death on her father. Had he been home instead of in prison, she thought, her mother never would have gone out that night.

Helen grieved. She started drinking and got into meth. She didn’t have a job and could not afford the trailer. She gave up custody of Michael to his father and bounced from couch to couch. She and a boyfriend eventually quit Grants Pass for Wyoming, where her father had moved to join members of his family. Helen’s boyfriend drove trucks for oil rigs and left her alone for days at a time. After three years, she broke up with him when he started cheating on her. Told her father she was leaving for Oregon. A few days later, she showed up on Miss Colleen’s porch.

The bottle became her best friend. Booze put her in the hospital when she began vomiting blood. She was hospitalized a second time in 2016 when she broke her right foot riding a bicycle and developed an infection. Her boyfriend at the time never visited her. You’ve left me with just the clothes on my back, she told him over the phone. Well, that’s a start, he said.

When the hospital discharged her, she had nowhere to go. A drug charge had put her brother in prison, and Dawn was using meth and living on the street. She offered Helen a tarp. Here you go, she said. There’s a tree. Helen had no idea what to do. She put the tarp on the ground and rolled up in it like a burrito and lived under that tree for a year. Food banks provided her with meals, blankets, and other survival gear. She owned one backpack and filled it with two pairs of jeans, two sweatshirts, a lot of socks, one pair of shoes, two T-shirts, and blankets. Carried it with her wherever she went. Always stocked up on toilet paper and feminine hygiene supplies.

Jessica

Jessica knows Helen is making a pizza but she isn’t hungry. Doesn’t eat much, sleeps less. Doesn’t sleep for crap. Most nights she walks to Morrison Park around midnight and smokes pot. She has been clean for three, maybe four months. Hates it. Hates being off meth and heroin. Drinks here and there. She has a lot of stuff in her mental closet, and it all comes out when she’s not using drugs, making her sick. She has dizzy spells and blackouts. She should take meds for schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder but she won’t because she can’t function on them, can’t move. Her brain screams, Get up! but she can’t. She doesn’t think they work right, but without them, without meth and heroin, without something, her memories run riot, painful stuff, all these tormenting thoughts tripping and tumbling inside her head, jabbing her brain like little thorns, and when she tries to verbalize them, the words spill out of her mouth with the speed of an auctioneer and no one understands her.

Honey, Helen always tells her, slow down.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m …

Honey, Helen says, it’s OK. Just slow down.

Jessica remembers looking for her dealer one day when she was still using. He wasn’t around and she started getting sick from withdrawal. She crouched behind a dumpster, shaking. Some lady found her and took her home for the night. She had a daughter in college and gave Jessica some of her clothes. Weren’t her size but close enough, and then she drove her back to her mother’s house. She and Jessica’s father had split up by then and she had a boyfriend. When he saw the shape she was in, he got her a fix.

She got into drugs after the uncle of a cousin raped her—and not just once—when she was twelve. She was out with her younger sister and he threw her in the back of his car. Your mom wanted me to pick you up, he said, and he took off and left her sister behind. She told her cousin and broke down crying and he said he wouldn’t mention it, but he lied and told her mother and she then told just about everybody she knew. Some members of the family, aunts and other uncles, accused her of lying. Her father wouldn’t look at her. Like she had done something wrong. She ran away for the first time after that. She went out one weekend and didn’t go back home. Walked to Riverside Park and slept in a tunnel slide on the children’s playground. A lady came by and asked if she was OK.  Jessica fibbed and said her parents knew where she was. The lady came by the next day to feed the ducks. She saw Jessica had on the same clothes as the day before and got worried and called the police. They took her home, and she ran away again. Her friends were like,  Hey look out for the cops. She wasn’t worried about the cops. Instead she kept her eyes peeled for a big red hippie van her cousin’s uncle drove. Cops were nothing. As soon as they dropped her off, she’d walk out again.

Her mom and dad used meth, drank, and smoked pot. Jessica’s baby sister cried when she found out. You’re all drug addicts! she screamed. Jessica said, I know it. It wasn’t all bad. Sometimes her mom would drive them to Medford, Oregon, for lunch at JJ North’s Grand Buffet. Jessica stood in the backseat and pretended to surf. It was fun. Her dad had a blue 1960s-vintage Chevy lowrider pickup. He liked old cars. He died in 2012. Part of Jessica thinks he’s still alive although she understands he’s dead. She knows that sounds really stupid. She isn’t good at dealing with things like death. She locks away bad memories in her mental closet, smokes pot, and numbs out.

She wants a goal to strive for but nothing clicks. She has applied for jobs but no one hires her. She has cleaned houses and watched kids, but she doesn’t have the phone numbers of the people she has worked for and can’t provide references. Helen tries to help her. She hooked her up with an old woman who needed assistance but the lady must have weighed 300 pounds. Jessica didn’t want to work for someone that big. She might fall and crack her head open and Jessica wouldn’t be able to lift her, and that would be on her conscience for the rest of her life.                              This evening she decides to walk to Riverside Park. There, that’s a goal and something she knows she can accomplish. The park doesn’t close until ten o’clock. Go to the side near the boat ramp and see who might be there. Jessica never has money but she has street friends.

She walks out of the church and into the night. To Rogue River Highway, past a general store and the BottleDrop. Homeless men stand beneath a tree, their silhouettes hunched in shadow, moths flitting above their heads, manic in the glow of streetlights. Jessica follows Parkdale Drive to the park. The expansive sky is a dome of black. She walks past a tennis court and toward a dock. A woman everyone knows as Blond Dawn stands beside a white Dodge SUV beneath trees. Jessica likes the swirl of colors on her tie-dyed T-shirt. The threads of her torn blue jeans snake against her knees.

Jessica? she says.

Hey. Cops letting you stay here?

So far.

Dawn lights a cigarette. She has been homeless off and on for fourteen years. She grew up in San Diego but hasn’t been back since 1981 when she got married. A long time. She has lived in Grants Pass since 1991. She and her now ex-husband ran a cabinet shop. Her father-in-law owned a winery in town. Between them they had two businesses up and running until her husband asked for a divorce. Dawn didn’t hire an expensive attorney like he did. Her ex took everything. She got the van.

They’ve moved everyone out of Baker Park, Dawn says.

Yeah, I know, Jessica says. Moved everyone out of everywhere.

Dawn leans against the van and rolls her head to unknot a kink in her neck. A dog barks and her gray pit bull sits up, ears perked. Shh, she tells it. She lets out a breath. Her dog chased a lady walking a chihuahua this afternoon. Not very good public relations. She owes $3,500 in camping violations and needs to set up a payment plan to get her driver’s license back. Right now she’s OK. But if the city closes parks to people living in their vehicles, she’ll be on the streets looking for another place to stop for the night. More fines, maybe jail if the police stop her and see that her license is expired.

You can be in parks but not in tents, Jessica tells hers, but you have to be out of the park after hours.

They haven’t run us off yet.

I heard different, Jessica says.

You heard wrong. We’ve been able to stay after the park closes. I didn’t expect this. I’m a hard worker. I like to carry my weight. I agree we shouldn’t be in the parks. A lot make a mess of it.

A lot do, Jessica agrees.

I don’t think that the city should just make us move out, though. We’ve been here for years.

Jessica rocks on her feet. She remembers one day, high on heroin, she passed out on a street near downtown. When she woke up, Helen’s sister, Dawn, and a homeless guy named Timmy were carrying her. Middle of the day. No one asked them nothing or stopped them. Carrying an unconscious woman and everybody’s like, OK. Dawn lived in a four-story building decorated with murals of blue sky and smiling people. Jessica woke up in her room on a mattress on the floor. In the days that followed, Dawn helped her kick heroin cold turkey.

She hasn’t seen Dawn for a while. About four months ago, she mistook Helen for Dawn one night at a 7-Eleven. They look alike but Helen is a little heavier. Helen told Jessica she was living at the church. Jessica started stopping by. After a few days, Helen asked Pastor Moore if she could stay.

Police take your stuff, Jessica tells Dawn. I’ve seen them sweep up everybody’s things and put it in the back of a truck and when everybody gets back to camp it’s like, What happened to my stuff?

Police do let you pick it up, though, Dawn says.

Have a cigarette?

No, no I don’t. This is my last one.

Jessica sighs. She looks up at the stars, how they crowd the sky.

The night has teeth, she says.

What?

Nothing, just my mind, Jessica says.

Helen

Helen puts the pizza in the oven and walks to her room for a glass of wine. She considers herself a functioning alcoholic. Just because she has a half gallon of vodka doesn’t mean she has to drink it all at once. She used to do that, plus a fifth or so of something else. Now, she’s OK with a glass of wine. A shot of vodka with it doesn’t hurt.

One day not that long ago, Helen pulled into an Arco station just over the bridge on the way into town and saw an old man approaching her. Tall, slender, black cowboy hat, black boots, bell-bottom pants. Long gray hair. Then she recognized him: Her dad. She hadn’t even known he was in town. These days they have an uneasy truce. Helen can’t see the point in staying mad at him forever. He experienced pain and guilt over her mother’s death just like she did. He misses her too. God made him who he is. It wasn’t his choice to be a violent drunk. I’m sorry for everything, he has told her many, many times. She tries not to talk about the past. He’s the only parent she has now, and she won’t lose him while he still lives. He rents a trailer home but won’t tell her where. She makes him uneasy, Helen thinks, because she looks so much like her mother.

She visits with him about once a month. He’ll call: I’m going to Wal-Mart. Alright Dad, I’ll meet you there if I have time. It works out. They’ll chat in the parking lot. She got a call from him the other day. Helen. Your Aunt Judy called me. She said you were on TV. What are you doing, Helen? I was at city hall meeting advocating for the homeless, Dad.

Her son, Michael, turned out well.  He lives in Portland and manages a chain grocery store. They don’t talk. His father poisoned him toward her, Helen believes, and Michael wants nothing to do with her. She follows him on Facebook. His father lives in Grants Pass and Helen runs into him every once in a while, long enough for him to give her a hard time. He had been working at a fence manufacturer. She doesn’t know what he does now but run his mouth. Michael is thirty-three and a father. Helen has a grandson. That makes her feel old. And she sort of is, she reminds herself. Shit, she’s lucky to have made it this far.

Mark

Mark Collier, a retired Navy pilot, is a friend of Brock Spurgeon’s. They have coffee about once a month. This morning he decides to drive to the J Street Camp. He has stopped by before and was shocked by the conditions. No water, not enough porta potties. He doesn’t see much coordination. People come in, try to help an individual or two, and leave.

He has lived in Grants Pass for twenty years, maybe more if he thinks about it. He was raised a Catholic and carries a lot of, if not guilt, a feeling of I-should-do-something-to- help-others-more. He’s read the French existential philosopher John Paul Satre who believed that every individual is fully responsible for their actions and choices, including the good deeds they choose not to perform. Fuck, Mark thought. That’s heavy. Jesus!  He began serving meals at a Grants Pass warming center during the winter. Cold, miserable homeless people came in off the streets, washed up, ate, and slept. Their most basic needs met, they then thanked him. The experience humbled him.

On his way to the camp, he notices a parked car. Rope holds plastic bags to the roof. A man sits on a basket behind the car. Another man leans against a pickup parked across the street. Duffle bags and a rolling suitcase by his feet. The two of them, Mark assumes, are living out of their vehicles. They’ll be told to move along. Or maybe not. As long as a vehicle doesn’t leak or make a mess, people won’t complain too much.

He imagines their lives: married and young, one person working, one person staying home taking care of their kids and pets. Maybe these two once worked. They were both happy until they weren’t. They divorced. Whoever had the better job kept the apartment. The other one moved out and lived in a motel but soon ran out of money. They didn’t have the wherewithal for the first and last month’s rent and a security deposit for an apartment. Rental history, letters of reference, none of that. Property managers interviewed them, required proof of income. Yeah, this guy doesn’t earn enough. No one in their family wants them, so they retreat into their car. The new normal. Cars have become mobile tent cities. Even Sartre would say, What the fuck?

Mark presumes most of the homeless are from Grants Pass. Why should that matter? They’re here now. He wasn’t born in Grants Pass. He grew up in Portland, moved to Medford, attended college, and served in the Navy before moving here.

He began seeing increasing numbers of homeless on the street around 2017 or 2018. Then tents started taking over the parks. Drug use fouled the bathrooms. Needles and syringes were scattered on the floor beside people passed out in the toilets. That really got everyone worked up. Concerts in the park got canceled both by COVID and the homeless.

Mark drives downtown passing Evergreen Federal Bank. The bank owner built Taprock Northwest Grill right along the Rogue River. Mark hears jet boats racing up and down the water, the high-pitched engines drowning out all other noise.

He parks outside the camp gate near a police cruiser, the officer inside looking at his phone. A young pregnant woman steps out of a dented Toyota hatchback and approaches him. A man about her age, two small children, and a terrier watch her from the front seat.

Hi, the woman says.

Hi, the officer responds.

His sunglasses catch her reflection and the image of the camp behind her.

I’m Lisa. I was told me and my boyfriend and two kids can’t drive into the camp. Where can we park?

Park for? the officer asks.

For overnight. We drove our car into the camp in front of our tent but were told we couldn’t do that.

It’s not for parking, and out here is private property.

I understand that.

You can park on a city street and walk here.

Mark watches her return to her car and drive a block away and park. He enters the camp, passes a sign outside a tent; She got the house, I got the shaft. New to town sleeping in my tent need a job anything will help. He smiles. He is divorced. He moved into a Motel 6 after he and his wife separated. Oh, this won’t be so bad, he thought. Well, after six days in a Motel 6, it was bad. She got the house and he took a five-gallon bucket and some tools. But he was fortunate. He had been a Navy pilot for eight years, then flew for the Coast Guard and later the Forest Service before retiring in 2011. He had been frugal and paid off his home. He had a military pension and collected Social Security. He got entrepreneurial. Took a lease on a building and turned it into a medical marijuana dispensary. Hired two of the sharpest guys in the business and got all his money back.

He surveys the camp and estimates it holds at least seventy tents, with at least two people in most of them. He kicks at the ground, considers the stones at his feet. Decomposed granite. It sucks in the heat. At the moment, the temperature hasn’t risen above sixty but according to weather forecasts it’s supposed to reach ninety and even higher in the coming days.

He approaches a sandy-haired woman with a dog and two sleeping puppies. They sit in a sliver of angular shade amid a jumble of sleeping bags.

How long have you been here? Mark asks.

She squints at him. Her leathered face etched into a landscape of years.

About a week.

Have you thought about going to the Gospel Rescue Mission shelter?

No. I have medication. Cannabis for PTSD.

Do you have to tell them you do cannabis?

Yep, she says, you have to sign off on the medical.

You don’t believe in lying?

No. I can’t even steal.

That’s honest.

Grants Pass Councilwoman Valerie Lovelace, who represents Ward 2, enters the camp. She holds a small dog and picks her way forward. Her blond hair falls around her ears. She wears a white blouse and blue jeans and adjusts her wide sunglasses.

Good morning, Valerie, Mark says.

Hello, Mark, she says. She puts the dog down. It stays close to her feet.

I wanted to walk my dog, get my dog out for a little bit, she says. He got skunked.

We got seventy some people here, Mark says. And their closest drinking water is a mile and a half away.

Is that really where it is?

The parks weren’t the answer but the city has made the situation worse with these camps.

Well, that’s why I’m here, Valerie says, her voice light and cheerful.

A man emerges from his tent, sees the councilwoman’s dog and squats beside it.

Hi puppers, he says.

He’s a friendly dog, Valerie says. He got skunked.

I’m Darren. What kind is he?

My dog is a cockapoo and skunk smell covers his fur. It’s really hard to get it out. He’s gone through two baths today.

I see, Darren says.

I’m using a homemade remedy to get the smell out but I may have to try something else.

I’m sorry, Mark interrupts, the whole dog discussion doesn’t do it for me.

Darren laughs.

I think you have a humanitarian crisis, Valerie.

How about we call it an emergency instead of a crisis, she says. Should we get them some tents?

Something for shade, Darren says. We have tents.

Ninety degree heat coming, Mark says.

We hear the message, Valerie says. This is happening everywhere.

People here have no food, no water, Mark says.

The guy next to me got put in a motel for two nights and is now getting into a program because he’s not doing well, Darren says. Lymphedema. He’s in a bad way.

They need shelter, Mark says.

Shade would be nice, Darren says.

Things take time, Valerie says. Nobody could anticipate this.

The moment it went to the Supreme Court we could have anticipated this, Mark says.

More homeless people gather around Valerie. She coos to her dog to behave.

This camp isn’t much of a plan, Mark says.

This is a plan after the fact, Valerie says.

Lisa, the young pregnant woman, walks back into the camp with her children and her boyfriend. She sees Mark and Valerie and the homeless people gathered around them. She walks up and asks Mark if he has any leads on housing. Before he can answer she tells him she has been homeless for two years. The fathers of her two children want nothing to do with them or her. Her boyfriend is the father of the child she now carries. They had stayed with his father but the old man couldn’t deal with her kids and kicked them out. The boyfriend’s uncle and sister and her little girl lived in a trailer, but they had no room for them so they left and camped in the mountains around Gold Beach, west of Grants Pass. With winter only a few months away, and knowing they needed a place indoors, they drove here. Lisa found work housekeeping but just two days a week, barely enough for two packs of diapers and wipes. She knows no one in Grants Pass. Her father lives in Wyoming. He shattered an ankle in the oil fields and has applied for disability. Her mother has thyroid cancer and lives with a sister in Texas. If it weren’t for her health, she’d let them stay with her. Her father not so much. He wouldn’t be keen on her kids what with his ankle and all.

You can stay in the Gospel Rescue Mission, Mark tells her.

She shakes her head.

I’m pregnant and I got kids to care for.

They’d help with that, Mark says

I’m not leaving my kids with just no one.

Well, you want someplace safe. It’s going to get a lot hotter. There’s no food or water here. Your kids won’t do well. The Gospel Rescue Mission may not be perfect, but it gets you out of here in a secure location, Mark says. Now, it won’t take dogs.

I won’t give up my dog.

It’s your kids’ welfare or your dog, Mark says. His voice agitated, rising. Which comes first?

I won’t give up my dog.

So is your dog more important?

I’m not saying that. He’s family. I just want some help. Why do I have to give up anything?

Mark throws up his hands and walks away. Get rid of the dog and take care of her children. Simple. But where would she take the dog? And maybe her kids are attached to it. Maybe she is. He has seen homeless people with teddy bears. A security sort of thing? he wonders. Why do I have to give up anything? Good point. Mark doesn’t know. He sees the police officer outside the gate and consults with him.

That couple with kids, Mark says and points into the camp. They don’t have a place. They won’t stay in the Gospel Rescue Mission. Which would take them and the kids but not the dog. But no, they won’t give up the dog but they might lose the kids, right? That’s Child Protective Services  stuff, right? You can’t keep a kid here.

The cop leans back. He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly.

It’s tough, he says. We used to call CPS all the time, but if the family is in a tent and taking care of the kids they won’t do nothing.

That’s insane. Not you guys, them.

I don’t know what happens. It’s sad.

I don’t know if moving them is helping but moving them gets them out of the parks, I guess, Mark says. I don’t have a solution.

This is all decided by city hall, the officer says.

I think it should be declared a humanitarian crisis.

I don’t know, the officer says.

Mark walks back to his Jeep. He sees Lisa leave the camp. She holds one of her children. Her boyfriend holds the dog and the other child.

You OK? Mark asks her.

I’m sorry but the Mission would not be good for my child, Lisa tells him. My daughter is autistic. A shelter has way too many people. It would be way too much stimulation for her.

But on the female side, I heard it was half full, Mark says

So they’ll split us up? the boyfriend asks.

I think you’d be together.

Thank you for wanting to help, Lisa says.

Good luck.

 Wanting to help wouldn’t be good enough for Sartre. Mark doesn’t have an answer.  Wanting to help wouldn’t be good enough for Sartre, Mark thinks. He doesn’t have an answer. People rise to their own level of incompetence. I’m on a dog walk and thought I’d drop by. No, Valerie, you need to put a system in place. Everyone blames the homeless. It’s not about fault. It’s about misfortune and in many cases the bad choices that come from that. The parks provided shade and people could sit on the grass so they wouldn’t bake. Now the parks have been cleared. But, Mark wonders, at what cost?

Brock

On a Sunday afternoon, Brock meets Park Watch volunteers at Riverside Park near a gazebo. Sunny day. Green, leafy trees cast shadows dappling the grass with moving shapes. About ten people are gathered together.

I found three needle caps and a needle just now before we even started, Brock says.

One man, Del Aldridge, a retired cable TV technician begins the meeting. A green hat complements his red T-shirt and jeans. He wears a pin, We Love Our Parks.

We’re not against the homeless, he says. We’re against drugs and the trash. That’s what we’re here for: to clean the parks.

I love the parks. I want to see them safe and clean, Brock says.

Del asks everyone to introduce themselves. A few of them are first-time volunteers. When they finish speaking, he points to a wagon. It holds gloves, plastic bags, metal trash pickers, and bottled water. He didn’t bring ice for the water, he explains, because it was stolen the last time.

Don’t touch anything. Use the pickers, Del says.

I’ve been coming through this park at night for the past week, Brock says, and I see people looking like they’re lost. They’re looking for their friends and stuff, but they’ve all been cleared out. There’s a group at the upper gazebo every night, however. Lower gazebo, it’s hit and miss.

Baker Park hasn’t seen that many people since the parks were cleared, Del says.

It’s getting less, Brock says. Depends on what time. They still lock the gate at ten at night, and then people go around it to get in.

They’re not stupid, Del says.

We’re going to the steps near the river’s edge and the second bridge and on to the grassy area to the left beyond the bridge, Brock says. Lots of trash behind there. I just start looking around in the bushes. Never know what you’ll find.

A jet boat races past drowning out further conversation. The volunteers fan out.

Brock wonders if he might run into Jack. Doubts it but he never knows. Brock was at a city hall meeting the last time Jack came to the house. He called his mother a fucking bitch and threw a chair. She called the police and he left. With Jack it’s all or nothing. Help me or I’ll take off. He lived two years in Portland, two years in Medford, and five months in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Went down there to score some dope and got stuck in the Bay Area. Tough place but he can survive anywhere. Brock can’t believe he’s still alive. He has been resuscitated half a dozen times at least.

Brock’s father abused meth and cocaine; Brock’s older brother, Brad, became a drug addict; and now Jack is one too. It seems like someone falls into addiction in every generation of his family. He lived with his father after his parents divorced. By the age of six he knew certain drugs made you happy, mean, sleepy, or a little of each. He understood that if his father didn’t have drugs he’d get mad, and if he had drugs he’d be happy. He got money from him by comprehending his moods. When he was happy Brock would receive his allowance. He freebased with his father at nineteen. One night his father’s girlfriend fell and had convulsions. Brock and his father thought she might die, but she came to and they helped her to a couch. They had a three-gram rock of cocaine cooked up and ready to go. Brock looked at his dad and they went into the kitchen to finish it. He still carries an image of his father in the barren kitchen leaning against a table, hitting the pipe, wearing  nothing but his underwear. Brock understood then. Really understood. I don’t want this life. He quit drugs, broke clean from all of that.

His father was just forty-eight when he died in a garage his mother provided for him. Meth killed him. Brad died in a Medford homeless camp. Alcohol and meth did him in too. Jack has lived in the same camp off and on. A cop knocked on Brock’s door and told him about Brad. He’ll never forget the sad, discomfited look on the cop’s face. The police discovered his body floating in a creek on a midsummer afternoon six days after he died. Brock had heard news reports about a body being found, but he didn’t know until the cops showed up two weeks later that it was Brad.

Brock has one other sibling, John, who lives in Florida. He tried drugs. Partied then got serious with life just like Brock. But Brad took a different path. His brain didn’t quite work right. Good guy. Everyone loved him. His mother would put him up in apartments when he was younger. Only reason he wasn’t homeless then. But he became too much for her. I’m running out of money and I’m scared, she told Brock. I can’t keep doing this. You can’t take any more money from Mom, Brock told Brad. Got to hit the rocks, buddy. That ruined their relationship. Created a lot of hostility and bitterness. The same thing with his father. He had nothing good to say about Brock because he had a place, a family, a job, and a nice car. Resentment hooks an addict as much as drugs. They hold bad feelings toward anybody who has something they don’t. Like happiness and satisfaction.

Brock has been dealing with other people’s drug problems for most of his life. He was born in Petaluma, California. He met his wife in high school. They married and had two sons, Jack and Nick. The boys grew up in a drug-free home, but drugs were a problem in Sonoma County and the Bay Area, and Brock decided to move to Grants Pass where his mother had family. But drugs were a problem here too. A lot of meth in those days, the early 2000s. Then it went away for a bit. Then fentanyl came in.

Nick feels nothing but disgust toward Jack. They don’t talk. Jack has two boys, fourteen and seventeen years old. They live with their mother. Jack doesn’t see them unless Brock makes the arrangements. Doctors have diagnosed the fourteen-year-old with bipolar disorder. He drinks and uses drugs. His mother does everything she can to straighten him out, but nothing has worked.

I found a ton of burnt foil, Del shouts from behind a stand of trees. You would not believe how much. I’m picking up all this stuff, cans, plastic cups, clothes. Shoes. We cleaned this area up a month and a half ago. Wasn’t this bad then.

I hate it when it’s near the water, Brock says. Polluting our waterways. I love our rivers here.

Here’s another needle cap.

Right on.

I wonder what that is? Dell asks, examining something in the grass.

USB port, Brock says.

Another volunteer, Bryan Weldon, picks up a piece of twine.

This is how they tie off their arms, he says. Slipknot at the end. I find these everywhere.

He drops it into a bag.  Bryan is seventy and a recovering alcoholic. Twenty-five years clean and sober. A doctor told him to quit drinking after he suffered two mild heart attacks. Change or you’re dead, he said, but it took Bryan’s wife to convince him. She threw a phone book at him one night and said she’d had enough. If he didn’t find an AA meeting or something, he’d never see her or their three boys again.

The homeless are going to take over our town, Bryan says. They should go to immediate, mandatory detox lock up and rehab. Can’t smack them around anymore. I’m too, I don’t know, extreme. I shouldn’t open my mouth. I believe in the old ways.

He picks up another needle cap and drops it in his bag. He wears a floppy hat, T-shirt and baggy shorts. A Sig Sauer pistol hangs off his right hip. He doesn’t go near the parks without it. He  thinks carrying a gun deters people who might want to mug him. A large man, he strides forward commenting nonstop about addiction and recovery. Busted for drugs, that old three-strikes-and-you’re-out, he believes in that. No one can make someone get sober. By providing camps for the homeless, the city has removed any incentive to stop using. They don’t need food and social services. They need to bottom out in the gutter to get clean. Over the years he has tried to help dozens of men beat alcohol. Today, four have been clean and sober for more than one year. Six are dead. He doesn’t know what happened to the rest of them. If it wasn’t for AA, he’d be in the grave.

Brock appreciates Bryan’s opinions but he isn’t convinced that one approach can or should be applied to everyone. Not all people quit cigarettes or lose weight the same way. A homeless woman rode her bicycle past a Park Watch cleanup one weekend and thanked them. Not all of them are doing fentanyl.

Staring at the ground, Brock searches for used needles. He’s the hands-on guy in his family, out in the parks with Park Watch and looking for Jack. He knows Jack wants nothing to do with him, but if he could put his eyes on him it would make Brock feel better. It’s the worst thing in the world for a parent to watch their child slowly kill themselves. Even worse when he doesn’t see it.

Park Watch has been his therapy. Before the group formed he carried an all-consuming anger. He has been in one fight. The person wasn’t homeless but he was in Riverside Park buying drugs from a guy everyone called Wheelchair Johnny. The buyer drove up onto the grass and spun a wheelie near where Brock was wiping down picnic tables. Brock walked a little distance away and called 911. When he got off the phone he noticed the buyer had snatched his bucket. Hey, that’s my bucket, man. The buyer shoved him and they exchanged blows. One of the buyer’s friends grabbed Brock from behind. Oh, gosh this is getting bad, Brock thought. He jumped away and sprayed them with mace as three police cars raced up, sirens blaring. For a moment Brock was no longer in the park but back in his house on one of those nights he had called the cops on Jack. I need you to remove him but not beat him up. They didn’t. They’ve been really good just as they were with Wheelchair Johnny, the buyer, and his buddy. They did their jobs and took them in. Period.

Jack was a good kid but Brock had a nagging feeling he would be susceptible to addiction. He always overindulged. He would consume candy or eat at a buffet until he got sick. Anything that made him happy he overdid, and that made Brock think if Jack got into drugs he’d be screwed. Brock prayed. He wasn’t religious but he sought out God, a higher power, whatever anyone wanted to call it, to spare his son. Please don’t let Jack fall into drugs like my father and brother. Brock knows all of Jack’s lawyers, probation officers, doctors, counselors, therapists. He has been right there with him but none of them have persuaded Jack to confront his addiction.

One night, Jack told Brock, Dad, I’m a responsible drug user. What do you mean? Brock asked. I won’t go to sleep without something to wake up to, a fix in the morning. He had always wanted to be the party kid. He was disruptive in school, and Brock and his wife would meet with all of his teachers. They liked him, he was smart, but he distracted the other kids. By the time he was seventeen he had been kicked out of high school, continuation schools, all of them.

Drinking worked for me for a lot of years, Bryan says, picking up more twine. I liked to party. In San Francisco I met The Doors and The Grateful Dead. Phil Graham had the best concerts. I met what’s her name. She OD’d. Janis Joplin. Here take some acid. Fun times.
The other volunteers chuckle. After an hour of scouring the park, they regroup and dump the drug paraphernalia they found into a sack in the wagon.

Who needs something to drink? Dell asks.

He offers bottles of water. Brock takes one.

Aren’t you afraid of overdosing, he asked Jack one day. No, I can never get enough money to OD, dad. But Jack did worry, worried enough to have Brock watch him shoot up one morning. He was staying at the house. Brock stood in the kitchen ready to leave for work. He grabbed his lunch and was about to walk out the door when Jack called, Dad! What? Come here. Brock hurried to Jack’s bedroom and looked in. He saw Jack about to insert a needle in his left arm. I’ve got some new stuff, he told Brock. I don’t know how strong it is. I need you to get some Narcan and watch me for ten minutes. He injected the drug before Brock could respond and lay back on his bed. Stunned, Brock grabbed a can of Narcan and stood outside the door and called Jack’s name every twenty seconds. Jack! Yeah. Jack! Yeah. Jack! Yeah, until he finally said, You can stop. I’m OK, Dad. Brock could barely move. He put the Narcan away, got in his car and cried all the way to work. He was furious, sad, terrified. How could you make me watch you shoot up? What was I going to do? Not watch you? Fuck you, I’m leaving for work? Wonder all day if you died and carry that guilt for the rest of my life if you did?

It’s been shit like that with Jack for he doesn’t know how long.

Part Three

Helen

The fans in Helen’s room stir the warm night air. She stares at the ceiling, unable to sleep, Justin beside her, Jessica out somewhere. Pizza wasn’t bad. Plenty left over. She hears the dogs panting. She could survive on Devils Slide again. If she had to. Built a minihome out of twenty-six wood pallets when she lived on the mountain. Pulled them apart and built a frame and walls. Nailed boards across the back to keep it stable. Like a house built out of Popsicle sticks.

She loved the solitude of living in dense woods. Like a homesteader. Camped not far from some train tracks. Five in the morning, every morning, the Central Oregon and Pacific Railroad would send a long train blasting by and wake her up. Her personal alarm clock. She washed in a creek, dressed, and walked her bicycle down a beaten path to the tracks shiny with dew. Followed them to a cut in the trees and emerged onto a neighborhood street and peddled furiously. At the time, she was employed by Miracle Workers, a housecleaning business owned by an elderly lady everyone called Miss Bonnie. She found the job through a friend. I need help cleaning a house, she told Helen. I’ll give you a few bucks. Helen had no idea people cleaned houses for a living. Miss Bonnie liked how she worked and hired her. Helen told her she lived on Devils Slide but Miss Bonnie didn’t care as long as she was dependable. Had to be on time. Clients have a schedule, Miss Bonnie told her. She allowed Helen just two hours to clean each house. Miss Bonnie sold Helen her Mitsubishi Eclipse for one dollar. It was a piece of junk and not worth fifty cents, but it ran and was an improvement over the bicycle. After work, she parked on Upper River Road by a trail that led to the mountain.

Helen earned $13.25 an hour. Take-home pay varied depending on how many houses Miss Bonnie sent her to. After work, she stopped at the food bank and filled her backpack with supplies. She bought alcohol and meth too. Some days she showered at Miss Colleen’s house before hiking  back up the mountain. Leftover food spoiled after two days in an ice chest. In winter it froze and lasted longer. She and Justin stayed on Devils Slide for four years until her body could no longer take the daily trek up and down the mountain.

When they left Devils Slide, Helen stopped using meth and slowed her drinking. She had become too much likeher sister. The mountain had ruined her knees, and the booze and drugs had taken a toll on the rest of her. Something had to give. Miss Bonnie retired and the business closed. Helen continued working for a few of her clients and they referred her to friends. Then she met Pastor Moore. They’d still be on the street if it wasn’t for him. Life has a way of working itself out. She hopes that will be the case again if she has to move.

Darren

In the morning when he emerges from his tent in the J Street Camp, Darren peers out at the cool mist fingering the air before the day’s heat begins to press down. He rolls a smoke. He wears a blue cap. A thin beard wreaths his gaunt, pale face. He licks the cigarette, sealing it and strikes a match. He is doing OK. A doctor told him he was somewhat bipolar. He’s not sure what that means, “somewhat” bipolar. He thought it was all or nothing. He never served in the military. The same doctor told him he had PTSD and suggested it might be from the stress of life. If that’s the case, Darren figures damn near everyone he knows has PTSD.

Maybe the doctor thinks his health problems caused his mental health issues. He has had trouble with his back since he was young. Two lower discs affected by arthritis, two other lower discs disintegrating, the middle of his back herniated, and the upper half with scoliosis. In addition, he has asthma and ulcers. I got slammed, he told the doctor. The doctor didn’t disagree. Darren has applied for disability but has not been approved.

Like many people in Grants Pass, Darren was born in California. Town of Riverside. He never knew his father. Never shook his hand, spoke on the phone, looked him in the eye. He and his mother moved up and down California—Fresno, North Fork—places like that. Never could quite get settled. His mother worked in a factory making carbonate drill bits. She did that for years. Nasty, dirty job. Darren remembers her coming home covered in black dust.

He has been dependent on his family for most of his life. Had trouble keeping jobs because of his health problems. As an adult, Darren lived with his mother and two aunts in a rental unit. Within seven years they all had died. Darren knew the day would come when he’d have to leave. No one offered to take him in. When the time came, he packed his duffle bag, tent, and some other things and stayed in Baker Park. Fifty-eight and homeless. Life had taught him to have reduced aspirations, and this was about as reduced as he could get. He thought in a week or two he would be stripped bare, stabbed, and left rotting in a gutter. Never happened. He feels good about that. Unlike other homeless people, he doesn’t own much. Some people have way too much stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff, they need their stuff. He has a good tent. More than enough room for him, his clothes and a few other items. Other than things he wishes he had, like cigarettes,which he shouldn’t smoke because of his asthma, he has all he needs. He’ll never go back to Baker Park. It was the worst. All the druggies. He stayed in Tussing Park close to the river, and then moved to the J Street Camp after the Supreme Court ruling.

So far the “less desirables,” as he calls some of the people in the camp, have not bothered him. He has never argued or fought with anyone or had anything stolen. Hey old man, how’s it going? people ask him, and that’s about it. He finds it strange when he sees a house. He wonders what the owners might be doing. Are they watching TV? Having dinner? Sitting around? He thinks about it. Must be nice to sleep on a bed. To have a couch, watch a movie, or play cards.

He had been on the street for a few months when a girl—nineteen years old he’d guess—with a big shit-eating grin came skipping and jumping over to his tent and plopped her ass down. Can I help you? he said. Look at my knives, she said. What? Darren said. She showed him three big fucking bowie knives. Nice knives, he said. She seemed displeased by his response. Like he hadn’t expressed enough enthusiasm. What was he supposed to say? Please don’t kill me?

Fifteen minutes later she got into a fistfight with another young woman and beat her ass. Holy crap, Darren said. She looked at him with that big shit-eating grin, came back over, and they talked for a good half hour about her life on the street and how she became homeless. She gave him tips too. Mostly just watch your butt. And don’t associate with strangers carrying knives. Thanks for that advice, he told her.

Hey old timer, a man says.

What’s up?

Nothing. I’m on the rotation. Have to move Thursday to A Street. It’s a lot smaller. Less than half the size of here. But I can come back in 24 hours.

Makes no sense, Darren says.

Won’t let you leave your stuff. Gotta take it with you.

Oh, I doubt that. You’ll be able to leave your stuff. They don’t expect you to tote tents all day, do they?

It’s inconvenient, the man says.

I agree with you on that, Darren says.

The knife girl still comes around. Gives him hugs and tells him about her day. Sometimes he doesn’t see her for weeks. Darren thinks she has a place to stay and but won’t tell anyone. Maybe she gets back with her family and tries to work things out. Maybe from time to time she tries to do right by herself. Good for her, but he misses her. She calls him her favorite old man. He doesn’t know why but it pleases him. He has no one else.

Helen

Helen loads her car with cleaning supplies, bucket, mop, vacuum. She checks to make sure she has gray pads she found in the drywall section of Home Depot. Amazing little things. Remove soap scum on shower walls just like that. Window scraper, got that. Good in showers too.  All the little cleaning tricks she figured out on her own. To unclog a sink she applies three effervescent denture tabs and three tablespoons of bleach. Works on teeth, she thought, should work on drains. Made sense. It bubbles up and plows right through the clog. She has a good technique for cleaning ovens too. She doesn’t like harsh chemicals so she uses a brush. Not a brush exactly. Like a Brillo pad but not as abrasive. She carries Windex and Mr. Clean. Screwdrivers in case she has to be Miss Fix It. Carpet Fresh for the rug.

She turns onto Rogue River Highway and drives to Country Estates, a mobile home park where eighty-one year old Sandy Gallo lives. She parks, hauls out her supplies, and walks up the wooden porch steps, pausing to catch her breath. Then she knocks on the metal screen door and lets herself in, careful not to let it bang shut behind her.

Hello, Miss Sandy. I made it, she says, stepping into the carpeted living room. How are you doing?

Miss Sandy smiles at Helen from a leather recliner.

I knew you would be here. I’m better.

Looking forward to your doctor’s appointment?

Yeah.

I got you down on my phone for the twenty-fifth, Helen says. I’ll pick you up and take you.

Yes, thank you.

Miss Sandy sighs. She has a bruised right knee, curvature of the spine, and struggles with her weight but she’s feeling better. The good news, according to her doctor, is that the knee should heal itself, however he can do nothing for her spine. She can stand, but not for long, and uses a walker. Simple tasks like reaching into the refrigerator hurt. Sometimes she just gives up and food spoils.

Anything in particular or just the usual? Helen asks her.

Well—Miss Sandy pauses—the fridge needs to be cleaned. I didn’t eat the oranges. There’s tuna I haven’t eaten too; that needs to go. When in doubt, ask; but most of it needs to go.

OK.

The bathroom, I dropped some trash.

I won’t vacuum it up. I’ll pick it up.

Dropped some pills. A cap on a pill bottle needs to be put on. Clean it out.

Yes, of course, Helen says.

When you make the bed, fold my towel. The kitchen is a mess

Should have seen mine this morning.

You cook?

Yes, but I cleaned it.

Miss Sandy has known Helen for two years. A friend referred her. She couldn’t maintain the house without her.

When I used to walk, I’d prep before you came.

Helen laughs.

Most people do. Clean the house before the cleaner gets here. Makes my job easier.

Helen approaches each house differently depending on what the owner prioritizes. It keeps the work interesting. Miss Sandy’s will be a two-hour house. The home with the alpacas is much bigger and takes longer. Helen usually starts at the back of a house, but here she’ll begin in the kitchen because Miss Sandy has dishes in the sink. Helen doesn’t clean dishes in everybody’s home. That costs extra but Miss Sandy has only a few dishes so she’ll start there, put them in a bucket to soak, and then move on to the bedroom. She has been to houses where the owners don’t do dishes at all. When Miracle Workers employed her, Helen cleaned the house of a lady who owned a pot farm. Workers ate in the kitchen and stacked their dirty dishes in the sink. You’re not paying us enough, Helen and her two coworkers thought. They would draw straws. The loser got the dishes.

Are the clothes in the dryer dry, Helen?

I’ll check.

She leaves the kitchen and stops in the laundry room.

Yes, ma’am. Dry.

She removes the clothes and folds them. Certain things she’ll do for Miss Sandy she won’t do for other people because they aren’t disabled. Like taking her to the doctor. A friend normally drives her but sometimes she can’t and Helen fills in. She also removes the garbage and picks up the mail.

My pajamas and robe, just hang on my door,  Helen.

OK.

Thank you.

Miss Sandy, which drawer would you like your nightgowns in?

Second one.

Helen walks into the bedroom. She strips the bed and applies clean sheets. She folds the corners and tucks in a blanket on top of the sheets and hangs a robe on the closet door and shuts it. Picks up bits of trash and wipes down a night table.

She feels tired. Justin wouldn’t take his meds this morning. Why did she just pick up his new depression prescription if he won’t take them? He saw a psychiatrist the other day. The doctor told him, You’re not active, you eat the wrong food. He blames Helen. Like a two-year-old. The doctor said, Don’t pay attention to what he says and see if the new meds work.

Miss Sandy, do you need water?

I’m fine, thank you.

Helen walks into the bathroom and cleans the shower. Miss Sandy listens to her work. She worries she might have to move. The trailer park owner has decided to sell. Some tenants have discussed buying it. If they don’t, another company will, and Miss Sandy feels sure the monthly fees will increase. She already pays eight hundred and some odd dollars in fees every four weeks. She may leave for a place where she’d get more help, assisted living, something like that. She’d prefer to stay. Everything is just so expensive.

I noticed you had a little water left in your breathing machine, Helen says. I threw the water out.

Oh good, thank you.

It amazes Miss Sandy the things she asks Helen to do, things she used to do without thinking. Cleaning the refrigerator. Folding her clothes and putting them away. Normal stuff. In the fall, Helen rakes the leaves and puts them in bags. She cleans windows without being asked. Never did Miss Sandy think she’d need this kind of help. I’m still upright, she reminds herself. Better than the alternative.

Helen?

Yes ma’am

In the spare bedroom there’s a plastic bag for the mail.

I got it

And would you put a towel on my chair?

I gotcha.

Helen grabs a brown towel from the laundry room. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she didn’t work. Stew about Justin probably. She folds the towel over the chair in the spare room and takes the garbage from beneath the sink. She walks out to her car,  puts it in the backseat and drives to a dumpster in the mobile home park. Nearby stand a row of mailboxes. She retrieves Miss Sandy’s mail and drops it on the passenger seat. She hopes Miss Sandy can stay here. Imagine having to move at her age. Just thinking about leaving the church exhausts her, and she’s almost thirty years younger than Miss Sandy.

Brock

Some nights Brock leaves his house between 9:30 and 10 o’clock and walks through Riverside Park with a body camera and a flashlight. The grass, wet from sprinklers, dampens his shoes. Only a few months ago tents filled the park. Now not one. A soothing, summer quiet fills the empty spaces. He sees a man with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. They greet each other and keep moving. Probably homeless but he has a right to be in the park like anyone else as long as he doesn’t camp.

Brock steps off the grass and onto a walk and stomps water off his shoes. He walks down a hill that opens into a wide field. He smells the leafy scent of the grass, hears a car turn down a street, sees the long sweep of its headlights. He shines his flashlight but sees nothing but the trees and the frantic darting of a squirrel. He walks on.

Jack stole a pistol from Brock in 2016, 2017, somewhere around then. He wanted to sell it to his heroin dealer for dope, then sell some of the dope, get the gun back, and return it before Brock noticed. That was his plan, but Brock knew immediately his gun was missing. He called Jack and told him if he didn’t see that firearm back in his house that minute he was going to call the cops.  Jack didn’t comply and Brock pressed charges and testified before a grand jury. Jack served eighteen months in prison. Brock believes he can be compassionate and still hold Jack’s feet to the fire. Actions have consequences. No coddling. Send someone like Jack to jail and it might save their life. Forced rehab. Bryan’s right. Brock believes in that. Most addicts would not take rehab if it was offered to them. Lock them up for a month, then ask them. Brock is convinced they’d say, Thank you.

Streetlights illuminate the swings and a slide of a small playground. Twigs break beneath Brock’s feet. He sees the boat ramp. A woman with dirty blond hair stays down here with a pit bull. He’s never had a confrontation with her, but he did with one of her friends, a woman in a white Dodge SUV. She started screaming at him, Get the fuck out of the park. Her boyfriend joined in and before Brock knew it they were standing chest to chest. He walked away. The woman had two kids and they were screaming at him too. Like feral animals.

He meanders up a hill, the dark enveloping him. Tents once were pitched all over here too. Got the tents gone but Brock still sees people hanging around late at night. Can’t very well call the cops on a guy sitting on a bench. But if he sees a tent going up, he’d say something. He notices vans in the shadows and assumes people are asleep in them. Only a few and not doing any harm. He’s not out to get anyone. He wants the parks to be used for what they were intended, nothing more or less. The other day when Park Watch did a cleanup, he noticed a family having a picnic. They had balloons. The weekend before, he saw a mother playing with her four kids. It made him feel good.

A breeze rustles his shirt. He walks between trees, their long shadows extending into the dark. He has probably spent three-hundred-and-some hours with Jack in methadone clinics. Every morning, fifteen to twenty minutes for more than three years, seven days a week. Jack would quit methadone for a while and then reenroll in the program. All sorts of people stopped at the clinic. Men and women in business suits on their way to work and people casually dressed. A few hung out but most got back in their cars and left. Sometimes Jack would have a take-home dose for the next day. He’d sell it. Brock watched him scam everybody. His counselors never comprehended the true Jack. They saw what he allowed them to see. He convinced a doctor to take him off benzos— benzodiazepine—and put him on another drug.  Jack didn’t want to quit drugs, however. He was just looking for a better high. He knew how to take what the doctor gave him and mix it with something else for that special kick. He was smart. Most of those guys are.

Brock used to feel ashamed and wouldn’t talk about Jack. He doesn’t feel ashamed now. Exhausted, frustrated, and scared, yes, but no shame. He expects that call one day, that knock on the door, but if Jack died tomorrow, he would know he’d done everything he could for him. He never shunned him. Some addicts haven’t spoken to their families in years. Brock and Jack have their angry moments but he has never pushed his son away.

He takes one final look around. Porch lights shimmer beyond the park. Nothing moves. In the tranquility of night that allows for moments of reflection, Brock considers his life. He has survived where others in his family have not. He will never give up on Jack. When he was a baby, a newborn, Brock held him for hours. I will be here for you no matter what, he whispered. Jack is still his son. And this is no matter what.

Helen

Memories:

First camping ticket: Around the time her mother died. Helen lay down in Riverside Park, a backpack beneath her head. A police officer told she was illegally camping.

Hope and Miracle: In 2022 she ran into a homeless dude with a shopping cart walking two dogs. Helen heard whimpering from the cart. He showed her nine, white-and-brown eight-week-old puppies covered in feces. A mix of Labrador and pit bull. She directed him to Morrison Park. It had hot water and he could clean the puppies. I’m looking to sell them to get a ticket to Texas, he told her. She met him later. He had cleaned the puppies but Helen saw they were all underweight. She scooped up one, a male. There was something about holding him. The comfort his soft body provided. The dude said, Keep it. She took the puppy back to the church. He’s staying, Justin said. They named him Hope. Helen returned to the park,  gave the dude a pizza and picked up another puppy, a female. She’s staying, Justin said. They named her Miracle.

Pajama Guy: He always ran around in his pj’s. He was very reserved. Kept to himself. So many homeless people do. He left his Morrison Park camp for the corner store one afternoon and on his way back collapsed and died. Temperatures were almost 100 that day.
Annabel: Helen loved her to death. Walking her bike down Devils Slide one morning, she saw Annabel laying on the ground. Pink hair, blue lips. At first Helen thought she was dead. Nineteen years old. She said she had been drugged and raped. Helen helped her file a police report. Annabel stayed with her on the mountain for months. She has a house and a husband now and lives near Eugene, Oregon. She must be about twenty-four.

Joseph

Joseph pitches his tent not far from the entrance to the J Street Camp and next to the tent of a woman and her brother. Her name is Laura and his name is Phil. Turns out he knew Joseph’s father. Laura and Phil read James Patterson novels. Joseph sits with them but doesn’t say much.

When he was sixteen and still in high school, he suffered a traumatic brain injury. He’s twenty-six now so that would be what? Ten years ago? He thinks so. He and some friends got high and drunk and one of them took his mother’s Winnebago and they all piled in and raced down the street. Joseph no longer remembers which one of them got it in their head to swing a baseball bat out of the passenger window and knock off mailboxes. Joseph leaned out a back window to watch. Bat boy hit more than a few mailboxes before he missed one and struck a telephone pole. The bat ripped out of his hands and smashed into Joseph’s face. He collapsed unconscious, and his friends freaked out. They rushed him to a hospital and left him outside the emergency entrance and sped off. Joseph suffered fractures in three places that required the removal of part of his skull. He received eight metal plates and thirty-six screws in his head, and he lost his hearing in his left ear. He was sent by air ambulance to a Portland hospital where he stayed for two months. A judge sentenced the driver of the Winnebago to five years in prison. His mother said he stole the vehicle.

Lion Heart was being chased by three dogs over there, Laura tells Joseph, nodding her head toward the far end of the camp. She puts her book down. They need to get those dogs fucking tied up.

That’s why Lion Heart walks around with a stick, Phil says.

Someone left three dogs in a van and one died of heat stroke, Laura says. I mean how stupid. It’s 102 outside.

Joseph owns a seven-year-old husky named Marley. He would never let anything happen to him. Goes wherever Joseph goes. Church people give him food. When he has seizures, Marley sits on him and licks his face. Joseph wakes up covered in piss. That’s how he knows he had a seizure. He wouldn’t piss himself otherwise.

When the Portland hospital discharged him, his mother took him home and told him to pack his stuff. She was pregnant with her boyfriend’s child. He didn’t want to take on another man’s son, especially one so banged up. Not his problem.

Joseph’s father was in a drug- and alcohol-rehab program at the time, so Joseph couch surfed until his father returned to Grants Pass and then he roomed with him off and on. He and his father look alike and share the same first name. They have birthdays in November one day apart. His father was born on November 12 and Joseph on November 13. He thinks that’s pretty cool. Despite the rehab program his father never stopped using. When the cops busted him for possession Joseph stayed on the street and watched his stuff. When his father wasn’t in jail, he worked. Handyman stuff, construction, field work. He’s back in rehab now.

Joseph has been denied disability and works when he can. Fast food joints usually, but he has trouble concentrating and remembering orders. He speaks in a nasal monotone that sometimes rises to a shout for no reason. Words get caught in his throat. He can stare at a wall for hours and not know why. Customers trip out trying to get his attention.

Phil works a few days out of the month, Laura says, and I get disability so that’s income. Not enough but it’s income.

I’ve been collecting cans to get fifty bucks, Joseph says.

Did you ever do fentanyl?

No, but I did other drugs, Joseph says.

I smoke weed, Laura says. I used to drink but that got me in trouble and almost dead.

Joseph settles in his chair. He met a chick about a year after the accident and they had two daughters but she got into fentanyl and Joseph left her. He didn’t handle their breakup in the best way but he didn’t want to be around her anymore. When he finds a place, he’ll see his kids. They must be six and five now. One was born in May 2018 and the other one sometime in October 2019. They stay with their mother’s father. She lived on his property in a trailer until he threw her out for leaving them to buy dope. He put a chain on the gate and said, You’re not coming back; stay the fuck away. Joseph got along with him and wants him to know he’s trying to do right.

Me and Phil hope to be in a place soon, Laura says. Depending on how fast HUD moves. The owner of a building we looked at has worked with HUD. All the light switches work. Smoke detectors work. There’s hot water.

I’m on a HUD list, Joseph says. I don’t know why I’m not getting disability. I just need a place. Just me and my dog.

I haven’t been in a bed for almost six months bouncing back and forth between the parks, Laura says.

She resumes reading. Joseph feels himself drifting and closes his eyes. He texted his mother the night of the accident. I’m playing Xbox at my friend’s house, he wrote. Last thing he remembers. Then he woke up in a hospital room. He looked out a window and saw skyscrapers. Wow, Grants Pass has gotten big, he thought. A doctor told him he was in Portland. Oh, Joseph said. He fingered a cold sore on his lip. Other than that he thought he was all right.

Helen

Pastor Moore arrives at the church in his pickup on a Tuesday morning in early September. He wears a suit and tie, his gray hair combed to one side. He has come to meet with two church administrators. They arrive shortly after him. Helen recognizes one of them as the man who told her two weeks earlier she had to leave. When he looks at her, she tells him she removed the trash as he had asked. He doesn’t respond. He peers inside her room, at Hope and Miracle barking at him, and makes no comment.

Pastor Moore takes the men through the kitchen and down a hall to the vestibule to talk. The man Helen recognizes says that she, Justin, and Jessica must leave. Their presence, he insists, violates the bylaws. Pastor Moor objects.

Where does it say in the Bible we put people out on the street? he asks. Where does it say a church can’t have a caretaker? Just because I no longer live here, doesn’t mean they can’t.

What would Jesus do? Put them out on the street?

He quotes from the book of Matthew: And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

The two men remain unmoved. The discussion gets heated. Pastor Moore folds his hands behind his back and looks at the floor. He won’t get drawn into a shouting match. The three of them walk out the front door and continue talking. Fifteen minutes later, Pastor Moore walks into the kitchen, where Helen has been waiting. She hears a car leaving the church.

Well, Pastor Moore says.

Well, Helen says. We don’t have to go nowhere?

Not today, anyways. They’re going to send a formal notice of eviction.

He looks at Helen, his face somber. He has pastored at the church since 2018. He presumes he will be called to church headquarters. If it becomes a grilling, if he is asked to step down, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.

They want you gone, Helen.

He stands. He remembers when Helen and Justin showed up at the church. He could see in their eyes that they were good kids. At seventy-three he looks at everyone as a kid. He doesn’t understand why the church leadership wants them out. They make it sound like he has violated every rule by letting them stay. There are some people, even within a church, who simply don’t like the homeless. They seem to forget the teachings of Christ and lean into those things in the Bible that suit what they want to believe. Pastor Moore doesn’t care for that.

Giving Helen, Justin, and Jessica a room had been a gesture of kindness. He didn’t think of bylaws. If he is asked to resign, he can refuse. Then it would be a dogfight, lawyer versus lawyer. Or he could leave on his own and resign before they ask him. Pull out, and spare himself the trouble. Spend more time with his beautiful new wife. He thinks the world of Helen. One way or the other it will work out. God is the one in control. Whatever shot God calls, everyone will have to live by. I adore these kids, he has told his wife. But in a church that professes the love of God but dislikes the homeless, he suspects his love won’t be enough.

They want you gone, Pastor Moore says again, and probably me too.

Helen sighs. She has St. Vincent de Paul sandwiches to pick up and deliver to J Street, a distraction she looks forward to. People have gotten meaner, she thinks, grown hard. She considers the possibility of losing what little she has. She needs to speak to Justin and Jessica. The other day Jessica told her she’d camp on Devils Slide if worse came to worst. Justin said nothing. He lay on the bed out of it.

Helen finds her sandwich wagon and puts it in the trunk of her car. Justin doesn’t offer to join her. What will she do with him? What will she do without him? She won’t abandon him or Jessica. He’s a big baby sometimes but he’s her big baby. They’ve been through so much together. If nothing else, the street creates a bond. Love and friendship. The basics still matter.^[1]

^[1] The Pentecostal Church of God headquarters in Drain, Oregon, would not comment for this story. In January 2025, the Grants Pass City Council voted to close the J Street Camp and limit the smaller camp to overnight stays only. Disability Rights Oregon filed a lawsuit later that month to stop the city from forcing disabled homeless people to live without adequate shelter in life-threatening conditions. A temporary restraining order now bars Grants Pass from enforcing most of its homeless camping regulations.

I’ve changed all the names in this story except my own. They’re all dead, but … that afterlife thing just might be true.

I’m an old man now, but I was ten or eleven or so in this story. Across the road, lived Ben, six months my senior, and Timmy, six months younger than me. We lived out in the country, without another kid our age for miles. So, we bonded. We bonded by chasing the neighbors’ cows. We bonded by stealing cigarettes from our parents. And we bonded by reading GI Joe comics. Each week one of us would put up the nickel to buy the latest one. When we got a chance, we lied our way into a war movie in Brunswick, usually Audie Murphy stuff. We were fixated on the glories of war.

At the time, Ben and Timmy’s father, Arkie, would get drunk and talk about war. He had fought in the South Pacific. Word was he’d killed 27 men in hand-to-hand combat there. [I wonder why he drank.] Another skill he had was theft—or souveniring, as he called it.  He shipped or brought home on leave an impressive assortment. Helmets, ceremonial flags, swords, maps, and firearms. Had he made a career of the military, I’m positive there’d have been a Sherman Tank over there.

Did I mention firearms? The one that fascinated us most and was most supported in the GI Joe comics and Audie Murphy movies was the BAR—Browning-Automatic-Rifle. And among the things we liked about it from our reading and viewing were TRACERS. These were bullets that left a fiery trail so the soldier could see where his ammo was hitting at night. This was exciting on the pages of a comic. It was thrilling in a movie. And Arkie had a BAR and according to Timmy a bunch of clips with TRACERS written on them.

We knew better than ask him for a demonstration. “You stay the hell away from that war shit. It ain’t good,” is what sober Arkie would have said. However, we weren’t about to stay the hell away from this fixation, and besides … we were sneaky.

I don’t know if the counterpart of carpe diem is carpe nocturn or carpe noches or what, but there came a night for us to carpe … or seize. My parents were going over to Cumston Hall in Monmouth where the players were doing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas that summer. I had made them pay dearly for dragging me to Madam Butterfly two weeks before. So, they made me promise to brush my teeth and go to bed on time. Step 1 of the plan was handed to us. Step 2 came just about as easily, as Arkie nodded off just when it got dark. Ben snuck the BAR out, and Timmy scored three clips that were marked as having one tracer every fourth shell or so. We headed for their back field.

We settled ourselves on a rise with about 120 yards of open field before the tree line and the railroad tracks. We hefted the rifle, and brought it up to our shoulders, practiced bracing our feet. That last didn’t work so well, and I decided that I’d shoot from the hip, just like GI Joe. But I wouldn’t do it one handed because, at about 18 pounds, the gun was too heavy.

We usually did a series of rock-paper-scissors to determine who would go first, but this night Ben played the age card. “I’m oldest. I go first.” Since we’d all get a chance, Timmy and I let him get away with it.

Ben got into a sitting position and mock sighted with his elbows on his knees. Satisfied, he set the adjustment for full-automatic, slapped the clip into the magazine, jacked a shell into the chamber, and released the safety. He took a breath and pulled the BAR tightly into his shoulder. He held the trigger enough time for four or five tracers to launch. Then, he put the gun on safety and prepared to hand it to me.

But I was jumping up and down and slapping Timmy’s back. We were excited beyond belief that it was even better than the comics or the movies we’d seen. Then Ben, reflecting on something new, yelled, “Stop, for chrissake. STOP!” We stopped.

What neither G.I. Joe nor Audie had explained to us was why tracers glowed. It’s a magnesium fire in the bullet, and it burns at about 3500 degrees.

Ben elaborated. “Down there. We set the pickin’ woods on fire.”

Pickin’ was our word then; it was safe to use around adults, and they wouldn’t get on our ass, but we knew what we meant. Timmy and I looked at the tree line and, sure enough, the pickin’ woods were on fire.

I’ve never known that level of fear, before or since. We three were ripping up ferns and tearing down branches that were on fire. We stomped them out. We kicked apart brush piles and jumped on anything that glowed. We gave up our bodies rolling on tufts of flaming grass or even sparks. We had to get those fires out, all of them, or Arkie could easily round his total up to 30.

With our last breath, we felt that we had all the fires out, little and big. We unloaded the BAR and headed for home. They went in their house, and I went across the road to mine.

Since we didn’t have running water then, I couldn’t take a bath or wash my clothes. They were burnt and sooty, so I threw them away. I went to bed without brushing my teeth.

I was asleep when my parents came in all excited about The Pirates of Penzance. The smell in the house dispelled that excitement right away and drew my mother to the trash bin. “These are what Freddie wore today, but they look like they been rubbed with ashes. Look, some are burned through.”

My father took the clothes, sniffed them.  “I’ll get him up.”

The combination of fear and fatigue put me in a truthful state. I didn’t even consider making up a story to cover this. I told the truth, the whole truth.

“Are you sure you got all the fires out?”

I nodded.

“We’ll check.”

So, I put my filthy body into clean clothes, something I was never allowed to do, and my father and I walked past Arkie’s house and down to his back field. I showed him where Ben sat when he shot, and where the fires were. I skipped the part about how pickin’ dramatic tracers are at night. Right about then, I just wasn’t feeling it.

We went behind the tree line and paced back and forth. In somewhere between 30 minutes and three months, Dad said, “Looks like you got it. Good job.”

When we got back to the house, Mom had bath water heated. I stripped down in the middle of the kitchen and washed the grime off.

Dad said, “Now go to bed. We will never talk of this again.”

And I haven’t until now. Everybody’s dead.

CROATOAN: A Review of Kevin Honold’s Our Lady of Good Voyage (Orison Books, 2024).

Kevin Honold’s Our Lady of Good Voyage begins in an unnamed Ohio town populated with German ghosts. The Germans, the children and grandchildren of once prosperous immigrants, all elderly now, move through the streets incuriously, “lacking the imagination to move on.” Joe, the novel’s reluctant protagonist, pulls his squad car over and tries to help one of these living ghosts but ends up giving her two dollars and advice to buy some lozenges. As he drives off, he realizes that despite “a common language,” he once again “failed to trade a single piece of worthwhile information.” “I may as well be a god damn ghost,” he thinks.

Joe’s childhood friend does not have time to be a ghost. Kenny believes that Mary, the mother of God, comes to him in dreams with a crown of stars and the moon beneath her feet and wants Kenny to visit her in what the Aztecs called the center of the moon, and what we, today, call Mexico. He believes that the devil is a miracle that has created the illusion of our self-centered world (“lovelier than a thousand Sistine Chapels”) and only the act of a journey, a pilgrimage, can save us from this first miracle with a second.  He believes that the voyages of Captain Cook and Intuit hunting practices are as real and as present as the toilet pipes he and Joe repair after high school. He knows that all is sacred, all always alive, and that we, unlike ghosts, have a choice to see this or not.

But Kenny is gone, and has been for ten years. He haunts the edges of Joe’s muted days, appearing shoeless in crowded city streets, preaching his vision to empty train cars, leaving the final message of the vanished Roanoke settlers (CROATOAN) graffitied in drainage ditches. Joe circles the flickers of this ebbing fire in his squad car, these hints, only sure of one thing: that Kenny, his best friend, failed at everything, but that failure itself somehow legitimized the undertaking. “Anything else was not worth the time.”

The novel’s other chapters take place on the road, in memory. Joe and Kenny make their way down from Ohio toward Mexico. They drink with a man with his head caved in on a bus, hitchhike with a suicidal veteran, violate the Missouri law of being poor (and from Ohio), escape an apocalypse-obsessed family cult in Louisiana, and hop trains with immigrants across Texas. The immigrants smile but nod off at Kenny’s story. They are too exhausted to hear the end, how he and Joe will find Mary outside Mexico City and beg her to reveal the truth, and this truth, her love for them, and their love for her, will make it impossible to deny the sacredness of every living thing. Border Control disappears the immigrants. VA hospitals and jails disappear the drunks. Churches and homes warm the faithful and the righteous and those who never leave home. It is difficult to say who the ghosts are here. Kenny tells us the devil most certainly is not one. We should love the devil, he confides to his fellow inmates in a Missouri prison, for “if we don’t love him too, the work will forever remain unfinished…I see him every day.”

Joe smashes a scorpion during his tour of duty in Somalia that follows their pilgrimage. He uses an oil barrel three times to crush it, and it does nothing spectacular, just stops moving. “Damn, killer,” says another soldier. Joe does not believe in God or that this world can mean anything more than it is. He sees only the humiliated and the humiliation. He signs up for the military because in a world that is all ghost, deployments and war become un-ghostly, a quickening, bloody heart in a waste of gray. They have been raised by exhausted and unhappy men with repressed memories of brutal World War 2 campaigns. But the pride of that rare past, of being someone else once, keeps their uncles and fathers alive to themselves in a world that has moved on. Joe sees this. He is smart enough to know that it is nice to have done something, to go somewhere, to be someone, at least once. And the military pays for school now, they say.

We all have a bit of Joe in us. It’s all sad. It’s all a loop, nonsense, a slow fading away. Don’t be too curious. Don’t look too far outside the electric light. Suck it up. You don’t know what’s out there. Keep your head down by pretending to hold it up. The is is the is. Stay alive. And we do. We survive for so long. Thousands of years. Whole eternities. Look at us! Examine our cities, our “brief golden clusters suspended in the night” and the armies of creatures crossing silently through the fields and trainyards around and within them. “The dead never hurt anybody,” Kenny tells Joe during a training exercise with the moon above them like a spider’s egg in the naked, winter branches. “It’s the other ones we have to worry about.”

Then Kenny almost despairs. He says he can hardly remember Her anymore. He warns Joe that “forgetting is the only death…Evil is everything that dims and obscures and wears away the gift for remembering.” Joe says, no, “Evil is time itself. Time is what takes everything away.” Kenny’s eyes go bright (brighter) with tears and hugs his friend. “You have been listening. Now I know. Thank you.” Joe does listen. We do listen. Even if we pretend that we don’t. Some say that’s all ghosts can really do. Some say that only ghosts believe in time because they are trapped in the idea of it. Others—like me—say that novels as true and wise and joyful as Our Lady of Good Voyage prove Kenny wrong. There will always be people among us who remember, ergo nothing ever dies, and there is no evil, despite the best attempts of the righteous and incurious to make us believe otherwise.

But enough with the ghosts. In the book’s final pages Joe, a child again, runs away from a snapping turtle that a group of boys have stomped to death, back to Kenny, off the path, somewhere in the woods. They spend hours “contriving little ships from bark and twigs, binding the planks and timbers with long green grasses.” They make a fort out of some old logs and beg for food from the local bakery. They work like devils to create a home that is not a home thanks to Kenny’s mom, who provides them somewhere safe to come back to, to return to after their long difficult pilgrimages, in Ohio, and Mexico, and Africa, searching for the mother of God the world over. They complete their project. They look out from their fort with immense human satisfaction. “Neither deadlines nor schedules concerned them, not the world’s troubles, and the long days led away, in gratuitous succession, to the very vanishing point of time, which was inexhaustible as air, and warranted as little concern.”

You can buy Our Lady of Good Voyage at Orison Books.

Chapter 12 of One Tick Stopped the Clock

Published by Legacy Book Press

Excerpted from ONE TICK STOPPED THE CLOCK Copyright © 2024 by Jennifer Crystal. Used with permission of Legacy Book Press, Camanche, Iowa. All rights reserved.

Some edits made for context

“Slow down, Mom! I want to get there alive.”

I don’t think my mother heard me. She rolled through a stop sign and swung a hard right at the hospital entrance, swerving as we roared up to the ambulance bay where she slammed the car into park.

“Mom, we can’t park here…”

But she was already out of the car, sprinting through the automatic doors, shouting, “Help! My daughter needs help!”

That September afternoon had started like any other during my multi-year convalescence from Lyme disease and other chronic illness. Too sick to work or take care of myself, I’d had to give up my independent life and, at age twenty-five, move back with my parents. Every afternoon, I left my sickbed and came downstairs when my mom arrived home from teaching. We made snacks as we talked. She had her usual flatbread with margarine, and I mixed banana slices and peanut butter in a bowl. 

“I can’t believe you like that,” my mom said. “Such a sticky mess.”

“Yum!” I put a big glob in my mouth, flipping the spoon over and dragging it across my tongue for affect. “Much better than that cardboard you’re eating.” I scrunched my nose and ate another spoonful. “How was your day?” 

“Long, and it was only the second day of school.”

“Only 178 more to go,” I joked, my mouth full and sticky.

“And to think they already made us have a faculty meeting today.”

Suddenly I felt flushed and shaky, like I sometimes did before my blood sugar crashed, a symptom of the tick-borne illness babesiosis. Beads of sweat formed on my temples.

“The nerve, keeping us so late on the second afternoon—” 

I stood up, feeling lightheaded and dizzy. My blood sugar couldn’t be low; I was in the middle of eating. But I felt like I might faint. “I’m sorry to cut you off Mom, but I have to go lie down. Right now.”

Alarmed, my mother stood up, too. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, I just suddenly really don’t feel well.”

I stumbled to the edge of the kitchen, holding on to the wall as I took the one step down into the den, then turned to the couch on my right and flung myself over its arm. I was gripped by a searing abdominal pain that made me scream and writhe.

“What? What’s wrong?” My mother reached towards me, but I rolled away.

“Oh my God, Mom, it’s like someone is stabbing me with a jagged chainsaw.”

“What? Where? Is it your stomach?”

I gasped for breath, clutching the right side of my abdomen. “Right…here…below my…rib cage.”

“Maybe it’s your appendix!”

“No, the appendix is lower.” I moved my hand down on my abdomen to show where the appendix is. “This is up here.” I rubbed the area below my rib cage. I felt like my insides were being sliced into little pieces. I threw myself off the couch onto the beige carpet, trying to get away from the pain. “Please Mom, make it stop. Make it stop!”

“Okay, okay. You’re okay. Here, just try to sit up.” My mom crouched over me, trying to pull me upright.

“No! That hurts more!” I thrashed on the floor, kicking my legs from side to side. 

“Let’s call the doctor. What’s the number? Do you know the number?”

Sucking in my breath to hold in the pain, I slowly called out my doctor’s number as my mom dashed into the kitchen to get her phone. She waved her free hand, trying to shush my moaning so she could hear. She walked away into another part of the house for what felt like an unbearably long time, then finally ran back into the den. “They said to take you to the E.R.”

Panting, I tried to pull myself up on the couch, but slid back down in pain.  “Can you go get my purse? It’s on my bedroom floor. We’re going to need my insurance card and medication list.”

My mother ran off, taking the stairs two at a time. She raced back through the den with my bag in hand and flung open the door to the garage. “Oh no. Oh no!”

“What?”

“The car’s not here. Oh my God, I forgot, Elizabeth has the car. She went to Mackenzie’s house.” My sixteen-year-old sister had just gotten her license, and borrowed my mother’s car whenever she could to go to a friend’s house. 

Pain and fear seized me again. I pushed them aside to say, as calmly as I could, “Okay, well Mackenzie only lives five minutes away. Call Elizabeth and tell her to come right home.”

For an excruciating five or maybe even ten minutes, I thrashed and howled while my mother paced in front of me, wringing her hands and peering out the window. “She’ll be here any minute,” she kept saying. 

Finally, we heard the engine in the garage and car doors slam. Elizabeth and Mackenzie tumbled into the house. They both stopped short when they saw me. Mackenzie’s eyes grew wide. She backed away, as if whatever I had might be catching. “Oh my God, Jen.” 

My mom grabbed the keys out of Elizabeth’s hands. “Give Jen your flip flops. Help me get her into the car.”

I screamed as my mother drove. When we got to a crucial turn at the edge of town, she said, “Maybe I should take you to a hospital in Hartford.” If we turned right, we could get on the highway and be there in twenty minutes. But I couldn’t hold out that long.

“No,” I whimpered. “It hurts too much. Just go to the local one.” Another hospital was a few blocks away. It didn’t have as good as a reputation, but this was an emergency. How bad could it really be?

After my mom slammed the car into park in the ambulance bay of the closer hospital, I stumbled after her into the E.R., hunched over at almost a ninety-degree angle.

The triage nurse sat us in office chairs across from her desk, as if we were here to open a bank account or discuss our taxes. I clutched my abdomen as I rocked back and forth on the seat. 

“Insurance card?” 

I reached into my purse and handed the nurse my insurance card, my license, and my medication list. “Here, everything you need is right here. Can I please just see a doctor? I’m in so much pain. My mom can go over all this stuff with you.”

The nurse peered at me over her wire rim glasses, sizing me up. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad is the pain?”

“Eleven!” I hugged myself harder. “Please, can’t you just get a doctor?”

The nurse sighed. “I have to assess the situation first.”

“What’s to assess? I feel like I’m being stabbed in the gut. Look, I have a PICC line in.” I showed her my left arm, where a peripherally inserted catheter ran from my elbow to my heart, pumping antibiotics to kill the Lyme disease bacteria. “I’m afraid it might be related to that.”

“Why do you have a PICC line?”

“Intravenous antibiotics for late-stage neurological Lyme Disease.” 

The nurse raised her eyebrows. I realized this might be one of the hospitals that followed certain protocols that didn’t approve of the use of long-term antibiotics. I did not have it in me to fight about Lyme right now. I needed my acute issue treated, stat.

My mother chimed in, “Look, she’s really in pain. Please can’t we just get her to a doctor?”

The nurse sighed again. “Ma’am, I’m just doing my job.”

Holding my head in my hands, I started sobbing. The nurse gave me an exasperated glare.

I screeched, “It hurts. It hurts. It hurts so much.” Dear God, I am screaming in their faces and still no one hears me. Please help me. I don’t want to die. 

Finally, I was brought to an exam room, but still there was no doctor in sight. 

“Can’t you give her something for the pain?” My mother pleaded with whoever was in the room, someone in pink scrubs. 

“We can’t give her anything until a doctor sees her.”

“Then, please get a doctor,” my mother cried.

“They’re all busy with other patients,” the woman replied. “There are several people in more serious condition than your daughter.”

I grabbed my mother’s arm. “Oh my God, Mom, I can’t take the pain. Please do something.” It felt like whatever I’d been stabbed with was now stuck in my stomach, cutting deeper each time I moved or breathed.

My mother brushed my hair off my sweaty forehead. “She said they can’t give you anything until the doctor comes.”

“That’s not how it worked on E.R. People came in screaming and Dr. Ross immediately ordered a liter of Lidocaine.” 

The sides of my mother’s mouth twitched in what would have been a smile if this were a different situation. She continued to rub her hand across my forehead. “This isn’t TV. George Clooney isn’t going to walk in here.”

“Believe me, I know. He would never leave me lying here in pain.”

“We should have gone to the other hospital.” 

I knew my mother was right, but I was too distressed for should-haves. I whined, “Just get the pain out of me. Get it out of me!”

The woman in pink scrubs turned around in alarm. “Are you pregnant?” 

“Are you kidding me? No, I’m not pregnant. I’m in pain. My stomach hurts. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m definitely not pregnant. I meant get the pain out of me. Not a baby.”

“Are you sure? Maybe we should do a urine test.” 

“OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” Instinctively, I sat up, which only made it hurt more. “Look, I’ve been bedridden for almost two years, okay? Two years. Alone. There is no way I am pregnant. Please go get a doctor!”

The woman hurried out of the room, and miraculously, a doctor appeared. 

“What seems to be the problem?” he asked. He was thin and young with cropped dark hair and a few days’ worth of stubble. I wondered how long he’d been awake. 

Holding my stomach, I told him what had happened. He nodded and looked at my chart, but never at me. Then he pressed on my abdomen. I yelped.

“That hurts?”

“Yes, that hurts! All around that area. The pain has not let up.”

“Hmm. Well, let’s get an x-ray. A nurse will come in shortly to take you.”

“Just try to breathe,” my mother soothed as she rubbed my head. “Let’s do some Lamaze.”

I wanted to laugh, but it hurt too much. “Mom, I really am not pregnant.”

“I know. But you’re screaming like you’re in labor. So maybe labor breathing will help.” My mom demonstrated by taking a big inhale and then slowly blowing out her breath in spurts. “Breathe with the pain.”

I sucked in my breath each time the pain gripped me, then tried to blow it out slowly. The technique didn’t seem to do much since my pain was so constant, but by the time a nurse came to wheel me to x-ray, the intensity had lessened.

“Feeling better?” the nurse asked as she positioned me in front of the x-ray machine.

“The pain has decreased.”

“Well, you’re still all clammy,” she said. “Somethin’s definitely cookin’.”

What the doctor decided was cooking turned out to be a huge pile of shit.

“I read your x-ray and I see a lot of…um…stool, in your colon,” he said to my stomach, refusing to meet my eye.

“I’m not constipated. I have a lot of medical issues, but constipation has never been one of them.”

“Well, that’s what this is,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m going to send you home with a laxative. That should help. You can follow up with your doctor tomorrow.”

“That’s not stool,” my doctor said when I got him on the phone later.  “I’ve got your x-ray in front of me. Those are gallstones.”

“Gallstones? Like in my gallbladder?” 

“Exactly. I don’t know how they missed this,” my doctor continued. “These gallstones are huge. The pain you felt was one of them trying to squeeze through the bile duct. Once it did, the pain stopped. Were you eating something fatty?”

“Yes, peanut butter.”

“Oh, that’ll do it. The gallbladder processes fat. You basically set off an attack.”

Vaguely, I remembered that when my doctor had offered me the option of the PICC line, he’d mentioned the rare risk of the medicine causing gallstones. “Rare” hadn’t seemed a likely scenario, then. I ran my free hand through my hair, twirling it around my finger. “So, what do I do now?”

“I’m going to call in some medication that might shrink the stones. Take that tonight, but then I want you to go see a specialist tomorrow and get an ultrasound. You can’t play around with this.”

The next day I drove to see a specialist at a hospital about an hour away, near my dad and stepmom Janet’s house. During the time that I was sick, I often migrated between my two childhood homes. “These stones are the size of rolls of duct tape. Your gallbladder needs to come out immediately,” the specialist said. He scheduled me for surgery the following morning.

“I’ll come,” my mom offered when I called to update her. 

“It’s okay. Janet can take me.” 

“What about when you wake up from surgery? When you have the shakes and throw up?” My mom had been with me after four eye surgeries as a child, and after knee surgery as a young adult when I’d been a die-hard skier, before being sidelined tick-borne illness. No one knew how to care for me afterwards like she did. Janet would do her best, but my mom was the one who had always held my hand, rubbed my head, and told me it was going to be okay. 

Still, all those surgeries had happened when I was younger. I was twenty-seven years old. I felt like I should be able to get through this on my own. “I can handle it,” I told my mom. “You have school. You can’t take a day off during the first week.”

“Of course I can. I’ll take a personal day.”

I hesitated. I really wanted my mom there. 

“Besides,” my mom cut into my thoughts, “I have Cubby.”

Cubby was a stuffed bear cub that my mom had given me before my first eye surgery. I was only nine years old at the time, so the nurses had let me keep him in the bed with me right up to the operating room doors and had given him back to me when they woke me in recovery. Cubby had been with me for all my surgeries. It started to feel silly bringing a stuffed animal to the hospital as I got older, but he’d become a good luck charm. 

“Gotcha there, don’t I,” my mom said. 

I sighed. “Are you sure?”

“I already put Cubby by the door.”

That night in my room at my dad and Janet’s, I slept on my stomach, which was difficult because of the PICC line. I woke up every few minutes either worried that the port had come loose or that a gallbladder attack was about to happen. I prayed each time I awoke. Someone must have heard me because I made it through the night without incident. 

In the morning I infused my antibiotics, then put on a button-down shirt, knowing from experience that I would be too out of it later to pull a regular shirt over my head. I French braided my hair, which would keep it off my face but still allow it to lie flat under the surgical cap. I had both hands tangled behind my head, halfway through the braid, when Janet called up to me, “Jen, please come downstairs.”

I dropped my hands. My hair tumbled loose as the braid fell apart. I walked down to the kitchen, where Janet greeted me with a somber face. “Your mom just called. She’s been in a car accident. She’s fine, but she’s going to be late. She’ll meet us at the hospital.”

My heart started to race. “Is she really okay? How bad was the accident?” I studied Janet’s stoic face. 

“Just a fender bender. She’s fine.” 

I wanted to believe Janet but wondered if she was just telling me that because I had to focus on the surgery. She didn’t say anything more as we drove to the hospital. Terrible scenarios ran through my head as we checked in, went through pre-op, and waited for the anesthesiologist. The clock on the wall ticked off several hours as we waited, but there was still no sign of my mom. 

“She’s fine,” Janet kept saying. 

My mom was still not there by the time they wheeled me into surgery. 

“I’m nervous,” I told the anesthesiologist.

“That’s normal.” He fiddled with my IV. “This first dose I’m going to give you is like a glass of wine. You’re going to feel great in a few minutes.”

“But it’s not just about the surgery. My mom got in a car accident and she’s not here. I don’t know if she’s going to be okay…”

The next thing I remember, a nurse was calling my name. “Jennifer…Jennifer…” People rarely called me by my full name, and it felt strange to hear it. 

Something else felt different, too. I didn’t feel shaky. I didn’t feel like I was out of control from the medicine coursing through my body. There was a dull ache in my abdomen, but otherwise, I felt completely calm. In my head, a voice softly said, “You’re stronger than you think, Jen Crystal.” Maybe it was my own subconscious. Maybe it was God. Maybe it was George Clooney. Whoever it was, I knew, in that moment, that I’d survived the surgery and I was going to survive whatever else was coming, too.

“My mom,” I said to the nurse. “Is my mom alright? Is she here?”

“I don’t know,” the nurse replied. “I’m not sure who your mom is. But someone gave me this and told me to give it to you as soon as you woke up.” She held out Cubby. 

Only then did I start to cry. 

Fights within the infantry were common enough that their variations came to be source material for a dark form of in-unit comedy. So it was with one of my tussles in the Pendleton dirt.

My platoon, nearing a four-day weekend of liberty, hurled headlong into its assignments like men frenzied by a demon possession. Our leaders enthralled our thinking minds with the simple incantation of the word “leisure” alone. Noncoms whipped themselves into a lather, finding a way to use the carrot of a long weekend as a psychological stick. Every whiff of insubordination, every instance of languor was shouted-out as sufficient cause for losing precious hours of rest.

Leadership had planned this so-called Final Exercise prior to our release. It was as a field maneuvers demonstration一a check mark within the long list of requirements needed to attain the status of combat readiness, elevating us from a training atmosphere to a higher, deployable strata.

We hustled overladen vehicles hungrily about a portion of the base restricted from live fire. So deprived of ordnance within our training exercises, we found ourselves reduced to infantile instances of make-believe that rapidly bled-out the platoon’s energy. The brass fed us unsatisfying reasons for our empty magazines and absent ammo boxes related to fire safety and protected wildlife species, all of which we decoded as thin cover for their avoidance of the paperwork and bureaucratic effort involved in drawing ammo and identifying a suitable training theater. 

Jokesters in the platoon gifted us with over-blown sound effects to mock the silliness of the exercise, improvising the blast sounds of an 81 mm mortar system before gamefully cycling through childlike takes on the percussive noises of our small arms weapons. Daunted more by boredom than combat, they struggled mightily against the dullness by inventing a soundboard of fictional laser guns to mine for any scarce laughs. Gruff Marines felt uncomfortable as such horsing around left a residue of foolishness, implying the unwelcome notion that we were unserious men at play. Soured by the exercise, the warrior class of our platoon retreated into stoic silences and meditative tobacco dipping, abruptly disinterested in bird-dogging us onward.

We were ordered, uncharacteristically, to establish a static firing position for all eight of our mortar squads without the usual fuckery of being shifted about the terrain like a knight giving chase across a chess board. We set aiming stakes, assembled the M252 81 mm mortar systems, practiced site-to-site procedures to ensure we were firing as a unit, and spent the ensuing hours digging ever deeper mortar pits, filling sandbags, and rotating out to periphery watch positions, vigilant for an imagined enemy within the borders of Camp Pendleton and, unthinkably, within the United States.

Idle hands.

We settled in for the night with ample time to find cause for complaint, for our muscles to tense from disuse, and to turn on each other.

Morning came sleepily with its characteristic valley cold. Light fog lazed about the hills until chased away by an ambitious California sun. We burrowed into our three-layer sleeping bag systems and bulked-up on layers of Polypro undergarments which we shed through the slow progression of the day and its rising heat. Relative to other large-scale exercises, we were skating along Easy Street which we managed to spoil with the tone of our own malaise.

There were no hypothetical fire missions, no ammo dunnage to be cleaned, and our weapons would be free of carbon upon our return to the armory. There was only the occasional squawk of the radio and light whispers between the radio watch. The officers and Staff NCOs hovered around some kind of illicit field coffee maker that could have easily set the dry grasslands afire.

We reconciled ourselves to eating MREs the likes of beef stew or teriyaki chicken for breakfast, tending to their careful heating and preparations like entranced Zen masters engaged in sacred ritual. Some Marines tugged dog-eared novels from overstuffed cargo pockets and sought their escape through the mind. Others napped within their flak jackets and deuce gear, ready to move at a moment’s notice should such orders ring-out like spontaneous gunfire.

I was sent on an early perimeter watch rotation having been spared from a night shift through a miraculous cosmic dice roll. The lax discipline that was everywhere on display had seeped into my bones, and I sauntered to a watch position on an elevated ridge cocooned in my green poncho liner which I had tucked into the neckline of my flak jacket, flagrantly assuming too much comfort to be an effective guard. I chose a prone position, laying on my stomach, occasionally scanning the hillsides for movement. Intermittently, a few CAAT platoon Humvees could be seen, sight-lined along various hillside approaches.

“Contact right!” I called out, generally unclear if CAAT was considered our ally or our enemy in this particular portion of the pretend field exercise, as much to feign attentiveness than out of any real desire to invest effort into the day’s training. Our platoon leadership generally held back the underlying intent of any given exercise as a means of bottling information to feed their own self-importance and maintain an artificially created advantage they lorded over us. The only information that filtered through the sieve of ranks was when to break down, where to go, and when to dig-in. All else was “need to know” and it had been made abundantly clear that I didn’t ever need to know.

Having established a veneer of alertness by communicating a few vehicle approaches, I allowed the cool of the morning fog to lull my body into a relaxed state and slow my breathing as I pretended to look out beyond the sights of my weapon. Sleep quickly overtook me, drawing me down into a place of deep and inner calm like a rounded stone welcomed gradually to its new resting place at the bottom of a quiet pond.

“Wake the fuck up, Smith!” a voice screamed into my ear. His volume was deafening and was easily loud enough to carry throughout the valley. I had been caught. Panic and adrenaline began coursing through me. I had never fallen asleep on watch before; this was something I prided myself on, though many Marines struggled with the discipline of it throughout their enlistment. Yet, here I was, undeniably in the wrong and spotlighted before the Staff NCOs and the officer. I scrambled to my feet and sought out the snitch.

Alanzo.

Chunky. Worthless. He stood leering over me, a light duty commando who was able to slip through the cracks of the Marine Corps by embracing an encyclopedic documentation of his various and vague ailments that precluded him from ever engaging in any serious training. It confounded me as to why he had chosen to be in the infantry when he so clearly did not belong even, apparently, by his own assessments. I could understand not being talented; I could not abide the way he gamed the system to drift by. If you don’t want to be here, my thought was, then be bold and shoot yourself in the foot or take a few sips of weed like some many others did and move on. Don’t waste everybody’s time pretending you’re a part of the unit instead of a platoon bottom-feeder in search of an easy way out instead of working your way up.

He represented all that was wrong with the Corps. He regularly cheated on his Physical Fitness Test, finding sympathetic or similarly chubby Marines who would lie about the number of sit-ups he could perform in the span of 2 minutes to goose his score by about 50 points. There was no cheating on pull-ups or run-times, which were too public, but it was obvious he did not meet the weight requirement standards, nor could he complete a unit run without falling back, wheezing and making over-exaggerated facial contortions intended to convey the depth of his unbearable pain to justify his inability to run further. Through his sick hall manipulations, he managed to alter his status to non-deployable before our pump to Iraq. Though his pretense had sickened me, I was glad he hadn’t participated in the invasion. I had no desire for someone of his questionable worth to supposedly watch my back. Perhaps more true, I felt his inclusion in the Corps cheapened what it meant for me to be a Marine, robbing my chosen struggle of its intended meaning. That he represented what it was to be a Marine dimmed the light of our collective reputation.

His presence compounded my embarrassment and fear at having been caught shirking my duties. I felt dirtied by his involvement. Those emotions immediately evolved to rage at the sight of this shit-bag Marine gloating at having the upper hand over someone (anyone!) to divert the negative attention away from himself and garner a sliver of praise, if only for a fleeting moment. I reacted in the only way that made sense in an infantry platoon. I balled my fist and let fly a wild haymaker at the general direction of his stupid face.

My punch smashed into the side of his Kevlar helmet, dampening its intended effect but delivering enough power to knock him to the ground. After he fell, I immediately scrambled atop his chest to pin him to the ground with my body weight and began raining blows towards his mouth. My strikes were largely ineffective given he wore armor and used his flailing hands to shield the exposed portion of his mouth and nose and eyes. In the heat of the grapple, he managed to shoot his fingers up and into my mouth, thrusting his fingers into my throat. I let loose a bizarre animal growl, frustrated, and swatted his hand aside before resuming my ineffectual attack on his face. My anger was only ramping up, with years of smoldering disdain for this near worthless Marine stoked to blast furnace rage by his momentary air of superiority over me.

We had the platoon’s full attention. There wasn’t much going on that morning, so it was a welcome entertainment. Even so, it could only be allowed to go on so long.

“Smith, get your fucking ass over!” called Corporal Wes. My anger waned, undermined by the uncertainty of just how bad the disciplinary action to come would be. “Now!” I didn’t have much time to think it over. I released Alanzo, shoving myself to a standing position by pushing down on him to add a parting gesture of disrespect. I ripped the poncho liner out of my flak jacket, realizing how undisciplined I looked, collected my light machine gun, and trotted back to my squad’s mortar pit.

“What the fuck were you doing?”

“Punching that piece of shit in the face, like he deserves.” 

“You were sleeping on watch, weren’t you?”

“I was,” I admitted, clenching my jaw, forever proud.

“I sent him over there. I knew you were sleeping, idiot.” I didn’t respond, waiting. “Why do you think he was wearing armor? I told him to put on his Kevlar before messing with you. Fuck! It’s like I’m a puppet master pulling all the right strings! I knew you’d take a swing! I willed it into being!” he said, smiling around an oversized dip of Copenhagen snuff. I couldn’t tell if he was proud of himself for busting me asleep on watch, for manufacturing conditions that led to Alanzo getting punched, or for having an excuse to screw with me for the remainder of the field exercise. Probably all three. Corporal Wes—master drama tactician. I appreciated the subtle genius of it. In addition to the obvious amusement, I had also served as an example to the remainder of the platoon to tighten up. There was always a sacrificial lamb, and I had become the fool unknowingly marked for slaughter. Worse still, a fool unredeemed by innocence.

“What are we going to do with you?” he asked, rhetorically. I knew enough not to offer-up any solutions. Best to shut your face and work through whatever came. I deserved it, which made it easier to swallow. “To start, lock your body at Present Arms. Now hold out your SAW straight-out at arm’s length. Keep your arm perpendicular to the deck.” I followed his order. I was well versed in this game from boot camp. He observed me as the strain grew in my muscles, then he glanced at the Staff NCOs and the Platoon Commander who were watching from a distance. Unsatisfied with the visual tableau he’d created, he unclipped the Kevlar that hung from my deuce gear and placed it atop the flash suppressor on the barrel of my machine gun. He forced me to heft an extra five pounds or so, cantilevered at the distance of my extended, skinny arms. The weight immediately created fire in my delts and shoulder muscles. “You better keep it the fuck up, Smith.”

“Aye, Corporal.” The worst part was not knowing how long it would last and was worsened by knowing that it was a biological fact that I would ultimately fail. I threw myself into the hazing, concentrating my entire being into denying the existence of my bodily pain and to hold my weapon and Kevlar at a perfect arm’s length. My friends walked by, some laughing and shaking their heads, others making weird faces at me to disrupt my military bearing and get me in further trouble for their entertainment. I don’t know how much time passed. Not much. It could have easily been three minutes as thirty. Pain stabbed at my muscles with increasing fervor until Corporal Wes next came by to venture an appraising look.

“Put your Kevlar on and lower your weapon,” he said. “You’re going to be an Ammo Man for the remainder of the day,” he said, demoting me from my usual position of Gunner. “But while we’re waiting for our next fire mission, I want you to low crawl out to both aiming stakes and adjust them.”

“Aye, Corporal.”

“That’s not all. Put a dip of Copenhagen in, before you go.” He handed me his can of snuff and watched as I pinched a healthy portion between my lip and gum-line. “That’s right.”

I stepped away, clipped my chin strap into place, then began low-crawling toward the first aiming stake fifty meters away, careful to drag my Kevlar’s edge in the dirt as I had done in Basic Training to simulate avoiding direct fire and, more importantly, to help convey the sense that I was being adequately punished. I used my sling to drag my light machine gun along with me, careful not to flag any one behind me, but occasionally (unavoidably) flagging myself, inadvertently breaking the weapons safety rules. By the time I reached my objective, the nicotine ambushed my body, vulnerable in its chemical unfamiliarity, leaving my head plundered and spinning. The day was by then hot. The heat coupled to the unfamiliar tobacco had my stomach turning somersaults. Once there, I made minute adjustments to the cant of the stake based on hand signals from my mortar squad. I crawled to the most distant stake a full hundred meters out from our position. Occasionally, I took a scenic route to circumnavigate clumps of cacti and brambles with thorny seeds.

“Hurry the fuck up, Smith!” Corporal Wes yelled. I marginally increased my speed immediately after he ordered such things, but quickly returned to my previous rate which is the only acceptable way to say “Fuck You” to a ranking Marine while in duty without actually mouthing the words aloud.

Once returned to the mortar pit, Corporal Wes smiled broadly. “Come on, Smith! Lighten-up! You know I had to do something, or Gunny and the Lieutenant would have come over, and it would have been worse. They probably would have fucked with all of us, and that’s when the whole damn platoon turns against you.” I nodded, acknowledging the truth of this. I was sullen, but more so at myself for having fallen asleep than at having been called-out on it.

Stan Walton, a Lance Corporal like myself at the time, rejoiced in the retelling of my fight. Before enlisting, Walton had routinely played in a Death Metal Band while studying blues guitar at the University of Memphis. He had sleeves on his forearms—tattoos that covered all available skin with endearing messages such as “Dying” scrawled laterally down his forearms, with flaming skulls embellishing the periphery of each word.

“You looked like a retarded Superman!” he teased, smiling ear to ear. “We saw everything. When you went back to wind up for a punch, the poncho liner you had tucked into your flak jacket whirled out like a goddamn cape! Ha-ha! Then you gave this ridiculous over-punch that made you look like something out of a DC comic or like some fool trying a drunk version of a Street Fighter super move!” Everyone in the squad laughed until they couldn’t breathe. He began re-enacting the scene, miming it over and over, wildly exaggerating my every move. I couldn’t help but smile and laugh along with them at my idiocy.

“I just can’t believe you sent over fuckin’ Alanzo!” I kept saying. Obsessing over his involvement. Amazed by it.

“He’s worthless. He deserved to be hit in the face.” This was the general consensus of the squad and, most likely, that of the platoon. It was probably the driving reason Gunny and the Platoon Commander had decided not to get involved, tacitly approving of the desire to police our own. Letting us men work it out like men are supposed to do.

That I had been the bully in this remembrance gnawed at me, undermining my ability to think of myself as a good guy. I had beat on a weaker Marine to cover my shame. I regret. I have so many regrets.

Doug Rawlings had his life planned out:  graduate school, business school, eventual law school, and a career in business. But then, like thousands of other young men, he received the dreaded SSS Form No. 252, Order to Report for Induction. Future plans on hold.  Rawlings completed Basic Training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and AIT at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.  After a two-week leave, next stop, Vietnam, where he was stationed in the Central Highlands (about 100 miles east of Pleiku), “B” Battery, 7^th/15^th Field Artillery, Firebase/LZ Two Bits, with an MOS of 93F20, Ballistics Support.

 After his return to the States, he moved to Boston, and discovered the poetry of Denise Levertov and Muriel Rukeyser.  He started writing his own poems, and sent a handful to Bill Erhardt and Jan Berry, who published them in the 1976 Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam.  Rawlings’ first book, Orion Rising (2014), opens with two prologues:  the first discusses his reasons for being one of the five founding members of Veterans for Peace, which originated in Maine in 1985 (and now has chapters in all fifty states, England, and Vietnam). In his statement he is especially concerned about the effects of war on children, past, present, and future.  He writes “A group such as Veterans for Peace can offer us, veterans of war, a vehicle to bring our special message to the children of the world.” The second prologue, and the first section of poems, is entitled “A Survivor’s Manual: Out of the Ashes.” In this prologue Rawlings has a running “conversation” with Robert Bly that was touched off by the 1970 Forty Poems Touching On Recent American History, edited by Bly. Rawlings presents excerpts from Bly’s introduction and then he reflects on how Bly’s comments connect to his life and work, especially as they relate to the idea of “political poetry.” Rawlings synthesizes these two apparent opposites, politics and art, when he writes “So I found some kind of comfort, if not inspiration, from Bly’s insistence that poems can be written that would ‘penetrate deeply into the psyche of the nation’ without sacrificing a personal voice.”

Many of the poems in the first section of Orion Rising concern the continuing impact of the past on the present, specifically the ways that memories of Vietnam haunt the life of the veteran. For example, in “A Soldier’s Lament,” Rawlings writes about the Vietnamese children who sat “beneath the barbed wire/ . . .  to sell us what they would: . . .  .” Now, decades later, “our souls/blister and burn/across the years/above the bonfires/of children’s curses.” In “Medic” Rawlings pleads with a medic to wash the blood of a wounded soldier off his hands, and then in the present to “come stop his screams/from tearing through/my dreams/my dreams . . .  .”

About section two, entitled “The Maine Poems: Family, Friends, and Place,” Rawlings notes “So it is a life of books and ‘hands-on’ labor that infuse many of the poems in this section. It is no mistake that love of the land, melded with love of family and friends, weaves throughout them.” Poems such as “Homage to the Winter Moon” find solace in Nature by providing a respite from the “strident headlines” of the world; similarly, in “Ice Out Poem: A Quartet,” the cyclical renewal of Nature offers hope for another year. At the same time, the poems about family often have a melancholic tone and hint at the tension between father and son, in “Father Grieving” and father and daughter, in “The Exchange.” In the heart-wrenching “To Jen Turning Sixteen” the writer is forced to come to terms with familial change and loss as his daughter, “The princess I made you out to be” grows into womanhood:  “Yet celebrating you on this day/A new rider on the rhythm of the moon/I must also mourn my own passing/before your eyes . . . .”

The final section of the book, “Fiddleheads: Poems for Children,” contains twelve of the original eighteen poems Rawlings wrote for his young children.  He writes that he and the children, ages five and seven, were “immersed in A.A. Milne, caught up in his poems musicality and utter joy of language play. . . . I carried this musicality into the woods and meadows and followed it where it may.” The poems activate the imagination with whimsical juxtapositions, like “Rainbow Girl,” who “just drank up/a hatful of rain/and gobbled down/a most enormous chunk/of sunbeam . . . .” Likewise, “Gravity Experiment”:  “But what if we took/a moose/and pumped/his antlers/full of air/and then cut him/loose—-  . . . ”

Rawlings next book, A G.I. in America:  The Government Issue Chronicles and Selected Poems   (2015), comprises two major sections:  “The Government Issue Chronicles” and “Selected Poems.” In the Foreword Rawlings recalls the start of the Full Disclosure project, a program of Veterans For Peace. He includes the text of a flyer he wrote announcing the event, held at the Judson Church in New York City. His basic question is, who gets to tell the truth of war?  “Is it the soldier coming home wounded in body, mind, and soul? Or the farmer whose land is sown with blood and unexploded ordnance? Or the families with loved ones buried in the ground? Or the families with loved ones maimed in body and mind?  Is it, perhaps, all of the above?” His poems attempt to answer all these basic questions by giving voice to those affected by war.  For example, “Working in the Garden” is dedicated to Suel Jones, who returned to live in Vietnam after the war. He finds “solace . . . in the warm soil.” However, the past rises up and any sense of peace is destroyed when the memories take hold: “Until they come at him again — unbidden —/those images of the village children/he was ordered to think of as weeds/as better to be wasted early on/than allowed to grow/into the enemy . . . ” Another poem, “Unexploded Ordnance: A Ballad” (dedicated to Chuck Searcy and his team that scour the country for unexploded materiel), juxtaposes the poet on Christmas Eve, pondering the shells he had sown in the war, with a scene in Vietnam of a grandfather leading his granddaughter into a field: “They trip into a searing heat/brighter than a thousand suns.” The book closes with the poem “The Wall” and an apostrophe to the dead whose names are on the Wall. In the poem he writes “Slipping past the panel where/my name would have been/could have been/perhaps should have been . . . ” The lines indicate both a sense of guilt for surviving and also the randomness of war. Why did he live while others died? In the apostrophe he seeks a connection to those brothers:  “I will touch your names and force myself to swing back through these many years and put myself in the place and time where and when we may have met.”

In the Shadow of the Annamese Mountains was published in 2020 (hardcover; paperback issued in 2023). The new and selected poems cover work from the years 1974 to 2019.  In their various ways the poems offer a gloss on the book’s epigraph, “Whatever you run from becomes your shadow,” as the poems attempt to confront and erase the shadows. There are poems of resistance and hope, and many of the themes Rawlings explores in his other books are evident here. For example, in “Walking The Wall: A Song” (2014), dedicated to his friend Don Evon, Rawlings notes at the start of the poem:  “My time in Vietnam started in early July, 1969—Wall panel number W21—and ended in early August, 1970—panel W7, line 29—a walk of about 25 paces past the names of around 9800 dead. I call this ‘walking the Wall.’” While the 1986 poem “The Wall” has a more melancholic tone, this poem ends defiantly, angrily, anti-war: “So take a walk with me down the Wall some late evening/Where we can all listen to the ghostly young soldiers keening/But don’t waste your time thanking them for their service/They just might tell you the truth – all your wars are worthless.” Another “Wall” poem likewise has a sense of anger. In “At The Wall for the Memorial Day Service 2015: A Lament” the speaker is at the Wall for a supposedly solemn service but observes nothing but hypocrisy and phony sanctimoniousness (“The beginning does not bode well./A pasty white rent-a-padre/ . . . wants us to know that the young/did not die in vain”). The dishonesty of the ceremony is in contrast to the reality of this “black granite wall/glistening with the entrails of those/poor bastards we left behind . . .  .” The poem ends on a hopeless note:  “How can I possibly abolish war in their good young names/how can I tell them they certainly did not die in vain/when I can’t even stop these clueless clowns/from desecrating this holiest of all grounds?”

The book includes a number of photographs by Rawlings’ fellow soldier, Don Evon, which mainly show village scenes, landscapes, and children, and in some cases offer a counterpoint to a poem, as in “Please Don’t Shoot the Orphans” (2013) and “On the Path of Moral Injury: More Questions Than Answers” (2019). About the photographs Evon writes in the introduction: “My hope is the photos here will trigger good memories for those who were there and will provide some small insight into the way of life of a non-political, non-military Vietnam.”

Relatedly, Rawlings co-edited three volumes of Letters to the Wall (2015-16, 2017-18, and 2019-20).  The letters are from veterans, family members, friends, and others affected by the war.  Some of the most moving letters are from sons and daughters addressed to a parent killed in the war.

Cầu Tre/Bamboo Bridge, Conversations between a Vietnamese Refugee and an American Veteran. Told in Poetry and Prose was published in 2021. The book is a collaboration between Rawlings and Teresa Mei Chuc, and is bilingual, with work in both Vietnamese and English.

The poems and prose alternate between Chuc and Rawlings. They do not necessarily form a “dialogue” between the two writers but rather create thematic echoes in the book’s five sections.

Most recently, Rawlings journeyed to Vietnam in August, 2023, for the 14^th Engaging With Vietnam conference.

 In his remarks at one session of the conference Rawlings talked about the idea of heritage and noted “that we who were in the U.S. military as part of the American war in Vietnam are now part of Vietnam’s heritage and, through us, American veterans, Vietnam has become part of America’s heritage.” He also read two of his poems in English, “Unexploded Ordnance: A Ballad” and “The Girl in the Picture,” which were then read in Vietnamese by Ms. Tran Xuan Thao, the director of the War Remnants Museum.

Rawlings’ poetry is about the many forms of heritage. There is the heritage of the war and its effects not only on the veteran but also more broadly on society. There is the heritage of family through the generations. Finally, the poems are about the heritage embodied in literature and the arts. In “Song of Myself” Walt Whitman asks “Who wishes to walk with me?” Through the many facets of his poetry we can walk with Doug Rawlings.

In September 2024 Ron Shetterly’s portrait of Rawlings was unveiled at the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine, as the 275^th in the series Americans Who Tell the Truth (see https://americanswhotellthetruth.org/).

Larry Abbott:

Let’s start by asking how you came to write poetry, starting around 1974, four years after your discharge in 1970.

Doug Rawlings:        

My earlier education was not leaning towards poetry at all. I had received a degree in economics and was working on an MBA at Ohio State University, to go to work at Eastman Kodak, where my dad worked, and become a corporate lawyer. Then I got drafted.

After my war experience, I came home, and my wife and I moved to Boston in the early ’70s for whatever reason. I don’t know. I got a job at a hospital, counting out pills and stuff. But Boston, at that time, had a number of all-night bookstores, and I wandered into one, on Harvard Square actually, and found this collection of poems by Denise Levertov from New Directions Books about her recent experiences in Vietnam, in North Vietnam, with Muriel Rukeyser, another poet. And I was just blown away. These poems were just amazing. They were, to me, the first realistic, honest account of that war that I read. There wasn’t that much out there. A lot of it was the gung-ho crap or really stoner stuff. I have nothing against that. I was a stoner when I was in Vietnam. Trust me – I was. But I just didn’t want to go in that direction. Her poems had a clinical tinge, but they read beautifully. Again, when I talk about political art, political poetry, I always talk about that notion that you have to be really careful about diluting the politics for the art, or destroying the art in favor of the diatribe from the politics.

It takes real skill to walk that line and come out at the other end with a powerful poem, and Denise Levertov did. I was reading her work and I started writing my own. I didn’t have anybody to share it with; I was just writing it for myself. This was before computers and the internet and all that. I started piecing together some poems, and I discovered in about 1975 or 1976, I think it was, these guys down in New Jersey, Bill Erhardt and Jan Berry, putting together a collection of Vietnam veterans’ poems, called DMZ.  I put eight poems in the mail and sent them off to these guys, thinking, what the hell? And they wrote back and said, “We love your poems. We’re going to put all eight of them in this collection.”

Wow. That, for me, was the first time – I like to call it an affirmation. Oh, my God. Maybe my poetry really has some kind of ability to reach others, to work with others. I started writing more poems, back and forth, back and forth, sharing with one or two here, whatever. There was a publication in Maine called The Maine Times. They published a few of my poems, which felt really good. So I continued writing.

Then we moved from Bath, Maine to this old farmhouse, an 1823 farmhouse in Chesterville, Maine. It just so happened that one of the people renting the house across from us was a guy named Jeff Kelly, who was into self-publishing and who had published a lot of books. He connected me with Lulu down in North Carolina, a company that does self-publishing. He, himself, has published 500 books, so he knew what he was doing.

He took me under his wing and started helping me put together these books of poems.

Larry Abbott:

This led to Orion Rising, which has three sections. The first section is more about your war experience, and one of the themes, I thought, was that the past continues to haunt the present, like the poems “Medic” and “Flashback.”

Doug Rawlings:        

Right. You’re making me think about this work I’ve done at Togus Veterans’ Hospital [Chelsea, Maine]. I went up there and volunteered for three years in the psychiatric ward, and we would talk about poems from the Civil War right up through the Afghan wars, looking at Walt Whitman, looking at the World War I poets, various writers like that. I would encourage the patients to take material from their psychiatric journals, which they had to keep, the therapeutic journals which they had to keep, and see if they could pull something from that and transform it into this thing called “a poem,” which is, in a sense, this abstract artifact sitting on the table that we’re talking about.

It’s not you, it’s not your war experience, it’s not your therapy, but it’s this thing called a poem. Can we craft it? Can we do something with this to make it for a particular audience, other veterans, yes, or people who are not veterans? We did that kind of work and it leads to this: my theory is that we can use our war experiences, which we’re never going to forget – they’re going to be with us forever, so forget trying to get rid of them – but we can use them in a positive way, as opposed to them using us. That’s what I was talking to these guys about. We had this one vet, he unfortunately died, who was a sniper in Iraq. He wrote these rhyming couplets about being a sniper, and he called them his Dr. Seuss couplets.

We would sit there and laugh. One time we had a sociology student sitting in there with us, and afterwards she said to me, “I can’t believe you guys were laughing at this stuff.” And we said, “Well, yeah, it’s just another way of dealing with it, quite frankly.” And they were quite explicit, but, again, they were humorous. It’s using that notion of gaining control over your experiences. The nurses said this really helped him sleep at night. He would work on poems and then he’d sleep at night.

Larry Abbott:

That relates to one of the quotes in your book: “Whatever you run from becomes your shadow.” If you confront those things, then you lose the shadow.

Doug Rawlings:        

Exactly right. If I can tie this into Veterans For Peace, when we formed V FP, that’s one of the specific reasons we did it. We are a 501(c)(3) so we’re an educational organization, not a therapeutic one. There were plenty of those and we knew that, but we thought, can we – most of us were Vietnam veterans, but others joined us later – use our war experiences in a positive way?    It was this notion that got us thinking about going to high school job fairs and setting up tables next to military recruiters.  We’d assure people that we are not anti-military, but we also want young people to have a deeper understanding of what military service entails.

We had some very interesting conversations with these guys – which, by the way, gets to the point of Full Disclosure, because people are accusing us of being anti-military, anti-recruiting. We said, “No. We’re all about full disclosure. Young people, if you’re going to join the military, take a look at the reality. Find out about how women are treated in the military, for example, or look at this. Look at that. Read this stuff.” So if you still make that decision to join the military, at least you’re going into it a little bit more informed than you otherwise would be.

Larry Abbott:

Another poem in the book, “The Girl in the Picture,” is about the idea of forgiveness and being forgiven.

Doug Rawlings:        

“The Girl in the Picture” is that famous photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, fleeing a village being napalmed. [“The Terror of War” by Nick Ut]. Most of us who are from the Vietnam Era know the photo exactly – I can look at people my age and say, “You know ‘The Girl in the Picture’?” And they know exactly what I’m talking about, that picture. It was iconic. It won the Pulitzer Prize [1973], and it was on, I think, the cover of Time Magazine. But it was a transformative picture for many people. They said, “This is the reality of war. This is what’s happening.”

I was writing this poem about suicide [the 1997 “Formula for a Single Car Suicide (A Tried and True Veteran’s Way Out)”]  – quite frankly, driving down Ridge Road, which is an S-curve, going 70 mph and turning the wheel to the left and to the right and heading into the woods and killing myself. After the war we called those single-car suicides. The VA did not recognize them as suicides, but we did.

A guy all by himself hit a tree, no alcohol involved, no skid marks? This was what he wanted to do. So that was where I was, working on that poem, and I happened to read in a magazine that Kim Phuc, the girl in the picture, was nine years old when that picture was taken, which, at that time, was the exact age of my granddaughter. It just flipped the poem for me, and I started thinking about it in those terms. And at the same time, coincidentally – or, according to Carl Jung, synchronistically, – I was also looking at this collection of poems, a collection from Buddhist texts, and saw that phrase, the shadow phrase, and it flipped the poem for me entirely. I imagined driving down that road and having Kim Phuc appear on the road. What would happen then? Well, I’d have to stop, as I say in the poem, pick her up, and take her home, because that’s what you do when you see a little girl walking down the road: you take her home.

That would happen to be a little village in Vietnam, as I say in the poem, where we could stand at high noon, and there are no shadows. The idea is that, perhaps, forgiveness exists somewhere – and as I say over and over again, I do not have the right to ask the Vietnamese people to forgive me for what we did in that war. But if they offer us forgiveness, we accept it graciously – and gratefully, actually.

I returned to Vietnam in August of 2023 with my son for a conference. I was meeting with a woman, Dr. Tran, who runs the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, depending on what you want to call it. She took me aside and gave me this phrase. She said: “We never forget, but we forgive.” And I thought, that’s exactly where I’m coming from.

Larry Abbott:

The second half of Orion Rising is titled “The Maine Poems: Family, Friends and Place.” This seems to be a counterpoint to the first half, although you do have poems about aging and death, but it seems to have a different tenor from the first section.

Doug Rawlings:        

It does. It makes me recall a poem I wrote for Suel Jones, a vet who chose to live in Vietnam after the war. I was talking to him one day and asked him, “Suel, what do these guys do, these NVA guys?” Because he goes out and gets drunk with his former enemies. “What do they do when they retire?” And he looked at me and he said, “Doug, they don’t use that phrase. They say they’re returning to their gardens.” I said, “Ah, okay.” I didn’t do this consciously; I did it unconsciously when I moved into the farmhouse in a  wilderness area. My wife and I, both raised in the suburbs, we didn’t know anything about living in the willywacks, if you will, heating with wood, plowing snow, and the like, but we made that choice.

We grew organic gardens and we heated with wood for 20 years, 10 cords of wood a year for three woodstoves, and figuring out that whole thing. Now I can reflect upon that and think, okay, that shifted my attention away from the war to the land – raising a family, having my two kids, a son and a daughter, learning how to do all these “outdoorsy” things. They’re both wonderful, amazing human beings now. They’re very connected to the natural world. But it was that reconnection with the natural world – or for me, a new connection with the natural world, I think, which is part of the healing process.

Larry Abbott:

You also have a section entitled “Fiddleheads,” children’s poems, which seem to be another counterpoint.

Doug Rawlings:        

At night, we’d put our kids to bed, they’d be three, four, five, six years old,  and we were reading A.A. Milne’s poems from Now We Are Six over and over and over again, silly kinds of poems, beautiful poems, with wonderful rhymes. My kids loved them.

So I started writing poetry in that fashion, just for them. Actually I put together a collection called A Baker’s Dozen, which is 13 of these poems, which were all written for my daughter and my son. They’re illustrated by my granddaughters. They’re reading a poem written to their mom, like “Rainbow Girl,” and my youngest granddaughter, Iona, does this drawing. So that’s what this collection is all about, sort of connecting the generations. I didn’t want to be known entirely as just a war poet. I wanted to expand if I could.

I was asked this by a student the other day at the university, about being a poet. I say this: I’m not really a poet. I think of people who are, like Denise Levertov, who dedicate their lives to writing poetry. I write poetry, I read poetry, but it’s not my main way of living; it’s sort of another part of who I am.

So I don’t kid myself about thinking my stuff is going to be immortal [laughter] or get on The New York Times’ Best Seller list. But I write it for myself and particular audiences.

Larry Abbott:

One aspect of your writing is that you’re trying to bring the voices of veterans to the page, either in poems or prose.

Doug Rawlings:        

Letters to the Wall, for example, tries to do that to some degree.  As part of Veterans for Peace, we discovered that Obama came up with $63 million to write a history of the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, he had the Pentagon do it. We looked at their website and saw the materials they were using and our reaction was, “Oh, my God, are you kidding me?” So that’s where we really started the veterans full-disclosure idea. What can we do to tell the truth?

I came up with the idea for Letters as part of full-disclosure. Why don’t we ask people who were adults, if you will, during the Vietnam War, who were directly impacted by the war – not just veterans, but conscientious objectors, friends and relatives of those listed on the Wall, Vietnamese people – write a letter to the Wall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and we will deliver those letters every Memorial Day. We did that for six years.

Larry Abbott:

How many volumes were there?

Doug Rawlings:        

Three volumes, about 500 pieces included in the three volumes. There’s a wonderful poem in there written by a student at the university where I taught. I did a little workshop and she came up to me and asked, “Can I write a letter?” And I said, “Sure.” Well, her grandfather was killed in Vietnam, and she wrote this beautiful poem to him, saying, “I wonder what your aftershave would smell like. What would your voice sound like if you held me in your lap?”  Incredibly powerful.

Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese woman . . .  Oliver Stone did a movie about her coming to the United States [Heaven and Earth, 1993]. She’s written two letters to the wall. In one of the letters – it’s a beautiful letter – she said, “I forgive you.” She’s writing to the people who killed in Vietnam, American soldiers who killed in Vietnam. She said, “I forgive you.”

Larry Abbott:

You include your poem “The Wall,” with an introduction. In the poem you write: “Slipping past the panel where/my name would have been/could have been/perhaps should have been/. . . Staring through my own reflection/beyond the names of those/who died so young . . . ” How did that poem come about?

Doug Rawlings:        

We formed Veterans for Peace in 1985, here in Maine, five of us. In 1986, we found out some vets who joined Veterans for Peace were doing a water-only, 40-day fast on the Capitol steps. They were opposing the war in Central America at that time. We chartered a bus to go to D.C. to support them, which, by the way, was seen off by the governor at that time of Maine, who was a veteran and recognized the work that we were doing.

As a side trip we went to the Wall. This is where my friend, Jerry Genesio [a founder of Veterans For Peace], found his brother’s name. He was killed three weeks after I arrived in Vietnam.

I do this thing called “walking the Wall.” When I go to the Wall – and I’ve been there a number of times – I start at the date when I entered Vietnam, July 2, 1969, and I walk it to when I left the country, August 11, 1970. I believe, rough count, there’s about 9,800 names on the Wall from the time that I was there.

Earlier, I had written a poem that was opposed to this memorial. It’s a very angry poem. I had heard, before I saw the Wall itself, I heard that they were going to build this monument in Washington. I thought: Oh, shit. It’s going to be like one of those with a guy on a white horse with a sword and all that crap. And I said, “We spit on/your war memorials” as part of the poem [the 1984 “On War Memorials For My Beloved Friends in VVAW”].

And then I go to the Wall and it’s just beautiful. It’s just striking. I wrote that poem, what it felt like to be walking down that Wall, thinking of the names. I did it at 2:00 in the morning. There’s nobody around. Just thinking of those names, those people in that wall.

Larry Abbott:

Your second book is A G.I. in America. The cover image by Rob Shetterly is entitled The Dog of War [2015]. About the image Shetterly notes: “The greatest threat to the humanity of the soldier may not be the enemy’s weapon, but his own participation in the war. That’s the dog I see.” Does A G.I. in America continue some of the same themes as the previous book?

Doug Rawlings:        

It does. It’s one of those books that has older poems and newer poems in it.  I wrote it because I was chosen to be the first Poet Laureate of Veterans for Peace, which was quite an honor. They give me that at the convention. Over the first year and a half or so, I felt that I had to put together a collection as the Poet Laureate; that’s what this is. It’s got some new stuff in it and it’s got some older stuff in it.

Larry Abbott:          

There is a sense of bitterness, I thought. The poem “Government Issue at the VA Hospital” has a very bitter undertone.  You write about a vet waiting in front of a freight elevator: “what was left of his family/waited downstairs/in the lobby/for what was left/of him.”

Doug Rawlings:        

Actually, a lot of my poems come from actual experiences, like when I’d do my workshops at Togus, which, by the way, is the oldest VA hospital in country; it opened right after the Civil War.

I’d see guys in wheelchairs my age or even younger, and they’re going to be there for a long time, and I’m just walking around, looking at stuff. I saw one vet sitting in front of a freight elevator as I went by. That’s where the poem comes from, that notion like, “Oh, wrong elevator.” No, not really.

Larry Abbott:

Because I’m just freight, stripped of humanity.

Doug Rawlings:        

I’m just freight now, being sent down to see my family, what’s left of me.

Larry Abbott:          

There’s that sense of loss.

Doug Rawlings:        

Absolutely. Real loss. I have a tremendous respect for the staff and the doctors at Togus. I know other guys who go to other VA hospitals that are not so good, but this is an excellent hospital. They’re really caring individuals, but you can’t get away from the fact that some of these guys – I look in the eyes of some of these guys, my age or younger, and their lives are just totally taken over by their condition.

Larry Abbott:

There’s also the idea that the war, any war, is never really over, either back home, or in Vietnam, or any war zone. “Unexploded Ordnance” explores this idea.

Doug Rawlings:        

That’s a poem I wrote for my good friend, Chuck Searcy, who’s lived in Vietnam for 35 years now. He started Project RENEW, which is designed to make the former war zones safer. He trains Vietnamese to go into villages to look for unexploded ordnance, to look for bombs that have not gone off that are killing people now, maiming and killing people. When I went to Vietnam last August, I went to their place. It’s stunning, the prosthetic lab, for example, and all the other things they do. The damage done to the Vietnamese people … even 50 years after the war is over, kids are still getting maimed and killed by these unexploded ordinances.  I wrote that poem from the experience of being in the artillery, having done what we had to do, sending those bombs out there, some of which exploded and some of which did not. They’re still maiming people.

Larry Abbott:

And then, in 2000, you published In the Shadow of the Annamese Mountains, which included both new and selected poems. The image of The Dog of War was on the frontispiece.

Doug Rawlings:        

Oh, yeah. That’s an amazing image. I wish that image was on the cover of Orion Rising [that cover has a portrait of Rawlings by Shetterly]. I didn’t find him until later, but Shetterly is just an amazing artist. I could talk forever about him. But In the Shadow of the Annamese Mountains, what I like about this, it incorporates a number of photographs by Don Evon that were taken when we were in Vietnam. What I like to tell people – we actually did this – I was in country about eight or nine months. I’m in this little fire base in the Central Highlands, supporting the 173^rd. Everything’s off-limits. I was never any place on-limits.

We were surrounded by concertina wire and sandbags but we decided that we were going to go into the village of Bong Son. Our little fire base was set up there. Across this plateau, there was a Korean encampment, and then there was the jungle, and then there was the village down in the jungle. We took our helmets off, our flak jackets off, stacked our weapons, had somebody watch our weapons, and we walked into that village unarmed. A lot of the pictures were taken when we met these kids in the village, just walking along without weapons.

A recurring memory about my experience in Vietnam is the damage we did to children. I didn’t have children at the time when I was there, but obviously I had children afterwards. And I realized, walking along with my daughter when she was two years old down a dirt road, the wonder in her eyes . . . we stole that from those kids.

There’s one picture in there of our dope dealer. She was about 10 years old and she sold us marijuana, heroin, opium, and all kinds of stuff. We laughed about it at the time, but that’s what we did to this kid’s childhood.

Larry Abbott:

The idea of the war’s effects on children comes out in the poem “Grandfathers,” where you’re connecting your family in the present to the children’s deaths in war where the grandfather has to measure the three-foot long coffin.

Doug Rawlings:        

I’ve watched a video of a guy with nails in his mouth being interviewed by an American journalist. If you look in the background you’ll see these coffins, just this little, tiny, three-foot-long coffins. I start that poem about how my kids would measure the height of my granddaughters by chalking their measurements on a post. I thought, I know something about feet and inches, so when I saw those coffins, I said, “This guy’s making a whole bunch of coffins for grandchildren.” That just blew me away.

Larry Abbott:

Your most recent book is Bamboo Bridge. It’s in five sections, and seems to be a dialogue with another writer. The sections are: Family, Children of War, When the War Begins, When the War Ends, and Moral Injury.

Doug Rawlings:        

Right. This was, again, another amazing experience. I am the poetry editor of a publication called Peace & Planet News, which we’ve been putting out for a few years. One of my friends, who is now the president of Veterans for Peace, Susan Schnall, lives out in Los Angeles. She suggested that I check out poems by Teresa Mei Chuc for publication in Peace & Planet News.

So I did. I liked them. I wrote to Teresa and said, “I love your poems.” We corresponded back and forth. One of the things I like about poetry is swapping poems. She teaches high school in Los Angeles now, but she came over as a refugee. Her mom was a refugee fleeing Vietnam. Her father fought for the South Vietnamese Army, so he was put into a so-called “reeducation camp” for nine years. She didn’t see her father at all. He finally came to the United States, she writes about this in her book, and he tries to kill her. He’s just crazy. He’s just way out there. She’s just a little girl trying to figure out the world from the perspective of being a refugee. Her mom learned how to speak English and they did the usual refugee things, which is captured by her poetry.

What we decided to do was, say, “Let’s put together a collection where I’m the father of a young girl and you’re the daughter of a father. You include some of your poems to your dad, and I’ll include some of my poems to my daughter, and we’ll go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth that way.”

Larry Abbott:

Were the poems meant to be a dialogue?

Doug Rawlings:

Ideally, yes. But, in actuality, probably not. They were written separately. She wasn’t writing a poem in response to my poetry or vice versa. They were just poems that she had written and poems I had written. When we looked at them, we tried to put them somewhat together so they are not totally distinct from each other. We hoped that they would be related. That format has worked for some people. It captures the idea.

Larry Abbott:

You were in Vietnam in August of ’23 to participate in the Engaging With Vietnam conference What was that trip like? What was the goal of the conference?

Doug Rawlings:

Oh, my God. It was amazing. We were invited over there because of Ron Carver’s book called Waging Peace in Vietnam, which he has translated into Vietnamese. He’d been working with Dr. Tran and the War Remnants Museum for years. He’s been back and forth eight or nine times. Finally, they got this book published. This was the 14^th annual conference, looking at the heritage of Vietnam, put on by Vietnamese scholars, for Vietnamese people. She asked if some of us would do a panel discussion at that conference. Ron asked me to join him and do it, and we did. The conference was an amazing experience. I went with my son.

We landed in Hanoi, and ended up in this wonderful little hotel. We wandered around Hanoi for a little bit, and then we fly down to Huế, which is where this conference took place. There were about 500 people there, almost all of them were Vietnamese. There were a couple of people from Scandinavia and a couple Americans here and there, but most of them were Vietnamese. Fortunately, they were kind enough to translate for us. There were workshops on “How can we women in Vietnam overcome the Confucian code of how women are supposed to be treated in Vietnam?” Those kinds of workshops. There was also a workshop on the GI resistance to the war.

I was stunned. I shouldn’t have been. Nobody had heard about this. None of the Vietnamese people. They knew about the American flower children resisting the war, but they didn’t realize that there were veterans who were actually resistant to the war in country and when they got back. So that’s what our part of the conference was. Chuck Searcy, who did the Project RENEW and the Friendship Village was part of the conference, and Dr. Tran herself, and myself, and Ron Carver.

I had the honor, when I was reading my poems, of Dr. Tran translating my poems into Vietnamese after I had completed them, which was really quite special.

Larry Abbott:          

What’s next on the agenda?

Doug Rawlings:        

We’ll just keep on going, I guess. I’m doing presentations now. I do a slideshow of my trip to Vietnam. I’m doing some poetry readings in different places and focusing on political poetry and political art. I think my teaching days are done. I’m 77. If somebody asked me to come back in and teach, I would gladly do it, but with some amount of hesitation because I’m beginning to think: How would I be in front of the classroom now with my memory? Who knows?

I’m still living in the old farmhouse, and I’m going to be there until they carry me away. Yesterday, I was working, planting the garden and cutting the grass and getting the wood ready for next year.

Websites:

 https://kellscraft.com/DougRawlings/DougRawlingsPoetryPage.html

https://www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org/

https://www.veteransforpeace.org/

slideshow:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rqDODNQ13Hn3jodGLuFR6wJ8BVGdEyoQjZuoyLkdNDg/edit#slide=id.g27eb81cd953_2_18

Time in a combat zone passes strangely. When you are surrounded by the incredible, the human mind has a tendency to dull your senses so that the days aren’t memorable, but there are a few days that stand out as brightly to me as a muzzle flash spitting in the dark.

One morning we were cruising along. Afghanistan in its simple beauty whipped by me. Women tightened their shawls as we passed. Children laughed and shouted, waved, or threw rocks.

“Chocolate mataraka!!!” they’d shout. In English this means literally ‘give me chocolate.’

A hand taps my leg. I chance a glance downward. Sgt Northmoney is looking up at me.

“Do you smell something funny?” he asks.

“I’m smoking a cigar,” I answer without hesitation. I’m too high to care that I might be found out, and frankly, I was a little annoyed at what he was insinuating. Yes, I was smoking drugs on our patrol. Yes, I was getting high as the lead gunner in a convoy. Yes, I was endangering the lives of everyone on board with my negligence. Guess what? Prove it! Not that I really wanted my Sgt to look closer, I just was in a constant state of defiance.

“Okay,” he says unconvincingly, but then he shrugs and I know I’m in the clear. The rest of that patrol was uneventful.

I had been in Afghanistan for months. I was ready to go home. I was sick of all the hot sun and long mission briefs. Sick of all the crude jokes and mindless drivel. The mocking we as men give one another makes me think of the schoolyard and crushes we had; we may as well have been pulling each other’s pigtails.

I had started smoking hashish in the turret of my vehicle around the middle of our battalion’s deployment. A few of us would purchase it off an interpreter back in our FOB whenever we had some down time.

Up to this point the idea had never occurred to me that the things I was seeing and doing would have any affect at all on my mental health. I was the same Avory in my mind who had joyfully flunked out of high school a few years before. The same Avory who played video games all hours of the night, and screamed obscenities at random passerby while driving in America. The same Avory who missed his brother and his mother.

There’s an idea we’ve all had that remains just out of focus. Slightly out of reach to our mind. Of our understanding. You think to yourself, “I’ll just forcibly extend to this idea, and then I’ll be one with the idea, and the idea won’t be out of focus anymore.” Instead, you notice no matter how hard you think on it, or maneuver it or your thoughts to achieve or attain this idea, it remains foggy. So it was for me from this point on, and for a long time afterwards. The idea I was seeking to achieve was soundness of mind, and it continued to elude me.

I was fooling myself that I hadn’t changed. I was meaner. Less trusting. Snapped at any moment. I started volunteering when I didn’t have to, and stopped taking care of myself altogether. I had a nickname through the rest of my time in the marine corps because of this. Dirty, they called me. And I was dirty. Crusty. I didn’t care.

On the last day of Ramadan, I volunteered to be the lead gunner again. We needed so many bodies to make up a full squad, they were short one. I volunteered. We left the wire like normal and set a cordon for a ground patrol that was sweeping through a couple compounds. I had my 240 machine gun in condition 3, like how it always was. That meant ammo was in the receiver on the tray ready to be fired. The only thing missing in this condition is I would have to pull the bolt back to the rear. After that, all I’d have to do is pull the trigger, and I’d be slinging 7.62 rounds down range at the rate of 950 rounds per minute. Condition 1. It makes sense that we would ride around in condition 3 when you think about how deadly it was at the touch of the trigger. You wouldn’t want to accidentally put a burst into someone’s house. Or family member.

The cordon was uneventful, though. I even decided against smoking this day. So I believed my mind was clear. I had a mud wall I could just see over in front of me, that led to a medium sized courtyard.

I was busy thinking about something, when gunshots rang out in the compound in front of me. The familiar rush of adrenaline pounded through my veins, along with the familiar fear.

I risked poking my head down really quick to ask my Sgt. “Is that right over there?”, I burst out to him incredulously, but I didn’t shout.

My Sgt said, “yeah I think so”, perfectly calm.

Back on my 240, I slammed the bolt to the rear, now ready to put so many rounds through it that it melted the barrel if I needed it to.

Adrenaline urges me on as I press my cheek on the buttstock, and I firmly plant my shoulder behind the gun.

I can’t believe it, contact right in front of me, not even 30 feet away. With a chilling thought, I realize we are in grenade throwing distance. A helicopter screams by overhead, its rotors beat a drum against my back.

The rims of my vision take on a reddish hue, before darkening to black. All I can see is the top of that mud wall, and the sight of my barrel. My hearing starts to dim too. All of a sudden there is no sound, just an increasing whining noise that starts somewhere deep in my psyche. A place I didn’t even know exists. All the while gunfire rings out staccato like, one pop followed quickly by another.

“Schanfelter!” A voice from the bottom of a well.

I rotate my machine gun methodically back and forth along the top of the mud wall, daring a taliban to pop his stupid head up. Wishing he would. ‘Do it’, my voice screams in my head. ‘Pop your head up. My finger is on the trigger, ready to split your skulls ,and shred your bodies, and spill your brains, and spill your guts, and—‘

“SCHANFELTER!” A voice I hear but don’t hear echoing again from that well.

‘Do it, you stupid, stupid taliban pieces of crap. I dare you. I want you to come at me, stick your stupid head up, taste my fury! Taste my vengeance, feel my wrath, pay in blood, pay in blood, pay in—‘

“SCHANFELTERRRR!!!!!”

That voice finally reaches me and I scream, “WHAT,” while tearing my tunneled vision briefly off my sights to see something very confusing. It’s my vehicle commander Cpl Junger.

Standing in the open.

Looking relaxed.

I notice no one else has moved either, except they all look at Cpl. Ewing and me.

“Schanfelter.” Cpl Junger says soothingly.

“What?” I say, matching his low voice.

“They’re fireworks.” He smiles at me.

I look around at everyone looking at me, and the continued gunfire popping repeatedly in the compound along with the sound of children laughing wildly.

Wait, children laughing?

Then reality comes flooding back to me, and what Cpl Junger says sounds home. It’s not gunfire, there are kids in the compound shooting fireworks. My vision starts to return. It’s just fireworks. People start to look away and go back to what they were doing.

Another bout of popping sounds, followed by the screeching joy of carefree children.

Just fireworks.

I look back at Cpl Junger as he smiles at me reassuringly.

“Oh,” I say.

We look at each other a moment.

“I was gonna do a whole other thing.” I say jokingly.

Cpl Junger laughs, turns and walks away.

I smile at the few remaining faces turned towards me. They take the bait and go about their business.

I turn and open the tray, take the bullets off, and pull the trigger, holding the bolt so it doesn’t fly forward, and ride the bolt home. I return the bullets to the tray.

It was the last day of Ramadan, and the whole city of Sangin was celebrating. Fireworks and dancing were happening everywhere.

And here I was about to shoot a couple of kids.

The most versatile piece of equipment an infantryman carries is a four-letter word. It can be used in almost every conceivable situation. It’s sharp, cuts smooth and clean. It can sever all manner of ties, emotional or professional or anything in between, in a single motion. Its shock-and-awe effect can rattle even the most linguistically tolerant. It can fly. It is a unit of measurement. It weighs nothing and takes up no space. It’s a navigation tool. Just uttering the word can elicit an immediate reaction from your surrounding environment. Regardless of the context, say that crude four-letter word and you’ll know exactly where you are just by the way those around you react. Say it right now. Out loud. Go ahead.

Fuck.

Nice. Felt good, right? Admit it.

The ways in which that little word can be modified and altered are almost endless. It is a verb. An adverb. An adjective. Even a noun. Its versatility is unmatched in the English language and there is no better way for it to reach its full potential than in the hands of an infantryman. There’s something about the way those four letters fit together that appears intrinsically correct. Puzzle piece-like. And yet it’s the only piece of equipment an infantryman is always completely out of.

I’m far from the first to pontificate on the significance of Fuck to the infantryman. In his memoir Helmet For My Pillow, Robert Leckie runs the gamut of all the ways Fuck shaped his experience serving as a machine gunner during the Second World War.

“Always there was that four-letter ugly sound that men in uniform have   expanded into the single substance of the linguistic world. It was a   handle, a hyphen, a hyperbole… It described food, fatigue, metaphysics.  It stood for everything and meant nothing; an insulting word, it was  never used to insult; crudely descriptive of the sexual act, it was never  used to describe it; base, it meant the best; ugly, it modified beauty; it  was the name and the nomenclature of the voice of emptiness, but one  heard it from the chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s until, finally, one could only surmise that if a visitor unacquainted with English were to overhear our conversations he would, in the way of the Higher Criticisms, demonstrate by measurement and numerical incidence that this little word must assuredly be the thing for which we were fighting.”[i]

Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck it. Get fucked. Fuckwad. Fuckhead. Fuckass. Fucknugget. Fuckstick. Fuckhole. Fuckup. Fuck Boy. Fuck Face. Unfuck. Motherfucker. Fuckin’ A! Fuck your mother. Fuck my life. Fuck off. Fuckwit. Flying Fuck. Fuck-all. Fuckety-fuck. For Fuck’s sake. Fuckery. Fucktangle. Fuckton. Fuckload. Fuck a duck. Give a fuck. Fuck Buddy. Buddy Fucker. Shut the fuck up. Holy Fuck. I don’t give a fuck. Tired as fuck. Fuck around and find out. Fucking Hell. Bumfuck. Mindfucked. Zero fucks. McFuck. Dumb Fuck. Royally Fucked. Fucked up beyond all recognition.

It’s not just the word itself but the way you say it.

Fuck. Short and sharp. A punch to the throat.

Or Fuuuuuuck. Drawn out and lingering in the valley of the second syllable with an elevation in volume the longer you draw it out.

FUCK. Belted out like a shotgun blast.

FAHK. Keep it in the sinuses.

Commandants change. Uniforms change. Regulations change. Missions change. Even the instantly recognizable Eagle, Globe, and Anchor emblem of the United States Marine Corps has been redesigned and modified several times over the history of the Corps. Fuck might be the only constant that the infantry has ever known.

At times, it is a crutch. Sure, it can be used to excess. Maybe some people feel that overuse can diminish the impact. But there are few words more powerful than a precisely placed Fuck. It packs just enough heat to elevate a simple complaint or concern into a higher registry of human emotion. Imagine: Your friend comes to you and unloads all their problems and finishes by saying, “My poor life.” Do you really feel where they are coming from? I don’t. “My poor life” drips with melodrama. Now, that same friend comes to you, unloads all of those same problems, and ends with a brisk “fuck my life.” You know exactly what they are trying to say.

The f-bomb occupies a place all its own in the English language. A quick Google search pulls the top result from Oxford Languages which starts its entry with a bold-lettered, all-capital warning: VULGAR SLANG. Fuck means “to copulate.” Fuck means to “ruin or damage something.” At one point, “Fuck” meant to strike. According to several dictionaries, the word has Germanic origins, with the earliest known recordings appearing in Middle Dutch dialects sometime in the 1500s with the word Fokken which meant to breed cattle. The Comstock Laws banned it from print from the 1870s all the way up to the late 1950s. Merriam-Webster sees it as a “meaningless intensive” that is “usually obscene” while Sassy Sasha, a regular contributor on the website Urban Dictionary, defines it as “The only fucking word that can be put everyfuckingwhere and still fucking make fucking sense.”[ii]

In some ways, the connection seems obvious. The infantry is a profession that prides itself on brash ruggedness. To be infantry is to be vulgar. It is an obscene way of life. We carry the heaviest loads for the longest distances with nothing but our backs to bear the burden while we are told to pray for war and a chance to kill, and we are expected to smile and thank the gods for the privilege to do so. It’s about as far removed from the domestic sphere as one can get. Still, there are other interesting connections between the infantry and Fuck as well. A significant portion of an infantryman’s identity revolves around the ability to shock and awe those who are not part of this holy tribe. Fuck and all its varieties fit right in with this philosophy. At the same time, it’s also one of those words whose absence can actually have just as much, if not more, impact as its presence. A British veteran of the First World War recalled:

‘It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word. Thus if a sergeant said, ‘Get your fucking rifles!’ it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said ‘Get your rifles!’ there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger.”[iii]

Fuck is the standard. It is expected, so commonplace that a grunt who resists its use can also stand out for all the wrong reasons. Your fellow infantrymen might see your clean mouth as a sign you think you’re better than everyone. You’re different. You’re special. Individualism of any kind is immediately (and I would argue rightfully) suspect in the profession of the infantry.

The Online Etymology Dictionary tracks the evolution of Fuck through a long, windy path of bastardized Latin and Middle English to its increased usage in common language at the start of the twentieth century.[iv] The verbal phrase “Fuck up” is “to ruin, spoil, destroy.” Likewise, the very doctrine of the Marine Corps rifle squad is written in similarly plain English. According to MCRP 3- 10A.4, “The mission of the rifle squad is to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or repel the enemy’s assault by fire and close combat.”[v] So, while Fuck might mean nearly anything in the civilian world, its most precise meaning in the infantry is “to kill.” In one of the more unsettling but poignant scenes in Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, an experienced soldier educates a younger recruit on the ecstasy of killing another man by comparing it to Fuck:

“Killing a man is like fucking, boy, only instead of giving life you take it.  You experience the ecstasy of penetration as your warhead enters the  enemy’s belly and the shaft follows. You see the whites of his eyes roll  inside the sockets of his helmet. You feel his knees give way beneath him  and the weight of his faltering flesh draw down the point of your spear.  Are you picturing this?”

 “Yes, lord.”

 “Is your dick hard yet?”

 “No, lord.”

 “What? You’ve got your spear in a man’s guts and your dog isn’t stiff?  What are you, a woman?”

 At this point the Peers of the mess began rapping their knuckles upon the hardwood, an indication that Polynikes’ instruction was going too far.  The runner ignored this.

 “Now picture with me, boy. You feel the foe’s beating heart upon your  iron and you rip it forth, twisting as you pull. A sensation of joy surges  up the ash of your spear, through your hand and along your arm up into  your heart. Are you enjoying this yet?”[vi]

The meaning is clear. Killing is fucking with the only difference being the creation versus destruction of life. The intimate knowledge of both elevates a soldier above his peers. The lord’s accusation that the young soldier might be a woman if he is not aroused by the mere thought of killing an enemy combatant is a telling moment that reveals gendered attitudes toward the act of killing as well as fucking. According to this portrayal (which has held an on and off again spot on the Commandant’s Reading List since 2000), in ancient Greek military culture, they are both considered the realm of men.

The writer Ocean Vuong views violence as an implicit piece of the American lexicon, especially when considering the way American men communicate with each other. Violence is their language. In his poem “Old Glory”, Vuong attempts to highlight this phenomenon by merely constructing a poem of common American phrases. The narrative that emerges is at once recognizable and progressively disturbing.

“Knock’em dead, big guy. Go in there

guns blazing, buddy. You crushed

at the show. No, it was a blowout. No,

a massacre. Total overkill. We tore

them a new one. My son’s a beast. A lady

-killer. Straight shooter, he knocked

her up. A bombshell blonde. You’ll blow

them away. Let’s bag the broad. Let’s spit-roast

the faggot. Let’s fuck his brains out.

That girl’s a grenade. It was like Nam

down there. I’d still slam it though.

I’d smash it  good. I’m cracking up. It’s hilarious.

You truly  murdered. You had me dying over here.

Bro, for real though, I’m dead.” [vii]

The physicality of the imagery is evident from the first line and continues to the last line with the projection of death as an achievement as well as the ambiguity of “I’m dead”, a common phrase used to describe someone exhausted by humor. For Vuong, this type of violent communication is encouraged, even celebrated, and therefore internalized by American men from a very young age. While appearing as a guest on Late Night with Seth Myers in 2019, Vuong said, “‘You’re killing it,’ you’re making a killing,’ ‘smash them,’ ‘blow them up,’ ‘you went into that game guns blazing,’ and I think it’s worth it to ask the question what happens to our men and boys when the only way they can valuate themselves is through the lexicon of death and destruction?” In that same interview he went on to say, “I think when they see themselves as only worthwhile when they are capable of destroying things, it’s inevitable that we arrive at a masculinity that is toxic.”[viii]

The infantry is no exception to this dynamic. In fact, as an inherently violent profession, it should come as no surprise that language of destruction is not only in use and encouraged but is also heightened in this environment. It is embedded in the identity of an infantryman, if not for vaunting then for survival. Still, it is worth considering the ramifications of internalized violence through language in wider society, and there is much to be gained by examining the ways we communicate with each other; the words we choose, where they come from, why we insist on resting upon violence as our chosen mode of meaning. Language matters. Our words matter.

But then, of course, sometimes fucking is just fucking.

The infantry is a life of necessity, a life largely spent in austere environments with whatever personal gear can fit in a pack. There is little if any room for creature comforts. Therefore, memories hold a higher value in the field. The mere recollection of a good Fuck can be enough to keep one warm through the bitter cold of a long field op. But there’s no such thing as privacy in the infantry. Everything is shared, from the candy in the MREs to the most salacious sexual encounters. These stories are both whispered and shouted. They are almost always exaggerated and drawn out. Often, they’re told in bold detail with knowing smiles and nods from listeners. Not everyone participates and there are usually some unspoken ground rules about who and what is exactly on or off limits. It’s a way of relating to one another and, at times, especially if the story can be corroborated, a way of boosting one’s social status within a platoon.

Twentynine Palms, California. July, 2017. Every day the temperature crept just north of 135°F. My company was taking part in a battalion-wide exercise, and we were running 16-18-hour days. I was a machine gunner in a CAAT (combined anti-armor team) platoon and at the end of every movement, I climbed down from my turret atop the up-armored Humvee with new sore spots, which quickly turned into sickly yellow and dark purple bruises. We grew accustomed to the weight of our flaks and the particular way they rubbed the salt and sand into our skin. We slept on our trucks under obsidian night skies and the temperature dropped to about 85°F, which felt like zero after spending all day in the desert sun. We rose long before the sun and our drivers bore down on their accelerators, peering over their steering wheels through the thick, clouded Humvee windshields with the strange acute alertness that comes with being awake for several days. We barreled through shadow-cloaked valleys and over open desert plains strewn with thousands of discarded guidance wires from TOW missiles crisscrossed like dental floss in every direction. After the conclusion of one of the more strenuous training evolutions, my squad leader decided it was about time to round everyone up and have some quality platoon bonding time. Tensions had been running high and the strain was showing on morale. The best way to ease this dynamic? We were all going to tell the story of how we lost our virginities.

We circled up under a thin stretch of cammie netting just as the sun set, most of us perched on crushed MRE boxes, some seated right on the sand. At first, hot and exhausted, no one felt like talking. But after some prodding and cajoling, the group began to open up. What followed were some of the strangest and most bizarre stories I had ever heard. There wasn’t a single virgin in the group nor a single story that resembled anything romantic. There were experiences involving teachers and friends’ moms, back rooms in churches and public restrooms, names remembered and names completely forgotten.

My own story?

When I was seventeen, I met a girl on Myspace while I was trying to boost my punk band’s online presence and we struck up a casual correspondence. She lived in England but she really liked our music, and our casual correspondence quickly took on a more intimate and intense flavor. At some point we exchanged phone numbers and began calling each other daily.

“Don’t fuckin’ tell me you got fuckin’ catfished,” a Sergeant interrupted. (At this moment whenever I tell this story, I always take a second to point out that “Catfishing” wasn’t even a thing at that time and I, in fact, was way ahead of the game in the online dating world. Some might even say a trendsetter. But yes, I was about to discover my newfound companion wasn’t exactly who she said she was.)

I guess the guilt and dishonesty of claiming to be an honest-to-God Anglo-Saxon residing in the United Kingdom got to her enough that she just had to come clean. It turns out, she was not British nor was she living in England. She was American and called Joplin, Missouri home. I took this revelation surprisingly well. I believe I was just in shock at how easily I had been hoodwinked by this random stranger I had met on the internet. Of course, being a horny teenager may have obscured my vision as well.

“I knew it. I fuckin’ knew it,” said the Sergeant.

Her true identity revealed, our relationship not only continued but became somehow fiercer. Spring break was near and we both had a week off from school. She booked a plane ticket to New York. I booked a hotel room at the Red Roof Inn with my mom’s credit card.

“The fuckin’ Red Roof Inn, Plunkett? Are you fuckin’ kidding? Couldn’t spend the money on a Marriot you cheap fuck?”

The whole thing went smoothly. I picked her up at the airport and we spent the day together. At the end of the night, I took her to the hotel. The door closed. We turned off the lights and were consumed in darkness. I searched for warmth. The intensity of what followed was brief and strange but life-changing in the way those moments are. It felt like love. But the line between Love and Fuck is impossible to distinguish in the darkness of a bedroom. We fucked. We un-fucked. Pain. Pleasure. I just remember that it was important to make it, right there. Put it all into that moment. Just that exact moment. Nothing before nor later would matter. The relationship didn’t last, of course. Things unraveled fairly quickly after that week spent together. We graduated high school in our respective states and went off to different colleges. There was so much more to come. Even though we did not know it in that moment. We barely knew what fucking was. Or what it could be. It’s never the act itself but the slivers of the moment that remain afterward. My memory of Fuck is an incongruous chain of these slivers from years past.

The way her eyes softened in the moment (the moment) and held my own and the earth might as well have stopped moving. And she looked like—and became—every woman I had ever known or would ever know. It was right there. In those soft eyes. For the rest of my life, I will remember her head illuminated, backlit by a halo of light, her hair pulsing from the whirring blades of a ceiling fan. The glow of ivory-white skin taught me the importance of warm light in a hotel room in Tribeca. How I briefly forgot my own name after a particularly passionate encounter and I just lay there for a few moments in complete nothingness. The pinpoint clarity that comes afterward.

There’s that other four-letter word: Love. A word so much more difficult to define and yet just as closely linked to Fuck and maybe even Kill.

All these four-letter words. Each one leads back to the other. Fuck. Kill. Loss. Love. They are different but so close to the same.

There is a section titled “Love” in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried where Lieutenant Jimmy Cross feels such an intense longing for his one-time girlfriend Martha, that he takes a small pebble she sent him in a letter and places it in his mouth just to feel closer to her. He has a strong desire to “sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood.” Lieutenant Cross longs to consume and be consumed. This longing is somewhat physical and sexual in nature but there’s a desire for some deeper connection he cannot have with her.[ix]

Late one night, after a particularly rough ruck march with my company in Camp Lejeune, I dropped my pack and felt my soul uncrumple itself, and the only thought that went through my mind, as strange and perplexing as it sounds, was that I just wanted to crawl inside my wife and be contained in her warmth and softness in a way that was not fucking but also not love. This thought hit me with such startling clarity, I had to pause a moment. The sky above was crude oil black and pocked with stars that glowed like incinerated diamonds. A soft breeze wrapped around me and swept up in the space between my soaking wet blouse and skivvy shirt, all the places where the straps dug into my shoulders, my waist. My skin turned to gooseflesh. My muscles, saturated with battery acid. Everything ached. A metallic taste coated my mouth. The stench of a hundred sweat-drenched, cortisol-dripping bodies consumed me and I looked skyward, trying to escape it. You will have moments like this in the infantry and you will not want to tell anyone about them. Instead, you say fuck, that really fucking sucked and you move on.

[i] Leckie, Robert. Helmet For My Pillow. New York, NY: Random House, 1957.

[ii] Sasha, Sassy. “Fuck.” Urban Dictionary, February 18, 2018.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fuck.

[iii] Brophy, John, and Eric Partridge. Songs and Slang of the British soldier: 1914-1918. London: Eric Partridge Ltd. at the Scholartis Press, 1931.

[iv] “Fuck.” Etymonline. Accessed June 6, 2022. https://www.etymonline.com/.

[v] Gehris, Scott. “MCRP 3-10A.4.” United States Marine Corps Flagship, August 7, 2020.

https://www.marines.mil/News/Publications/MCPEL/Electronic-Library-

Display/Article/2472229/mcrp-3-10a4/.

[vi] Pressfield, Steven. Gates of Fire. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1998.

[vii] Vuong, Ocean. Time is a Mother. New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2022.

[viii] Michaels, Lorne. Episode. Late Night with Seth Meyers Season 6, no. Ep. 111. New York, NY: NBC, June 12, 2019.

[ix] O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York, NY: Penguin, 1991.

A Game of Soldiers – A Review of Playing Army by Nancy Stroer

LT Minerva Mills is a hot mess. Literally. We meet her with ‘sweat pooling in her waistband’ as her mother rams through a terminally inappropriate ‘Pink Tea’ at Minerva’s first assumption of command ceremony at Fort Stewart, aka ‘Camp Swampy,’ Georgia, on a hot summer day in the mid-1990s. Mrs. Mills has fallen out of step with the times, the people, the weather, Army tradition, and her daughter’s need to project authority in a time and a place where Minerva had inherited none.

As the daughter of a Viet Nam MIA, Minerva has been an outsider to the ‘Army Family’ her whole life. She makes an unlikely protagonist – she eats too much, she drinks too much, she weighs too much, she struggles to control both herself and the people in her command. In other words, she’s totally relatable. She struggles to assemble the self-protective camouflage needed to help her straddle the insider/outsider divide which she must overcome if she is to succeed in command and in achieving her grail quest – understanding what happened to her father. Expert at Army field navigation, Minerva struggles with navigating human interaction among her superiors, her subordinates, and her equals. The novel takes us through physical and psychological terrain which challenges Minerva at every step.

It is rare to find women who write knowledgeably and skillfully about the US Army, and even more rare to find women as active military protagonists in gendered narratives of war outside the extensive military romance industry. In our current historical moment of mythical, Playing Army provides a welcome examination of the interior life of warrior women. Military women survive in the dominant masculine military culture by playing their cards very close to their chests. Those who have mastered the art of saying little and observing others closely rarely come out from behind their impassive masks to reveal the thoughts that they’ve learned to hide so well.

The clear, dry, acerbic interior voices of women who crave power, who search for meaning, who seek service tell their stories here. Their stories adeptly illustrate the uses of silence as a weapon and a defence among women in the US military. The novel also charts the Venn diagram of personal commitment and resistance which embroils all participants in closed systems such as the US military, but particularly those at the intersections of marginalisation. In addition to LT Mills, the novel explores briefly the interior worlds of two competitor peers – LT Logan, the golden child of a US soldier and a Vietnamese mother, and First Sergeant St. John, black, lean, an exemplar of Army ethos. These warrior women are observed and draw with precision and clarity, a deep sympathy for their situations, and a generous acknowledgement of their significant strengths.

Playing Army explores the structure of power through the micro-aggressions in a hierarchy founded on the management of violence. The neglected military narrative field of logistics, maintenance, and personnel takes center ground, mapping the tails that wag the dog. The change of focus from stereotypical US military blood combat narratives is both welcome and overdue. The keenly observed ground truths of the unglorious majority challenges the myth of that the ‘real’ Army exists only in and for combat. This optic brings into focus the dark play and unglorious realities of the ‘real’ Army for the majority of Army personnel.

Playing Army is skillfully crafted, satisfying in its resolution of LT Mill’s journey learning to be serve well as an Army officer, and tantalising, in that it leaves us with unresolved questions. The child of a soldier father who neither knew nor wanted her, why was she named ‘Minerva’ by her mother? Why has clear-sighted Minerva chosen to ‘Min’imise herself? The vignettes centered on LT Logan and First Sergeant St. John are both compelling and brief, inviting follow-on novels.

I hope Nancy takes them up on their offers of further stories to be told. Having hosted these complicated women with compelling narratives in my reading room, I find myself hoping to be invited inside their lives and thoughts again.

Missouri inmate Patty Prewitt has been in prison for almost 40 years. She is serving a life sentence for the murder of her husband, Bill, in 1984. The conviction, however, is problematic. The prosecution’s case relied upon slut-shaming Prewitt and questioning her fitness as a mother based on relationships that took place five and more years before the murder, a time when the Prewitts were separated. The prosecutor did not share with the defense evidence that established a strange car was seen parked around the corner, a significant omission. A pathologist, brought on only weeks before trial was discredited in a number of trials where he served as a witness for the prosecution.  

Prewitt is not eligible for parole until 2036, when she will be 86 years old. Maintaining her innocence, she declined a plea bargain that would have made her eligible for parole after just seven years. Had she taken the deal, she would have been released many years ago. 

Former Missouri Department of Corrections Director George Lombardi who, during his 41 years in corrections, has never recommended anyone for clemency supports Prewitt’s release.  In light of “the long sentence she has already served, the total support of her children and grandchildren, and her unprecedented contribution to the culture of the prison and to her fellow offenders,” he recommends that “Missouri Gov. Parson take the just, responsible and compassionate action and grant Patty Prewitt clemency.”  Warden Brian Goeke identifies Prewitt as a woman best suited for release.

“Where’d you get these? Did an officer give ‘em to you?”

“You think I’d do a guard for protein bars?”

 He looked appropriately shocked, so I continued, “No one trades a protein bar for sex! Look around! These horny hos give it away!”

Unabashed because he actually thought he’d made a good bust, this skinny eighteen-year-old corrections officer then asked, “Then where’d ya get ‘em?”

With the same degree of furious indignation, I spat out, “At the can-efing-teen! There’s a list on that wall of what they sell! Why don’t you check it out before you accuse this old lady of trading geriatric sex for protein bars!!!!”

As a mic-drop finale, I snatched the three bars from his hand, turned on my heel, and marched down the hall to my freshly-tossed cell to survey the damage.

At that very moment I missed my prison kid Amy with a heart-squeezing ache. We shared a cell for a decade and like an old married couple we regaled each other every evening with the events of the day—mostly tales of how stupid this prison and these people are. She would have howled at this encounter.

Because of her drug addiction, Amy passed through prisons for a couple of decades. I knew her during every incarceration and warmed to her readiness to see humor within the darkest of prison days. During her next to last confinement, she gave birth to a son. He was the one that she gave up entirely. She was finally mature enough to know she couldn’t provide a child with any kind of stable life. Her two daughters weren’t so lucky, and both ended up in this prison with us.

At the beginning of her seventh and final prison bid, I spied her across the chow hall at breakfast. I hadn’t heard that she was back. Self-disgust radiated from her slumped shoulders and bowed blonde head, so this captain-save-a-ho ambled over to hear the sad story of why she was back. Again. As a conclusion to the convoluted tale about how she ended up with two sevens and two fives running wild, she quietly added, “Yeh, Patty, I fucked up again. I’m under a mandatory fifty percent. Twelve years flat. I really fucked up this time.” My heart broke for her and all the broken-winged sparrows who fall from freedom into prison. Breaking my reverie Amy asked, “Ya gonna eat that toast? Butter? Jelly?”

As I shoved my tray her way, an idea sprang to mind. “What wing are you on?”

“A, and it’s a loud, disrespectful, trap-house zoo. Plus they put me on a top bunk above this rude, loud-snorin’ bitch with boils all over her butt. Boils! She says a spider bit her, but I bet it’s staph. No self-respectin’ spider would put his mouth on that ass!”

“Amy, I have an empty bottom bunk in my room. If you want, I’ll ask Ms. Raspberry if she’ll move you over. They train service dogs now, and you’ll love those pups.”

Amy brightened like the sun breaking through a cloud. That’s how we began our decade of cohabitation.

Because Amy owed nearly $2000 in unpaid parole fees, she reluctantly headed straight to the dreaded clothing factory to get a job. The factory was the only place that paid a living wage, and she had no one on the outside to help her.

Within the relative safety of a four-person concrete prison cell that had been converted to jam in six, we made our home. The other four bunks were inhabited with a parade of girls just passing through. Some joined our conversations. Some didn’t. Amy and I made a pact to keep the cell peaceful, and we did. During count times, I sat cross-legged facing her, while she perched on the edge of her bunk swinging her short legs. We verbally painted scenes, crimes, and memories from our free lives. We mulled over how the snarky librarian had admonished us. We worried about our kids. We conspired, aspired, perspired. No subject was off-limits. More importantly, I listened, really heard her. I didn’t give her a load of unsolicited advice. I just loved and listened. Therein lies the magic of healing.

When Amy was just a little kid, her father had her and her older sister at his place for the weekend. On the way to go fishing, he told the girls to run out to the pickup. He’d be right there. They waited until Amy couldn’t stand it any longer. Disregarding her sister’s protests, she raced back into the house to holler at him. When she burst in the living room poised to yell, “DADDY,” she choked. His limp body lay crumpled across the rusty-orange shag carpet, a ragged pool of red blood oozed from where the top of his head had been, the smoking shotgun muzzle still stuck in his gaped mouth, hunks of brain tissue, blasted across the wall, lost their grip and splatted on the console TV.

Less than ten years later, Amy was a pregnant teenager. Her heartless mother never spoke to her again. Small wonder she self-medicated.

Amy was the same age as my daughters, so I couldn’t help but mother her. I made sure she had the hygiene items she needed. I religiously placed a multivitamin on her locker every morning and encouraged her to eat her veggies, because she had Hep C. She loved softball and created, out of misfits, the best team in this prison. We didn’t win every game, but she made sure everyone felt good about themselves. We laughed a lot. Even through tears.

When the goon squad busted in like rabid Nazis to tear up our cells, Amy would want to lay down and take a nap. Tornado warning? She would be overcome with drowsiness. Prison is one anxiety-producing occurrence after another, so I mercilessly teased her that she suffered from some form of stress-induced narcolepsy.

As an integral member of our prison theater troupe, Prison Performing Arts, I tricked Amy into taking a speaking role in The Rover, a period piece with sword fighting. We were issued foam rubber swords, but during the first performance, as Amy thrust, the blade part fell to the floor. She was left holding the handle. At that moment Amy discovered she was a natural comedienne. She never looked back and was in every play we produced. A star was born.

All her life, Amy had considered herself a royal loser. A slut. A drug addict. A thief. A horrible mother. Stupid. Unlovable. A poor excuse for a woman. Ugly. A midget. (She was short, barely 4’10.) She had never glimpsed or believed in the special, talented human being that I saw in her. Acting became her saving grace, and she thrived on stage. When college courses were offered, she enrolled. Even though she doubted that she’d be able to do the work, with a bit of my tutoring, she turned out to be an excellent student. I’m a certified fitness trainer and talked her into training, too. The physical and mental work was hard, but she persevered and puffed up about an inch after passing the exams.

Our prison time marched on in its petty pace until we got the proverbial good news/bad news. The good news was that legislation had been passed that would free Amy soon; the bad news was she was not prepared. We always planned for her to work at the nursing home when she was eligible so she could save up a healthy nest egg. My daughter Jane set up a hasty go-fund-me account that raked in enough to buy her a laptop so she could continue her college. Amy left here with nothing but thrift-store clothes on her back.

It’s hard starting from scratch, but she was doing so well out there in the free world. Clean and sober, working to keep spirits up in the nursing home. Then Covid hit, and life got really scary for the confined. She had the Department of Corrections on speed dial complaining about how prisoners were poorly treated. Out of the blue, Amy fell in love with a man unlike any she’d ever known, a kind and honest man who truly adored her. She was making me believe in happily ever after.

But Amy died. Suddenly. The addicts all attributed her sudden death to drugs, but I knew better and felt vindicated when the autopsy proved me right. Amy’s big broken heart had failed. She suffered cardiac arrest as she was preparing to go to care for those women and men in the nursing home prison.

Real life is no fairy tale, Amy. I miss you.

I am careful with the coffee tray. It holds four coffees and one tea for my guys in the VA hospital lobby.

Everyone who comes to the VA hospital spends time sitting in the lobby, waiting for a meeting with a doctor, or a blood draw, whatever they need. All of us are in the lobby because our bodies paid the price for our service.

It is a large lobby, with many comfortable upholstered chairs placed in the center of the lobby floor. VA clerks sit behind the long counter on the left, and the Eye and Ear clinic is on the right. Flags for all the services; Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and the new Space Force hang from the high ceiling. A large US flag hangs opposite the service flags. The doctor’s offices and labs are behind the elevator cluster near the information desk. Occasionally a nurse in blue scrubs would appear from the doctor’s offices and shout out the name of a patient for their appointment.

Everybody wears baseball caps proclaiming their branch of service or places where they served: Desert Storm, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. Vietnam Vets are the oldest guys now.

My group calls itself the Orange Brigade. You can tell by our baseball caps that we are all Vietnam War vets. We suffer from exposure to Agent Orange, the defoliant, hence the name of our group. We meet on Mondays as we wait for our appointments. The group started after we all met in the lobby one Monday for our appointments. We pulled together some chairs into a corner of the lobby and shared our Vietnam stories. We would wait for our name to be called and talk about the Red Sox, or the Bruins, and the state of the country. We started with ten in our group, but there are five of us now.

The brigade includes Gerry, a former Marine with Parkinsons, Jim, a six-foot five ex-paratrooper with cancer, Charlie, an Air Force vet with raging diabetes, and Shirley, a former Army nurse who has severe migraines. I’m an Army vet, too, the youngest in the group at sixty-seven with an ischemic heart. I make the coffee run to the café just off the lobby.

I bring the tray over to the group. Gerry’s hand trembles when he reaches for his coffee, which is half-filled, so he doesn’t spill.

“Thanks, Tim,” he says. Gerry had to cut his law practice down to almost nothing when he became ill.

I give Jim his large black coffee and a chocolate-dipped donut.

“Mama’s milk,” he jokes. “Thanks, brother.” Jim played pro football before the Army drafted him, now he is thin and frail. When he came home, it was difficult for him to adjust. His career in law enforcement was cut short by his difficulties, including lots of brawls and drinking. Two marriages went bust as well.

Charlie grabs his large mocha coffee, and a honey glazed. He uses a wheelchair because his legs can’t support his obese body. Shirley nurses her tea and shakes her head at Charlie’s gorging.

“You want to go into a diabetic coma?” says Shirley.

Charlie shrugs at Shirley’s comment. “Hell, I’m dead already. The Air Force killed me. I flew in the planes that sprayed Agent Orange.” He took a bite of the donut. “When the VA diagnosed me, I was shocked. I had to take insulin shots. I couldn’t eat what I wanted, or drink what I wanted. That’s no way to live. Fuck it, I’m doing what I want.”

I sip my decaf and Splenda and say nothing. Everyone makes their own choices. When I returned from the war, I had it made. My fiancée had her Dad get me work at his advertising agency, and we married, raised two children, and were happy till my first heart attack at fifty.

Shirley nurses her tea and shakes her head. When she first joined the group, she spoke of her time in the war. “So many boys, so much hurt,” She left nursing after the war. She had a lengthy career in retail, and the success helped ease her pain.

A nurse comes out of the clinic office and shouts, “Wentworth, Gerald!” Gerry shouts “here!” and grabs his walker to stand up.

“Carry on, folks! See you guys next week.” Gerry straightens up, turns smartly with his walker and shaky legs over to the nurse.

Jim shakes his head and says, “Man, Jerry will be lucky to be here with us next week. He’s getting worse.” Charlie laughs, Shirley just sips her tea. It worried me that Gerry was worse, and in spite of his bravado, he knows it too.

Another nurse appears and shouts, “Brackett, Charles!”

Charlie nods to us, says, “See you guys’ next week,” and wheels off. He is slowly eating and drinking himself to death. Jim says aloud what we all were thinking,

“I bet Charlie aint gonna make to next week.” Shirley nods in agreement. We are quiet for a minute or two, then I ask Jim how he is doing, and he says,

“Middlin, boy, middlin. My belly hurts all the time, and they wanna cut out my intestines and put me on a bag. I don’t wanna do that, but I guess I have to.”

Shirley says, “do it, Jim. You can live longer with the bag.”

Before he could reply, the nurse comes out again, “Kearney, Timothy!” Raising my hand for the nurse, then offering it to Jim, I tell him.

“I WILL see you two next week!” I smile.

“For sure, brother, take care,” he says. We shake hands. I bump fists with Shirley who smiles up at me.

Walking toward the nurse I look back at our corner of the lobby. Jim, wincing at the pain in his stomach, is slumped in his chair. Shirley tries to comfort him. I stare at the two empty chairs, Charlie, and Jerry. The Orange Brigade body count is rising. I take a deep breath and follow the nurse.

Art After War: The Visual Diary of Danish Soldier Henrik Andersen

As the memory of U.S. participation in the Afghanistan War fades in the minds of most Americans (the report on the exit fiasco notwithstanding), there was probably even less awareness that the military did not “go it alone” but had NATO allies, including Denmark (which entered the war 2001), one of the twelve founding nations in 1949.  In Afghanistan the Danish military suffered 43 deaths from combat injuries, with 214 wounded in action.  The raw number is low compared to the U.S. but was the highest number of deaths any country suffered if considered per capita, and so had an outsized impact.

That the Danish participation in the war still looms large in the country is reflected in an installation at The Danish War Museum in Copenhagen, which developed A Distant War – A Danish Soldier in Afghanistan over 10 years ago.  It reflects an on-going presence of the war and its aftermath, a memory embodied in a physical space.

Mai Stenbjerg Jensen, the curator, told me that “the exhibition was made in collaboration with the Danish Armed Forces, more precisely with soldiers from ISAF team 10. Objects in the exhibition have all been brought home directly from Afghanistan. The exhibition shows the Danish soldier’s journey during a deployment to Afghanistan. The story is told from the soldiers’ perspective” (personal communication, July 4, 2023).  The exhibit follows a ternary pattern of a soldier going to war, in country, and back home.

The return home to civilian life can be problematic, as soldiers of any country’s forces can be affected by PTSD.  In the same way that the war for the American public is largely forgotten, the effects of war on the individual are likewise ignored or misunderstood by the broader civilian population.  This can lead to a sense of dislocation and alienation.  For many vets, the arts can offer a pathway to understanding their feelings of estrangement upon return by creating a visual or verbal representation of those feelings. Another intention of veterans’ artistic creation is to share their work with both the general public and with other vets.  The artwork can provide the non-vet with a window into the veterans’ war and post-war experiences, helping to bridge the vet/non-vet divide, while sharing their work with other vets can both inspire and create a sense of community, thus reducing that sense of isolation and estrangement.

Henrik Andersen, now 40, served in the Danish army for 15 years and was deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan from February to August 2017. He had the rank of Specialist. When he returned home he was eventually diagnosed with PTSD.  He decided that he would use artwork as a way of dealing with the various levels of how the diagnosis affected his daily life.  Starting on January 1, 2022 and until December of that year he created a new watercolor each day.  He notes in an artist’s statement: “Follow my painted diary for better or for worse with my daily companion PTSD.  A new picture every day in 2022 that both describes my world in and around me.”

Photo courtesy of Mads Ullerup

Andersen told me that “the diary concept was one my wife came up with, and for me a way to express myself daily through both good and bad days with a troubled PTSD mind, the thoughts, the emotions and sense of things which made an impact that particular day. I usually made the picture at the end of the day to make sure I got the most important impact of the day down on paper. It’s sometimes really hard to go to a mentally neutral place when you’re filled with anger, depression and loneliness. To empty your mind of judgmental thoughts and emotions and find that one thing that mattered just that day, that in itself can become therapeutic.”

He continued: “It would be really nice for me to be able to reach as many veterans as possible with my art.  I hope that it will make a difference and maybe even inspire others and others like me, who are battling with the aftermath of their deployment, to inspire others to find new ways to express their daily struggle. Even though I have my Instagram account, I’ve still not reached out to as many as I would like to. I do think it is an important message to get out to veterans and their families, that there are other ways to express yourself than you might think. My artwork is very personal to me, and it was a big deal for me to go public with it. It is meant as a daily diary in pictures and every day a new picture in 2022. My wife convinced me to make it public through Instagram, so I would post a new picture, describing my day emotionally or physically.”

Photo courtesy of Mads Ullerup

Andersen is not a formally-trained artist.  He was adept at drawing and painting from childhood and was influenced by an eclectic mix of comics, the figures in Warhammer, movies, and the classical sculptures and paintings in museums. Regardless of the medium or the genre he was always interested in how a thought, a question, or an emotion could be expressed. To him, the work begins with an idea and then the manner of expression evolves from the initial idea.  The finished product, he says “comes from trial and error, both so rewarding and frustrating.”

He does not plan any of his daily images but rather allows spontaneous moments to guide his work. The images are diverse, ranging from the relatively realistic to surrealistic to expressionistic. Even though they are created to reflect what Petersen is experiencing on any particular day they are not merely solipsistic and self-referential; they become a visual correlative that take on a broader meaning.  The titles to the works help in this regard.

Photo courtesy of Mads Ullerup

The early pictures set the tone for much of the rest of the year.  “Angsten og Vreden del. 1/The Anxiety and the Anger part. 1” is dated January 2, 2022, and depicts a fragment of a face in profile, just a nose and a wide-open mouth in a scream, with a ball of reddish-colored smoke emanating from the mouth.

“Selvvalgt ensomhed/Self-selected Loneliness” (January 3) depicts an empty chair in a barren room; a day later, “Fjernsynet viser ingenting/TV is Showing Nothing,” a TV set in a bare gray room has a blank green screen, connoting that there is nothing worthwhile being presented. Each depicts a sense of emptiness and the inability of some vets to re-integrate into the broader civilian society. “Mareridt i rodt, derefter sort/ Nightmare in Red, Then Black,” completed a few days later, shows a bleak, war-torn landscape with a few burned trees in red, mirroring a burned-out psychological landscape.

The January 5 work “Stenen i maven, mørk og varm/ Stone in the abdomen, dark and hot” refers to the physical impact of PTSD, and suggests that PTSD affects the vet not just psychologically but also physically.

As the year progresses the imagery takes on different dimensions.  A few works show recognizable scenes, like the river and bridge of “Ude for at se verden/ Out To See The World” (February 21), a floodlight on a lone power pole (“Sidst i rækken/Last in line,” March 6), steps going down a tunnel (“Sidst i rækken/ What happens if you look inside,” April 15),  a dilapidated house with collapsed roof (“Ja der er brug for genopbygning/ Yes rebuilding is needed,” October 11), and an isolated cabin (“Hyggeligt uhyggeligt/Cozy Cozy,” October 14).  Interestingly, none of these scenes include people, and even in “Cozy Cozy” there is a sense of isolation and remoteness, while in “What happens if you look inside” there is an intimation of foreboding as the steps lead to emptiness.

Faces, especially the eyes, and stylized bodies figure in a number of works, a few of which are self-portraits. “Sidder her bare del. 1, 2, 3/Just sitting here sharing 1, 2, 3” (August 26, 28, 29), is a triptych of sorts.  The first two panels depict a skeletal figure sitting on a rock leaning its skull on its right “hand.”  In 1, the background is a washed-out gray.  The same figure is in panel 2, but some color has been added.  In the third panel the figure is in the same posture but is now fleshed out in green. There are three human figures in the October 21 “Bare en fornemmelse/Just a Feeling.” The figures, in foreground, midground, and background, are dressed in brown and wear neckties, but are faceless. The two closest figures have flames around their feet, while the figure in the background is engulfed in flames. The figures appear impassive, accepting pain and death.  “Sådan føler jeg mig/This is how i feel” (October 30) is a self-portrait.  The figure is fleshed, not skeletal, yet the posture is reminiscent of the skeletons in “Just sitting here sharing 1 and 2.” The eyes are wide and the face anguished, suggesting the pain caused by PTSD.  Although the title “Trivialiteten er skræmmende/Triviality is scary” (February 8) might be considered a bit strange, it points toward the inability to fully reintegrate into the daily minutiae of civilian life. In this self-portrait, the predominant feature in the multicolored, somewhat blurred face are the eyes. Similar to other works, the eyes are wide, staring, fearful.  In the July 23 “Selvportræt/Self-portrait” the face is disembodied, outlined in gray and framed by red, and seems to be floating in the clouds over mountains, leading to a sense of disconnection and alienation from the world.

There is also a self-portrait entitled “Tabt forbindelse/Lost Connection” from October 11.  There is a disembodied head attached to tendrils with a green object next to the cheek.  Both of these works connote a sense of loss, even a dissociation from one’s own body.

Much of the work has an abstract quality.  “Drukner på land/Drowning on land” (November 10) depicts shapes of blue and brown, yet the title reveals a sense of struggle and suffocation.  The November 2 “Tankespin/Mind spin” is a burst of reds, and represents both the explosions of war on the battlefield and in the mind.  “Hvor brænder det ?//Where does it burn?” (August 20-22) is another series in three parts. In each piece, stylized and intermixed dark and lighter blue smoke rises from what could be hills. Looking closely at the first panel one sees what could be disembodied eyes in the smoke. In part 2 the eyes become a bit more pronounced. In part 3 an outline of a face in dark red, with what appears to be bared fang-like teeth, is revealed in the smoke. There is an agonized expression on the face. Again, the burning can refer to the destruction of war and also to a mind on fire.

Not all the watercolors represent negative emotions. The March 8, “Et sælsomt lille væsen er mødt op/A happy little creature has appeared” shows a rabbit in a field. In “Foråret kommer nu/Spring is coming” from March 9 a sprig of green grows out of a finger on a green hand, showing the regenerative power of Nature. There is the playful “Guleroden er der, jeg kan se den nu/ The carrot is there, I can see it now” (April 4); a teddy bear is the subject of the October 18 “Ren kærlighed/Pure love”; likewise, a bird is the subject of “Maskot/Mascot” (November 10). These more “gentle” works indicate that even with the traumatic aftereffects of war there is the possibility for beauty and clarity.

As he looks back on his visual diary he told me “this picture [the April 1 “Hænderne, der skaber og ødelægger/The Hands that Create and Destroy”] and others like it, of a withered, sick hand, gives a new meaning after I tried to take my own life in February 2023, and the attempt left me with exactly that, and really makes me think about the dual meaning in a lot of my pictures. I’ll admit that I didn’t succeed every day, but it was just as important to some days paint through a veil of tears or immense anger. I haven’t continued in 2023 with the diary but I am still painting, it is my little safe zone through the day and it has a calming effect to put paint on paper, the colors and the brush don’t expect anything from me, and as long as I don’t try to force something on to the paper it’s very fulfilling and stressless. My pictures surprise me in ways I would never have imagined.”

The range of Andersen’s images offers a broad insight into the post-war experience, including the effects of PTSD.  His images reveal the uncertainty and tenuousness of what any particular day will bring. At the same time, the very act of creation becomes a shield or bulwark against this uncertainty and provides a sense of order, not only in the finished product but also in the process itself, which provides a structure that my otherwise be lacking.

All statements by Mr. Andersen were from correspondence with him on October 7, 10 and 11, 2023.

All artwork images courtesy of Henrik Andersen.

All photographs of Andersen courtesy of Mads Ullerup.

Images available on Instagram:  henrikerladetmedptsd

References:

Danish casualties:  https://politiken.dk/udland/art4788077/Danmark-mister-flest-soldater-i-Afghanistan

A Distant War:  https://en.natmus.dk/museums-and-palaces/danish-war-museum/exhibitions/a-distant-war/

Mads Ullerup, “With Paintbrush and PTSD,” October 22, 2022, https://www.veterancentret.dk/da/nyheder/2022/med-pensel-og-ptsd/

The Oscar-nominated Danish film Krigen (A War; 2015, directed by Tobias Lindholm), with echoes of “Breaker Morant,” examines the moral quandaries that war occasions and reveals that these dilemmas occur regardless of the size of a nation’s forces. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/movies/tobias-lindholm-narrates-a-scene-from-a-war.html

Dubai is one gigantic, grey strip mall.

“Does anyone know why they call this place Dubai?”

I look away from my bus window. The tour guide sits on the edge of her seat in the front row, leaning into the aisle, microphone in hand.

“Come on,” her eyes wide, “Anyone want to guess? ‘Do’ and ‘Buy’! Dubai! Because everyone comes here to shop…”

I look back out the window. Like the last port visit, Bahrain, this port visit is one solid color. But instead of brown, this place is gray. We are on a wide highway. Cement buildings flicker past. We drive up and over a bridge, take the next exit off the highway, and wind back down and under the bridge. A pair of palm trees stand a little way ahead like two green phalanxes guarding the terracotta-roofed buildings behind them.

“…and up ahead is the Trump hotel,” the tour guide says.

Everyone continues to look out the windows. Trump became president the first month of our deployment. I wonder if the tour guide expected a different reaction.

“We’ll drive around the back and get out so everyone can get a good picture.”

The narrow street is lined with plots of manicured grass and palm trees. All the palm trees are exactly the same height.

The hotel looks like the palace at the end of the Candy Land board game.

We pull off to the side of the road. I look away from the hotel and out my window. The expanse of calm, turquoise water merges with the sky in an exact horizontal line. There are no waves. There are no dolphins. There are no seabirds.

I step out of the bus and walk over to the sea wall. It is a little higher than my waist. I lean over the top and look down. There is no sand, just turquoise water. It is as clear as drinking water. There are no clumps of algae, no seaweed, no barnacles in the nooks of the seawall. It is as if everything has been sterilized.

I look back at the hotel. A lot of money has made this a picturesque seaside destination. The bushes are trimmed into perfect geometric shapes; there are no cracks in the paved road. Everyone holds up their phones, their faces masked in the hotel’s shadow. I turn back to the water. I search for a ripple on the surface, anything that shows a scar, an imperfection, a smudge, anything that will tell me this place is alive.

“Ok, everyone!”

The tour guide claps her hands, gives a broad smile. She moved here from the Philippines to work as a promoter of this country. That is what a tour guide does, right? Represents this place in such a way as to get tourists to spend a lot of money, tell people about it, then return sometime in the future to do it again. I wonder if she knew this was going to be her job when she left her family behind. I have to believe there is something here that she has found, something more than money, that keeps her here. Has she found a real, living place here?

“Next stop, the Carpet Factory!”

If so, I don’t think we will be shown that place today.

“Surgeon, how was your tour?”

I look up from the liberty log. The Physician Assistant (PA) leans on the bulkhead in the lobby of Main Medical. Over the last five months of deployment, he has assisted me in taking care of patients and has been a workout companion during group cross-fit classes. He always listens when the sadness gets too great, and I need to tell someone I am missing my husband and two young daughters.

“The trip? Depressing.”

“How so?”

“Everything seems sanitized…”

He wrinkles his forehead.

“Or covered in sand.”

He nods, “Yes, that is everywhere.”

I put the pen down. “Any updates on the patient we transferred off the ship yesterday?”

“The pelvis abscess patient?” the PA asks.

I nod.

He looks behind him then says, “He had surgery, but I think he did ok. They took out his appendix and drained the abscess.”

I exhale. I was afraid of that. I was up all night worrying I did not adequately convey to the transfer service the potential difficulty of operating on this patient. Not being able to directly dictate a patient’s care, or even just talk to the surgeon taking care of the patient is a very frustrating part about being deployed in a part of the world where I know no one and know less about their medical systems. But often, it is not safe to operate on the ship. The safest thing to do for a patient is get them off the ship. And for me to give up control. I hate that. I had hoped the patient would have gotten an interventional radiology drain, that pelvis would have been a disaster to operate in. I have the equipment to drain a pelvis abscess, but he was at risk for getting very sick postoperatively. We have no blood bank, we are not equipped to take care of a sick post-surgical patient for very long, and he is in for a long recovery. Even though I love operating, the right thing to do was get him to a local hospital.

“They started him on a diet today,” the PA continues.

“Wow, that’s quick.” I pride myself in being somewhat aggressive when it comes to feeding a postoperative patient, but if I had been staring at a pelvis full of pus, I probably would have held off feeding him for at least a day or two. His intestines won’t work normally for a while.

“SMO (the Senior Medical Officer, pronounced Smoh) wants to see if he can be discharged in time to get back on the ship before we leave port tomorrow.”

I shake my head.

“Well, that might be ok, right?”

“No. He should not come back to this ship. Besides, he won’t be ready to be discharged in a week let alone tomorrow…”

“But his surgery went ok…”

“No,” I say again, “He won’t be ready. His guts are going to freeze up and not work. That’s why all you try to do with a pelvis abscess is drain the abscess, not operate on him. That’s what I tried to convey yesterday over the phone anyway.”

“Well,” the PA says, “We are in port, you couldn’t have operated on him anyway.”

“That’s not the point!”

The PA takes a step back.

I exhale. I can’t explain to him how frustrating it is when no one seems to listen; when no one seems to understand how sick this patient is still going to get. Instead, I say, “I’m sorry. I just really miss my family.”

He nods. “I know.”

“I’ll see you at dinner.” I walk past the PA, step over the hatch to the lobby, and into the cross-department passageway.

The patient was in septic shock. If I am honest with myself, I was afraid to operate on him, I was glad we were in port. If we were out to sea, I would have had no choice, he would have been too sick for a Medevac flight. And his surgery would have been close to impossible to perform without another set of knowledgeable hands, Surgeon hands. And there is no other Surgeon. There is just me. And as the lone general surgeon I have gotten into the habit of thinking of the worst outcomes. If the worst had happened – me not being able to get him off the OR table alive – I would not be able to walk into that operating room again. Then what would happen for the rest of deployment? There is no one else to take my place.

I walk into my office and turn on the light. There is a large box marked Priority Mail sitting on my desk. It’s from my mom.

I open the box, pick up the pink envelope on top and open it. It is a Mother’s Day card. Underneath the card there are four pounds of whole bean coffee. “Thanks, Mom.” I stow the coffee under my patient exam table then look back into the box. I pull out a large pack of Red Vines.

“Ha! Well, at least they aren’t Twizzlers,” I say, remembering the sea story I had heard on my first day out to sea. On the ship’s last deployment, the supply ordering had gotten mixed up and the only things that were sent to the ship were pallets of Twizzlers. The joke was that there were surely still boxes of Twizzlers oozing red crust into the bowels of a ship storeroom somewhere. Ah, so that’s where the cockroaches are coming from, I had remarked, putting in my two cents like I always do. But I worried I had upset the storyteller. Instead, my comment was incorporated into future retellings, and will probably continue to be a part of this ship’s lore for longer than I will.

There is one last thing in the box, wrapped in floral paper. I pick it up and tear open the wrapping. It is a folded pink T-shirt. I hold it up and the shirt unfurls under the fluorescent lighting, its silver looped script sparkles: I am a mother and therefore blessed.

This is not what I need to hear today. I am about as far away from being a mother as I have ever been, even before I had children. I can’t ask my daughters about their day, I can’t tell them about mine, I can’t give them a hug. I have left their day-to-day care to a nanny – a very capable, loving nanny – but what mother leaves their five- and two-year-old children? For a career? For a duty? For medicine? I realize I am not the only mother who has deployed. I realize mothers will continue working, striving, and loving their children all at the same time. But it is hard to do everything all at once. Especially when I physically cannot right now. Being reminded of that impossibility is not what is going to help me feel better about being here. I refold the shirt with the words on the inside and toss it into the trashcan.

Just before Memorial Day, the ship re-enters the Gulf of Aden.

“Is it hot in here or what?” I ask the Radiation Health Officer (RHO), a member of the medical department in charge of monitoring shipboard dosimeters. Condensation drips down the bulkheads. Sweat drips down the side of my face. So much for taking a shower this morning.

RHO opens his mouth, raises a finger, but I cut him off. “Never mind. I’m going to breakfast; would you like to join me?”

“Sorry, I have a rad health physical with SMO in a few minutes.”

“Wow. Both of you here? This early in the morning? Is the world ending?”

“Don’t remind me! Plus, I think he said he was going flying later or something.”

“Oh, great. I really am always the last person to know.”

“Ha! I know!” RHO says, “And you are the one who has to cover for him…”

“Don’t remind me,” I echo and walk down the passageway.

I push open the Wardroom door. There are only two occupied tables. I exhale; some days it is preferrable to eat breakfast alone. I decide on a hard-boiled egg and a bowl of oatmeal and walk over to an empty table in the corner. I put my tray down, walk over to get some water, then head back to my spot. An officer who sometimes goes to the same weekly exercise class as I do sits at my previously empty table.

“I hope you don’t mind, Surgeon,” he says as I sit down, “But I hate eating alone.”

I nod because it’s the nice thing to do, roll the hard-boiled egg on the tray until it cracks, then start to peel it. I exhale; I need to make conversation. “How’s your day going?”

“Oh,” he replies, “I just came off duty. Going to get some sleep, then back on duty tonight.”

“Busy schedule on the Bridge?”

He nods, then puts his fork down. “Surgeon, are you ever not on duty? I mean, who covers for you if you get sick?”

“No one.”

“What’s your secret?”

“About working all the time?”

“No, about not getting sick.”

“Oh.” I look down at my oatmeal. It looks like a lumpier version of grade-school paste. “I don’t know.” I push the oatmeal away. “I have two young daughters at home, so my immune system is primed, I guess.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” He takes another huge bite of scrambled egg, swallows, then stands up. “Well, if I have your permission, Ma’am…”

“Yes, please.”

He picks up his tray. “I’m off to get some rest, we’ll be busy going through The BAM tonight.”

“The what?”

“The BAM…something,” he twirls his hand in the air, “Mandeb,” he shrugs, “You know, The Gate of Tears.”

“Oh,” I nod, but I have no idea what he means.

I wait until he leaves the wardroom then I pick up my tray, guiltily turn in my uneaten bowl of oatmeal at the dirty dishes window, and rush back to my office. I open the search engine on my computer, but per normal, the connection is painfully slow. I see sick call, clinic patients, cover for SMO while he goes flying, grab a quick lunch, see a walk-in abscess patient, and look at an X-ray for the PA before I can google, The BAM.

To re-enter the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden, the ship has to traverse the Bab el-Mandeb, shortened to the BAM, translated as, the Gate of Tears. It is the narrowest part around the Arabian Peninsula, a choke point for container ships because of the minimal room they have to navigate safely around the point. Are aircraft carriers bigger than container ships? I don’t know. When we went through the first time, I did not know to ask that question. I was blissfully unaware; I did not question my own safety. Something has happened to me between the beginning of deployment and now.

I look up at the television screen on the bulkhead in my office. It is on the black and white flight deck camera channel. The sky is a deep grey, the water a dark black. I can’t clearly see the edge of the deck. We are going through this narrow passage at night. I know that I personally try not to do anything at night – I try not to operate at night, I try not to medevac patients at night – everything is riskier at night, right? Or does this mean that it is riskier to traverse this place during the day? I don’t know.

My heart races. I can’t make it slow down.

I want to go home. And I have no control over that desire. I have to trust that our Captain, just like a Surgeon, has tirelessly prepared for all possible contingencies. But I also know that not every part of a surgery can be planned. An anatomic variant, a hesitation from a team member, or just plain old bad luck, can end an operation prematurely. We got around this point the first time without a scratch – I didn’t even know I should have been worried.

I turn off the TV and rush out of my office.

The passageway is deserted. The ladderwell is deserted. The overhead lights in the hangar bay are off; everything has more shadows tonight. No one is working out in the hangar bay gym. All the Weapons Department office doors are closed. I make it all the way to my stateroom without seeing anyone. I am all alone.

I enter my stateroom. It is dark except for a small light on over the sink. My roommate’s bunk is empty. I take off my boots and lay down on top of my blanket. I don’t take my uniform off. I don’t take my hair out of its bun. Most nights I know I will be woken up in the middle of the night for a medical emergency, but I always change out of my uniform and get into pajamas to at least attempt to have a good night’s sleep. I don’t want to risk it tonight. I don’t want to use up all my luck. Perhaps, if I don’t change out of my uniform, the one thing I have control over tonight, I won’t be needed, I won’t have to get out of bed, and then perhaps we will have enough luck left to eventually get all the way back home.

“Surgeon?”

One of my Corpsmen stands in my office doorway. “Is it time, HM3?” His rank is Hospital Corpsman, third class.

“Yes, Ma’am,” the Corpsman says, “My flight leaves in an hour.”

I look back at the TV on the bulkhead. The morning after the BAM crossing, I rushed down to my office and turned it on. The waters of the Red Sea looked the same color grey, there was no indication on the screen that we had done anything significant while the TV was off. And this morning, the waters of the Mediterranean also look the same color grey. Perhaps that is the point.

I stand up and walk to the door. “Goodbye, HM3. Good luck at your next duty station.”

“Thank you, Ma’am.”

The Corpsman turns to leave, then stops. “Ma’am?”

“Yes, HM3?”

“When I first heard that you were leaving the Navy, I thought, there goes all the common sense.”

My breath catches in my throat. I don’t know what to say. Am I giving up? That is my greatest fear. And will there be anyone left who will continue?

“Ma’am?”

“Yes, HM3?”

“Can I get a hug?”

My chest aches. I nod and walk over to my Corpsman — my Corpsman who had worked tirelessly on the ward with me, who had carried his Medical Response Team bag to countless medical emergencies, who had cared for mass casualty patients and sailors in his repair locker, a remote location on the ship where sailors stop flooding, put out fires, and repair damage — and I pull him into a hug.

“Goodbye, HM3. Do good things.” And I let him go.

“Yes, Ma’am. Goodbye.”

I sit at my desk and close my eyes.

I shake hands with patients daily. I place a hand on a shoulder when I listen to a heartbeat inside a patient’s chest. My fingers touch tender abdomens. But in actuality, I have very little human contact.

I leave the department, change into gym clothes, and walk aft through the hangar deck. I catch a sliver of the turquoise sky just above the dark green of the sea. I walk up to the O-3 level, enter the cardio gym, and go for a long run on a treadmill. For the next hour, I forget about the pelvis abscess patient who flew back to the states and had to have another emergency surgery. I forget that my daughters are growing up without me. I ignore the constant questioning thought – What good am I really doing here? – and I just run.

At the end, I stop the treadmill, and clean the console. I exit the gym via the long port-side passageway. My chest burns: my legs are spent. I pass a berthing area, a lounge area, go up two steps, pass through a hatch, then walk by a humid open machinery room. I go through another hatch, go down two steps, and pass single-occupancy staterooms and the radio office. I stop in front of one of the midships knee knockers.

It is like all the other knee knockers — an oval opening for a hatch without the hatch, like the one that caused a large scalp laceration in one of my patients. The bottom metal rim of this knee knocker is immaculately shined. There is not one speck of dirt on it, no smudges, no fingerprints, no faint boot marks. I have never seen one so clean before. It is as reflective as a mirror.

I turn and look down the passageway behind me. I turn and look up the passageway in front of me. I am alone. I lean forward over the metal lip, hoping to see my face upside-down, like in a circus mirror, but all I see is a thin dark shadow.

I stand up, lift my foot over the shined metallic surface, and for a moment, my shoe meets only empty space. Where is the deck on the other side? I look down at the bottom of the oval. Its reflective surface is gone, replaced by one large shadow. I feel as if I am falling into that blurred image; I feel erased.

I am going to die.

I am going to die here, on this boat, and my family won’t ever know what happened.

I am going to die.

And I am all alone.

A rushing sound fills my ears. The bulkheads seem to vibrate.

Then, my daughter’s voice calls to me from across the void.

You aren’t going to die, Mama, just the part of you that you don’t need anymore. Everything is going to be ok.

I blink.

The rushing and vibrations stop.

I look back up and down the passageway. I am still alone. I am still going to die. Just maybe not today.

I lean forward, put my running shoe down on the solid deck, and continue walking down the passageway.

“Good run?” the RHO asks.

I nod. I open my mouth to ask if he ever felt like he was going to die. Now. Today. Or if he has ever heard his daughter’s voice in his head as clear as I hear his voice right now, calling him back from an abyss. But something tells me to shut my mouth. I can’t tell anyone about that shadow in the knee knocker, that void, that nothingness. But that also means that I can’t share my relief when I heard my oldest daughter, Evelyn’s voice.

Not that it matters. No one will believe me anyway.

Perhaps, I am just hungry. “Dinner?”

“Yes! I’m…”

“Medical Emergency! Medical Emergency! Medical Emergency in…”

The RHO looks at me. There is fear behind his eyes. “That is deep trunk extraction territory.”

In certain areas of the ship, particularly some Engineering spaces or Reactor spaces or Weapons spaces or Supply department storerooms, the only way to get in or out is up a long, narrow, vertical ladder. If a medical emergency occurs in any of these spaces, the Medical Response Team cannot carry the patient out on a stretcher. The only way to get out a non-ambulatory or unresponsive patient is by hooking them into a stretcher and hauling them up as quickly as possible by a big cable and pulley system.

“Surgeon!”

I unclip my radio. “This is Surgeon. Go ahead.”

“Surgeon. This is SMO. A sailor was found down, not sure if he’s breathing, not sure if he fell, either way, non-ambulatory. Senior Chief and HM1 are heading down there now.”

“A deep trunk extraction?”

“Yes. I already called CHENG.” CHENG is short for Chief Engineer. A team from the Engineering department manages the cable and pulley system.

I grab my go-bag from the bottom drawer of my desk. I push the talk button. “SMO. This is Surgeon. Where is the extraction point?”

“The aft mess decks. I’m on my way there, now.” My radio clicks off.

I look up at RHO. Do I ask him about that voice anyway?

I shake my head and run out of the department.

I jog down to the aft mess decks. If the patient fell, a closed head injury or a high cervical spine injury could cause airway compromise. But why did he fall? Sailors go up and down these ladder wells all the time, many times a day. Dehydration? Exhaustion? Did he have a heart attack? A stroke? Did he take too much Benadryl? Did he take too much of something else? Did he want to fall or was he just ok with not being able to re-grab a rung?

To erase one’s life, to take it away, means we all have failed that one person, our shipmate. It means there is no purpose in the mission anymore. And I am not talking about the dropping-bombs-on-bad-guys mission. I’m talking about the working together for something bigger mission. Freedom. Hope. Justice. Big lofty, naive ideals. Ideals I have had to hold close in the middle of the night. Tightly. If I did not naively believe, well, how would I have been able to treat patients with my limited supplies and personnel? How would I have been able to look a transfer patient in the eye and tell him he will be ok, he will be given better care at the host nation medical facility than with me on the ship, even though I fear I am lying? How would I have been able to hope that my daughters will someday understand why I had to leave?

And when those ideals fail us, it doesn’t matter how tightly you hold on. Like knowing the potential consequences of traversing the BAM in daylight. Like deciding, despite all the work it took to get to where I am, The Ship’s Surgeon, I cannot do it anymore.

The bulkhead closes in, the fluorescent lights buzz down, my vision flickers. I have to stop thinking about my decisions. I need to focus on helping this sailor. This is why I am here. And there is no one else.

Up ahead, a group of dark blue shapes bends and twists. I blink and my vision clears. There are so many people working to save this one sailor. Working, not for the mission of the ship, but for our shipmate.

I will my tired legs onward.

A group of sailors bends over a large pulley next to a hole in the deck, an open escape hatch. My Surgical Tech is crouched next to the opening, his Medical Response Team bag next to him. The Executive Officer (XO, the second in command of the ship), the Command Master Chief (CMC, the highest-ranking enlisted member on the ship), and the Senior Medical Officer stand off to the side. I nod to SMO. His role is clear – he will oversee, he will support the command, as needed. My role is less clear. I am supposed to do something, swiftly and expertly, if the patient needs it. No one cares if I will be called on to do something I have never done before. I am just supposed to be able to do it. Expertly.

My legs wobble. Even before surgeries I have done so often that I can do them in my sleep, there is always a brief moment before I operate when I doubt my abilities. That moment has gotten longer the longer I have been on this ship. It is hard to know if you are about to do the right thing when you are all alone and have no one to tell you that what you are doing is right.

“Ready?” one of the Engineering sailors yells down into the open hatch.

I cannot hear the response. I open my go-bag and take out two fourteen-gauge needles, the plastic wrapping slippery in my fingers. It is mechanical, my hands reaching for these life-saving devices. I do not think about it. If the sailor is unconscious from a fall, and cannot breathe from collapsed lungs, these needles will save his life. All I have to do is put them in the correct place.

Sound, buzzing, rushing returns to my ears. The clank of the cable against the metal hatch opening, the calls and grunts of the sailors around me.

It will be soon.

The machine clanks, pauses, then clanks again. My Surgical Tech stands up. The orange end of a stretcher peeks up over the hatch in the deck. He grabs the handle on the end as the stretcher emerges.

I cannot tell if the sailor is breathing. I want to rush at the stretcher, assess for signs of life, to work quickly. But I stay where I am. I wait until the stretcher is righted. I wait until it and my Corpsman are away from the gaping hole.

“Surgeon!”

I rush over to the patient. I see fog in the oxygen mask.

I bend down, place my fingers into the hole in front of his cervical collar. I feel a bounding pulse. “Stretcher bearers!” I yell.

I let our shipmates carry the stretcher down the passageway.

I lift my radio and call Main Medical. “We are on our way.”

I turn back to SMO. His face is tense. I nod and he returns it. Then I rush down the passageway.

“Surgeon, is the patient going to be ok?”

I nod, then hesitate. “I hope so, Nurse.”

I don’t know what it is like to be on the other end of a deep trunk extraction team. I can imagine it is far lonelier than stepping over a knee knocker and thinking there is nothing but blackness, an absence of hope. I can fix a collapsed lung, I can stabilize a broken neck, but I did not have to do any of those things for this patient. All I had to do was listen.

“Nurse, have a good night. Let me know if you need anything.”

“Yes, Surgeon.”

My patient is asleep in his bed on the ward. I nod to the shipmate already at the bedside, I hope my gratitude washes over him, and I walk on.

I walk past the closed OR doors. I don’t feel much like celebrating or raising a fist in the air. We work and we work, and we try to do the right thing. But is what we are doing, right?

I walk into my office and sit down.

How are we all going to be ok so we can continue to do this job until the end? I think that is the question Nurse is asking.

I look over at a drawing on the bulkhead next to my desk. My youngest daughter, Waverly, sent it to me. It has been next to me the whole deployment, retaped several times, the edges curling. It is labeled, My Family. I look at the row of faces with our arms and legs sprouting directly from our heads. That always makes me smile. There is a D beneath the biggest one, and an E and a W below the two smaller ones in the middle. And at the end of the row, beneath the medium-sized smiley face, there is an M. I lean forward. But there is something else. I have never noticed it before. Perhaps the pink construction paper needed to be faded enough for me to see it. Directly in front of the letter M there is a tiny, pink-colored heart scratched into the paper.

Perhaps that is the answer to Nurse’s question. With enough time, as long as it needs to take, we will eventually get to the answers. And hopefully, we will be ok.

29 April 1971

From: Naval Science Department

To: Midshipmen Second Class, Navigation and Piloting 301 (NAV 301)

Subject: Final Navigation Project-Due: 1600 hours, 13 May, Luce Hall, Room 104

Mastering navigation is critical for every Naval Officer. This project covers topics from the last eight months and represents 40% of your grade. Instructions, answer sheets, and charts are provided. The exercise simulates USS Robinson’s (DDG-12) transit from San Diego to Pearl Harbor as part of a carrier task force. You will serve as Robinson’s navigator.

****

“Company, ten-hut. Dress right. Attention to morning announcements.”

Our midshipman company commander’s voice was stern at our 0645 morning meal formation. “From the Battalion Officer: This is the final warning for whoever is bombarding the eighth wing tennis courts with debris. If littering continues, an all-night watch will be manned by eighth wing residents.”

Chortles and snickers filled the company ranks.

“It’s not my fault; business is business,” whispered my roommate, Billy Gleason, beside me in formation.

“Maybe it is your fault,” I said. “Did you look? Rubbers are everywhere.”

The company commander continued. “Alumni returning from their first duty stations will attend a reception in Memorial Hall at 1700 today. First Lieutenant James Creeson, USMC, class of 69 from our company is scheduled to attend if anyone wants to say hello.”

“We should go see him, hear his Vietnam stories,” I whispered.

After classes we changed from working uniforms to whites and rushed to the reception, anxious to see what had become of Jimmy Creeson. He was alone on the balcony, smoking Camels, flicking ashes into a plastic cup. He was five-six, muscular, a former collegiate wrestler. His skin had a yellow tinge, his hands quivered, the flame dancing when he lit his cigarette. The Marine Corps logo was engraved on his class ring stone. As our first midshipman squad leader when we were plebes, he’d been disciplined but upbeat, always smiling. We respected his demanding nature because the tasks he gave us seemed to have a purpose. We saluted him, excited to see him, but he didn’t return it, nor did he smile. He discreetly took a flask from inside his left sock and poured vodka into his Kool-Aid. He offered us some and Billy, at the risk of expulsion, accepted. We had listened intensely to periodic announcements of the Academy’s Vietnam casualties, including Creeson’s classmates, relieved that his name was not among them. He looked exhausted, his eyelids drooped, but he had survived. His uniform was immaculate, with three rows of new ribbons, including the Silver Star.

“How’s football?” he asked Billy.

“I didn’t make the team,” Billy said, slouching. “Lost my touch.”

“Football isn’t everything. It just seems like everything. It’s a diversion from all the BS,” Creeson said, his voice without inflection.

“How’s the Marine Corps? What’s Vietnam like?” I asked.

Creeson looked puzzled, perhaps offended, glancing about without eye contact. He took a long drag and gulped his drink. “I shouldn’t have come here. You guys, be careful. Really,” he said. He walked away, not checking out with the officer managing the reception. With perfect posture and bold cadence, he walked, heels clicking, down the Bancroft Hall stairway into Tecumseh Court.

I felt terrible about asking my questions. We talked with feigned interest to a few of the naval officers at the reception who had completed sea tours. Some had participated in naval gunfire support off Vietnam’s coast; others had cruised the Mediterranean, gladly assigned to ships far from war. None of them, except James Creeson, seemed damaged.

“Creeson looked terrible. He didn’t look like the same person. My uncle’s skin is like that when he needs dialysis,” said Billy.

“The Marine Corps is out of the question for me. I’m going to drive ships,” I declared. Billy, perhaps a little tipsy, was falling behind as we walked, maybe frightened by what he’d seen. “What about you, Billy? Ships? Planes? Submarines?”

“I haven’t thought much about it. We don’t have to decide until January. I guess the National Football League is off the table.”

We were not exactly model midshipmen but did the best our consciences allowed. Billy, from New Mexico, and I, from Nevada, roomed together during junior year. We were brothers in western solidarity, sons of landlocked mountain desert states that were isolated from the Navy. We stayed mostly under the radar, not shining, not failing, getting by. Billy’s business acumen made him famous in an underground way. By junior year, our classmates seemed to forget that he was a football recruit.

Billy’s right glutes, hamstrings, and calves were marvels. His right leg juxtaposed with his left appeared to be twice as big. He held his state’s high school records for the longest field goal and consecutive PATs, leading to his induction into New Mexico’s High School Football Hall of Fame. He was 5’10” and weighed 165—perfect for a kicker. His 800 math SAT and 20-20 vision, coupled with kicking skills, made him a perfect Navy recruit. He told me he’d dreamed of being interviewed on CBS following his winning kick in the Army-Navy game.

After a successful year on the freshman football team, Billy was cut from the varsity because he developed a chronic hook. His range exceeded fifty yards, but he couldn’t shake the portside hex. The team hired an ex-NFL kicker to assist—no luck. His father engaged a sports psychologist who calmed Billy’s sweating nightmares but didn’t correct kicking problems. The Academy medical staff warned his father that too much psychological treatment could hinder Billy’s ability to obtain a security clearance when the time came. Treatment ceased.

Ashore in Italy during a summer training cruise, a fortune teller told him he would live until he was ninety, but kicking was, “I am sorry, che sfortuna.” He tried confession in Saint Peters, seeking higher authority than the Academy Chapel confessional adjacent to the crypt of John Paul Jones. Religious entreaties failed. For two years, on his way to class, Billy threw pennies at Tecumseh’s statue overlooking the Yard. Tecumseh, a Shawnee warrior, brought luck to penny throwers.

“That won’t work,” Bobby Williams scoffed, throwing a penny on his way to an exam. “It only works for tests—not kicking.”

Billy suffered anxiety and boredom with the curriculum that he might have liked if playing football were included in his life. He suffered as an anonymous spectator among the rest of us. I marched next to him many times on our way through Annapolis to Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium for home games. Standing on the field within his kicking range of the south goalposts, waiting for the Brigade to complete the “march on,” he softly read aloud names of famous battles decorating stadium bulwarks—Leyte Gulf, Midway, Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor.

“This is chip shot range for you,” I commented, attempting to change his mood.

“No kidding,” he whimpered.

In the first game of junior year with ten seconds to play, Navy’s kicker missed a thirty-five-yard field goal. We lost by one. A ray of hope emerged when Billy was invited to varsity practice on Monday—he was uninvited on Tuesday.

Billy searched for distractions. He wasn’t interested in Weapons Systems or Seamanship classes, earning lackluster C’s. He effortlessly earned A’s in calculus, physics, and physical education. He read passages aloud to me from his father’s letters, mocking his father’s chagrin. When the grades didn’t improve, sterner letters arrived.

“Can’t you try harder? You’re embarrassing us. How hard can ‘Introduction to Shipboard Weapons’ be? What’s going to happen when the weapons are real?”

Instead of studying more, he conjured a plan to become the entrepreneur of Bancroft Hall. He was our black-market Yossarian, a money-making machine, using his version of Wall Street analytical shrewdness.

“I can see the market,” he exclaimed in October before midterms. “Everybody wants comfort food that reminds them of home.”

“What?” I asked, looking up from homework.

“I can relieve homesickness. I’m going to sell grilled cheese sandwiches at night during finals week. We’re going to make a fortune. The sandwiches probably don’t even have to be good.”

He piloted his business plan during midterms. The Brigade had extended study time beyond normal taps during test weeks and midshipmen were hungry late at night. Billy borrowed money from our banker classmate, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and he recruited Bobby Williams and me as cooks. We practiced grilling in a Teflon-coated electric frying pan—a violation of every fire code and hygiene regulation in our universe. Billy hid the pan in his basement storage locker and retrieved it at night when we should have been studying. Instead, our spartan team wrapped steaming sandwiches in foil, stuffed them in paper bags with chips, and sold them door-to-door for two dollars each, quickly selling all we had.

When first semester finals week came, applying lessons from the pilot, Billy upgraded production capacity with six electric griddles and more workers. The buttery aroma of sandwiches filled the hall. We posted guards to ensure that our kitchens remained hidden. Our company’s seniors liked the grilled cheese so much that they turned a blind eye toward our enterprise and its brazen violations. We sold over 1000 sandwiches for four dollars a bag, five nights in a row. Miraculously we passed our exams, exhausted, cash happy. Billy repaid Stonewall with interest.

****

Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, from South Carolina, was the son and grandson of Academy graduates; his father was an oil company president and a member of Augusta National Golf Club. Stonewall received unsolicited monthly deposits, “from Motha,” to his bank account and became a lender to classmates in need. After his successful investment in Billy’s business, the two briefly seemed like close friends. They played golf and Billy helped him with calculus. In April their friendship crumbled.

“You have Masters tickets?” Billy inquired, a month before Spring Break when the golf tournament was scheduled.

“Of course,” Stonewall replied. “Do you want to come? Mason’s coming. You should come too.”

“I can buy the tickets from you,” said Billy.

“Are you kidding? You’re a guest,” explained Stonewall.

Mason, from Raleigh, was Stonewall’s roommate and teammate on Navy’s golf team. Mason would do almost anything to escape Annapolis and return to Raleigh for weekends. He bragged obnoxiously about his harem there.

Two days before Spring Break, Stonewall cancelled Billy’s invitation explaining that his family “wasn’t going to the tournament because MeeMa was ill.” Billy had watched the Masters with his father on TV for years. He was heartbroken not to see it in person but gracious with the bad news. “Hope your grandmother gets well soon,” he said. We heard that Mason was still going on the trip, so Billy suspected that his own Yankee roots and lack of Navy “blue blood” had caused the family to veto the visit.

Instead of the Masters for Spring Break, Bobby Williams, Billy, and I took the train to New York, stayed in a Times Square hotel, drank beer, and watched the New York Knicks using free USO tickets. On Saturday in between tourist excursions, we watched the Masters on TV.

“Hey, that’s Mason,” yelled Bobby. “He’s wearing a Navy golf hat.”

Billy angrily glared at the screen, his blackball suspicions confirmed.

When we returned from break, Mason told us all about the Masters. Stonewall’s grandmother had miraculously, “praise the lord,” recovered. Mason bragged about the “ladies of Augusta” with whom he’d “had relaaations.” We didn’t believe him until we spotted the antibiotic on his desk a week later.

Billy became analytical about Mason’s illness and devised a new enterprise to exploit the ways of midshipmen tomcats. He ordered a case of condoms that arrived in an enormous box with no return address. “If I’m right, we have a bull market—more profitable than sandwiches,” he predicted. Advertising required delicacy—but he was convinced that confidential sales would be appealing. Mason and Stonewall were his first customers.

“Twenty dollars a box? Steep,” complained Mason.

“Not for quality,” explained Billy. “You don’t have to leave Bancroft Hall. I know you don’t want to be caught with your pants down again,” warned Billy, winking.

They bought two packages each and I thought Billy was going to be sick with excitement when he considered the profit potential.

Gradually, however, Billy realized what liars comprised the bragging Brigade. He made a few sales to guys like Mason, but no significant market emerged. Even when Billy lowered the price multiple times, nobody wanted rubbers. Occasionally someone would “buy one for my wallet, just in case, you know, better safe than sorry.” Billy sulked. “I should have run a pilot,” he lamented.

Reengineering Billy’s condom business was inspired by my chemistry professor, a Navy Commander whose whites were decorated with Vietnam War medals and a command-at-sea button. He seemed bored, unengaged with class, dreaming of the bridge of his destroyer. During class, he filled a latex glove with water and casually lobbed it to the lab’s deck where it exploded.

“The purpose of the Navy, gentlemen, is to deliver ordnance,” he proclaimed, suddenly inspired to provide us with important truths beyond the chemistry curriculum.

His explanation of the Navy baffled me. No one challenged his manifesto or even commented on the mess he created. My trouser legs were soaked, making me wonder how much water would fit in one of those high-quality condoms. Around three gallons, we discovered.

“The problem is lifting that little boy,” proclaimed Billy. He lowered his prices and began an aggressive advertising campaign, showing others a condom’s superb ordnance potential. They were nothing like conventional water balloons. Rubber wars erupted. Bombs were launched and booby traps set throughout Bancroft Hall. Vicious warriors, creative future ordnance deliverers, added Kool-Aid to their payloads—red water bombs were death sentences for Navy whites. For several weeks floods and condom remnants were everywhere.

Billy became a cautious arms supplier, warning overly aggressive warriors of risks. “Dropping three gallons from six flights up could injure somebody,” Billy counseled.

“We’re not going to hit anybody, just get them wet. This is America; shut the fuck up!”

Water wars waged by future Navy and Marine Corps officers escalated. Just opening a door could be disastrous and bomb squad pre-clearance became a requisite. Booby traps were planted in the most unexpected places. Halls were awash in a rainbow of colors, slippery, treacherous.

After a month, the antics died, skirmishes completed, scores settled; mutually assured destruction necessitated a cease-fire after so many uniforms had to be replaced. Business subsided and remaining condoms were sharply discounted, deployed mostly to nightly test bombings from rooms above the tennis courts at the base of Bancroft Hall. Spring-fevered weaponeers sick of studying jettisoned enormous bombs that barely fit through the windows. Noisy splashing geysers were so commonplace that we no longer watched them. Custodians grew tired of policing the mess and complained to the Battalion Officer.

****

Billy and Stonewall had jointly organized and financed a weekend party for eight of us earlier in the year. The party was scheduled for May, a month before our Ring Dance and the semester’s end. They had each paid half the deposit for a big house on Chesapeake Bay, ten miles from Annapolis. Because of continued tensions between them as the date approached, Billy requested a refund from the owner, a 1948 Academy graduate, who resolutely refused and reminded him that final payment was due. Seven of us wrote rental checks to Billy who consolidated payment. We cautiously proceeded with party plans, despite the lingering animus.

Along with our dates, or drags, in Academy vernacular, we arrived at the majestic, weathered house, greeted by warm southern breezes, azaleas exploding with color, Marvin Gaye blasting over speakers, and picturesque views of the shipping lane to Baltimore. The place was calming, filled with the owner’s Academy mementos including a signed poster of Roger Staubach. The intended calming effect of the party settled over us, temporarily easing the pressures of upcoming finals and the problematic Navigation Project. Our location, outside the seven-mile limit, a radius from the Academy’s chapel dome, allowed us to drink beer and other “laaabations,” Stonewall’s phrase, without violating Academy rules invoking severe penalties.

Billy prepared detailed plans for the weekend in the same manner he ran his businesses-an inclement weather plan, a transportation plan, menus, assignments for cooking, clean-up, sports equipment, security, safety. We mostly ignored his fastidiousness but were immediately thrilled to see the results of his food planning: blue crabs in bushel baskets and a keg of Michelob greeted us on the screened porch.

“How do you do this again?” asked Alison, Mason’s girlfriend.

With his mouth full of crab, Mason explained and demonstrated crab dissection. Alison, a student at Georgia Tech, was the reigning Peach Bowl Princess.

“See, there’s nothing to it. The biggest legs, that’s where it’s best.”

“Mason, I’ve ruined my nails. Can you hit this crab with the little mallet for me? The last one splattered crab guts. Smell your hands, Mason. How are you gonna get that off? If you think you’re gonna touch me with those hands, you’re dreamin, Darlin.”

We fifteen, minus Alison, pounded away at crabs, swilled beer, and occasionally took breaks to eat salad and cornbread and dance to the music. A salty breeze rustled our newspaper tablecloths as the sun disappeared. With his planning, Billy sought harmony, mostly for the sake of recovering his damage deposit. Nevertheless, his planning had gaps. In this case, his oversight was sleeping arrangements.

We had four bedrooms, eight couples, and no plan. Some would be stuck sleeping on couches or on the floor. The relationships, including mine, having just met my girlfriend in March, were in various stages. Most seemed relieved with sleeping arrangements that posed no pressures.

Mason, on the other hand, desperately wanted a bedroom. In the hastily executed straw drawing for bedrooms, Alison and Mason were stuck on the living room floor. Mason continued his entreaties.

“Please, Bobby, you don’t want a bedroom. You hardly know that girl and she’s only seventeen.”

“Fuck you, Mason,” Bobby’s date snarled, taking Bobby’s hand, leading him through the bedroom door, sticking out her tongue at Mason.

Mason waved his checkbook, offering to buy a bedroom. He whined and threatened to leave, but classmates who’d drawn bedrooms ignored him.

Alison had been steadily sipping Manhattans after declaring that she couldn’t deal with crabs. Her speech was slurred as she coddled Mason’s arm and kissed his neck. With no bedroom, she made a cocoon-like bed on the floor with two air mattresses, quilts, and blankets she’d found in a closet. She changed into her Georgia Tech T-shirt and silk gold shorts with a yellow-jacket insignia.

“Goodnight classmates and thanks so much for giving us a bedroom after I found this place and made the arrangements,” Mason spouted, emerging from the bathroom with toothpaste on his lips.

“Mason, you didn’t find this place, Billy did. And your contribution to the rent is pitiful. We should make you sleep on the beach,” I said.

“There’s room on that boat by the dock. You could move this little bed under the stars and practice celestial navigation,” Stonewall suggested.

Mason and Miss Peach Bowl looked comfortable, framed by the pinewood floor, perched between the wall with Staubach’s poster and a table filled with the owner’s collectibles. Twelve of us, now in sweatshirts, paraded past them. We took our drinks to the beach, revived the fire with driftwood, and breathed in cooling breezes. It was not yet midnight—why sleep with so much beer left? The lights shining from Bobby’s room ruined the starlight. We saw him through the window playing Yahtzee with his girlfriend. We banged on the panes, beckoning them to douse the lights and join us. The fire, the Old Bay aroma, beer, and female company created a lazy coziness.

“How far did you guys get on the Navigation Project?” Bobby asked.

“I’m past the fog in San Diego Harbor,” Stonewall said.

“Relax, enjoy this last weekend,” implored Billy. “We have until Thursday. It won’t be that hard once the enemy submarine gets out of sonar range and the ship doesn’t have to zig-zag. I think it’s a straight track from there to Pearl Harbor. If there’s some trick, we’ll find it.”

Under the stars the only sounds were the fire and the squeak of rubber fenders on the motorboat rubbing against the pier. No one seemed sleepy. Suddenly, the embarrassing sound of Miss Peach Bowl’s groaning, muffled screaming, and pounding fists against the pinewood emerged from the house, providing evidence that Mason was indeed the biggest stud since War Admiral. The ending to our jealous, disdainful listening came with the crash of glass shattering–a lamp or vase had been knocked to the floor. We assumed the amorous noises would cease, but they continued. I knew Billy was cringing at the thought of paying damages, but he remained calm, sipping beer, adding firewood. “Mason is such an idiot,” he complained.

On Monday Billy’s bank called informing him that Mason’s rent check had insufficient funds. The landlord also called wanting to know “What the hell happened to my wife’s crystal vase? I am taking the replacement cost out of the deposit.”

Mason immediately promised to pay his rent money the following week but grew hysterical when he heard about the additional cost of the broken vase.

“If you assholes hadn’t made me sleep on the floor it wouldn’t have happened. How did we know that vase was on the table? I can’t pay for it for a while.”

“What about you, Stonewall? You want to help your roomie out here?” Billy asked. “Should we convene a meeting to see what our classmates think about this?”

“It’s not necessary. When the owner tells you how much, let me know,” Stonewall said.

****

We were deluged with end-of-semester work. The Navigation Project took hours, but Billy was uncharacteristically inspired to finish. Thirteen charts and ten pages of problems covered the spectrum of navigation and piloting we’d studied—deriving fixes, ship positions, using Loran, radar, magnetic and gyro compass readings, celestial navigation with stars, sun, and moon. My charts seemed messy, bleared, smeared with erasures, and sweat. In all, I thought the Naval Science faculty had created interesting problems. I finished on Wednesday evening and packaged my project as prescribed. Smiling, Billy returned from Luce Hall, waving his receipt after submitting his project early.

“You’re finished, right? We can talk about it without worrying about an honor violation?” Billy asked.

“My charts are ready. I’m not opening them again,” I declared.

“Did you find the math error in the Antares star line calculation? If you correct the math, the stars cross in a point, a perfect fix,” he explained.

Billy’s math error discovery was ingenious. I’d never considered the possibility that math errors would be purposefully inserted in the problem. He stood beside our window, rubbing the strings of a football.

“Having the task force arrive on a Sunday morning in December was a clever touch. You noticed that didn’t you?” I asked. Distracted, he didn’t hear me.

“Look at those idiots.” He was peering down at Stonewall and Mason’s room, kitty-corner to ours on the deck below. Bobby’s room was next to theirs. Football fields and the Chesapeake Bay formed a scenic panorama to the south. Rooms were not air conditioned so in spring everyone kept the windows open. A cacophony of music blared from the open windows.

“What idiots?” I asked, examining the court lit with lights from dozens of rooms where midshipmen were studying.

“Mason and Stonewall. Look at them down there. You know damn well they’re working on the project together. We should turn them in.”

We turned off our lights and clandestinely watched them, reviving our anger at Mason, confirming our distrust of Stonewall who was peering out the window, yawning, checking his Rolex Submariner. Mason was marking fixes and drawing tracks on the large-scale chart of Pearl Harbor where the transit ended a short distance from USS Arizona’s memorial.

“It wouldn’t be that hard to hit them from here, do you think?” Billy asked.

“With what? Noooo,” I said. “No.”

“Let me ask you something. If you’d broken the vase instead of Mason, do you think Stonewall would have offered to pay for it?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“We’re just not in the same Navy as they are. Don’t you think an attack is justified? My balloons?”

“It wouldn’t be that hard, but it’s a bad idea.”

“One try. If we miss, they’ll just think it was another tennis court water bomb. We’ll be Yamamoto—surprise attack.”

“I have some line and canvas we can use—we can’t just throw it. Aim and stealth are the problems.”

Billy smiled. “Where’s the hose? I’ve got red Kool-Aid that will be perfect.”

“Don’t fill it too much,” I warned. “The plebes always add too much water and end up exploding it on themselves.”

With the big red balloon, like a rising sun in the middle of our deck, we plotted our attack. We meticulously practiced with a shoe tied to the end of the line hung from a window in a room across the hall from us, out of sight from our target. As we prepared in the twilight some of the plebes noticed us slide the rope out the window. We decided to risk one more test and swing the shoe toward the target to validate trajectory and line length. I could see a sweaty sheen on Billy’s face.  Mason continued charting, head down, and Stonewall was adjusting his stereo, raising the volume of “Give Peace a Chance.” Despite their egos, they would surely see us. They glimpsed our way but somehow didn’t notice the line. After several perfect practice swings with the shoe, we marked the line length with chalk and pulled the rope inside. When we raised the giant red condom to our window ledge and fitted the canvas straps around it, we could hear the plebes above the music gasping and applauding. Billy shook his fist at them, demanding silence.

The ball was heavy but manageable. We lowered it slowly to the marked line length and began swaying from side to side across the sill. The red ball moved smoothly, gaining momentum, bulging where the latex was weak, inching toward the target. It grazed the bulkhead below us, and we cringed at the thought of a rupture.

“Okay, here we go,” Billy whispered. “One more big swing.”

I guess we didn’t account for the size of the ball compared to the shoe, or the added length of the cradle, or the line’s stretch from the weight. The enormous red orb swung directly through Bobby’s window and exploded over his Navigation Project, turning his world ubiquitously red. Bobby screamed, overwhelmed by the explosion, a casualty of friendly fire. The plebes were flashing lights, jumping up and down, shocked, awed.

We threw the rope to the middle of the tennis courts below. Billy sat down, pretending to read, listening to Bobby’s profanity echoing across the court; I held a pillow to my face, fighting an explosion of laughter. Of course, we’d missed our target, like Billy’s kicks, to the left.

****

Second Class Ring Dance traditions prescribe that class rings be strung on ribbons and worn as pendants around our dates’ necks until each couple ceremoniously dips them into a binnacle containing waters from the seven seas. We completed the ritual and donned our rings. After three years of anticipation, the ceremony seemed anticlimactic. We’d been counting the days, and now, entitled to wear rings like Jimmy Creeson’s, they embodied alarming burdens we’d face in one year when we were commissioned.

Billy and I returned to our room after the dance just before curfew. Billy was jumpy, energized, twisting his ring, singing songs from the dance. Two Navy ships were anchored in the Bay, ablaze with strings of celebratory lights. The athletic field to the south was abandoned, its goalposts lit by streetlamps and a waxing moon.

“Come on,” Billy insisted, pulling his bag of footballs from the closet.

“What?”

“Come on!”

We trudged down the back stairs in Navy tuxedos with yellow cummerbunds, pleated shirts, gold buttons, and dance-scuffed shoes. The damp grass soaked the knees of my trousers as I held the ball for Billy Gleason on the forty-yard line.

“Look,” he exclaimed. “Antares is right between the goalposts. This is for Jimmy Creeson.”

His kick soared triumphantly through the uprights.

But vnto Kain and to his offering

he had no regarde: wherefore Kain

was exceeding wroth, and his countenance fell downe.

—Genesis 4:5, Geneva Bible of 1560

From first light until long after sunset, Cain worked the land, raising mustard, wheat, and rye in crooked furrows scratched from the hard earth. When he stood from his labors in the gathering dark, the evening star mocked his fears, its cold serenity foretokening another rainless day. In the end, all of it was lost—the shoots and the seed as well—during that first summer in the east.

Each day, while the crop withered, Cain’s brother Abel led his flock to the brackish pools beyond Shinar. In so doing, he managed to keep a few sheep alive. But the animals, too, grew meager and listless.

Because of this, Cain’s mother and father, Eve and Adam, despaired  of their lives. They took little of the food their sons gathered with such agonizing effort: tiny fry from the dying creek, a handful of desiccated almonds, a few locusts, a bird Cain killed with a stone. Whatever the brothers could find, they brought to their parents, and Adam and Eve sat beneath the tree and wept, and the tree, watered with their tears, turned the color of gypsum. When winter arrived with bitter winds, Cain and Abel built a low shelter, and the family shivered with cold and with fear of the prowling wolves whose hunger had brought them down from the hills. Day after day, Cain stalked the desert with a sling. He brought home such small creatures as he could fell, but it was never enough.

Sometimes at night, Cain wrapped a skin about him, crawled out of the shelter, and peered west toward Eden, where he could just discern the singular splinter of gold light that was the angel’s flaming sword. The angel stood sentry, without relief, night after night, season after season, and never was the sword not to be seen. At such times, Cain turned back to the shelter and lay down between his mother and his brother. During the short winter days spent hunting alone in the desert, he often daydreamed of the fruit to be had in Eden, the swollen and splitting windfall lying in untasted heaps beneath the sagging boughs. The waste sickened him.

One morning, without a word to his brother, he took the way back. At sight of Cain, the angel raised his sword of fire.

“Master,” Cain said, “I do not wish to return to the garden, but only desire a palmful of fruit-seed lying beneath the trees. Here,” and he took the treasure from his pouch, the gems he had found while hunting in the desert, topaz and chalcedony and sapphire. The gems shone brightly, hammered to brilliant hues by the sun. He held them out for the angel to see. “These are yours, Master, in return for a palmful of seed.”

The angel lowered the sword, and Cain let slip the prize into the angel’s palm.

“Wait here,” the angel said, and Cain was left alone, shivering in his tattered cloak, before the open stile to paradise.

From within came the sound of falling water, trickling like starlight. In the midst of the garden, the tree of desire sighed in a breeze. To Cain’s ears came the drowsy roar of an unseen lion. Something moved in the leaves near the waters, and Cain saw the bright shadow of a face turn toward him, and the breath caught in his throat.

The angel returned with a grape leaf enfolding a palmful of moist black seed, and a parting curse for the exile. Cain tucked the seed carefully into his pouch and turned back toward     the east.

*

For the murder of his brother, God condemns Cain to be “a fugitive and a wanderer.”

His guilt, Cain assumes, will be proclaimed by the fact of his banishment, and he protests that “anyone who meets me may kill me.”

Not so! God assures him.

And Lord God put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.

There comes a moment in many stories, when the future resolves in stark detail in the hero’s eye, and he sits amid the wreckage of his costliest dreams, filled with regret and with sorrow for a world that will not shape itself to his desires. Perhaps such a moment had come to God   .

*

The poor in spirit, the addicts, the despondent; the drinkers and thieves; those who transgress by loving too much, and those who love recklessly in hopes of mitigating their loneliness; the wanderers and the demobbed soldiers in their wornout boots; those whose anger threatens to consume the earth and all the people in it: these are the children of Cain, these are the children of God. You know them when you see them. They are objects of a sympathy that is often insincere. More commonly, they are despised for their weaknesses, their wrecked lives, their ineluctable and assured oblivion.

Therefore is the world divided between the children of Abel and the children of Cain, between the good sons and daughters hopeful of salvation—those vessels of election who pledge allegiance to the law—and those marked by their refusal to be saved.

*

According to another story, written long after Cain had vanished in the Land of Nod, God assumed a human likeness and became a wanderer in the earth, seeking the very one he had cursed and banished all those years ago. But the terms of reconciliation were from the beginning tangled and obscure.

The mechanism of redemption, in the revised version, turns on a paradox: the greater the sin, the greater the forgiveness. Of the woman who anointed the rabbi’s head and feet, Jesus said, “Many sins are forgiven her, for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.” Again, he asked the crowd, “Who will love his lord more? The man who is forgiven a debt of fifty shekels, or the man forgiven a debt of five hundred?”

*

The story of Cain appears in the fourth chapter of Genesis and achieved its familiar shape somewhere around the sixth century BCE. An echo is heard in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which appears centuries later in the Gospel of Luke, composed in the first century CE. The two stories from the two testa   ments—Cain and the Prodigal, Hebrew and Christian—though separated by half a millennium, are similar in some ways, complementary in others. Cain’s brother Abel and the Prodigal’s brother are both obedient to the law; the former meets his death, and the latter is wounded in his pride. Cain is set wandering; generations later, the Prodigal returns. Neither asks forgiveness, neither asks to be restored to his rights; they ask only to be suffered to live. To my mind, the Prodigal is Cain’s revenant, welcomed home after many years abroad, his faults forgiven, his advent recognized as the rebirth of one long dead.

But the conclusion of life’s journey will not be a joyous occasion where a pack of runaways are rewarded with the snowy albs of innocence. Not this, but a somber assembly where those who spent their days buried alive above ground will compel  Him to look into their faces.

*

The time will come, the Lord will ask his prodigal son:

“In your life on earth, were you happy?”

And I’ll forget it all, only remembering those

meadow paths among tall spears of grass,

and clasped against the knees of mercy I

will not respond, choked off by tears of joy.

                                                                 —Ivan Bunin

The moment Judas found himself  at the petitioner’s bar, before the twelve elderly men arrayed on tiered benches, his courage left him. From their high places, they regarded his sudden and unexpected return with surprise, and they waited for him to explain himself. When he didn’t speak, their surprise turned to suspicion. Who could predict what these agitators were capable of? But when he still could not bring himself to speak, their suspicion distilled to plain contempt, because it was clear by then what had brought the miserable man back.

Sure enough, the man produced the pouch of silver coins and held it out to them. I don’t want it, he said.

You don’t want it? Then give it to the poor. The collection box is beside the door. You can place it in there on your way out.

I don’t want it.

Donate it to the temple, said the chief elder. Throw it in the lake. It matters little to us.

I don’t want it.

He’s beside himself, said a second elder.

But a third, with genial exasperation, stood with effort, placed his hands on the rail, and spoke with pity and with kindness. We are charged by the people, the elder said, with preserving the peace. If we cannot maintain peace among  ourselves, we bring the Roman authority down on our heads. The man you helped us to apprehend had turned your mind with apocalyptic fantasies and Greek metaphysics. We understand that the whole business is unpleasant, but you have regained the path of reason and did the right thing. Now you seem to regret your decision. See here now. You’re a young man. You have a life ahead of you. Don’t be rash.

And the chief elder, turning back to his interrupted task, said, You’ve been paid for a service. Our business is finished. As for the money, see thou to that.

*

Anatole France, in The Garden of Epicurus, tells the story of one Abbé Oegger, Senior Vicaire of the Cathedral Church of Paris. The good Abbé “could not endure the idea that Judas was in hell.” The more he considered the matter, “the more baffling grew his doubts and difficulties.”

Having concluded that an all-merciful God cannot be other than merciful, and that it was God’s duty and obligation (his métier, as the German poet He ine would have it) to forgive, he prayed to God to reveal the forgiven Judas as “the chiefest masterpiece of Thy clemency.” The Abbé told his bishop that God had indeed heard his prayers and that, in a vision, the priest “felt two hands laid upon his head” and that he was now “consecrated Priest of Pity, after the order of Judas.”

There was precedent for this curious errand. Origen, third century theologian, had asserted that all living things would at last be reunited with God. For Origen, the idea that God would commit a soul to hell was tantamount to admitting that God could be defeated by mere human will. Gregory the Great and John Scot Erigena both affirmed that, at the final judgment, the whole world will be restored to its first perfection—including devils.

Their teachings were condemned, and so was the Abbé’s. The advocates of unconditional celestial clemency have always faced official denunciation. France relates that Oegger’s “mission ended in misery and madness.”

Abbé Oegger, said France, was the “last and most gentle-hearted of the Cainites.”

(Please God, not the last.)

*

The simple reasoning behind the Abbé’s doomed endeavor was that if Judas is forgiven, all are forgiven. Perhaps he was a bit unhinged, but I see in the Abbé’s efforts the compassion of one man for a cursed and friendless soul, a lawyer working pro deo for a hopeless reprobate. For Oegger, it was imperative that we pardon all, even—perhaps especially—the most hopeless of all criminals: the traitors. Nothing less than the salvation of the world depended on it. To admit a limit to God’s mercy was the only true heresy and the only unforgivable sin, the priest argued, with sound doctrine.

*

In grade school, one of the sisters punished students by making them kneel on the knuckles of their own hands. Years later, while reading an old story, I recalled that punishment.

“And, behold, a hand touched me,” I read, and remembered three boys kneeling on their fingers on the tile, with their noses touching the wall at the front of the classroom, “which set me upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands.”

Did our teachers—did the priests and nuns who devised the rules and the consequences—believe that a child could be raised toward heaven by even so much as a knuckle’s breadth, through any merely human power? What, did they doubt the boundlessness of God’s mercy? Did they not understand the story of Cain? Had they never read the Book of Daniel?

*

And the stone on the roadside said then,

“How heavy your steps have grown.”

And the stone said, “Will you return now

To your forgotten home?”

                           —Leah Goldberg

A shepherd kept watch over a mixed flock of lambs and goats that browsed among the hillside tombs, but the man walking below the hill did not see the shepherd or the goats or the tombs. In the shadow of the hill, he stormed with anger at his own gullibility, and at the arrogance of the rabbi, the one who had evilly disavowed his own mother, his own sisters! Wild talk about destroying the temple, careless talk about coming with the clouds of heaven—to judge the world! So much good will squandered, so many trusting souls disappointed. So many lives endangered.

Pride was the rabbi’s avowed enemy, the man recalled bitterly. But by his own pride he is destroyed. And now the Romans, stirred to wrath, are going to destroy us all.

All that day and through the night, the man made his way through the mountains, away from the city. The next morning, exhausted, he sat beside a stream and saw, to his surprise, that he had arrived in the hills of his childhood. He recalled that, when he was very young, the river’s water was cold and clear and good to drink. But the water, he was sorry to see, had grown turgid. Cast-off shoes, broken jars and sheep bones, pot handles and a stained mat now littered the once-grassy bank. The people of the villages had fouled the waters, made them unfit for any creatures but swine. This valley, he thought, once the paradise of his youth, will become a place of desolation by the time the Romans are finished, and it will be returned to the dominion of storks. Perhaps, he thought, that will be for  the best.

On the path that ran beside the stream, two sparrows alighted for a dust bath. The brief fluttering of their wings raised delicate clouds of yellow dust in the morning air. His heart grew calm, his anger cooled. The sweat on his temples dried.

When he saw the tree, now in late summer splendor, standing alone in the field beyond the stream, he recalled the summers of his youth. Then, he had often led his father’s flock to rest in the tree’s shade. At those times, he sat beneath the tree and wondered at the green mysteries of the day. Many birds had made their homes in the tree then, and their restless piping recalled the turning of a thousand tiny cartwheels.

Now the tree stood in a neglected tract of bean flowers and harebells. Magpies had driven the songbirds away, then departed. Only a pair of ravens stalked the edge of a dry ditch. He looked again, a little surprised to see a rope hanging loose from the tree’s lowest branch. He leaned forward and peered closer, half-uncertain of what he saw.

A shepherd appeared on the road, driving his little flock with a switch. The goats passed by, but a single lamb paused to nibble the hem of his cloak, and he stroked its ear. The shepherd paused and raised his switch to the empty sky, the empty hills, and spoke with mild impatience in a language that the man had never heard before in his life. Then the shepherd walked on, and the lambs skipped away, and the man was alone once more.

He returned his gaze to the tree, and found that looking upon it made him glad, and he decided he would visit the tree again, after so many years. But not now. The tension of the previous morning—his humiliation before the elders—faded in the day’s mounting heat, and there came over him a sudden and a bone-deep weariness. He lay  back and slept.

When he woke, he was not alone. A young man, whose ways and looks seemed familiar, was seated beside him. The man held a fistful of sunflower seeds, and now and then he opened his hand and picked one and chewed it as he observed the sunlit field that contained a solitary old tree. He turned his head away and spat a husk, then resumed his brown study of the day. It was then that Judas noticed the wounds in the young man’s feet, and the blood.

Ravens’ shadows slipped, silent as fish, over the hard ground.

Judas of Kerioth, the young man said. I have something to tell you.

October 6, 1973. Los Angeles.

The stack of newspapers sat in front of me on the brown shag carpet, and next to it was a plastic bag half full of red rubber bands. I reached into the bag, took a dozen or so bands and slipped them onto my wrist. I pulled a newspaper from the stack and folded it methodically; the right third over the middle, then the left third over that. I snagged a rubber band from my wrist and slipped it over the tri-folded paper. Once done with the stack, I would load the papers into the twin green bags tied to my handlebars, straddle the bike, and start my route, as I did every Saturday.

But this Saturday, my customers would wait late into the afternoon for their morning edition of the Herald Examiner, while I stood statue-like in front of a grainy black and white television screen. A familiar desert landscape would erupt in fire before my eyes.

As was her ritual, my younger sister watched Scooby-Doo. I did too, as I folded newspapers. I could always identify the villains, the characters behind the mask of the Ghost of Captain Cutler, The Black Night, or The Caveman. Their disguises were thin and their guilt certain. Telling my sister who the villain was just before the unmasking was satisfying in a mean-spirited way.

My sister sat open-mouthed in front of the television and watched Shaggy, Scooby, and the rest in the final chase scene. With the masked villain captured, I pointed a finger at the screen, ready to reveal his identity and ruin the ending for her. But before I could utter the words, a news anchor’s face appeared.

“We interrupt our normally scheduled program to bring you a special news bulletin,” he said.

Images of tanks and armored vehicles raced across the sandy terrain of the Saini Desert in Egypt, and dark-faced soldiers fired Kalashnikovs at enemy positions. The contrail of a Phantom fighter jet ended in a white plume, intercepted by a surface-to-air missile. My sister looked at me in dismay, her expression asking: Where had Scooby gone?

I knew I shouldn’t wake my father. He was catching up on sleep after working a graveyard shift in a low-skill job, the only kind available to some immigrants.

I walked into the bedroom. “Dad…? Dad…? Egypt is at war.”

He was up. Glassy eyed, staring at the blurry screen, adjusting rabbit ears.

On the television, artillery shells rocked the desert in an unending barrage. Egyptian and Syrian troops, in a coordinated attack, advanced on enemy positions in the Sinai Desert and the Golan Heights. On the Sinai front, tens of thousands of Egyptian infantrymen crossed the Suez Canal in inflatable boats under heavy shelling and through clouds of smoke. Key Israeli military positions throughout the Sinai were bombed by Egyptian jets, clearing the way for the advancing ground assault. The Yom Kippur War had begun.

Watching this war unfold before my eyes, I was thrown back in time to a day six years earlier. My mother was carrying my then baby sister and gripping my hand so tightly. Terror filled her eyes as she looked out the window of our Cairo apartment. The flash of bombs lit up the night sky and silhouetted darkened buildings. The air smelled of spent firecrackers. Israeli jets were bombing a nearby airport. A staccato of red tracers shot upward toward them, searching, not finding.

In June 1967, the Israeli Air Force struck airports across Egypt, targeting runways and rendering them useless, then picked off jet fighters on the ground. Egypt lost nearly its entire Air Force in a matter of hours. Then, in a haphazard retreat, the exposed Egyptian army suffered extensive losses and ultimately surrendered the Sinai Desert with hardly a fight. Victory for Israel was swift in what came to be known as the Six-Day War. For Egyptians, it was a humiliating defeat; a war lost as soon as it began.

In the few years that followed the ’67 war, Israel built one of the most formidable defensive lines the world had known, the Bar Lev Line, on the eastern shore of the Suez Canal. A seemingly impenetrable seventy-foot-high wall of sand studded with anti-tank mines spanned the length of the canal. Behind it, thirty-three heavily fortified military installations and hundreds of tanks kept watch, ready to open fire on Egyptian forces should they try to cross the canal and retake the Sinai. To Israel and the world, any such attempt by Egypt would have been suicidal. To Egyptians, the Bar Lev Line was an ever-present reminder of their defeat, a stain on their national honor.

The world didn’t seem to care about the lost pride of a defeated Egypt. Not as long as Arab oil was flowing, not with the Israeli military appearing, by all accounts, invincible, and not with the Arab nation lacking the military capability to change the reality on the ground. Egyptians, it seemed, were expected to simply live with their June ’67 defeat and accept the occupation of their cherished Sinai by their enemy. Egypt’s prized Suez Canal, a source of international prestige and badly needed money, would have to sit idle with Israeli soldiers on its eastern shore, taunting and humiliating. Nothing to be done about it, the world thought.

Six years later, I stood by my father in front of the television in our Los Angeles apartment, neither of us able to speak. A surge of patriotism rushed through me, and I felt my heart race as I watched columns of Egyptian tanks and infantrymen pour into the Sinai Desert to reclaim our occupied land.

I wished I was back in Egypt. I belonged in Cairo streets, among the crowds in Tahrir Square, all of us proudly waving our flag with the golden eagle. Had I been older than my twelve years , they might have let me donate blood. A little older yet, and maybe they would have given me a post where, ever-vigilant, I would stand with my finger on a trigger.

Why had my family ever left Egypt? I remember asking myself. And when the answer came to me, I felt ashamed. We left a defeated, virtually bankrupt nation for the American promise of economic prosperity. We left for the possibility of buying our own home, a car, and a television for every room. Things that seemed so trivial as I considered them in that moment.

I pulled myself away from the television, took another newspaper from the stack, pounded each fold flat, and stretched a rubber band around it. The rubber band snapped in my hand. I felt the burn on my fingers and in my soul.

#  #  #

The Yom Kippur War coincided with the month of Ramadan. I had always cherished the joyful celebration of this holy time in Egypt. I remembered the children carrying colorful, candle-lit holiday lanterns and prancing on the sidewalks in the early evening. I had watched their blue, red, and yellow lights dance on the sides of buildings as they sang, skipped, and twirled. But this Ramadan would be different, I knew. Lights in Egyptian cities would be extinguished, even the lanterns, to deprive enemy bombers of easy targets during their nighttime air raids.

That year, in America, Ramadan would be stranger yet.

In a time before call waiting, telephone lines were constantly busy. Our receiver sat on the hook only moments before the phone rang again. Instead of offering the customary Ramadan greetings, callers asked, “Are you watching this?” Shock and disbelief robbed the color from my parents’ faces even as they tried to reassure acquaintances who feared for relatives at home, for Egypt. The calls often ended with “Alhamdulillah,” an expression of gratitude and praise to God for the early military successes we were witnessing.

The day after the war began, Sunday, the downtown Los Angeles mosque was filled to capacity. Emotions in the grand room peaked with pride and hope. The fiery sermon the Imam gave rendered his voice raw. All in the mosque raised their hands to God. We prayed for victory, and more than that, we prayed for redemption. Let it not be like the last time. Let it not be another Six-Day war–another humiliation. At the end, the Imam gave many of the worshipers, including me, a firm handshake. He told me to be brave, to be proud.  I nodded and told him that I would.  But this, I later learned, would not be easy.

#  #  #

Monday afternoon, I sat in my seventh-grade classroom waiting for an instructor to arrive and begin teaching a subject I was hardly interested in. I wanted to be home, to pull a newspaper from the stack and thumb through it, looking for a headline with the word “…Egypt.” How many miles would it say we had taken back from our occupied land? How many enemy jets had our SAM-6 missiles shot down? And would it answer the big question: Were we still winning?

I fanned through pages of pencil sketches in my notebook, talentless drawings of tanks and jets in desert combat.  I was startled by a voice close to my ear. “Your country attacked my country,” said the taller of two boys standing over me, a known bully.

His country? He wasn’t Israeli. There was nothing foreign about him. I was the immigrant, the one with the strange name. The one who stuttered trying to decipher English words in a textbook while other kids snickered. I did not respond.

With his finger poking my thin chest, punctuating each word, he said: “Are you happy about it?” Again, I didn’t answer. He rested a fist on my desk, his face close to mine. His friend stood behind him, helping make the point. I looked for the teacher, who still hadn’t entered the classroom. I scanned the room for anyone who might help, anyone who would be on my side. Kids chatted and clowned about. None of them had taken notice, nor would they help if they had.

Looking up at my adversaries, I cowered. This was their classroom, their school. I was an immigrant, tolerated in their country. I was alone. I flinched at the boy’s feigned punches. I endured his provoking slaps, barely blocking them, never getting up from my seat. I did nothing to stop him. Finally, the teacher walked into the room and told my assailant to take his seat. The insult of that day lingered, as did the shame of having not stood up for my country’s honor.

In the days that followed, one question played on my mind. The American boy had said that Egypt attacked his country. Was Egypt fighting Israel or America? Or were they one and the same in this? How could America someday be my country, my home, if it gave aid and comfort to my enemy?

#  #  #

Ten days into the war, America’s Department of Defense delivered on a promise: an airlift so massive it reconstituted the Israeli army, which had been heavily compromised on the Egyptian front. Now, with even more advanced weapons in Israeli hands, the tide of the war would turn, and not in Egypt’s favor. I pulled the knife’s edge through the string holding my daily stack of newspapers. I took the top copy, and without looking at it, I began folding; the right third over the middle, and the left third over that.

The phone stopped ringing. Conversations about the goings-on of the war were less frequent, more subdued. I heard adults around me grumble about Egypt having to make do with outdated and inferior weapons from the Soviets. No bombers, no long-range missiles, only defensive weapons for Russia’s Arab client. In the eyes of many, this reflected the Soviet’s long-standing strategy: to help Egypt survive, but never win a war. A victorious Egypt might need Russia less. And if Russia lost its largest client in the region, its influence over the oil-rich Middle East would diminish. Frustrated by the limited access to needed weapons, Egypt’s then President Anwar El-Sadat had expelled 15,000 Russian military advisors a year before the start of the Yom Kippur War. While Israel had the full might of American power behind it, Egypt’s backer seemed less committed.

As a child, watching the politics play out with Egypt and America on opposite sides, I was torn. Where should my allegiance lie, with my native Egypt or my adopted U.S.? I feared what Americans would do to me, to my family, if they knew of my questionable loyalty.

#  #  #

A couple months passed, and the war was over. And mine, it seemed, was the last shaky voice crying out: “Egypt won. We did it.” But my truth was cast aside as fables of super-human feats by Israeli soldiers in the battlefield took center stage. Then came the pictures, splashed across magazines. Handsome Israeli soldiers with lovely light-eyed girls posing next to American tanks. Rockstars selling victory, democracy, freedom, and sex; a marketing campaign for a Western audience. And in time, I began to doubt my own truth. Perhaps our victory, the one talked about in Egyptian media, was exaggerated, even fabricated.

My heroes, once again, became cartoonish villains, unsophisticated and unrefined. Hopeless in their fight against a foe superior in every way. They were faceless in a grainy sepia-toned picture, a sandy landscape. Draw your best dark-faced bad guy here.

For the rest of that school year, my classmates largely ignored me. I was that kid who held on to a fantasy, a crazy story about a victorious Egypt, a version of events neither believed nor cared about. The world had moved on. In a noise-filled classroom, I sat alone.

#  #  #

A year later, in eighth grade homeroom, a boy with an accent introduced himself to me.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Egypt.”

“Oh… I’m from Israel.”

I tensed up, saying nothing.

He leaned over. “Here, in America… no war. Okay?”

Before I knew it, before I decided whether it was something I wanted to do, I extended my hand. We shook.

My new friend asked me if I had seen any fighting when I lived in Egypt. I thought of the night when I stood alongside my mother and watched the airport burn.

“No. I didn’t see any fighting.” I lied.

“I did,” he said. “Egyptian jets attacked my town. For a while, it was maybe once a week.”

I felt a jolt of pride run through me, though I kept it hidden from my friend. His words affirmed my belief. Egyptians had fought back. They had punished the enemy for its sins. That evening, done with my paper route, I held my bike on top of a hill. The empty green bags hung from the handlebars. Traffic had died, and the street was empty. I straddled the now light and agile bike, unburdened by the weight of newspapers. I rocked the Schwinn forward, then back, then forward again. I kicked off. Peddling, harder, faster. I raced down the hill, the cold air making my eyes water. The empty bags fluttered at my sides, their straps pulling. Could they tear away? I peddled faster still. A jitter, then a high-speed wobble tested me, but I held on. The fluttering sound grew louder in my ears, a make-believe engine, roaring—an Egyptian jet fighter. My front wheel lifted. I soared into the night sky.

#  #  #

Decades later, more was revealed about the Yom Kippur War—declassified top-secret reports, clandestine tape recordings, and never-before-seen newsreels. First came the picture of the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, her hand holding up her forehead, distraught at the calamity of a war she never saw coming. Then, a video of the Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, shaken, looking small in his military uniform, broadcasting to a frantic Israel on October 10, 1973; his words offering no relief. I pointed at the computer screen: There it is. Proof, we beat them. From their own mouths. Then, as the video stopped playing and the screen went black, I saw my own reflection. Sitting alone, no one by me to co-witness.

More recordings came: soldiers’ recollections, nightmares, acts of heroism and of humanity. One such recording still lives in my mind. A transmission by an Israeli soldier, a hold-out in an underground Bar Lev Line fortification. His frantic calls for reinforcements–tanks, airstrikes–go unheeded on a static-filled radio channel. He pleads for his life as the structure collapses around him. His voice strains, calling for God as artillery shells fall. “They’re coming… breaking in… I’m burning.” About to meet his end, he curses the ones who would leave him to his fate: “God will not forgive you…” Then, his final words, to his mother.

I had not prepared myself for this; a voice reaching through the decades and gripping my chest.

#  #  #

When she was in the ninth grade, my daughter’s class was given an assignment. “We’re going to have a town meeting about the Arab-Israeli conflict,” she said. “Each of us will talk, like…you know…like we live there. Like Arabs or Israelis.”

“Easy A,” I said. “I got you covered, kid. Your dad knows everything about the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

“I’m supposed to give the perspective of someone my age. A boy. His name is Shlomo.”

“Shlomo? What kind of an Arabic name is Shlomo?”

“It’s not Arabic, Dad. It’s an Israeli name.”

“Wait. Does your teacher know you’re Egyptian?”

“Yes.”

I was impressed. It was a lesson in empathy.

#  #  #

Through the years, I had watched one fictionalized Mossad movie after another. Miraculous ventures projecting Israeli superiority. The same story, repeating, image-building, propagandizing.

But in 2013, I came across “the postmortem.” That was what the senior CIA analysts and directors called their video-recorded discussion held at the Richard Nixon Library. It was the intelligence community’s examination of what had gone wrong, how the CIA and the Israeli Mossad failed to see the Yom Kippur War coming. As the experts spoke, I leaned in. I watched, rewound, and watched again.

They said it plainly. Egypt’s President Sadat launched a war of deception that took advantage of inflexible American and Israeli mindsets. No one believed Sadat would start a war with his country in such a weak military position. Israel, still high on its victory in the Six-Day War, believed no Arab nation, least of all Egypt, had the will to fight. With every Sadat promise of an attack that didn’t come to be, with every mobilization of his military forces that he later recalled, Israel and the West became more certain that war would come no time soon. They grew to disregard what appeared to be Arab bravado, saber-rattling, amounting to nothing.

No one saw Sadat’s gamble for what it was: a limited war, not to conquer an enemy, but to reanimate a dead peace process.

#  #  #

Heroes achieve what in the moment seems unimaginable. In the first two hours of the war, Egyptian forces had overrun the formidable Bar Lev Line. They advanced into the Sinai and retook the Suez Canal, along with seven-hundred square miles of enemy occupied land. In so doing, they ripped away Israel’s mask of invincibility.

As the war progressed, Israel gained momentum. Israeli forces moved into the western side of the Suez Canal and encircled the Egyptian Third Army, cutting off its supply lines. But, as a condition of the ceasefire agreement that ultimately ended the war, Israel retreated from those gains. Pundits took turns spinning the outcome of the war, each claiming victory for their side. As, I presume, they forever will.

Having achieved his objectives in the Yom Kippur War and created a path for diplomacy, President Sadat walked into the Israeli Knesset and began the work of peacemaking. This time, Israel was less eager to let slip such an opportunity. It would no longer reject out of hand peace efforts that required it to surrender occupied Egyptian land.

I still remember Sadat putting a match to his smoking pipe and saying: “No one will capitulate here. I am not ready to capitulate. [We will not give up] an inch of land or a grain of sand from our land.”

In signing the 1978 Camp David Peace Accord with Israel, Egypt gave up its privilege to use its military against Israel in support of its Arab neighbors. But after twenty-five years of war, this was a privilege it no longer wanted. Within this Agreement, Egypt endorsed a framework for peace negotiations between Israel and its other Arab neighbors. This framework was used as a foundation for the Oslo Peace Accord signed by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the early eighties.

I knew the Camp David Peace Agreement was an admirable achievement. But at the time of its signing, my teenage heart had not yet learned to appreciate the virtue in peace-making. It still sought vengeance. I wanted the chance to stand before a classroom and bask in the light of undisputed victory. I searched for evidence of victory on the battlefield through books and news articles. What I found was this: No longer would Egypt stand in the shadow of its defeat in the Six-Day War. No longer could its enemy claim invincibility, not without a note in the margins, not without a question mark. That was what mattered to sixteen-year-old me.

On October 6th, 1981, the eighth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Sadat was assassinated. It was then that many began to speak of the man’s achievements and sacrifices, to contemplate his legacy. Anwar El-Sadat; the great strategist on the world stage.  The hero who did more than win a military objective, who did more than win back the Sinai for Egypt. Here was the man who successfully executed a war to win peace.

#  #  #

I recently turned on a Scooby-Doo episode for my grandson. It was The Funland Robot episode. One of my favorites, I told him. At the end, after the unmasking, I said: “You know, in real life, it’s not so easy to tell good guys from bad, winners from losers. Sometimes, you have to look hard to find the truth. It’s not like in cartoons.”

My grandson looked at me and said: “That show was boring, Grampa.” He reached for his game controller, ready for combat. Enemy soldiers scurried, shooting. He returned fire.

My daughter entered the room. “Time to go home, baby,” she said, as blood splattered the inside of the television screen.

“One more minute, mom.” He answered, ditching his AR-15 for a pump-action shotgun.

“Are you good with him playing these games?” I asked. “I mean, they desensitize.” She gave me that I-can-raise-my-child-on-my-own-thank-you-very-much look.

“Now, young man!” she said to my grandson. He obediently clicked off the game.

Teasing, I said: “Next time you come here, boy, you leave that game controller at home. We’ll play checkers.” I wanted to see them roll their eyes in exasperation at Grampa. They did, and I laughed.

Violent as my grandson’s game was, it fostered no hatred in him. I knew he saw no evil in his cartoon-like adversaries. I hoped that things would always remain this way, that he would never know a real enemy.

As I watched my grandson leave, I thought about another boy— on his bike, tossing newspapers. I thought about that boy seeking retribution. I thought about the rage in his voice, unheard. I thought about him growing up, so long unable to see the glory in the fight for peace.

My year-long run as guest-columnist for The Wrath-Bearing Tree comes to an end this month. I’m not sure if WBT founders Adrian Bonenberger and Mike Carson planned for my stint to last only twelve months, but in my mind it was always the goal. Twelve months, twelve Strike Through the Mask! columns, each with a different subject, obviously, but more personally, each with a different tone or style. My goal was variation within similarity, like a record album of yore: some songs fast, some slow, some mournful, some more upbeat, but all recognizable as the unified work of the creator.

I also welcomed the pressure of a monthly deadline. On my blog Time Now, I publish when I please. But I grew up loving the daily, weekly, and monthly columns of writers I admired in the newspapers and magazines I read—thinkers who wrote lively, interesting columns on a regular schedule. Finally, I realized I could use Strike Through the Mask! to range wider and dive deeper than I typically did in Time Now. Subjects I might not touch in Time Now, such as soldier memoirs and current events, I have explored at length in Strike Through the Mask! Most of all, I wanted to show Time Now readers a little more of the “real me”—my opinions, thoughts, and interests apart from the focus on other peoples’ books and artworks in Time Now.

I couldn’t have asked for better editors than Adrian and Mike. They have allowed me to write almost without suggestion or guidance, for better and for worse, and their infrequent edits and comments have always been on-point and encouraging. The war-writing community is lucky to have such thoughtful and generous leaders.

So what lies ahead? Time Now seems to have run its course, as well. I won’t definitively declare it’s over, but it does seem time for other writers more in-tune with the spirit of the 2020s to carry on its work. But who knows? I’ve read John Milas’s The Militia House and watched The Covenant and I have thoughts…. Navy veteran Jillian Danback-McGhan’s short-story collection Midwatch is on the way. A movie titled Fremont, about Afghan interpreters in America, and Northern Shade, about PTSD, are highly recommended and I look forward to watching them. Entire genres related to war-writing, such as YA and romance, lie mostly untouched, awaiting analysis….

I started Time Now in 2012 when it seemed clear that a vibrant writing-and-publishing scene centered on the work by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans was emerging. One precipitating event was the 2010 War, Literature, and the Arts conference at the United States Air Force Academy. I was fortunate to attend and it was there I first met or heard read authors such as Siobhan Fallon, Matt Gallagher, and Benjamin Busch. Another catalyst was the publication in 2012 of Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, David Abrams’ Fobbit, and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk—novels published by major houses and widely reviewed and largely celebrated. At the time, I was teaching at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where I had already sponsored a reading by Brian Turner. That had been an early-on, isolated event, however, and now I sensed a cohort of vet-writers and affiliated family members and interested authors with no formal military affiliation coalescing. I also intuited that I, an infantry veteran of Afghanistan with a PhD in English Literature, was in a position to document and promote the emerging work.

Scenes need events, outlets, and platforms to thrive. From that first 2011 WLA conference to the next one, in 2018, a number of events and publishing venues, infused by a sense of community, shared endeavor, and a do-it-yourself ethos, made being a vet-writer exciting and fulfilling. Online publishing sites a-plenty were available, and publishers and general readers were reasonably open to vet memoir, fiction, and poetry. Seemingly every large city and college campus was hosting vet-writing workshops and the vet-writer presence at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Program conference (AWP) was robust. I regularly attended AWP between 2014 and 2018, where I hosted several panels and met and mingled with many writers in the scene. And until 2015 I had a position at the United States Military Academy at West Point that allowed me to stage events for vet writers and artists to read and perform for cadets.

That physical sense of community has largely faded, and vet-writers now rely on social media to promote, connect, and opine. That’s OK, but if writers and artists now coming into print feel isolated rather than connected by the digisphere, I remind them that the cohesion of 2010-2018 was largely generated by the initiative of the participants themselves. If recreating that energy seems desirable, then the answer is to stage readings, host events, create platforms, reach out, form alliances, and keep knocking on doors. I’m not a position to help make that happen much anymore, but I love the spirit and energy when I see it.

To end here, I’ll offer some photos of prominent authors in the scene I’ve taken over the years. Some I’ve already published on Time Now, but they’re too good not to be given another airing. Salute to all the writers and their works!

Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet, Phantom Noise, and many others, Red Bank, NJ, 2018

Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone and The Confusion of Languages, West Point, NY, 2018

Phil Klay, author of Redeployment and Missionaries, Highland Falls, NY, 2014

Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom, Youngblood, and Empire City, Camden NJ, 2016. (This picture was supposed to be taken in front of Walt Whitman’s house, but what can I say? We screwed up and took the photo a few doors down from the Good Gray Poet’s residence.)

Hassan Blasim, author of The Corpse Exhibition and others, West Point, NY, 2014

Elyse Fenton, author of Clamor, Dodge Poetry Festival, Newark, NJ, 2014

Brian Van Reet, author of Spoils, Austin, TX, 2016

John Renehan, author of The Valley, Arlington, VA, 2018

Elliot Ackerman, author of Green on Blue, Dark at the Crossing, and many others, Middletown, CT, 2019

Adrian Bonenberger, author of Afghan Memoir and The Disappointed Soldier, Branford, CT, 2021

Brian Castner, author of The Long Walk and Disappointment River, among others, New York, NY, 2020

Playwright Jay Moad and fiction author Jesse Goolsby, New York, NY, 2017. Moad and Goolsby were two of the driving forces behind the United States Air Force Academy’s War, Literature, and the Arts journal and conferences.

Roy Scranton and Jacob Seigel, Brooklyn, NY, 2018. Scranton is the author of War Porn and Seigel is the author of the short-story “Smile There Are IEDs Everywhere,” from the seminal vet-writing anthology Fire and Forget edited by Scranton and Matt Gallagher.

Jennifer Orth-Veillon and Benjamin Busch, New Haven, CT, 2018. Orth-Veillon edited the anthology of writing about World War I Beyond The Limits of Their Longing that features a who’s-who of vet and vet-adjacent writers. Busch is the author of the memoir Dust to Dust, as well as a poet, actor, filmmaker, photographer and illustrator.

There Is No Such Thing as an Unwounded Soldier

Ron Whitehead works in a variety of photographic series:  Eye of the Storm are impressionistic visions of war to give a more dynamic view of combat than a strictly documentary approach.  One work shows a flaming parachutist plunging toward the ground; another shows a jet fighter in a lightning storm; a third shows a helicopter and tank silhouetted by flames;  Looking Back focuses on the impact of the past on the present, specifically the transition from his military experience to civilian life; My Lighthouse was inspired by a song by the Rend Collective and expresses his commitment to the Christian faith and how his commitment can calm the inner storm and offer a sense of healing; Art of Healing expresses the ways that art can be instrumental in the post-war healing process but also that this process is tentative; the images in Fight for It reference the brutal nature of war; American Dream is ironic in that the photographs show more a problematic re-adjustment rather than a return to a perfect life.

Although his oeuvre encompasses a variety of imagery, including some where the camera itself is the subject, Whitehead’s reflexive self-portraits are the predominant images in his work over his career, not in an egocentric way but as an artistic mediation of how he negotiates the past and the present.  The photographs suggest that, post-war, Whitehead is “in pieces,” no longer a unified whole, but also that he is searching for ways to re-establish an integrated self.  The self-portraits negotiate the space between the past of war and the present of job, home, family, community, and the larger society.  His work objectifies the inner conflicts between “the face of war” and “the face of after-war.” The photographs express T.S. Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative (1921), in that they represent Whitehead’s emotions, thoughts, and perceptions.  The self-portraits appear in many forms, some literal, some abstract, some surrealistic, some humorous, but each expresses the effect of his return to post-war life and provides the viewer with an insight into these perceptions.  He occasionally blends text to complement the image.  In her discussion of the ways that the arts, particularly poetry, tell us about war, Janis Stout (2005) writes that “literature and other cultural products offer an indispensable means of gaining impressions of war . . . not only are such cultural products ends in themselves, they are also means to the end of gaining insight into how the war was experienced and perceived by specific human beings” (2005).  Whitehead’s self-portraits reveal how his war, and his return, were experienced.

One of the themes that emerges from the self-portraits is that of the split self.  There is a schism between the self that went to war, the pre-war self, and the sense of self after war.  Whitehead began exploring this theme photographing a colleague, Harry Quiroga.   In “Still Serving” (2013), an early work from the Art of Healing series, Whitehead’s photograph of Quiroga’s face is split (the same image appears in “Love a Veteran,” which includes a quote from Welby O’Brien:  “It takes an exceptional person to love a warrior/especially a warrior whose war will never cease”).  In the photograph Quiroga, dressed in a business suit and tie, stares into the camera.  One side of his face is “normal,” representing the apparent seamless transition back into the world of work and formality.  The other side of his face retains the camouflage paint from the war, suggesting that even back in “the world” the soldier retains the indelible “paint” of war.  In another iteration of this image (2013) the photograph is “torn” down the center, with the “now” side in color and the “war” side in black and white.  The idea of the split self appears in a number of other works.  “Smoke and Mirrors” (2014) takes another angle on the split self.  Whitehead’s face is in profile, enveloped by wisps of smoke.  Superimposed on the profile is an image of his smiling younger self in his Army uniform.  The past is never far from the present.  In a 2018 work from My Lighthouse Whitehead is centered in the frame.  On the right-hand side a lighthouse beam brightens half of his face.  On the left, his face is darkened by the smoke of battle in the desert.  The photograph highlights the stress of living in two antithetical worlds.  In “Two Face” (2013) there are mirror images of Whitehead’s face looking at the viewer.  Half of the face on the right is “normal,” while the other half is in camouflage.  The face on the left is again split, with the right side of that face in camouflage; Whitehead adds a twist with his “normal” face in profile on the left side.  “Two Sides” (2017) extends the theme of the split self.  In the photograph there are two identical and connected faces in partial profile looking in opposite directions.  Razor ribbon coils around the faces.  The expression of duality emerges with some variation in such works from the Looking Back series as “Mask,” “Mask 2,” “Façade,” and “Façade Mask” (each 2018).  In these Whitehead places a mask of his face on or near his “real” face.  In “Façade 2” Whitehead is in black and white, while the mask he is putting on and the hand holding it is in color.  In “Façade Mask” Whitehead is looking at the camera while, ambiguously, pulling a mask over his face or, perhaps, removing it.  Is he removing his “face to the world” to reveal his authentic self?  Or is he in the process of pulling down the mask to hide that self?  Superimposed on the image is a scene from Desert Storm with burning oil fields.  Likewise, in “Mask,” oil fields burn in the background while he holds a mask in front of him.  Each of these “Mask” portraits speaks to the tension between the memories of the war which affect the present and the need to forget the war and reintegrate into society.  As the text in “Remembering” (2014) states:  “Remembering Is Easy.  It’s Forgetting That’s Hard.”

Other portraits are more abstract but still reveal the psychic dislocation he felt after his discharge and return to the States.  “Looking Back 2” (2017) borders on the surrealistic.  In this work Whitehead creates a distressing and baffling effect by using horizontal strips to break the image of his face into incongruous components.  Each “strip” is a different part of his face that do not align connoting, again, a sense of psychic disharmony.  The same effect is seen in “Parts” (2017).  In this work the strips, smaller but more numerous, re-arrange his face.  “Torn” (2018) is a variation on the use of the strips.  In this work Whitehead’s face, in black and white, is facing the viewer, superimposed over a desert scene.  However, a strip is “torn” across his eyes, revealing eyes, in color, staring at the viewer.  This creates a contrast not only in the blend of black and white and color, but also an opposition between past and present.  “Ripped” (2018) also uses this motif.  There is a close-up of Whitehead’s face in grainy black and white.  A strip is torn off to reveal his eyes, in a horizontal panel, in color.  This smaller panel is superimposed on the desert scene of burning oil wells.  He is looking out from the war, and that only the war provides any color.  (In “Rear View” [2015] the point of view is from a driver looking out of the car’s windshield.  The road ahead and the surroundings are in black and white; in the rear-view mirror is a group of Whitehead’s fellow soldiers, in color).  “Bullets” (2017) is another variation on the use of the strips.  In this case the strips are bullets, and his facial features are on the shell casings.   “Broken 1,” “Broken 2,” and “Explode” (each 2018) use the same image of his face.  In “1,” part of his face is shattered, looking like exploding shards of glass.  In “2,” the image of the exploding face is superimposed over a tank.  In “Explode” the impact of the war is more explicit.  Whitehead’s face is on the right side of the frame; the exploding shards are smaller, and as the image gives a sense of movement from right to left the shards blend with the smoke and flames of burning oil wells.

RW 1

“Picking Up the Pieces” (and the related numbers “2” and “3,” each 2018) are similar to the portraits using the strips.  In each of these Whitehead’s face becomes a jigsaw puzzle with pieces detached from his face, making his appearance enigmatic and fragmentary.  In the first work part of Whitehead’s face in black and white is dimly seen behind other parts that are in color.  Two jigsaw pieces of his eyes, in color, are where his eyes should be.  But are they to be placed into the puzzle of the face, to make the face whole?  In “2” Whitehead, holding a hand in front of his face, stares at the viewer through eyes that are jigsaw pieces.  There are empty spaces in parts of face where the pieces are missing, revealing blue sky and clouds in the background (“Hands 6” [2018] is a variation on the motif).  “3” references the war more directly.  Whitehead stares at the camera and reaches toward the viewer with a jigsaw piece, on which are an eye and a scene of battle.   Other pieces have desert scenes, with a burning desert in the background.  By handing the puzzle piece to the viewer Whitehead may be trying to bring the war out of his consciousness and share his experience.  “3” is an attempt to put all the pieces of his life back together and to represent in these photographs Lois Lowry’s words that are embedded in another photograph, “Sacrifice” (2014):  “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain.  It’s the loneliness of it.  Memories need to be shared.”  Art is a way of sharing painful memories, a cathartic process.  By offering the viewer the puzzle piece Whitehead shares his memories.

RW 2

“Just Another Day” (2018), from American Dream, is a portrait that reveals by what is not shown.  There is a figure in a medium shot, dressed in a suit and tie, representing the “uniform” of the civilian world of work.  However, in place of the head is a white cloud (perhaps smoke from a battle).  The headless figure “wears” a tanker’s camouflage helmet on which is perched dark goggles, symbolizing the military world.  The title suggests both the repetition of the civilian world of the “daily grind” and also that the memories of war uneasily co-exist with the civilian world.  The absence of the face, replaced by the smoke, suggests that these two disparate worlds somehow neutralize one’s identity.  Whitehead was an infantryman in the 1^st Armored Division and became a Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV) driver in Desert Storm, and a particular vehicle, nicknamed “Terminator,” is pictured in some photographs, like “Driver’s Eye” and “Globe 2” (both 2018).

RW 4

There is a humorous undertone in some photographs with Whitehead in the pose of Clark Kent ready to take off his civilian clothes to reveal his real identity.  In “Still Serving Office” (2018) Whitehead is dressed in suit and tie (with tie “blowing in the wind”), with a city scene of office buildings in the background; opening his suit jacket reveals an image of his smiling teenage self in his army uniform.  SM_BDU (2018) uses the same image of Whitehead in suit and tie, but the background is a lightning-flecked American flag.  He opens his suit jacket to show his army uniform.  Whitehead is conveying the idea that the formal dress is a type of camouflage; underneath the suit and tie, hidden from the view of the civilian world, is the most meaningful self.  On a more serious note, Whitehead in suit and tie also appears in one of the works in My Lighthouse.  An image of a lighthouse is revealed on his chest when he opens his jacket.  Whitehead is superimposed on a battle scene with a map of Kuwait.  The lighthouse represents the delicate balance of hope and stability while the war still rages in his mind.

RW 5

Eyes and hands are an important part of Whitehead’s self-portraits.  In a number of photographs eyes and hands are disembodied, existing on their own.  In “Hands” and “Hands 4” (both 2018) two hands with open palms are centered in the frame.  The skin and lines on the hands have been replaced by images of Whitehead’s fellow soldiers from Desert Storm.  Behind the hands is the familiar desert scene with smoke and flames from the burning oil wells.  Similarly, in “Hands 2” (2018) his hands are crossed, and on the palms is an image of a tank in battle; the background is a desert scene resembling a maelstrom or a tornado.  The memories of the war are literally imprinted on the soldier’s body.  The flesh, the “reality” of the hands, is erased; the memories and perceptions take over.  In “Hourglass” (2018) two hands hold an hourglass.  The sand in the top bulb creates an image of a tank in a burning desert.  The sand passes through the neck into the lower bulb; in this bulb an image of Whitehead’s face is gradually formed by the sand.  The war “sand” creates Whitehead; the two bulbs are symmetrical, each connected to the other.  The war is being poured into Whitehead.  In “Contain” (2018) Whitehead grips a glass globe in his two hands.  (On his left wrist he wears a bracelet he made from his Combat Infantryman’s Badge).  Inside the globe is desert scene of war.  The photograph suggests that Whitehead is attempting to “contain” or control the forces of war in which he participated.  “Hand in Mirror” and “Mirror” (both 2015) are similar.  In the former, Whitehead stands at a bathroom mirror and extends his hand toward it.  However, his image is not reflected; the image in the mirror is a scene of war, and part of his hand seems to disappear into the mirror image, again suggesting that memories and perceptions of one’s war experiences are inescapable, and that there is a desire to reach back into that experience.  In the latter, he stands at the same mirror.  This time, the reflected image is Whitehead . . . as a teenager dressed in fatigues, seeking perhaps an impossible connection between past and present.  Whitehead follows this search for connection in two untitled 2022 works.  In one, he stands in front of a brick wall with an image of a war scene, as if on the other side of the wall.  He is reaching through the wall toward the scene.  Utilizing a similar image (without the wall), a crucifix is suspended over the war scene.  He is reaching toward the cross.  Taken together, the two photographs reveal the tension between the desire to reconnect to the war experience and the desire for peace which the cross evokes. Can the two desires portrayed in the images co-exist?

RW 6

The eye as a subject in itself becomes an important part of the self-portrait, as the eye both looks out while at the same time takes in.  Like a photograph, the eye records, and this visual document can be permanent.  “Paper Eye” (2018) shows a scene of a desert aflame with burning oil wells.  A strip torn from the image reveals an eye staring back at the viewer.  “Eye” (2018) shows an extreme close up of an eye.  Superimposed on the pupil is a tank, and smoke and flames blow through the sclera.  In “Looking Back Flame Eye” (2017) the pupil emits a large flame.  Within the flame is a disabled tank.  A similar image is in “Looking Back Flames” (2018).  In this work the pupil is engulfed in flames while an invasion map of Kuwait emerges from the flames.  In “Pop Out” (2018) there is a close-up of an eye in profile superimposed on a burning desert.  The eye explodes outward in fragment that resembles a map of Iraq.  Imprinted on this fragment is an image of the teenage Whitehead in his Army uniform.  “Eye Lens” (n.d.) is a variation.  Again, there is a close-up of an eye with a scene of a burning desert.  But in a twist, the pupil is a camera lens, suggesting that the images of war become permanent photographs in the mind.  “Broke” (2018) shows a close-up of a pupil shattered like glass; inside the pupil is a tank.  Surrounding the broken pupil is a length of barbed wire. In “Camera” (2018) there is a close-up of a Canon Eos.  In the camera’s lens there is a human eye with images of captured enemy soldiers.  The scene of death is so powerful that even the camera lens explodes, sending pieces of glass toward the viewer.  The uneasy relationship between war and post-war lives emerges in a work in the My Lighthouse series.  On the right side of the frame a cross is superimposed on a close-up of an eyeball; on the left is a lighthouse casting a beam of light on the eye.  The lighthouse rises from a war scene in the desert.

RW 7

It might be unusual to consider a skull as a form of self-portrait but this image appears occasionally in Whitehead’s work.  “Skull” (2017) is one of his more disturbing, yet more powerful, self-portraits.  Whitehead is in medium shot framed against the background of burning oil wells.  However, most of his face is a skull with a vacant eye socket and clenched teeth; superimposed over his neck and part of the face is an American flag.  There is an uneasy relationship between life and death.  For the combat soldier the line between life and death, living flesh and the fleshless skull, shifts by the minute, by the second, by feet and inches.  The skull also figures in three untitled works from 2023.  Two of the photographs use similar imagery.  Whitehead, in jeans and t-shirt and carrying a backpack, is on a highway, moving toward a skull in the distance, set in a desert of smoke and flames.  Is this a rendezvous with death even after thirty years?  In another untitled photograph a skull is in profile with its top and lower jaw missing.  A burning desert is superimposed.  The empty skull holds a dozen small paintbrushes.  Whitehead suggests that death and war could be transformed by, and into, art.

RW 8

Some recent untitled work takes a different approach to the self-portrait.  Three photographs from 2021 show him facing the camera or in profile, and what looks to be a primal scream emanates from him.  The smoke and flames of a burning desert are superimposed around his face.  In two photographs Whitehead seems to be on fire.  In another close-up the screaming face, with a reddish tinge, is speckled with black flecks, giving the appearance of ashes.  In another work he stands in the desert like a colossus.  In one work from 2022 Whitehead looks up at a sky of smoke and flame; in two others his body is partly composed of Polaroid One Step 60-second snapshots, creating an ambiguity of who is the “real” figure and who is a disembodied group of snapshots (another photograph shows the camera printing a photograph of his younger self in the Army).  In a more surrealistic work his head is tilted forward over a desert scene.  His face is not flesh but comprised of the browns and greens of camouflage, which drips into a sinkhole in the sand.  It is as if Whitehead’s identity is melting into the sand.

RW 9

A 2021 untitled photograph shows Whitehead, with a philosophical, thoughtful expression, against a backdrop of a Desert Storm scene.  The text embedded on the left side of the frame reads, as if Whitehead is pondering the message, “You Live Life Looking Forward/You Understand Life Looking Backward.”  This phrase reflects one of the major concerns of Whitehead’s work.  The bulk of his photographs explore the interaction of past and present, and seek, through the artistic image, an understanding of the past, especially war, and its continuing impact on his life today.  It is an on-going search for unity and coherence.  His art is a type of bulwark against chaos, and attempts to recapture memories and make sense of the past as it impacts the present, and to commemorate that past, although painful in certain aspects, to make permanent the evanescent, and to reconcile opposites in that search for unity.

Ron Whitehead joined the Army right out of high school, serving for four years as an infantryman.  He was initially stationed at Fort Polk in Louisiana and then to Bamberg, Germany.   He deployed to Iraq in 1990 and fought in Desert Storm with the 1^st Armored Division.  After discharge he joined the Maryland National Guard and entered Messiah College in Pennsylvania.  He has an undergraduate degree in Art Education and a Master’s degree in Instructional Technology from Western Connecticut State University.  He has been teaching high school art in Ossining, New York, for almost thirty years.  He continues to work with veterans whenever he can.  One of his passionate endeavors is to bring students to the VA hospital in New Haven, CT.  The students listen to the stories of vets and turn those stories into art as a way to honor the veteran.

A selection of Whitehead’s work can be viewed here:  https://sites.google.com/view/ron-whiteheads-portfolio/home

Eliot, T.S.  “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood,1921.  “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.  https://www.academia.edu/796652/Hamlet_and_his_problems, p. 4

Stout, Janis.  Coming Out of War.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama:  The University of Alabama Press, 2005, p. xiv.

In collaboration with So Say We All‘s Veterans Writing Division, founder Justin Hudnall and The Wrath-Bearing Tree‘s Andria Williams had the privilege of serving 21 veterans, active-duty servicemembers, and veteran family members over 2023 by providing four masterclasses followed by an intensive creative writing workshop.

We would like to thank our masterclass teachers, Abby Murray, Halle Shilling, Peter Molin, and Andria Williams for their inspired presentations on the aspects of craft; all of our wonderful participants; and California Humanities for supporting veterans in the arts.

So Say We All and The Wrath-Bearing Tree are proud to showcase a portion of our cohort below. We look forward to reading much more from them in the coming years.

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Connie Kinsey: “The Letters”

In the old gray shoe box with the tattered red lid is four years’ worth of letters.  Most of them are addressed to my mother, but some are addressed to me. Many are written on onionskin and sealed in the familiar FPO airmail envelopes brightly colored red, white and blue. They crinkle and crackle when you touch them. My dad wrote these letters during his four tours of Vietnam–the first in 1966 and the final one in 1972.  

Those years he was away were hard on us all, but of course he took the brunt of it.  He left everything behind.  We missed him.  

He missed everything.

Those letters have been around the world, carted from base to base, and stored in one closet or another since the 1960s.  I have not read all of them yet.  I have not read most of them.

My mother gave me the letters with a warning.  To use her words, there are some pornographic parts. I imagine there might be. He was a young man away from the woman that almost sixty years later he would refer to as the love of his life. 

That’s not the reason I can’t bring myself to read them. I think I’m prepared to see my dad as a fully human male with a healthy sex drive. That might have been difficult when I was a teenager, but in all of those letters he is younger than I am now. Much younger.  The men he led much younger yet.

What I’m not prepared for are the spaces between the words -the things he doesn’t write about — the booby traps, the snipers, the dead bodies, the leeches, the cold c-rations straight from the can. At least, I don’t think he wrote about them.  But I don’t know.  Not yet.

I know of these abominations because I hang out in Vietnam veterans’ groups on Facebook. I never post. I just read. It’s research. The guys know I’m lurking there – I asked permission. I want to know what my dad, what they, went through, but I also don’t want to know. It’s like watching a horror movie while peeking through fingers.

My father, Captain Conrad L. Kinsey, always said the Marine Corps took him as a poor boy and turned him into an officer and a gentleman.  I’m quite sure there was nothing gentlemanly about Vietnam.  But he survived when so many didn’t. 

I adored my father. Most folks did. He was the officer and gentleman he wanted to be since seeing his first Marine in dress blues as a poor 9-year-old boy in Michigan. He had fulfilled a dream and took his oath seriously.

My dad was a commanding officer who lost thirteen of his men in a horrific battle on May 10, 1968, at Ngok Tavak near Chu Lai.  It was Mother’s Day.  They weren’t able to retrieve the bodies. That battle haunted him. Gave him nightmares.  Landed him in a psychiatric ward decades later.

A group of the survivors formed and held reunions every five years in Branson, Missouri. My father finally attended when a group of forensic anthropologists went to Vietnam and retrieved the bodies of his men.  Until they came home, he just couldn’t go. 

After his death, I was invited to attend what turned out to be the last reunion. It was held six months after his funeral.

I ended up drinking too much with a group of men who thought my father a fine gentleman and referred to him as their best commanding officer ever. I cried a lot, but I laughed a lot too.  I have a photograph of four of us – me and three older men, though not older by all that much, our arms around one another’s shoulders, broad smiles on our faces. 

They were able to say to me what they’d never said to their commanding officer.  I was able to ask them questions I’d never been able to ask my dad.  

We bonded that night.  I’m still in touch with some of them. 

It was an important weekend in my life and my grief.  Talking to those men helped me heal from my dad’s death. It had seemed as if the whole world just went on when mine was collapsing.  But those men that night – they remembered, and we remembered the man, the Marine, Captain Conrad L. Kinsey had been.

He’s been gone seven years now. His death was sudden and unexpected though his wounds never healed. He had severe post-traumatic stress disorder.  His experiences branded his heart, brain, and body.  Vietnam, Ngok Tavak and the thirteen who didn’t come home, especially, affected every experience he would have until the Sunday evening we found him dead. 

I’m writing a book of my experiences and his during the Vietnam war. I was young and having an idyllic childhood in Hawaii and then moody teen years in North Carolina. He was doing four tours in hell. Incorporating his letters into this book is important. I must read them.

I must.

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Author’s note:

The 50th anniversary of the official end of that terrible terrible war is coming up soon – May 7, 2025.  It will be three days short of the 57th anniversary of the battle that broke my father. 

It’s time for me to begin. I can handle my dad’s sexuality, but I am not sure I can handle the unwritten words that became his post-traumatic stress disorder.  

I once had someone dear to me and eight years older say, “Vietnam was not a factor in my life.”  He said it as if tired of hearing my stories, tired of hearing my dad’s stories, bored by us both. I was stunned. He was the right age to serve but had a lucky draft number.  What privilege to have lived through such an era without it leaving a mark. How insolent and insular. 

Vietnam was a heavy load for my family – my father so much more than the rest of us, but we were scarred too. I cry when I open that box of letters. I will cry when I read the letters.  I hope to smile too.  To hear his voice as I read.  But the unknown of what’s in that box haunts me and I’m afraid to begin.

But…Semper fi, Daddy, Semper fi.  You rest in peace now.

– Connie Kinsey

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George Warchol, “Service in the Middle”

Some inspire movies and books,
and others wind up in the news.
But for defenders with wrenches or keyboards in racks,
publicity wrecks our Service in Quietude.

And somewhere between the snipers and spies
are the middling faithful and true.
But no one tells stories about the comms guys,
they’re complex and they’re boring too.

Such as “Italy Went Dark” and the “Smurf Attack”
And “The Air Traffic Control System in Afghanistan is Down Again” too.
But the clever fixes among cables, and packets, and stacks…
They’re cool! But they would not interest you.

They say “All gave some, and some gave all”
and that’s true In Arms, sisters, and brothers.
But the defining phrase for answering the call, is
“Less than some; More than others”

Shep’rding the Team and The Job carried out,
that’s full time, and full effort, and much of what Service to Nation is all about.
But the pow’rs demand our grind and our continual waiting hurry,
“Waste yourself in OUR Way of Attainment! Or Be FOREVER Unworthy!”

“Climb the ladder, collect and achieve,
Stripes and baubles and slash up the sleeve!”
“Fill the reports with heroic deeds!”
“Promote!” “Promote!” MAKE them believe!

And like promotes like and after evil doth enter,
the Teeth of the Grinder do harden and render
Honesty’s kernel as powder in blender,
seeking to crush and to force The Surrender.

But instead, I’m finding my place in creative belong,
buoyed among words and not stripes.
And I’m finding my voice in verse and in song,
and in my choices towards effort, and living, and life.

And coming to terms with all that’s gone past,
I at last come to seek My Own Peace.
My Terms. My Service. My Sorrows. My Joys.
My ways to meet my own Needs.

I’ve done things you can not,
and you’ve done things I could never.
But the greatest of treasures, of gifts to be caught,
Is finding ourselves…and keeping ourselves together.

*

George Warchol, “Give and Get”

Give it up.
Give it up and get going.
Let it go,
and get on your way.

Listen up
and teach yourself freedom.
Write down your story,
you’ve got so much to say.

Lift your head.
Don’t abandon yourself.
Find your starting ground,
and don’t you retreat.
Just hang on.
I promise I’ll be there,
I’ll catch you.
Just try to stay on your feet.

Put it down.
It’s too much to carry.
Talk it out.

Don’t bury it deep.
Begin to trust
and be
just
a little less wary.
Let us help you begin to see.

To see something different
from all that you’ve known.
To perceive there is more
than your bearing alone.

See that we,

that we want you with us.

You have done so much good.
You are worthy of trust.

Just get up.
Get up and get going.
Begin to move.
Please, just shuffle your feet.
There’s still light ahead.
And there’s still movement showing.
And there’s still a good chance
for some kind of peace.

Everyone suffers.
But not all the time.
Not forever. Not always…

But always for some of the time.

And If redemption be needed,
then know that suffering need not be without value.
Grind the growth from it.
Squeeze it for purpose.
If nothing else,
it shapes us for something more.
Perhaps to fit us for more acts of tomorrow.

From the middle I can only tell you of what I see.
But from in front of it,
I can look back,
and tell something,
of what it means
against the background
of former,
forged ideas,
and
old,
cold,
hard,
sharpened facts.

Get in front of it.
We must put this behind.
Get in front of it.
We must stop wasting time.
Get in front of it.
We are not going alone.
Get in front of it,
and tell it to push you home.

You can watch George’s beautiful reading of his work here.

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Mariah Smith — No One Left Behind

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” – Voltaire

I’d already been awake for a day and half when the bombs went off.  Physically, I was in a hotel room in the Willard Intercontinental in Washington DC, but mentally, I was outside the gates of the Kabul International Airport, in the crush of scared and desperate people, trying to guide a number of Afghan families through the mob that surrounded it. My friend Dee, an Afghan American, who I had served with in Khost Province in 2007, was doing the same for her cousins and aunts and uncles. She was the one who texted me first, the instant after the explosion at the airport gate, and moments later the pictures started flooding in. The images were live-streamed into my brain, becoming indelible memories, through the phone screen my eyes had been glued to since August 15th 2021, the day the Taliban entered the city. The pictures showed people running holding their children, covered in dirt and soot from the blast, torn and bloodied clothing littering the streets. A thousand dropped and crushed water bottles. Dee called me on WhatsApp a few minutes later as we tried to get accountability of the Afghans we had been communicating with. In the end all we could do was cry wordlessly together at the futility and the anger we felt.

Hanging up the phone, I closed my eyes in exhaustion for a few minutes and let the despair wash over me. There had been very little sleep the past 9 days. The King sized bed in the quiet hotel room threatened to swallow me. The same hotel room where I had put on a dress and good earrings the previous day, pinned my hair up, and walked into a meeting where I asked for, and received $250,000 from Boeing’s veterans group to help fund our evacuation efforts. Until a week ago, I had never done any fundraising before and now we were asking for six figures at a time. Instead of sleeping I got up, walked into the marble bathroom, brushed my teeth, splashed water on my tear streaked face, put on a ball cap to cover my unwashed hair and went downstairs to the conference room where the others were. There was more work to be done. 

The first interpreter I ever worked with was named Joseph, or that was the name he used when he was with our unit. He joined our platoon of MPs a few days into the Iraq War in March of 2003. He recalled being a teenager when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990/1991 and the US kicked off Desert Storm. When the US returned again 12 years later, he immediately volunteered to help. One night, all of us lieutenants were called to the bombed out building on Tallil Air Base that we were using as a temporary command post to meet our interpreters. The first one wouldn’t shake my hand, informing me of his religious restrictions against touching women. I was the only female officer in the company. Joseph stepped forward and shook my hand warmly, his kind smile and direct eye contact dispelling the embarrassment and irritation I had felt the moment before. War was new to all of us at that time. We were excited – we felt like we were going on a big adventure. None of us knew it would dominate and sometimes consume the next almost 20 years of our lives. 

I don’t know what we would have done without Joseph. It wasn’t just that he could speak the language and we couldn’t. He showed a group of inexperienced Soldiers what a war is like for the people whose home is where it is being fought. What was at stake. What to do when you encounter children on the battlefield, the elderly, the injured citizens. All the realities none of us had lived before but would live many times over in the years to come.

In the years that followed there were more deployments including three tours to Afghanistan. And right around the time I was done with the Army, America had decided it was long past done with Afghanistan, we started negotiating with the Taliban and set a timeline to leave. I will never forget the sadness on General Miller’s face in one of the last televised interviews of units pulling out. He sat on a concrete perimeter barrier and talked to the reporter, no inflection in his voice, only fatigue, perhaps hiding the regret and disagreement he felt with the decision. One of the younger Soldiers who was interviewed said she hadn’t even been born yet when the Towers fell on 9/11. 

Downstairs in the conference room of the Willard, 18 years after that first meeting with an interpreter, I was trying to make things right. A dozen other grim, exhausted people, most of them fellow veterans, sat in a horseshoe formation of tables behind laptops. Many were from other non-profits like ours, No One Left Behind. The tables were littered with Redbulls and spitters. Messages continued to pour in from people who were working inside the airport grounds, those on the streets where the bombs went off, and other veterans from all over the country trying to find and help their interpreters. A congressional committee staffer who was also an Army 82nd Airborne veteran like me, texted: “Hey – are you hearing that the Kabul airport is shutting down? The gates are all being closed and nobody else is being allowed in?”

We had been talking and sharing information all week. Those of us in that conference room had a direct connection to US troops on the ground inside the airport. I had just heard that the Marines were bulldozing shut the gate that had been bombed, welding them closed behind earthworks. After the bombs, no one else was getting in. 

“Yep, it’s true.” I confirmed. 

“WTF?! Blinken and Hicks told Senators this afternoon on their call that ops would continue at least until the 31st.”

“We are struggling to even get American Citizens on the airfield right now.” I told him about the earthen berms being erected to block access to the airport, all while American citizens waved their passports and Afghan interpreters desperately waved their visa paperwork outside the razor wire. “Everything I have seen is indicating we are done evacuating. They lied.” I set my phone down, disgusted at the way we were leaving our allies. Not even the Senate Intelligence Committee was getting straight answers.

A few hours later I watched in furious disbelief as the President addressed the country from the Oval office, a row of American flags behind him. He praised the bravery of the orderly withdrawal and reiterated the rightness of ending the War in Afghanistan. The group of us volunteers stood in front of the TV with our arms crossed, numbly watching the canned and false message being peddled. It was a pathetic attempt to try and spin the gigantic cluster fuck we had watched unfold over the past ten days into something resembling a strategic plan. I couldn’t believe anyone would buy his empty statements. Did they even care about the scale of suffering that was happening on the ground in Afghanistan? The senior leaders at the State Department sure didn’t seem to. As the US prepared to abandon the embassy in Kabul some US employees in the visa office burnt all of the Afghan passports and documents they had custody of. These were the golden tickets for the Afghans who had earned a Special Immigrant Visa to the US through their work with the American military or government. Although the burning was ‘standard procedure’ for preparing to abandon an embassy, in this case to the enemy, this action further sealed the fate of those who were so close to making it out yet still trapped.

Someone switched off the TV, and we walked to Old Ebbits Grill, a Washington DC institution. We ordered some much-needed alcohol. One of the other volunteers arrived a few minutes after the first wave of us, spotted my Old Fashioned on the table, asked if he could taste it, and knocked it back in one swallow, cherry and all, before his ass even landed in his chair. The table shrieked with hysteria tainted laughter. We were all a little unhinged from the horror of the past several days. 

For almost two years, I’ve tried to think of a coherent way to talk about those two weeks in August 2021 and the months that followed. It was both the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed and some of the most moving work I’ve ever been a part of.  

In April and May of 2023 No One Left Behind was contacted by a team from Japanese public TV. They wanted to do a story on our organization along with the Afghan women who had been part of the female tactical platoon (FTPs, they were called in short). This consumed my life for a month but ended up being very cathartic. One of the themes of their show was moral injury among veterans. “The Japanese people do not have the experience with this. The generation that fought in WWII never spoke of it and there have not been conflicts since. We also do not want them to forget what is happening to the Afghan people.” At the time of this writing I am still waiting for the documentary to be released. I don’t know what angle they will take the story. Although I came to trust the production team, both women close in age to me, I have to recognize that they are from a different country and I don’t know how they will paint the United States and our involvement in Afghanistan. I still hold a security clearance for work, and I held this in my mind every time they interviewed me. Although I was mostly open with them, I was not able to fully share the depth of the doubt and anger I was feeling at my own country’s clumsy and sometimes arrogant involvement in a 20 year war that we lost. It was hard to even put it in writing for this essay. In a way it feels like treason. 

“Tell us the story of the skinny, scared woman again.” The Japanese camera woman zoomed her lens towards me. They must have asked me half a dozen times, referring to a story I had told them about searching Afghan women on a compound that Special Forces raided along with our ANA partners. My job was to search the women on the compound and this particular young woman was likely in her 20s as I was. As I searched her for weapons, in her own home, that I had invaded I was struck by how malnourished and frail she felt under my hands. Although I was gentle, I stood behind her with my boot between her two sandled feet and felt the fragility and lightness of her body, ashamed of my own camouflaged and armored presence restricting her movement and how easily I could have hurt her if that had been my intent. 

I think they liked this story because it drew a stark contrast between the American soldiers and the Afghan people whose country they were occupying. But that was the opposite of the Afghans in the military and government we had worked with. We were working collectively for a better future. And then that was snatched away from all of us. I say snatched, but it was years of poor strategy, a rotational plan that didn’t work, a lack of focus, and a misunderstanding of the durability of the Taliban. When we lost and were cut off from our friends in the most chaotic, traumatizing way possible, all we wanted was to be able to be with our friends again and help them live safely. It wasn’t about the differences, it was about our common humanity. 

“Tell us about your PAIN and the GUILT” the camerawoman and interviewer would say. Emphasis on these sad words. Each interview led to a request for another, often revisiting the same topic 6 or 8 times. They wanted to hear more about my deployments in Afghanistan, hoping for a good shoot ’em up story I regretted and I think they were a little disappointed in the relative calmness of my deployments. Although they wanted the Japanese people to know the Afghans stuck under Taliban rule were still suffering, with few options, we didn’t talk much about the withdrawal itself. 

I met Efat when we interviewed her for the Japanese public TV show. She had been a female police woman, a job she loved. Now she was trapped at home. During our interview she cried helplessly and the feeling of watching a strong woman in such despair was gut wrenching. How do you help someone keep hope alive in these circumstances? I felt very helpless and grateful for the friends that have been able to leave. What does Efat have to look forward to? She was the one who made me confront, most clearly the reality for women left there. When I interviewed her, her surroundings looked like a mud walled compound with little furniture inside and a small assortment of basic kitchen implements. She told us they had sold a majority of their possessions in order to live. She was dressed in a loose black robe with a black scarf ready to wind over her hair if she stepped outside. The way she sobbed softly tore at my heart. There was nothing I could do or say to help or that made anything better in any way. How terrible to be trapped so completely in your own country, after having lived a different life of relative freedom as a young adult.

No One Left Behind continues to evacuate people out of Afghanistan, mainly through funding their travel to Pakistan while they wait to finish processing at the US embassy in Pakistan. We set a goal to help 1000 leave in 2023 and we met that goal on 30th of June. We set a new goal of 2000 and we made that goal also in late October. There are still so many people trying to help, but it will really take a change in US and international policy to allow everyone who needs to leave Afghanistan to make it to safety.  The overwhelming need makes our efforts feel like a drop in the bucket. 

It was almost nine months after the evacuation when Latifa and har family arrived at Dulles airport in May of 2022. They had been waiting in Iceland for the past 4 months while their US visa was finished. Latifa was the primary applicant, which was less common for the woman to be the primary applicant, less than 10% . After having NOLB consume my life for almost a year, and to be overwhelmed by the amount of people reaching out that we couldn’t yet help evacuate, I realized it became important for me to help one person, one family, and to see what the experience was actually like for a new family arriving. This felt like it was as much for my redemption and well-being as it was for theirs. They came to live with me, making progress in starting their new lives though they still feel the wounds of the country they left and the life they lost that is now no longer possible in their native land.

The night after I left the Williard back in August of 2021, the night after the last US plane left the airfield in Afghanistan, I was at a black tie event in Virginia horse country where I live now. It felt surreal, rich horse people in the most beautiful part of Virginia and that night I felt very removed from it, like a disoriented witness. I was still fully immersed in the violence and tragedy of what I had seen.  I felt like I had been deployed, even though I hadn’t left DC. At one point I started to tear up, overwhelmed, and my date walked me out to the large balcony where we watched the guests dancing, brightly lit through the plate glass windows, while we were shadowed in the summer night, the music from inside competing with the sounds of frogs and crickets. Teenage girls in their homecoming and prom dresses, jumped about joyfully on the dance floor in small groups or with their parents. The stark contrast between their safety and inhibition and what girls their own age had just gone through and what their lives in Afghanistan would be like now. 

This is the story I wish I wasn’t telling. I wish our war had ended differently. After investing all that time and lost lives and lives forever changed, our country’s leaders had us walk away in the most humiliating way possible and leave our friends behind in a near hopeless situation. However, our work with No One Left Behind continues. While we are still helping people depart Afghanistan on the Special Immigrant Visa program we are also very focused on helping them restart their lives here in America. And this is where my faith in my fellow citizens remains strong. The kindness and generosity by regular people we have seen extended to these newly arrived Afghan refugees is incredible to witness. Restarting a life and a career in a new country is exceptionally challenging and so many Americans have stepped up to help in a thousand different ways. For a period of time after the withdrawal I was hyper focused on the horror and unfairness of what had happened to so many Afghans and how it affected the veteran community. But now my focus has shifted more to the good we are able to be part of.

***

Reinetta Vaneendenberg — A.O.R.

Letter from Hotel California 1 epistolary
The Hall of Valor 3 prose
Vet Killed by Granby ST Hit/Run 4 newspaper reportage
Obituaries 5 newspaper reportage
Collateral Damages of A.O.R. Ambiguities 6 scratch-out poem
Crossing Granby Street 8 poem encased by fragments
++++++++++

28/8/2017 Hotel California haha (same as before)

Dear Liz,
A volunteer is typing this for me since my hands are bandaged. His name is Jonathan and
he’s here allot getting new legs and his gut fixed. Sometimes we play backgammon like you and
I did that year in the sandbox. I move pieces with my good finger.
It was great talking to you last night. I’ve been thinking about you allot today. You—in a
good place now, with a room of your own at the veteran house. It’s ok to accept the room and the food and the clothes. You’re a vet and all that is for vets. Not everyone can be lucky like me and spend a year at Hotel John Hopkins in lovely Baltimore.

Last night when we talked you were mad again about the AOR crap but we couldn’t do
anything. It’s over and done with and over and done. Listen hear, you and I aren’t responsible for the 10,000 dead from 9/11 and its wars,
so you need to let that go.

Take those five fuckin “Xs” off your fuckin hat. Sailors don’t count our kills or anyone
else’s. Shake your red hair free. We did the best we could with the crappy equipment and
leadership. Like Nam, man: who’s the enemy? Our interpreter, Fahad? A kid? A fruit vendor? Congress sucks! How can they tell us who’s a threat? When we can or can’t shoot? They’re a million miles away. In fuckin DC.

I must a got all stirred up after our call because I had that same dream again last night, the one with you standing in your battle dress, head down and walking, not watching where you’re going and I’m yelling “Liz! Look out! LIZ!” But you keep walking. I keep yelling. I wake up sweating, crying. You always had rotten situational awareness. I guess that’s why we made it as battle buddies.

We had good war-fighting skills. The rules of engagement said when we could shoot. The
area of responsibility—the lines for bullets, bodies and bags were clearly drawn on maps,
directives, messages for Afghanistan, Iraq. I don’t know why we were sent where we oughtn’t to of been. Boundaries are boundaries.

You’re right it was a set up because there was no way we could have guessed that little
girl had a bomb in her dolly basket.

Have you heard about the lieutenant? Someone came by saying the Navy was not
promoting her because of the explosion. I don’t think it was her fault that we went where we weren’t ‘supposed to and her being in the navy not the army. I agree with you that w

I don’t think it was her fault that we went where we weren’t ‘supposed to be’ and her being in the navy not the army. I agree with you that we were setup because Fahad didn’t go with us and he always wanted to be with us everywhere.

The sandbox is a strange place for sailors. Don’t you think so? How can our Navy not
promote a young officer who is eating the same crap we had to and live like we had to and the Elephants keep changing the AOR and ROE? At least she didn’t get hurt. She got home in one piece to her wife and kids.

Jonathan’s nice, a handsome dude. Maybe you could have coffee with him when you
visit. I know you come from blue blood but not all guys are like those
Our families are so fucked up. Mine tries but they don’t understand, even my dad who
did Vietnam. They returned to disdain and us as heroes but are forgotten a month after returning anyway. None of it is anyone’s responsibility. Hope you get this litter at your new address before our next call.

The docs say I’m doing ok and can see you whenever you come up from Norfolk. I’m
sorry for the mix up last time. I had the dates wrong. And here you rode the bus all day. Sorry.

Time is jumbled between surgeries and meds. You know what I mean—you have allot of meds to. I was in OR for reconstructing surgery the day you came. I don’t see much that they can do— nine fingers got blown off and all the operations won’t bring them back—but those doctors go figure they always have an idea how to make a bad thing better. Next operation is to make the whole in my gut better.

The only good things in my life are you and Jonathan as friends. The rest is crap. Look
forward to your weekly call. Same time same station.

So, now I really have to go because Jonathan has to go to PT. Remember when that
meant physical training, a chance to burn off some steam? Now it’s pain and torture.
I asked him to sign this for me so you’d know it was really from me but he laughed.

Just believe it’s from me,
your battle buddy,
Mary

The Hall of Valor
lists all
6906
U.S. military who have died during the Global War on Terror
in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn.
This Hall of Valor is a searchable database
by name, operation, month and year. It can also sort
by death date, oldest to newest or newest to oldest.

Viewed 3DEC2017: thefallen.militarytimes.com

VET KILLED BY GRANBY ST. HIT/RUN
NORFOLK
Dispatch reported an anonymous call 2:12 p.m.,
28 August 2017, about a hit-and-run at Granby Street and Thole Street
intersection in the Suburban Acres area of Norfolk. The caller said a
person was hit by a compact brown car. An emergency crew was on
scene within 4 minutes of the call, followed by an ambulance 3
minutes later.

There were no identifying documents found on the victim. She was
pronounced DOA at DePaul Hospital.

Police found no witnesses.
The victim has been identified as Elizabeth C. Stanton, 37, a U.S.
Navy veteran. Burial services pending.
Anyone with information about this accident is asked to call Norfolk Police Investigations.

obituaries
Elizabeth C. Stanton
NORFOLK – 37, Funeral
service: 8 a.m. Monday, on
Sept. 11, 2017, Virginia State
Veterans Cemetery, Suffolk.

Collateral Damages of A.O.R. Ambiguities

Area of Responsibility inside outside
the enemy outside inside
ordersdogtagsdufflebagI.D.cellphonesmokes
Iraq on the Way Back
Domino Theory
burqa door-to-door
An improvised explosive device I.E.D.
is a hidden bomb Blows up patrol
convoy missing body parts Balad
Bagram Air Base Afghanistan
we don’t know where the leg is Politicians
make up rules of engagement R.O.E.
tasty fish eggs grow into the child as I.E.D. who will lead us
hightechhighbodycount out-foxed
push meds push to keep/up with them
Ramstein Air Force Base Germany
VA Hospital amputations prosthetics thumb
Hand Calf Legs Charles C. Carter Center for Mortuary
Affairs, Dover Air Force Base, Delaware
Warmonger body armor/MadeinChina/budget hearings
re-take, re-deploy, re-calibrate
Fall of Berlin,Hanoi,Fallujah.
HailMaryFullofGrace
It has been 16 years

Senator, Is the 22-Veterans-Per-Day Suicide Rate Data Reliable?
Do you have stats for correlation with
Homelessness? Alcoholism? Drug abuse?
VA Failure rates? CPTSD? TBI ? 

See: the Latin cida, killer
S u i cide me
Fr a t ri cide us
G e n o cide them
CNN reports an increased rate of blue-on-blue violence as military kill their own
By the book By the book
6 Bythebook
6 Bythebookbythebook t hebookCP
9 By book T
0 ook S
2 ok D
nobook
Allah M.C.
Mission Co
Com
Comp

black body bagsbagbags

Black
Hawk

W
a
r

She charged the crosswalk as if rushing the landing zone,
right arm propelled red pony-tailed floppy head.
Hot wash rose from swampy beach traffic.
I saw her as a unit, an interruption across my line of sight.
The uniform of a street person, I presumed, with time to
look during the long light. I turned up the AC.
Flicked the auto-lock.
Black wool beret, with five white Xs pinned on it.
Hawaiian shirt, glaring blue, green, yellow
Camouflage pants, too big or her now too small.
Black mocs like clown shoes, pale heels peeking out,
as if her feet had lost the mass for boots.
She was closing on the sidewalk, focused on the mark—
When the light turned, I shifted the Vette into first
just as horns blasted.

Reinetta Van explores identity and historical perspective issues in hybrid forms. Her work has appeared in The War Horse  and anthologies Sisters in Arms: Lessons We’ve Learned and Things We Carry Still: Poems and Micro-Stories About Military Gear. Van ([email protected]) scribbled A.O.R.’s first draft June 12, 2017, and hopes to express someday why this piece sticks in her craw. You can hear her read from her work here.

***

Tom Keating – REMF

Richie handed me a bandolier.

“Another fucking waste of twelve hours,” he said. The green cloth pockets each held a magazine filled with eighteen rounds for the M16 battle rifle slung on my shoulder. It was almost 1800 hours, and we were going on perimeter guard duty till 0600 hrs. the next morning. Ninety-eight degrees, and our jungle fatigues were soaked with sweat.

We loaded up the truck in the company area for perimeter guard duty, which we were assigned to do every couple of weeks. Twelve hours sitting in a hot, wet, smelly sandbagged bunker on our sector of the Army base perimeter. Twelve hours of boredom.

“I’d rather be typing the fucking monthly fuel consumption report,” I replied. “This sucks, again.”

“Can it, you two, and get on the truck,” yelled Sergeant Hollis, the sergeant of the guard for this shift.

The twelve of us climbed on the open truck, wearing helmets and heavy, sweaty flak vests, our rifles slung on our shoulders. The truck drove out to the perimeter along the dirt road behind the tall, barbed-war fence of our base. Two small Vietnamese villages were just four hundred meters from the fence, and the locals who lived there would come into the main gate each day, get checked by MPs, and then go to work on our base as cooks, laundry workers, and housemaids.

The combat troops called us REMFs, rear echelon motherfuckers; support troops that made the war possible with our typing, driving, computer programming and other work skills needed in a modern Army. We do the paperwork that feeds the war with everything from body bags to bullets. Our base and living quarters the grunts (infantry) call luxury. We had beds, daily hot chow, plenty of water and in some cases, air-conditioned offices.

Most of the soldiers assigned to this logistics base were trained to be Army administrative types. Some, like me, who were trained for infantry, were assigned as clerks or typists when we arrived. The Army marches on paper. I knew I lucked out with this assignment, instead of being in combat.

Every couple of weeks we were pulled from our offices, trucks and repair shops and thrown together for bunker guard duty, strangers to each other. The truck arrived at our bunker’s situated on large earthen berms on the perimeter near one of the gates into our base. The truck stopped, and Sergeant Hollis got out, walked to the rear, and said,

“Kearney, Philips, Richie and Denton, you four here, in bunker number one.”

We hopped off the truck. Someone handed us our weapons, flares, ammunition for the M60 machine gun, extra canteens, and a box of C-rations. Richie carried two rolls of toilet paper. The truck drove down to the next bunker. We waited while Philips picked up a stone and threw it into our bunker.

“Hope ole snaky aint in there today.”

Cobras loved our bunkers; they provided shade for the cold-blooded reptiles, who also enjoy the rats that live there, too. We threw stones in the bunker to let Snaky know we’re coming in. Sure enough, he slithered out, an eight-foot-long cobra. The snake turned and retreated into the brush near the barbed wire. Philips threw in another rock and waited. Nothing. We carefully entered the bunker, our home for the next twelve hours. There were no bushes or tall grass around our bunker. Defoliant sprayed every week made sure of that.

I set the machine gun on its bipod, positioned it out the center bunker port. We took off our helmets and flak vests, and settled in. The heat and stink inside the bunker was unbearable. Richie and Denton went outside behind the bunker to smoke some weed. Philips and I took the guard position, looking out at the villages.

Philips said he was a truck mechanic for the 350th TC (Transportation Company). A short, stocky fellow, he speaks with a hillbilly accent. “Kearney, where you from?”

Before I could reply Richie came back in. Richie was tall and lanky. He shoved his glasses up higher on his large nose and announced, “Put on your gear, the sergeant is coming to check, and he’s got the ELL-TEE with him.”

We put on our helmets, shirts and vests and waited. Sergeant Hollis called us together outside the bunker. Lieutenant Nack, the officer of the guard this shift, stood behind the sergeant. Nack’s tailored fatigue was dark with sweat. Hollis was an experienced soldier who had fought in Korea. He gave us our instructions.

“Okay, you guys know the drill. Two on two off, two hours. Kearney, I want you on the machine gun. Richie, check the commo line. You are Reno 4. Do it now.”

Richie picked up the field phone handset, pressed the key and said, “Bravo One, Reno 4 commo check.” Richie put the receiver down. “We’re good to go, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Hollis replied, “Okay. Do that at least once an hour. Me and the lieutenant will do another check later tonight and bring more water. Anything else, Lieutenant?”

Nack stepped forward. He wore the custom fit new model body armor jacket that zipped up the front. “Stay alert, men. Keep your eyes open tonight, Intel says we are sure to get hit by Charlie.” He stepped back. Nack worked in the finance office, probably hadn’t fired a weapon since Basic Training or whatever reserve officers went through. They turned and got back in the Jeep and left.

Philips asked as he took off his gear, “Kearney, you think the EL-TEE was just bullshitting about an attack?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “It is the big Chinese New Year festival, I would expect them all to be celebrating, not fighting.” We settled in, looking for movement in front of us.

Denton and Richie relieved us two hours later. The sun was almost gone, so Phillips and I went outside, where it was cool, the air fresh. Trucks and Jeeps kept coming and going out of the gate near our bunker. Philips used the piss tube alongside the bunker, and I sipped warm water from my canteen. Just then the field phone chirped. Richie picked it up.

“Reno 4.” His eyes got large, and he looked over at me.

“Roger, yellow alert. Reno 4.”

Yellow alert meant some shit was going down. We hustled back into the bunker. I drew back the cocking lever of the M 60 and put my shoulder against the stock. I looked out the port. Richie and Denton picked up their rifles. Denton looked confused. He didn’t know what to do with the rifle. I looked over and said,

“Denton, put the magazine into the rifle, then pull the charging handle. Put your selector switch off safety to fire. Richie, give him a hand.” These guys were clerks and typists, not infantry. Finally, their rifles were locked and loaded. We waited. I saw the gate being closed; Vietnamese workers on the post being hustled out of the gate as it closed. A Military Police Jeep pulled up to the gate, with an M60 machine gun mounted and manned. Damn!

“We have to check the claymores to be sure the wires are okay. Who wants to go with me?” Philips nodded his head. “Okay. Denton and Richie, eyes front. If you see anything move, shoot it. We’ll be right back.”

The two of us exited the bunker and found the claymore wires leading from the bunker. We followed along in the fading light all the way to the mines which were thirty feet in front of the bunker. Everything looked okay, the wires attached to the blasting caps, positioned “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.” We ran back to the bunker. I heard a rumble, like thunder. The phone chirped again. Richie answered,

“Understand. Red alert. Reno 4.” Richie hung up and relayed the news. “The VC are attacking Bien Hoa Air Base, and we may be next! Holy Shit!” We were jacked up with adrenaline and fear. The booms were louder, closer. The stutters of a machine gun could be heard. The field phone chirped again. I picked it up.

“Reno 4,” I said into the handset.

“Reno 4, stand by. Victor Charlie spotted in the village 400 meters your front. TAC air on the way. Get low in your bunker.”

“Reno 4.”

“Get down,” I shouted, “TAC Air!” Everyone crouched down below the sandbag wall of the bunker. We heard the roar of an F4 Phantom jet, and two large explosions. The F4 Phantom roared away. I cautiously looked over the sandbag port. The villages were gone, just smoke and fire. Nothing was moving in front of us. I looked over to the gate, the MP Jeep was gone, replaced by an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC). Before I could process this, we heard more firing and some small explosions, grenades most likely. Then it got quiet. The firing stopped. Nothing moved. The phone chirped again. I picked it up.

“Reno 4.”

“Reno 4, stand down from Red alert. Alert status now yellow. alert status yellow.” The sergeant arrived shortly after we relaxed. ELL-TEE wasn’t with him. I told him our situation.

“Sergeant, we went on red alert,” I looked at my watch, “60 minutes ago, just got word to stand down to yellow. TAC Air blew up the villages to our front. All weapons locked and loaded.”

“Okay, Kearney. Stay alert. This may go on all night.” Hollis drove over to the next bunker.

I turned to the guys. “Let’s get back to the guard schedule: two on two off, two hours. Stay alert. If you think you are gonna fall asleep, move around, take deep breaths. Me and Philips will take the first watch.”

Philips and I looked out the bunker towards the destroyed village. Damn! the jet just blew it away! There were people there earlier. I hope they got out before the bombs. Jeesus! No movement at all. We could hear the chatter of machine gun fire and explosions far down the perimeter on our left. The APC roared away towards the fighting. We were alone in the darkness.

“Kearney, I’m scared.” Said Philips.

“Me, too,” I replied. The lights at the gate cast some in front of our bunker. Richie and Denton were napping outside. The sounds of battle diminished. We started to relax. After forty minutes I was fighting the urge to close my eyes and sleep when Philips whispered to me.

“Kearney, I see somebody moving!”

“Where?” I jerked alert.

“Over to the left, see it?”

I slowly turned left, and yes; someone was slowly crawling towards bunker two on our left. A sapper! I turned to my right and saw someone else crawling towards us. Two sappers! They got through the wire somehow and were about forty feet away.

“Philips, ” I whispered, “you fire right, I fire left. Go!”

I fired my M16 four times at the guy. Bunker 2 must have seen the sapper too and fired their M60 machine gun. The red tracer rounds bounced off the ground in front of the crawlers. The sapper on the right got up on his knees to fire a B40 rocket at our bunker, just as Philips hit him. He fell back, and the rocket went sailing over our position and exploded behind us. Denton and Richie were now wide awake.

“Jee-sus! You got them,” shouted Denton.

“Keep looking,” I said. “There may be more.” My heart was pumping fast. My vision had sharpened. I scanned in front and on both sides, even looked behind us. But there wasn’t anyone else.

My infantry training told me to go out and check the bodies. I ran, crouched, to the first body. He was deformed by the rounds he took from me and the M60 from bunker two. His right arm was missing. Picked up his rifle and slung it on my shoulder. I checked him for papers, found some.

The B40 rocket guy was twenty feet away. Philips’ shot had blown his head apart. I wanted to throw up, but I held it in. I picked up his launcher and the rockets he carried. No papers on him. I ran in a crouch back to the bunker. I threw up outside the bunker entrance, then went in and picked up the phone.

“Bravo One, Reno 4.”

“Reno 4.”

“Weapons fired. Two enemy Kilos. No Whiskeys, (Army code for dead and wounded), two weapons recovered.”

“Roger, Reno 4. Continue alert.” We could hear some explosions and rapid firing along the perimeter, but it was quiet near us. Philips looked at me, his eyes were wet.

“I shot deer and squirrels back home,” he said. “But these were men! Jeesus! I don’t want to do that again, Kearney.”

“I know,” I said. “It is fucking awful, but they were going to kill you and me and Denton an’ Richie. We didn’t have a choice.”

“Shit,” said Denton, “I wanna get outta this fucking bunker and this fucking country.”

“Shut the fuck up, Denton, you just got here,” said Richie. “You aint going anywhere for a year. Kearney’s right, it was us or them.”

Philips went outside, still upset. Denton and Richie took over the guard. I stayed in the bunker. I was suddenly hungry, feeling lightheaded as the adrenaline left me. I could not relax, though.

Time passed, and we heard no more shooting. When the sun came up, smoke was rising from the village. The two enemy bodies were still there in front of our bunkers, flies feasting on them. We heard no battle noise, just a few random rifle shots somewhere down the line. Sergeant Hollis and Lieutenant Nack were coming down the access road in the jeep. Hollis stopped the Jeep, and I went out to meet him and Nack. I nodded at Nack. No saluting officers near the wire.

Sergeant Hollis said, “Situation, Kearney.”

“Sergeant, all quiet. No further attack on this section since 2300 hrs. Two dead sappers out front, I policed their weapons and some papers taken from their bodies.” I pointed at the two weapons and the papers tucked in the corner.

Nack looked startled. He scowled at me, “Specialist, who told you to take the weapons and papers?” Hollis rolled his eyes, very slightly.

“Sir,” I said, “that’s SOP, disarm the enemy dead and check for any intel. They told us that at Fort Jackson.”

“Oh, you were infantry,” he snarled.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, You should have left the weapons there and notified me.” He wanted credit for the weapons capture. It would look good on his record, and maybe a medal. He took a small note pad from his breast pocket and a pen.

“I need your name and your unit and commanding officer.”

“Sir, Specialist 4th Class Kearney, I am an administrative aide to General Stark at headquarters supply, fuel division.” Nack looked surprised. That brought him up. He didn’t want to fuck with one of the general’s boys. He put the notepad back in his pocket.

“Okay. Sergeant, take charge of the weapons and documents, and contact the engineers to remove the bodies.”

“Yes sir.” He went into the bunker and retrieved the weapons. “Kearney, I’ll make sure you get credit for the captured weapons.” Nack threw an angry look at the Sergeant as Hollis put them in the back of the Jeep and climbed behind the wheel.

“Thanks, Sergeant,” I replied.

“Good job, men. Your relief is on its way.” The Lieutenant said as he hopped back in the Jeep. Hollis drove away as the field phone chirped. I picked it up.

“Reno 4, Alert status Yellow.”  I turned to the guys, who were tired, dirty, and still jacked up on adrenaline.

“Alert Yellow, we can relax.” Then we heard the truck coming to bring us our relief. It was 07:00hrs. I took off my flak vest and sucked my canteen dry. Phillips had recovered somewhat and smiled at me. I could hardly wait to get back to those fucking fuel consumption reports.

Tom Keating is a Vietnam Veteran who kept a journal during the war in Vietnam, which enabled him to publish his memoir, Yesterday’s Soldier: A Passage from Prayer to the Vietnam War. He has also published in The Veteran, the Military Writers Society of America’s Dispatches, The Vietnam Memorial 40th Anniversary Tribute, 0-Dark-Thirty from the Veterans Writing Project, the Microlit Almanac from Birch Bark Editing, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree. He lives west of Boston with his wife Kathleen. You can hear him read from his work here.

***

Nancy Stroer – What Do You Expect?

The Rooster’s nose was his most salient feature, curved and sharp as he strutted and preened in front of formation. It was an act, but the Rooster snapped his barnyard into submission without apology.

He told me, “Ma’am, I need you to take all the females to the clinic.”

There’d been a rash of pregnancies in the barracks. Okay, maybe two in as many months, but this was the Rooster nipping his birds into line.

“It’s like we’re running agot-damn brothel on the female floor,” he said after he’d dismissed the soldiers. Other company leaders remarked, variously:

“These females got to learn how to keep their legs closed.”

“Put males and females together and what do you expect?”

What did I expect? I expected to get along as a woman in a man’s world. I knew how things worked and I expected I’d do fine with that, having grown up with three brothers, playing sports, all of this occurring in the broader context of a world run by men. I didn’t think about any of this in so many words back then. I didn’t know that I was a Guys’ Girl, a term my young adult daughters use now with a curl in the corner of their mouths.

Back in the olden days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (unless it’s super-juicy), the NCOs were ranting the same old litany to a sexual but sex-free god, repeated in NCO meetings and formations and ad hoc conversations near the filing cabinets. Sex was a given, a right, for some, and a loaded weapon for others. Male soldiers wanted to have sex, were going to have sex. The women had to expect to receive that attention whether they wanted it or not. And they should expect it, but not want it. If they wanted it, they must appear not to; otherwise they’d get a reputation in the Barracks Bicycle. Those were the expectations.

No one expected birth control talks for the male soldiers. Two of the guys were walking around, looking kind of sheepish at times, kind of proud at others. There was much slapping of shoulders and good-natured cussing.

I processed information differently in those days. I was so young, still surfacing from the dreamworld of adolescence to find myself drowning in the patriarchy, except I thought I was swimming just fine. The only other female officer to process it was pregnant herself but married and therefore did not count on the Tally of Concern. Maybe her PT game was a little weak, but she managed to get her hair done. She was decorative but ran the supply warehouse with confidence and competence. She was a Black woman, with a team of mostly non-white soldiers. Her operation was a bit intimidating to me, and maybe secretly to the Rooster, too, because his beak was out of her business. And sure, the commander was a woman but she was an androgynous little elf and we left her alone because to engage with her in conversation was to invite a deluge of unwanted information about her irritable bowel syndrome.

There was righteous sex (guys going to the Red Light district), and sex that was out of control (women daring to have sex in their barracks rooms). The NCOs moralized about the need for guys to get laid and the impact of single women getting pregnant on The Mission. Everyone laughed at the idea of the unsexy having sex. I recognized the double and triple standards, but still bought all the tangled lines.

Maybe these young female soldiers don’t know about birth control, I thought. They couldn’t all be the dirtbags the sergeants said they were, just getting pregnant to get out of the barracks and straight to the head of the line for military housing and priority spots at the child development center. Maybe they were just waking up as humans, too.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find the women gathered in the clinic lobby not looking contrite or curious but sullen and angry. I didn’t quite get their mood. “Don’t you want to be in charge of when you get pregnant?” I asked them. Surely they’d joined up to be all they could be. Capricious childbearing would shoot their career trajectories out of the sky.

Standing next to me, Johnson swung her swollen belly to face me. She was small and quiet. Curls framed her brown face. “Cute” is a diminutive way to describe her, but she was diminutive. She was objectively cute. I didn’t know her, since she worked in the supply warehouse where women made up about a quarter of the workforce, in contrast to my operation across the parking lot with the mechanics, where the air was heavy with secondhand smoke, AC/DC, the ping of wrenches and tool boxes across concrete floors. All the women watched each other, though, and my general impression of the ones in the supply warehouse was that they were as quietly competent as the pregnant female officer who ran their show. They were organized, and a little disparaging of the men who worked there because they clowned around too much. A bit dismissive of me as too rough and ready. Too accommodating of the Rooster and his ilk. Maybe they found us too white, and therefore suspect. This insight is a late add. I’m sure I didn’t think too much of the racial dynamics at play in those days but my memories are fully colorized now.

So cute little Johnson rounded on me and said through clenched teeth, “I’ll have as many children as I got-damn well want,” and I had no response. It was an astounding, revelatory moment. Of course she was right. Of course she was outraged at the Rooster’s overreach. A woman of any marital status can have as many children as she got-damn wants. A Black woman might justifiably feel more ferocious about this than anyone. Johnson’s withering stare — those soft cheeks pulled into a parentheses of disdain — was an emotional heart round.

In a flash I melted into a puddle of shame, remembering how my father made me return a pair of cargo pants when I was fifteen because they were “too revealing.” The second pair was so baggy I had to take them in at the waist which, in my newly self-conscious opinion, made my butt look even bigger. This was the first time I’d been told explicitly to hide my assets. I did not wear my new cargo pants and, among other things, I stopped volunteering to go to the board in health class, no longer wishing to show my work. Or anything else.

Might as well disappear my whole body, starve it into its preadolescent shape. Or maybe to eat and drink to keep up with the boys. Or go on whack diets to have something to talk about with the girls. Or to do all the sports and sweat and swear and carry the mortar plate on ruck marches and be considered just another one of the guys.

Didn’t matter. I wasn’t one of them. The male soldiers still vied to run behind me in formation. Let me hitch myself to that ride, they’d say.

They left me notes under my car wiper blades and lewd sculptures on my desk. They backed me into the corners of quiet offices. They turned up at my house at odd hours. It was easiest to laugh them off, to call them the assholes they were, to put them all in their proper places, and keep my business to myself.

I had expected Army men to misunderstand me. My religious father with his Master of Fine Arts, who had enlisted as a medic in the days of the draft so he could control his fate, told me as much when I was insisting that I’d be able to control my fate, too. “It’s different now,” I said, “and I’ll be an officer.” But there are lots of ways to kill a person without firing a shot and on my very first day in my very first unit, my very first platoon sergeant took one look at my left hand and said, “We got to get you married, ma’am. An unmarried officer is going to cause trouble.” I hadn’t expected a welcome like that at all.

And here was Johnson with her soft round cheeks and her rounder belly, unashamed of the truth of the matter: that even she, this actual cherub of a woman, had had sex and now she was having a got damn baby and she didn’t give a flying fuck what I or Rooster or anyone thought about her marital status or any of her choices. Johnson’s comment was a two-by-four up the side of my head, and it woke me all the way up, right there, even though I still didn’t know what to do with the information.

I’ve heard many white veterans say that they got to know, and become friends with, people of color for the first time when they were in the military. But did we really get to know each other? Did we just laugh with them at company picnics or did we allow ourselves to be slugged, as I was by Johnson’s verbal pugil stick, into the bleacher seats? It was a risk for her to say what she said to me, and a gift. I can only think that she was so angry she couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself. Which at the time made me stop caring what the men thought, and to crave insight into what the Black women, the enlisted women, the queer women — all the ones operating outside of the narrow parameters of an acceptable life for a female soldier — were thinking behind their shuttered mouths. When someone rounds you on the convulsive truth, it’s hard to hear but it is a gift, and Johnson taught me to grab with both hands.

Nancy Stroer grew up in a very big family in a very small house in Athens, Georgia. She holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and served in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold War Germany. Her work has appeared in Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing from Middle West Press. Her debut novel, Playing Army, is forthcoming from Koehler Books in 2024. She reads from her work here.

***

It was such an honor and a pleasure to work with these talented writers. Thank you for supporting So Say We All and The Wrath-Bearing Tree.

Founded in 2009, So Say We All is a 501c3 literary and performing arts non-profit organization whose mission is to create opportunities for individuals to tell their stories, and tell them better, through three core priorities: publishing, performance, and education.

In addition to the programs made available to the public, SSWA offers education outreach programs specifically targeting communities who have been talked about disproportionately more than heard from in mainstream media. Creative writing and storytelling courses are offered in partnership with social service organizations such as The Braille Institute, Veteran Writers Group – San Diego, PEN USA, Southern California American Indian Resource Center (SCAIR), the homeless residents of Father Joe’s Village and Toussaint Academy, San Diego Public and County Library branches, and more.

The biggest hurdle for someone with a story that needs to be told is knowing where to begin. So Say We All’s purpose is to answer that need, to be a resource that listens to all facets of its community regardless of the volume at which they speak.

–

Justin Hudnall received his BFA in playwriting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He currently serves as the co-founder and Executive Director of So Say We All, a San Diego-based literary arts and education non-profit. In a prior career, he served with the United Nations in South Sudan as an emergency response officer. He is a recipient of the San Diego Foundation’s Creative Catalyst Fellowship and Rising Arts Leader award, SD Citybeat’s “Best Person” award of 2016, and is an alumni of the Vermont Studio Center. He produces and hosts the PRX public radio series, Incoming.

30 questions; let’s see who knows their stuff. Answers below.

27-30 Correct: Expert

23-26: Sharpshooter

19-22: Marksman

Less than 19: Bolo

Ready, go!

1.  “The war tried to kill us in the spring.” This is the opening line to what 2012 novel by an Army veteran about two buddies deployed to Iraq?

2. “We shot dogs.” This is the opening line to what 2014 short-story by a former Marine?

3. The author of the 2011 short-story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone is ______.

4. In 2012, this novel about an Army Iraq veterans attending a Dallas Cowboys football game was a finalist for the National Book Award.

5. Match the author with the title of his or her story in the 2013 short-story anthology Fire and Forget:

Jacob Siegal                      “The Train

Brian Van Reet                “Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek”

Mariette Kalinowski       “Smile, There are IEDs Everywhere”

6. What are the names of the Iraq Army veteran and Afghanistan Navy veteran who started the NYC non-profit war-writing organization Words After War?

7. This 2012 novel set in Afghanistan drew inspiration from the Greek classic “Antigone.”

8. Match the title and author name of these GWOT war novels written by civilian women:

Roxana Robinson                We All Come Home

Helen Benedict                    Carthage

Joyce Carol Oates               Sand Queen

Katey Schultz                      Be Safe I Love You

Cara Hoffman                       Sparta

9. Name the titles of the two graphic novels written by Maximillian Uriarte, one set in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan.

10. This novel by Marine veteran Elliot Ackerman takes its title from a phrase used to describe American casualties suffered at the hand of their Afghanistan allied partners.

11. Match the author and title of these novels written in the early years of the GWOT veteran-writing boom:

Benjamin Buchholz         The Sandbox

David Zimmerman          Last One In

Nicholas Kulish              One Hundred and One Nights

12. Match the names and titles of these novels and short-story collections written by male civilian authors:

Luke Mogelson            A Big Enough Lie

Eric Bennett                These Heroic, Happy Dead

Jonathan Chopra         The Good Lieutenant

Aaron Gwyn                 Veteran Crisis Hotline

Whitney Terrell           Wynne’s War

13. The name of Marine veteran Atticus Lish’s novel about a former Marine adrift in New York City is ____.

14. Match the names of the Iraqi authors with their works:

Sinan Antoon            The Corpse Exhibition

Hassan Blasim           Frankenstein in Baghdad

Ahmed Saadawi        The Corpse Washer

15. Match the name of the war-writing collective/seminar/journal and its founder:

The Wrath-Bearing  Tree           Lovella Calica

Veterans Writing Project            Adrian Bonenberger

Voices from War                         Travis Martin

Military Experience and the Arts           Kara Krauze

Warrior Writers                           Ron Capps

16. Which military academy sponsored the War, Literature, and the Arts conferences in 2011 and 2018?

17. In what branch did vet-writers Brian Castner, Jesse Goolsby, Eric Chandler, and J.A. Moad serve?

18. In what year did Phil Klay’s short-story collection Redeployment win the National Book Award?

19. This Navy veteran’s short story “Kattekoppen” first appeared in The New Yorker in 2013 and then in the author’s short-story collection Bring Out the Dog in 2018.

20. The proprietors of MilSpeak Foundation and Middle West Press are ______ and ______, respectively.

21. The title of this poem by Brian Turner was later used as the title for an Academy Award-winning movie. What is the title?

22. What are the names of the memoirs written by the following veterans:

Brian Turner ____

Benjamin Busch ____

Ron Capps ____

Kayla Williams ____

23. Match the author with a volume of poetry they have written:

Colin Halloran              Sand Opera

Hugh Martin                Lines Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

Kevin Powers               The Stick Soldiers

Phillip Metres              Shortly Thereafter

24. Match the author with a volume of poetry they have written:

Lisa Stice                   The Iraqi Nights

Jehanne Dubrow      Clamor

Elyse Fenton.             Stateside

Dunya Mikhail           Forces

25. The Army veteran author of the novels Fobbit and Brave Deeds is _______.

26. The two novels set in Afghanistan written by Pakistani-British author Nadeem Aslam are ______ and _____.

27. “The Trauma Hero” is a concept associated with which Army veteran writer? ______

28. What are the names of the war-writers portrayed in this photo accompanying a 2014 Vanity Fair article titled “The Words of War”?

(Vanity Fair photograph by Jonas Karlsson)

29. What are the names of the authors featured in this 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) panel?

30. What are the names of these war-writing luminaries, taken at a reading at The Strand Bookstore in NYC in 2014?:

BONUS (2 points): Benjamin Busch wrote the introductions to one of the following anthologies and Ron Capps wrote the other. Match the author with the anthology:

Retire the Colors

Incoming

Answers:

1: Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

2: Phil Klay, “Redeployment”

3: Siobhan Fallon

4: Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

5: Jacob Siegal: “Smile, IEDs Are Everwhere.” Brian Van Reet: “Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek.” Mariette Kalinowski: “The Train”

6: Matt Gallagher and Brandon Willetts, respectively

7: Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch

8: Roxana Robinson: Sparta. Helen Benedict: Sand Queen. Joyce Carol Oates: Carthage. Katey Schultz: We All Come Home. Cara Hoffman: Be Safe I Love You

9: The White Donkey (Iraq), Battle Born: Lapis Lazuli (Afghanistan)

10: Green on Blue

11: Benjamin Buchholz, One Hundred and One Nights; David Zimmerman, The Sandbox; Nicholas Kulish, One Hundred and One Nights

12: Luke Mogelson, These Heroic, Happy Dead; Eric Bennett, A Big Enough Lie. Jonathan Chopra, Veteran Crisis Hotline; Aaron Gwyn, Wynne’s War; Whitney Terrell, The Good Lieutenant

13: Preparation for the Next Life

14: Sinan Antoon, The Corpse Washer; Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition; Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad

15:  The Wrath-Bearing Tree: Adrian Bonenberger; Veterans Writing Project: Ron Capps; Voices from War: Kara Krauze; Military Experience and the Arts; Travis Martin; Warrior Writers: Lovella Calica

16: The United States Air Force Academy

17: United States Air Force

18: 2014

19: Will Mackin

20: Tracy Crow and Randy Brown (Charlie Sherpa)

21: Brian Turner’s The Hurt Locker

22: Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country; Benjamin Busch, Dust to Dust; Ron Capps, Seriously Not All Right; Kayla Williams, Loved My Weapon More Than You (or, Plenty of Time When We Get Home)

23: Colin Halloran, Shortly Thereafter; Hugh Martin, The Stick Soldiers; Kevin Powers, Lines Composed During a Lull in the Fighting; Philip Metres, Sand Opera

24: Lisa Stice, Forces; Jehanne Dubrow, Stateside; Elyse Fenton, Clamor; Dunya Mikhail, The Iraqi Nights

25: David Abrams

26: The Wasted Vigil and The Blind Man’s Garden

27: Roy Scranton

28: Left to right: Maurice Decaul, Phil Klay, Elliot Ackerman, Kevin Powers, Brandon Willetts, Matt Gallagher

29: Left to right: Brian Turner, Katey Shultz, Siobhan Fallon, Benjamin Busch, Phil Klay

30: Left to right: Adrian Bonenberger, Roxana Robinson, David Abrams, Matt Gallagher

BONUS: Retire the Colors: Ron Capps; Standing Down: Benjamin Busch

“Fire in the belly!” “Be all you can be!” “Get fired up!”  Slogans to incite, ignite, excite and encourage living on the edge—the thrill of defying death on the pages of peril. “Fire in the hole!” The acrid tang of sulfur and gun powder odor, the tympanic thrum in my ears.  “Drive on!” “Hoorah!” Be honorable—I wanted that. “God! Duty! Country!” Be a part of something greater than yourself; ask what you can do for your country.  “Lockdown, lockdown—fires take your position!” Words seared into my adrenalin. The Pavlovian response to leap from the warm comfort of my bed to draping myself with combat gear, bare feet to boots, racing to a foxhole.

Each time my Sgt. copped a quick feel, each time I screamed “Cover me!” the soft and good and kind parts of me fragmented and fell away making me sharper, more linear, more chiseled. Each leer and lip lock, each lock and load inventoried in perpetuity in my brain—tiny registers of offense, stacking up sandbags of resistance, numbness, defenses inside me precariously high—get ready, keep vigilant—always on the alert. Balance, balance—those sandbags teeter and threaten to topple unceasingly.

“Ruck up!” (time to move out). “Tits up!” (dead person ahead). “All one big Charlie Foxtrot,” (cluster fuck).  Sing along with the cadence, “We’re gonna rape, kill, pillage and burn!”  and the stack gets higher, sleep gets leaner, readiness gets sharper and the air gets thinner. Tight rope walking on concertina wire.  It’s all about being one of the boys, only I’m not. It’s all about embracing the aggression and dismissing the vile, only I don’t and I can’t. It’s going all in…only I don’t belong “in.”

Silverfish in shower drains, rats and rodents running rampant in streets where school children play crawling on warheads, where raw sewage seeps into rice fields. It’s hookworms in the topsoil, cockroaches in the quarters, abandoned Amerasians, beggars, parasites and prostitutes—too much to keep up with.  Jackhammering at my privilege, burrowing into my core, nicking away tiny shards of me. Increasing the pounding percussion in my ears, behind my eyes, throughout my head.  Grinding my teeth unconsciously, knowing the expectations roll like an unstoppable boulder: higher, faster, smarter, more than, stronger, better, first place, tight group until yeah, that edge is now a razor; my nerves electric current, my heart in a chronic race with my respiration. The alert sirens and flashing lights of gray matter pinwheeling wildly, working their way into a tornado-like funnel of frantic preparedness.  Ever vigilant, ever ready, every day, every second.

“So get fired up Kid—get that fire in the belly!” with a yuk yuk solid slap on the back. Aspirations of the American Way. But more of me keeps dying. Splintering off, bleeding out, disfiguring like a Picasso.  Bits of me swept up and away like smoke off a moth’s wing; dust motes of shoulds and oughts with nowhere to go. A wail chafes my throat, “God! Help me!” But god is a hologram bubble here; visible one second, then evaporates and is gone. What would there be to help anyway? All that fire leaves–is ash.

Every work day morning at 8 o’clock sharp, me, Juan, Marcus, and Willard stand at attention with hands over our hearts while the national anthem plays on the loud speaker at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, San Diego, California. While the music plays, resident supervisor, Captain C. T. Wallace, in his Navy Reserve uniform, runs the flag up the pole, ties off the rope, salutes, and goes into his office.

I’m Mike. I  ride herd on the crew renovating gravesites here at this place of rest for American vets. It ain’t easy work. I speak un poco Espanol, and my crew is mostly Mexican. My rule is when they conversate with each other they can talk Swahili for all I care, but they have to speak English to me.

These guys work hard in full sun most every day, at prevailing wage. I really have three crews, the one working today, the one that leaves every two, three  months, and one in training. Something that intrigues almost everyone is the ashes of cremated vets. Yesterday, the whole crew gathered around so I knew something was up.

Marcus said, “Look at this, Boss. Someone forgot to put a body back where it came from.” He handed me an pickle jar filled with what I quickly saw was ground up charcoal and crushed pasta shells. That’s not what cremains look like, but I kept quiet.

“How can we get this back where it belongs? There’s no name on it?”

“Hell, that’s no problem.” I fished out a piece of broken pasta and popped it my mouth. “We’ll just eat it. No one will ever know.”

The crew burst out laughing. Marcos grins. “You’re un bastardo inteligente.” With this bunch, one minute I’m a mean-ass drill instructor, the next a friend.

Every morning, after the Anthem, a gray Kia Rio drives past. The driver, a young blonde wearing a blue pants suit, low-heeled black shoes, and a white blouse, opens the car’s trunk, grabs a green and white folding chair, a yellow umbrella, and a flower, and carries these like birthday presents to her usual spot near the rose bushes.

She sets up her chair, opens the umbrella, then goes to the columbarium, where ashes of cremated bodies are kept, unlocks a niche door, takes out an urn, about the size of a half-gallon of milk-remains of the person she’s mourning-holds it a minute, puts it back, stretches to remove yesterday’s white geranium from its holder, replaces it with the new flower and goes to her chair.

Often, on the blue San Diego bay below like an art gallery painting, a submarine, or aircraft carrier glides out to sea, past the Point Loma light house, with sea gulls circling and the sun turning the ocean silver and gold.

The young woman fits her i-Phone buds into her ears, opens a book, and reads, wetting her finger with a pink tongue to turn a page. She’s still there at noon when we come up to eat lunch in the shade of the coral tree.

Juan says, “She’s here every day, for who? Husband? Brother?” He waves a tattooed hand in the air. “Every fuckin’ day, rain, or shine.”

Willard asks, “How do ya know ever day? Ya work weekends?”

Juan says, “I bet if the park’s open, she’s here. A husband probably. Not likely her daddy. She needs a man. Like me.”

Juan was paroled from Donovan State Pen last January. His first few days he was edgy as hell when the Star-Spangled Banner played. “Part of our job is respect for the deceased,” I said. That seemed to work. He’s first on the truck every morning and follows directions. That’s all I can ask from any worker.

Marcus asks, “Think the lady plays music on her phone?”

Marcus and Juan are kin, second cousins, I think, or maybe they married sisters. Anyway, they ride together in Marcus’ Ford Bronco and eat the same thing at lunch. Marcus is broad as sliding door, has a shaggy grey moustache and wears the same green pants and long-sleeve blue shirt every day.

Willard says, “Classy girl like her? Probably religious shit.”

He’s tall with long blonde hair. Always has a red and blue wool beanie pulled low over his blue eyes. He sits on the ground in the shade of the truck to eat lunch and has more ‘tats than an NBA player. He’s done no hard time if his application is correct.

Marcus says, “Classy? You mean assy? She wants something hard. Carne dulce. I’m her man.”

I ignore this and spray paint the grass orange where we’re to dig.

*

One noon, we’ve finished our tortas. Marcus grabs the weed whacker we use to barber the grass around markers, lopes across the road and begins to edge the sidewalk next to the blonde woman’s chair. What the hell!

I run up. Her blue eyes go big, her face white.

“Pardon us, Ma’am. My man’s trimming grass that maintenance missed.”

“Yeah,” Marcus says, “Make it perfect. For you.” His eyes scorch her from jeans to tennis shoes..

Her voice sweet as a phoebe’s call, but a bit shrill, she says. “How nice.”

*

Back at the truck, me and Marcus have a go. “Dude,” I say. “What the hell?”

“Wanted her to see a real man.”

“That was pretty stupid.”

“Oh, yeah? She was all smiles. Liked it.”

“Really? Truth is, you scared her shitless. Pull that trick again, I’ll write you up.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Count on it.”

“Un hombre tiene que hacer lo que un hombre tiene que hacer?”

“Not on my watch, hombre.”

At two o’clock every day, the blonde stows her gear and drives off in her gray Kia, going slow as a hearse.

*

Soil contracts at night and expands by day. Rain and irrigation water wash away dirt leaving ruts and holes. Gophers and rats dig tunnels. All this causes head stones to tilt or fall over. Sometimes, a casket splits open, showing rags and brass buttons, bones grey as gun powder, some no longer than a chicken leg.

Often, we have to renovate a whole section. We spread caskets and markers on the grass, name side up so we know what goes where when we’re ready to close the graves. When this happens, cemetery visitors swarm like yellow jackets around us, push past our yellow tape, take selfies next to the caskets, kick clods into the trenches, pepper us with questions. “Whatcha doing?”

I answer, “Heroes deserve a beautiful and peaceful resting place. We’re repairing their graves.”

“Every casket has a body?”

“Absolutely. We’re careful to see each grave is correctly marked.” That’s the company spiel. It’s a lie. Stones mark where a body used to be, but tree roots squeeze caskets, they  disintegrate and flesh rots. When we work, we dig the markers out by hand before the backhoe rips a trench, then we lower a metal box into the ground and pour in reinforced concrete. When the cement is dry enough you can’t write your name in it, we re-set the headstone, a man on each side, careful not to leave any footprints, and sink the marker five inches deep, tamp sand and pea gravel around it and replant the sod. That sucker will stand straight as a soldier for years.

It takes sweat and know-how to cut away stubble with a sharp shooter and pry out weeds  with a rough-neck bar or square up a trench with a spade, but it  gives me time to think. I screwed things up with booze so bad that eight years ago, as part of my rehab, the VA sent me to culinary school. I had custody of my kids then. I got a job at a restaurant, doing food prep, but the pay was so lousy, I couldn’t pay my rent, much less keep two growing boys and a young lady in clothes, so I hired on here. Me and the kid’s momma have joint custody. I make $12.38 an hour, $18.56 overtime, with an extra twenty-five a week for being crew supervisor.  I try to save a little each time the eagle shits so I can open a restaurant someday. Weekends. Reservations-only seating.

I trim the grass around a stone with the weed whipper while my crew digs on a new section. Saturday night Cinda’s coming for dinner. If she can find a sitter. She lives in that double-wide across the street and two trailers down at Clariton Estates Mobile Home Park. She has full, red lips, tons of dark curls and dancing eyes. When she smiles, my throat goes tight.

I’ll start with an amuse-bouche, say a celery-infused beef puree. For the primo, Bibb lettuce and endive, with a little arugula and radicchio for bitterness, tossed with quinoa and mushrooms, topped off with honey-roasted walnuts and organic plum tomatoes and a nice lemon garlic dressing.

What secondo will she want? Fish or chicken? I’ll drop by her trailer tonight after her kids are down, say 8:30 or so, and ask her. If fish, it’ll be sea bass grilled in lemon butter and almond paste. If chicken, I’ll wrap it in foil and smother it under charcoal with parsley, onions, and green peppers.

The dulce? Double chocolate cake. I’ll bake it Friday, after work.

This week, my mind wonders from Cinda and Saturday night’s plans. The blonde in the beach chair by the columbarium? Who’s she thinking about?

*

Willard and Marcus are having a lover’s spat. They team up on most projects. If Marcus made a sharp turn, Willard would break his nose.

“What ’ya mean, rules for dying? Silliest thing I ever heard.” Williard tosses his shovel away and picks up a hoe.

Marcus says, “There’s five of ‘em, man. When my nephew was offed, the social worker told us about ‘em.” He grabs a hoe, too.

Williard doesn’t go for this. “Tonterias.”

“No bullshit. She named ‘em. One by one.” Marcus turns to me. “Tell him, Boss.”

“You mean the stages of grief? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance?” Marcus nods. Surprised I guess. I learned these when my AA sponsor’s Dad died last year. He made certain he touched every base, but other sober drunks told me you’ll live with those five mind states forever.

“Yeah. That’s what I meant.”

Willard  still has doubts. “When my Old Man took out that eucalyptus with his motorcycle, we knew he was dead. There was nothing to deny. Tore his bike all to shit. Him, too.” His face is red, and not just from work. This is the most I’ve ever heard him talk.

I nod. “Ever play over and over in your head how you could have kept the accident from happening? Feel sad when you think about it?”

“Everybody does, right? That’s normal, ain’t it.”

“I think Marcus’ point is our mind goes through various stages when someone close to us kicks off. Thinking how you could have changed things? That’s bargaining. Feeling shitty. That’s depression.”

Willard slices a lizard in half with his shovel. “Hell, I don’t drive the street where he bought it anymore. Ain’t that the shits?” He shakes his head as if to change the memory..

Juan says, “What staget, how you say, stage, is our Little Darlin’ goin’ through?”

“The blonde? Beats me.”

“Is there a dickin’ stage? That’s what she needs. A good jugando.”

*

A week or so later we’re waiting for the backhoe to trench a site. Marcus says, “Boss, I dropped my gloves at lunch. I’ll go get ‘em.”

“Like hell you will. The other crew sees you, they’ll say you’re diddling around, and I’ll have paper work to complete for weeks. I get the big bucks. I’ll go.”

Marcus clenches and un-clenches his fist.

I ignore this. “Double check our measurements before the ‘hoe starts, okay? I won’t be long.”

Me and the crew eat lunch across from the columbarium because the benches there are in the shade, the rest rooms clean and easy to get to. I go to where Marcus sat. No gloves. Where they on the ground and someone tossed ‘em in the trash? Negative. I stoop to look under the bench.

A girl’s voice interrupts. “Looking for these?”

It’s the blonde in the Kia. She’s not blonde any more. Her hair is pink and blue. She different somehow. She waves Marcus’ gloves.

“That wild-eyed guy. The grass trimmer. He dropped ‘em. I was taking ‘em to Lost and Found. You’re the boss, right?”

I nod. “Thanks.”

The small gold necklace around her throat says Misty.

“Misty, you’re here every day. What do you  read?”

“Stuff Tate liked.” She holds up a book. “This is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” She smiles. “I finished Harry Potter. The whole series.” She waves her red and gold phone. “I’m getting damn good at Grand Theft Auto, too.”

“I’m impressed. Tate was your husband?”

Her face pales. “Yeah. He was Army. An IED exploded near him in Afghanistan. They shipped his body home. I never saw it. We were married one year, eight months and four days. At his funeral, as a testimony to his service, I vowed to visit his grave 609 days straight.” She smiles. “Seventy-three more to go. You familiar with the Five Stages of Grief?”

The second time in two days this has come up. “Some. Why?”

She takes off her sun glasses. Big blue eyes. “I’m past denial but I’m still angry. If I could, I’d kill every fucking politician in D.C.” Black streaks run down her cheeks. “My support group says we never fully recover, just learn to survive.” She tries to smile through the tears.

“Got a job. Waitress at a bowling alley café. To pass the time. Part of  survival my group says.” She smiles. “I’m nuts, I guess. I talk with my dead husband. And he answers.” A half smile. “He says it’s okay to date. But I can’t. Not yet.” She puts a finger to her lips. “Quiet, Misty. Tate says these grounds are sacred. Respect the dead. Don’t talk so much.”  She smiles. “You agree?’

I nod.

She turns and walks to her chair, without looking back. A small blonde woman living a tortured life.

*

I’m Navy, myself. The only one in my crew who served, but my bunch turns over so often, next week I might have four. I was stationed at Subic Bay in the Philippines for 2 years. Me and this Filipino girl, Baby Ruth, shacked up. I fell in love. Not with her, but the sex. I was raised Southern Baptist, taught to  love Jesus more than life. My first liberty I had a Manhattan. After that, there was little room for Jesus. An old salt said church is good place to find women. I went with him. Met Baby Ruth. She was short and pretty, with skin the color of coffee with cream. Sex came natural to her. When my tour ended I felt guilty leaving her there. Stateside, my pastor said I could send for her. I did. We got married. She was a real Jesus freak. I was mostly just confused. I didn’t love her, but loved our sex. I hated our kids, but loved being a dad. Booze and nose candy made everything better.

Four years later, two squalling kids running around, my wife preaching Jesus to me, my head splitting, hands shaking, desperate as a convict on death row, I’d swear every morning I’d had my last drink. One night wasted on booze and drugs, I wrecked my truck on the 805. It took the doctors at the Veteran’s Affairs hospital 42 days to put me back together again. I joined AA. Three years later I got straight. Lost my job as a heavy equipment mechanic and tried small engine repairs but the drugs made my hands shake and the detail work gave me a head ache. The VA said they’d send me to culinary school. They did. I finished a 3-month course.

I visit AA rooms most weekends. Last night, the speaker talked about the 3rd Step, where you make a decision to turn your will and your life over to God. Six  years ago, I told my sponsor I’d like to do that. He asked, “If two bull frogs sit on a lily pad and one of them decides to jump, how many bull frogs are on the lily pad?”

“One,” I answered.

“No, dummy. Two. Decidin’ to jump ain’t the same as jumpin’.”

So, I jumped. Did all the fuckin’ steps. The whole nine yards. That’s why I’m sober today.

*

Getting ready for Cinda’s visit tonight, I clean the kitchen, wash my DAV Thrift Shop dishware, shine both settings of silverware, spread a red and yellow beach towel on the table and put Martinelli’s in the frig. I’ll buy a cake since I didn’t bake last night. I clean the bathroom and change sheets. Mrs. Chase from the single-wide next door- I call her Mrs. Scuttlebutt-bangs on my door.

“Isn’t it romantic? Cinda’s husband brought her the prettiest bouquet. Spend the night. He wants them to try and make a go of their marriage again.”

Suddenly I’m tired, really tired. It’ll be chicken for lunch this week.

*

Sunday morning. I wake up empty. Haven’t seen Misty or her Kia this week. What gives?” I slam a Nine Inch Nails CD intomy truck’s player, grab a 5-Hour Energy and drive to Fort Rosecrans.

What the fuck? Willard’s beat up pickup’s in the parking lot. Why? Not what I expected. Misty’s next to the roses as usual. Williard’s headed toward her. I run across the grass toward him.

He sees me. “Stay out of this, Boss!”

“Where ya goin’?”

“Juan says she wants a man. That’s me.”

I feel his body heat. The smell of bourbon. Sweat. He needs a shave. His beanie hides blood shot eyes.

“You can’t just grab her.”

“You didn’t say shit when Marcus bragged what he’d like to do to her.”

“No, but I should have. Think it through, man. Don’t do something today you’ll regret tomorrow.” Talking Program to adrunk is a waste of time, I know. Get ‘em when they’re sober. And shaky, the Big Book says.

Willard’s breathing hard. Sweat glues his shirt to his back.

“I could take ya,” he says, squaring up in front of me, fists doubled.

“I know.” He’s one tall dude.

I’m breathing fast. I don’t want to fight. “Walk away, my friend, and it’s over.”

He sways like a weeds in the wind. “Fuck you.”

He steps toward me. I don’t move. “We gonna fight?”

“If we have to.”

“What if I walk?”

“That’s the smart thing.”

“You gonna fire me?”

“I have to. Don’t come in Monday. HR will send what you’re owed.”

“Fuck.” He doubles his fists again. “I could beat the shit out of you.”

“I know. All that would prove is you’re tough. You’re a smart guy. Go sleep it off. You’ll be glad you did tomorrow.”

He glares at me, takes a deep breath, turns, and weaves off toward his pickup.

*

“That looked pretty intense.”

It’s Misty.

“Nah. Work stuff. No big deal.” I force a smile. “Didn’t see you this last week. Where you been?”

“I won’t be here as often as before.” It’s her turn to force a smile. “I met someone. It’s not serious, but my support group says it’s time I moved on. I’ll try.” The smile works this time.

I nod. “ I understand.” Maybe it’s time I move on, too.

Misty sticks out her hand. “Thanks for being my friend.”

“My pleasure, ma’am.” I come to attention and salute. She laughs and walks toward her car, ready to meet life on life’s terms.

Monday morning after the Anthem, a black Nissan drives slowly by and parks. A man in a dark suit takes two chairs from the trunk and carries them to a fresh-dug grave under a tarp. He goes back to the car and escorts a small lady wearing a black hijab to the chairs. They sit.

On the San Diego bay below, sea gulls circle and the sun turns the ocean silver and gold, like an art gallery painting. An aircraft carrier glides past Point Loma Light House, going off to war.

Patrick Hicks: Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and taught English in South Korea for a year before he joined the United States Army. He served in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division and, when he was deployed to Iraq, he became an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. His first collection of poetry, Here, Bullet, won the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Pen Center USA “Best in the West Award”, and it was a New York Times Editor’s Choice Selection. His second collection, Phantom Noise, received equally strong attention and it was shortlisted for the coveted T.S. Eliot Prize in England. His memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, has been praised for both its clear-eyed perception of what it means to go to war, as well as it’s narrative structure, which is fragmented vignettes that examine the many wars that America has been involved in. Turner nudges us to think about the long after-burn of war and how one generation influences the next.

His work has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and many others. He received an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Turner gives readings all over the world and he has made appearances on NPR, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, PBS, and RTÉ in Ireland. When not writing or touring, he is a faculty member in the MFA Program at the University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. Although soft spoken and humble, his readings at book festivals and universities are deeply thoughtful and moving explorations about literature, global politics, and our responsibilities to each other.

Turner has three new collections coming out with Alice James Books, and we sat down to talk about the first in the series: The Wild Delight of Wild Things.

Patrick Hicks: Let’s start with the title, which comes from a line of poetry that your wife, Ilyse Kusnetz, wrote. In fact, the very first poem in The Wild Delight of Wild Things isn’t your work, it’s hers. It’s as if we have to read through her work in order to get at your own. And perhaps not surprisingly, she infuses the entire collection. She passed away of cancer in 2016 and, as I read this new collection, it felt like a restoring of her presence or an act of determined memory to be in conversation with her. Could you talk about Ilyse’s place in this collection and how she continues to influence you?

Brian Turner: Our home in Orlando, Florida, has a small entryway that leads to the living room. I’ve never told anyone this, but whenever I’m about to leave the house and whenever I return home, there’s a very brief ritual I do that reminds me of Ilyse. It’s one of the many ways I try to be alive with her in my life. To be present. To be in the presence of. To be in conversation with. And I think this practice mirrors, in some ways, the construction of this book—as her voice both begins and ends the meditation.

It’s also a chance for me to share her voice with others, which is a way of saying it’s a chance for more people to fall in love with her. And on that note—I dare anyone to read that first poem of hers and not fall at least a little bit in love with her.

PH: One of the first poems in The Wild Delight of Wild Things is “The Immortals.” It’s about jellyfish that seem to resurrect themselves from the dead and become young again. It’s a denial of death, and it’s rooted in nature. You write, “They have learned to reinvent themselves in defiance/ of the body’s undoing. They rise from their own deaths./ They rise from the bottom of the sea.” For a poet who has been lauded, rightfully so, for your work about the Iraq War, there are many references about nature woven throughout Wild Delight. Was it liberating to focus on things other than the Iraq War? In many ways, this collection feels like it comes from Brian, and not from Sergeant Turner.

BT: You know, this is something I’ve thought about quite a bit—not only for myself, but it’s a dynamic that I recognize in many writers and artists. When I lead writing workshops for veterans, for example, I often mention that my intention isn’t to simply give them writing tools and meditative approaches that might help them to explore and navigate their experiences while in uniform. I tell them that my larger hope is to offer tools that might help them to write their way into the rest of their lives.

And here I am, doing that very thing. You know? Becoming Brian, more and more with each passing day.

PH: “The Salton Sea” starts off with a rumination of the crew of Enola Gay practicing bombing runs as they drop huge barrels of concrete onto a target that would eventually become Hiroshima. And then the poem switches to the Cold War. You mention how twenty-four million gallons of jet fuel spilled “into the water that Albuquerque rests on.” Ilyse grew up in Albuquerque and died of cancer. It’s entirely possible, as you write, that she is “one of many unrecorded deaths on the home front.” In the poem, you talk about a reluctance for some people to think that she could have been a victim of the Cold War. Could you talk about what prompted this poem?

BT: This poem is watermarked with so many conversations Ilyse and I had after her diagnosis. And the anger welling up near the end—that’s her anger, blended with my own. There’s research involved in this poem, too, sure, but the basic argument and the emotional structure of the poem were drafted by her one conversation at a time with me as its first audience.

If we take a bird’s-eye-view of this… I’ve long been fascinated by the boundaries drawn between what some call the home-front and what we might think of as a conflict zone. There’s a kind of psychic disconnect there, I think. While it’s a very practical and seemingly logical thing to associate conflict zones with places where pain and trauma and death and violence occur, it does a disservice to the complexity of experience when we untether the home-front from the battlefield.

It’s similar to the experience of looking at an oak tree—how easy it is sometimes to forget that the root structure below can grow as much as three times larger than the canopy above.

PH: Maybe we could stay on this line of thinking for a moment. In the poem immediately following “The Salton Sea” you write about Cuvier’s Beaked Whales beaching themselves—and dying—due to the “acoustic blasts of active sonar” in submarines. Just as the military inadvertently poisoned the water of Albuquerque, the Navy is doing collateral damage to whales. In both poems, you question the long-term hidden effects of war. Do you notice such things, perhaps, due to your experiences as a soldier? You have spoken at book festivals about the grave and lasting harm that has been caused to children caught in war.

BT: It’s impossible for me to know whether I might have written this poem if I’d never worn the uniform. But I’m moved and troubled by these losses when I hear of them. Collateral damage. I recently visited the battlefield in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and walked some of the Union lines. As I considered the landscape, I searched for stands of red cedar and live oaks. I was looking for survivors—for ancient trees with stories to tell. Eastern red cedar, for example, can live up to 900 years. And I wondered if some still held minie balls or grapeshot within them, or if trees sometimes weep bullets the way the human body can sometimes weep shards of glass or metal fragments long after an initial injury.

PH: In “The Jurassic Coast” you have a lengthy stanza that lists off the animals that will likely go extinct before the century is out. I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of many of them, which is precisely the point I think you’re trying to make. What are we inadvertently killing? Why don’t we care? You end the poem with a powerful stanza about the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Just as you celebrate the wild delight of wild things in this collection, there is also an undercurrent of lament and despair.

BT: I wonder sometimes if the vast scale of it all is simply too overwhelming for the mind to grasp. I know that’s true for me. While this book holds an intimate conversation with Ilyse at its center, that conversation is mirrored, in some ways, with a meditation on climate change and what it means to live in the Anthropocene. Elegy is at the heart of this, I’m sure. A way of praising and lamenting and grieving and offering comfort all at once. My hope is that it’s clear-eyed in its compassion.

PH: Very much so. And even though I just mentioned an undercurrent of despair running through this collection a few seconds ago, it is equally true there is profound awe and fascination for the world around you. Some of these poems span lengths of geological time that our minds simply cannot fathom. It’s clear that a great deal of research went into these poems. Can you talk about your research process and how you threaded that information into these poems?

BT: Long before this book truly discovered its form, I began an earlier version as a kind of challenge: I would write 100 brief lyric essays on nature, and in each piece, I would learn something about the world and I’d also in some way be in conversation with Ilyse and our relationship. It didn’t work as a book, though—and that was a hard thing to accept at first. I had to sit with that fact for some time before rolling up my sleeves and weighing what was necessary and what had not earned its place on the page.

One of the beautiful things I learned in this entire process is that scientists and researchers are incredibly kind and helpful and clear and generous. Only once or twice did I not receive a response to a query. The opposite was true of the vast majority of folks I reached out to for their expertise. I have a standing invitation now, for example, to visit cave sites in India and to see first-hand the cupules I’ve written about in “The Auditorium Cave.” And I can’t wait to go!

PH: One of the most powerful poems in this collection is “Ashes, Ashes.” You start by saying “California is on fire” and then mention how trees and plants have been turned into particulate that rides the air as ash. You also bring our attention to the longest burning fire anywhere on Earth—an underground coal seam in Australia that has been raging for some 6,000 years. The third part of this poem focuses on your father’s body being broken down by the intense flames of a crematoria oven, and you write about it in great detail. Lastly, there is the haunting image of you cradling Ilyse’s ashes the night you brought her urn home. Could you talk about the writing process for this poem? How long did it take to write “Ashes, Ashes”? It’s one of your longest poems in the collection, and I sense that it took a while to piece together.

BT: “Ashes, Ashes” took several years to write, though the bulk of the writing was done in three phases. The first half of the poem was written after my father’s death, in 2015, and Ilyse was still alive. We didn’t talk about Marshall’s death. It was something I pushed down inside of myself emotionally. And yet, I wrote this meditation during the autumn after his death. Ilyse read everything I wrote and this meditation was no exception—as she was its first editor. And so, in a sense, we talked about this grief through the page as she suggested edits and choices in language, but the conversation stayed there and I didn’t talk about his loss outside of that.

What I couldn’t see then—or had blocked from my own imagination—was that this meditation would later include the second half that you mention. A version was published in The Georgia Review (Fall 2017), and that was later scaled down into the much more streamlined version that’s here in the book.

I’m continually reminded that there are things I want to write, and there are things I need to write. It’s a rare thing for a poem to contain both of these things at once.

PH: A difficult question, and I want to ask it delicately. In “The End of the World” you write, “I wanted the ruin. I’d be lying if I said otherwise./ I wanted the hurricane to destroy what was left of my life./ […] if that hurricane simply crushed me to death/ and then splintered the home around me into an unspeakable/ puzzle of what was once our favorite place on Earth—so be it.” Ilyse passed way in 2016 and you have also lost your best friend, Brian Voight, as well as your step-father, Marshall. Grief has been your companion for a long time now. How have music and words sustained you?

BT: Now that some time has passed—it’s been almost seven years—I can see a bit more clearly. I can see that writing helped me to find my way forward. I had a lot of anger for quite some time, and it’s been difficult for the body to metabolize that and then slough it away. Part of what helped was the research I did into the natural world. In some ways that attention to the details of this amazing planet helped me to fall in love with it once more. And yes, I had fallen out of love with it. When I realized that art offered some ways back into memory, and into conversations with the dead I love—that began a series of creative meditations both on the page and with sound that have sustained me to this day. Ilyse and Brian both died far too young. Both were artists that had so much to give to this world, to all of us. Part of my work now, as an artist, and as a human being, is to find ways to collaborate with them so that others might have a chance to meet those I love.

I’ve found that the sorrow that lives within the body remains, at least for now, with a kind of ebb and flow to it. It’s something I’m learning to live with. We each grieve in our own way, and the signature of love and loss is unique to the heart that carries it.

A friend in Colorado has shared with me some of the trees up in the mountains that are a part of his life. Lightning trees, as he calls them. You can trace the smooth skin of the trunk where lighting has discharged through the tree with such intensity that the bark has been blown off. They are mapped with scars from the ground to the sky. They are survivors. They radiate a quiet wisdom. And I can’t explain what it is or how it happens, but when I place my palms on the trunks of those trees, a sense of calm washes through me, something timeless and transcendent, and I open my eyes, and I breathe, and then I walk back into the days of my life.

PH: There is a definite, and yet subtle, soundscape to this collection. Waves appear in many of the poems. So do birds, clouds, fire, and the fall of rain. You’ve done something unique for this collection because you have literally created a soundscape that can be accessed by a QR code. Once a reader finishes The Wild Delight of Wild Things you invite them to listen to a thirty-minute song called “Clouds,” which in many ways is an auditory meditation on the entire collection as a whole. I can hear the sounds that hold these poems together and there is also film of clouds taken at 30,000 feet. I’m not aware of seeing—or hearing—anything quite like this before. Could you talk about how the idea, and the song, came together?

BT: I didn’t realize I was creating this when I began it. In Chennai, I sat under a sacred tree and recorded the birds above. I then had the honor of speaking with over 100 students of traditional dance and song in a nearby classroom—and so I asked if they might follow my lead and sing a wave-like meditative pattern with me, which I recorded on a hand-held recorder that I often carry with me. Likewise, while living in Ireland as the inaugural John Montague International Poetry Fellow for the city of Cork, in 2018, I was lucky enough to have a full choir bussed in from an outlying town to record in a gorgeous chapel. The waves themselves were recorded late one night on Anna Marie Island as Ilyse and I sat on the beach to watch the Perseids rain down.

And so, this meditation in sound arose organically as I began to learn how to live in the word after. Now that it’s done, I hope that “Clouds” might help the reader to process their own thoughts and feelings and experiences once they’re finished with the book. But in a larger sense, I hope this meditation stands on its own—and that it might prove meaningful and helpful for others in ways that I can only imagine.

*
The Wild Delight of Wild Things will be published by Alice James Books in August 2023. To hear a sample from “Clouds,” click here.

Memoirs written by soldiers and Marines who fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah in Iraq and the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan portray many events that caused their authors anguish. Below I describe three particularly wrenching episodes. More than narratives of harrowing combat action, they illustrate the emotional strife wrought by war.

The first two episodes are from Ray McPadden’s memoir We March at Midnight. McPadden served as a US Army platoon leader in 1-32 Infantry, 10^th Mountain Division, on a 15-month deployment to the Korengal and then on a subsequent redeployment there with the 2^nd Battalion, 75^th Ranger Regiment.

The third episode is from Alexander Saxby’s Fallujah Memoirs: A Grunt’s Eye View of the Second Battle of Fallujah. Saxby, a rifleman in 1^st Battalion, 8^th Marines, recounts his participation in the house-by-house fighting in Fallujah in November 2004.

As you read my summaries of the events, consider what would you have done if you were in the authors’ boots and how would you feel about the events now.

The Powerless Lieutenant

Late in McPadden’s first tour in the Korengal, he and his platoon are visited by their battalion commander (a lieutenant colonel) and command sergeant major (the senior enlisted soldier in the battalion). McPadden and his men have been in the field throughout their deployment, seeing much fighting and also engaging extensively with local nationals on more peaceable terms. They have endured a long, cold winter without many amenities, and as McPadden puts it, “climbed every mountain in Kunar twice.” McPadden and his men clean-up as best they can for the visit, for they sense it is as much an inspection as a friendly chance to thank the platoon for a long, hard job well-done. Throughout We March at Midnight, McPadden recounts a love/hate relationship with his chain-of-command. On one hand, he idealizes his company commander and battalion commander as soldier-warriors he hopes to impress. However, he also often finds them out-of-touch with the actual circumstances he and his men face and prone to issuing orders that are impossible to fulfill.

The visit begins well, but then goes horribly wrong. A soldier in McPadden’s platoon attempts a funny retort to a question from the sergeant major and the sergeant major, a by-the-book stickler for order-and-discipline, is not amused. He rips the soldier a new one, and then orders the soldier to pack his bags; the soldier is unceremoniously being removed from the platoon. By the sergeant major’s book, an insubordinate wise-ass given to pop-off answers has no place in the unit, no matter how good a fighter he has been or how entrenched he is in the platoon family. The platoon, already short-handed as a result of combat death and injury, must now endure the last few weeks of deployment without one of their beloved members and a trusted fighter.

The soldier is crushed, and McPadden stands there dumbfounded. He appeals to the battalion commander, but the colonel is anything but sympathetic. “It’s decided,” he retorts, “Trust me, we are doing you a favor,” as if he too believed the soldier was a cancer that needed excising for the good health of the platoon. McPadden, suddenly aware how powerless he is and how capricious is his chain-of-command, stands paralyzed as the soldier packs his gear and stows it in one of the colonel’s trucks. McPadden writes:

Minutes later the colonel’s convoy departs with [the soldier] crying in the back seat of the second Humvee. I cannot stop thinking about this little warrior, crying at being removed from his platoon and squad, destroyed at being forced off the battlefield.

Former Friend, Now a Foe

Toward the end of his tour in the Korengal with 1-32 Infantry, McPadden befriends a local policeman named Abdul, who then becomes McPadden’s partner in several military, infrastructure, and governance projects. McPadden and his men are invited into Abdul’s home for meetings and meals, where they meet his family and are always extended hospitality. All good, but two years later McPadden returns to the Korengal as part of a Ranger strike-force charged with killing-or-capturing Taliban leaders. As one mission unfolds, McPadden finds himself and his Rangers lined up outside Abdul’s residence. An Afghan male emerges from the compound and is shot dead by the Rangers. McPadden makes a funny quip about the man’s death rattle, but upon inspecting the body recognizes the man as Abdul’s father. The Rangers then raid the residence and McPadden follows his men inside. There, he sees Abdul lined up against the wall with the other detainees. McPadden writes:

His aquiline nose I will never forget. If this were a movie, at this point, we would lock eye and one of would say something with tremendous gravity. In reality I freeze, then spin away and duck out of the house, fearing Abdul has seen my face. I do not know what he would say to me, whether he’d insist this is a mistake and plea for release or maybe admit to being bad. Perhaps he will blame me for everything that afflicts his homeland: poverty, lack of social mobility, decades of civil war, scarce natural resources, corruption, economic instability, and religious fanaticism. I don’t really know. I do know that when we shot Abdul’s dad, I mimicked his death sound perhaps to convince myself that I didn’t care about these people. In any case, I decide the worst thing would be Abdul failing to remember me at all.

Death in a Minaret

A week into the Second Battle of Fallujah, on Alexander Saxby’s birthday, a good friend of Saxby’s is killed. Saxby’s unit fights on, and later they assault a mosque from which they are taking fire. They return fire and then enter the mosque and climb to the top of the minaret. At the top, they discover the now-dead bodies of two insurgents who are obviously not Iraqi nationals. Confirming the presence of foreign fighters is a high priority information request from Saxby’s higher headquarters and also of interest to two New York Times journalists embedded with Saxby’s platoon.

A few hours later, Saxby describes to the two journalists the foreign fighters lying dead in the minaret. The journalists want to see the bodies for themselves, and the fighting calm for the moment, they convince Saxby’s platoon leader to assign a squad to escort them back to the mosque for photographic documentation. Saxby doesn’t go, but another of his good friends, Bill Miller, is part of the journalists’ escort. Unbeknownst to the patrol, the mosque has now been reoccupied by insurgent fighters. As Miller leads the journalists to the top of the minaret, he is shot and killed.

That evening, Saxby and one of the journalists are on the roof of a house the Americans have occupied. Saxby writes:

The New York Times reporter was sitting near us, trying to get a signal to send out his stories. He looked at me and asked what I had gotten for my birthday. I didn’t even look at him when I said, “Two dead friends.” I knew it would be many years before I celebrated my birthday again, assuming I made it past the next few weeks.

I have described the scenarios starkly and solely from the point-of-view of the authors. McPadden’s colonel and sergeant major may have seen more troubling signs than McPadden realized. Abdul, as McPadden notes, may have been a Taliban or Taliban sympathizer all along. The two journalists in Saxby’s account actually do have their say in later pieces (links below).

That’s all fair, and the confluence of perspectives have potential to change the thrust of the stories I have described. But that’s not work I will do here, and would probably be of little use to McPadden and Saxby. In the moment, and for years after, events occur on the battlefield that forever impress themselves on the participants without easy or satisfactory resolution. The average ordinary circumstances of deployment and combat are challenging enough, but sometimes an extra-added quirk or fillip of circumstance elevates the average and ordinary into the overwhelming and unfair. Soldiers rely on training, their mission orders, their instincts, and their sense of what their rank-and-duty role entails to see them through, but nothing prepares McPadden and Saxby for the events described above. Power, or powerlessness, is at the heart of the issue in each vignette, but not simply in the form of being subject to the cruelty of rank. The vignettes speak to the powerlessness of soldiers in the face of circumstances they couldn’t have seen coming and whose unintended consequences place undue demands on their ability to make sense of them.

****

The New York Times reporter in Saxby’s vignette is Dexter Filkins, the author The Forever Wars, an excellent journalistic account of the Global War on Terror campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. With Filkins is photographer Ashley Gilbertson. They offer their version of Bill Miller’s death in a recent PBS Frontline interview titled “Once Upon a Time in Fallujah”:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/once-upon-a-time-in-iraq-fallujah/transcript/

In 2008, Filkins wrote at length about the event in a New York Times article titled “My Long War.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24filkins-t.html

Ray McPadden, We March at Midnight. Blackstone, 2021.

Alexander Saxby, Fallujah Memoirs: A Grunt’s Eye View of the Second Battle of Fallujah. 2021.

For all Strike Through the Mask! columns and especially this one, thanks to Wrath-Bearing Tree editor Michael Carson for suggestions and inspiration.

Corn, Coal & Yellow Ribbons. Poems by Kevin Basl and Nathan Lewis. Trumansburg, NY:  Out of Step Press, 2021.

Midnight Cargo:  Stories and Poems.  Kevin Basl.  Trumansburg, NY: Illuminated Press, 2023.

Corn, Coal & Yellow Ribbons is a chapbook of 11 poems, a collaboration between Kevin Basl and Nathan Lewis, who seek to answer the question “why did you join the military?”  Although the question pertains to them and to their unique individual circumstances, the question also has a broader resonance.  Basl, from rural Western Pennsylvania, joined the Army in 2003, first went to Iraq as a mobile radar operator in 2005, and then was stop-lossed, returning in 2007.  Lewis is from upstate New York.  He joined the Army at 18 and deployed on an MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) Artillery crew to Iraq in 2003, just in time for the invasion.

“Corn” and “Coal” represent not only the specifics of family background but also the regions that the poets hail from.  “Yellow Ribbons,” of course, is the near ubiquitous symbol of freedom during the Iran hostage crisis and continuing to the first Gulf War

In the introduction, they try to, if not fully answer the question of “why” a young person joins the military, at least present the conditions that lead to enlistment.  They take a different approach, “an oblique perspective,” to the “why”:  “More often overlooked are the cultural and economic conditions that push kids toward military service, an experience that will fundamentally change them, sometimes in tragic ways.”  The genesis of the book was a workshop that involved discussions with veterans from rural areas, and although the poems are written for vets they make aspects of the military experience accessible to the civilian.

The poems alternate between Basl and Lewis (except for two consecutive by Basl) and often complement  each other.  The poems, part reminiscence and part search for understanding about the past, use finely-tuned details to show the impact of that past on the present.

“Rust Belt Fed” by Lewis makes the connection between the socioeconomics of a hardscrabble region which “seems to grow only feed corn and soldiers” with military recruiting; ironically, the ground is fertile for the production of generations of soldiers.   Recruiters in essence prey upon the vulnerable youth of the area who are precluded from exploring more expansive options:

The combine strips the corn from the fields,

the recruiter’s van strips the youth

from our schools, churches

Like metal scrappers pulling wires and pipes

from a foreclosed home

The image suggests that the recruiting process has virtually a criminal motive, with the only purpose being to “feed” the war machine with “kids with computer skills . . . /To be made into precise cyber warriors” and “Athletic kids dense enough to be/turned into blunt weapons, . . . .”

Basl’s poem “Mouth of the Abyss” echoes some of the imagery of “Rust Belt Fed.”  The poem begins with the destruction of a farm, “clawed away for stripping,” by “Whitener Brothers Coal Incorporated.”  A way of life is expendable; nature and the human residents are beholden to the forces of despoilation.  Coal mining destroys a way of life in the same way the recruitment process destroys the young.  The mining strips the land; the military strips the young.

The speaker, a seven-year old boy, is able to watch the mining “canyon” expand, and one day goes to the “mouth of the abyss” with his father, who warns him of the potentially-fatal dangers of the crater.  As the poem ends the boy wonders if it is possible “to witness man’s work/and live to talk about it.”  The same could be said of war.

Lewis’s “First Ambush Mission” and Basl’s “Resume Builder” both connect a youthful event to later Army experiences.  In the former, Lewis recalls the “Ragweed insurgencies, nightly raccoon attrition” that plagued his parents’ corn field.  He and his twin brother decide to lie in wait through the night with their shotguns:

Pulling triggers interested me more than pulling weeds

Out back in a kid-built shack called “The Fort”

Twin brother and I on an ambush mission

Raccoons standing in for guerillas

After their unsuccessful foray—one shot at “Something moving in the shadows”– they return from the fort in the morning and unload their shells on the kitchen table.  As the poem ends there is a correlation between the events of the night and his military future:

My wet sneakers squeaking on linoleum—

Had my ears not been ringing

I would have heard

Desert Army Boots crunching gravel

It is as if his soldiering was preordained; he was one of the young men “stripped” from home by the “metal scrappers.”

The idea of a preordained military future is echoed in Basl’s ironically-titled “Resume Builder.”  In this poem the speaker recalls Mr. Floyd, a somewhat notable member of the community (“Lifetime member of the Hallton Rod and Gun Club./Two-time winner of the American Legion turkey raffle”) and a long-time high school gym teacher.  He has little tolerance for students with “zero athletic aspirations” and despises “Phish-phans, Juggalos, skaters, and scummies.”  The ending of the poem reveals Floyd’s recognition that the military may be the only option for those with a foreclosed future:

Counselor of numbskulls when he tells them

there may be a place for you yet

faraway at basic training

Bastard prophet, when you realize, damn, how he nailed that last one.

Although Floyd, whose own life is mundane, is an object of ridicule to the students, he is also that “bastard prophet” who knows that his students’ lives will basically go in one direction.

Overall, the 11 poems in the book show a side of the military that is far from the heroic ideal.  The authors note that the “book’s cover was handmade from pulped U.S. military uniforms” (with the cover image by Christopher Wolf of a tank plowing through a cornfield), showing that as swords can be made into plowshares uniforms can be made into art.

Each author’s post-military life has shown that commitment to the arts. Basl holds a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from Temple University.  He has worked with Warrior Writers and Frontline Arts to conduct art workshops and is an accomplished paper-maker and musician.  He was featured in Talia Lugacy’s 2021 film This Is Not a War Story.  He has written numerous essays and articles about various aspects of the veteran experience.  Lewis, Like Basl, has conducted writing and papermaking workshops for veterans since 2009. His artwork has been shown in many galleries across the country, including the Brooklyn Museum. He appeared in the film The Green Zone (2010) and This Is Not a War Story. He is one of the founders of Out of Step Press. The name of the press is an ironic twist on the precision of military marching along with a connotation of non-conformity

Midnight Cargo is a collection of three stories and eighteen poems, many of which derive from specific events during Basl’s deployment.  Although trained to be a radar operator (14J) Basl was re-classed, at various times, as a cavalry scout, security escort driver, laborer guard, and, less excitingly, deliverer of trash to a burn pit. The book’s title references another one of his jobs in Iraq, that of the nighttime loading of the remains of deceased service members onto C-130 cargo planes. The poem “Sacrifice” is most closely aligned with the meaning of the book’s title. He describes the loading of “those long metal boxes” for the final journey home. However, the loading and imminent departure is unsettling, as the reality of death breaks through the impersonality of the task. The plane itself is like a coffin, “exhibiting the skeletal hull/wires and nets/vining the walls —”; it is “an inglorious vessel,” lacking the solemnity that the occasion requires,

set to carry home

the cold weight

of a friend’s absence

the cold weight

of a mother’s depression

housed in a coffin

wrapped in a flag.

The loading of the bodies occurs at night, which reflects the secretive nature of the event, as if there can be no acknowledgement of death.

The first poem in the book, “The Red Keffiyeh,” and the following story, “Occupations,” pivot on the object and symbol of the keffiyeh. In the poem, the keffiyeh was a gift from a boy in Iraq whom the speaker became close to, and which now represents the memories of his tour, especially his interactions with Iraqi civilian workers at Camp Anaconda. The keffiyeh “now lives in an unfinished hardwood case,” unopened for years “till last night.” As he tries on the scarf he notices that the “checkered fabric had frayed,” analogous to the fraying of his memories of Iraq.  There is a sense of loss and regret in the poem’s final lines:

[I] gazed in the mirror at my weary face

and, still gazing, went on to consider sadly

its beauty and how old the boy would now be . . .

“Occupations,” which can be seen as a companion work to the poem, details the narrator’s interactions with Iraqi laborers employed for “hootch fortification.” The story is told in third-person, but focuses on a Sergeant Adams, who develops a relationship with a boy, the teen-age Gabir, whose brother and father were laborers. As section 2 of the story opens, Adams asks Gabir to buy him a keffiyeh for his wife’s birthday. His wife is a musician and he feels that she could wear the keffiyeh while she played cello and sang: “The perfect gift.  Their marriage might survive this deployment after all.”  He gives Gabir money for the purchase.  Gabir agrees, but in the ensuing days is elusive about the scarf, and one day Gabir and his family fail to appear at the camp. Two weeks later, though, a new laborer shows up at the camp and gives Adams the keffiyeh. Adams attempts to get information on Gabir and his family from some Iraqi workers but they are reticent to offer any specifics, only saying that the family “went north.” He gives the men a message of thanks to Gabir, but the men are noncommittal.  As the story ends Adams, still deployed, receives a photo of his wife wearing the scarf. However, after he returns home, he “never saw her wear it—on stage or anywhere.” And a year later, after they divorce, “he found the keffiyeh buried in a box of clothes and jewelry she returned to him.”

Both the poem and the story are linked through the kaffiyeh; the story also illustrates that what is meaningful to one person is simply a disposable object to someone else.

Two poems that use the cleave structure are “Art Therapy” and “The Agency’s Mark.” The lines can be read down the left column, the right column, or across, giving a sense of three poems. The juxtapositions are similar to stream of consciousness, with new meanings revealed depending on how the lines are combined by the reader. “Art Therapy” was inspired by George Bush’s Portraits of Courage paintings, and a note explains the Right to Heal Initiative that the poem also references. The left column alludes to Bush’s paintings, while the right column begins:

Cops march into position

protestors in pepper spray goggles

unfurling a hand-painted banner

We Demand the Right to Heal!

Similarly, “The Agency’s Mark” interweaves two parallel experiences. The left-hand column limns a painting by Haeq Fasan entitled Horse Dance, while the right-hand column critiques the CIA’s secret funding of art that would “counter the Soviet’s promotion/of ‘socialist realism’—” by providing money and venues for art that would reflect American values.  In a note to the poem Basl cites an article from Newsweek in 2017:  “The CIA weaponized art as a form of ‘benevolent propaganda,’ intending to show the world that capitalism, not communism, produced better—and more—work.”

Another poem with an interesting structure is “God Mode.” The lines are relatively short, separated by backslashes and white space, giving a sense of a computer or machine spitting out phrases. There is also the suggestion of an omniscient, impersonal armed drone operator watching his dehumanized potential victims on a screen: “your body of pixels/     is the target of my wrath/                  your heat/is a death signature/     your name/     is irrelevant/ . . . ” War becomes a computer game, albeit with human lives at stake.

Where “God Mode” shows the impersonal aspect of war conducted from a cubicle, “Rules of Engagement” focuses more on the individual in a situation where violence saturates one’s daily existence; the potential, and almost need, for violent readiness is everywhere. The phrase “‘Deadly force authorized,’” visible in every camp, becomes part of “your foretold madness. . . . Your rifle will become a phantom limb.” The poem ends, though, with a question apparently addressing his fellow soldiers, positing that the individual has lost agency and any sense of choice:

You ought to question, hero, before the rounds go flying

Whose hand really does the authorizing?

The ramifications of this “foretold madness” takes a chilling turn in the poem “Terror,” which describes the psychic dislocation engendered by “Deadly force authorized.” The terror becomes what is internalized from this environment:

Someone you think you know

Free falls through darkness . . .

In the greasy smoke

a mirror to greet him

fractured

opaque

two eyes not his own:

the violence he has sown

now feeds on his days.

The story “The Bugler” has echoes of the black humor and absurdism of, among others, Joseph Heller, Tim O’Brien, and David Abrams. The story concerns Specialist Jenkins who, although unable to play the bugle, is called upon to be the bugler to play “Taps” at a funeral ceremony for a World War II veteran. Jenkins is issued “a special bugle . . . ‘It has a little speaker inside’ . . . You push a button and “Taps” plays.’” Much of the story then concerns the bumbling attempts at a rehearsal for the ceremony.  On the day of the funeral the preacher gives the standard encomiums about the deceased, the 21-gun salute was “coordinated and crisp.” After the volley Jenkins takes center stage, raises the bugle to his lips, presses the button, and a “tinny, nasally . . . lifeless” “Taps” issues forth. He is “embarrassed for the family . . . sad and embarrassed for himself.” The widow, however, to Jenkins’ chagrin, praises his playing. As the story ends, Dave, a Vietnam vet, apparently an acquaintance of the deceased, asks to see the bugle. He removes the speaker and plays a few notes.  He hands the instrument back to Jenkins and urges him to play. Surprisingly, after a feeble attempt, Jenkins does blow a “satisfying” note. As the story ends, Dave calls an elderly couple (who had a wreath with a yellow ribbon attached) over “to come see what the noise was about, to come learn the truth for themselves.”

What is the “truth” to be learned? Is it that the ceremony was part sham? Is it that belief, expressed by the preacher and the yellow ribbon, is hollow? Or that belief is more important than truth? There is a note of irresolution about what constitutes the “truth.”

The work in Midnight Cargo was inspired by a range of subjects, from the writer’s memories, experiences and observations of war broadly defined and his time in Iraq, to his return to the States and feelings of discord, to post-war endeavors like making paper from cut up uniforms, to cultural events, like the 2023 Rose Procession in Chicago. Overall, through this prismatic lens, Basl emerges, as he writes in the poem “Presence,” as “the person who is here now.”

For further background:

Outofsteppress.com

Kevinbasl.com

Illuminatedpress.org

In my blog Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature I rarely reviewed memoir and non-fiction. I also tried to promote stories about war other than those by infantrymen and stories about war that encompassed more than the battlefield.

In Strike Through the Mask! I’ve expanded my reach to address memoir, non-fiction, and actual events. In some columns, including this one, I have also begun exploring stories of fighting men and women in combat.

Two locations dominate the Iraq and Afghanistan “booksphere.” In both cases, the locations were scenes of intense fighting. In Iraq, it’s Fallujah, particularly the Second Battle of Fallujah, which was fought in 2004. For Afghanistan, it’s the Korengal—the river valley and surrounding mountains in Kunar province that featured some of the biggest battles of Operation Enduring Freedom and arguably the longest, most sustained effort by Americans to fight the Taliban.

The Second Battle of Fallujah saw a large combined-arms force, led by Marines, fight insurgent house-by-house through a city known for its many beautiful mosques. In the Korengal, US forces, led by the Army, strove to rid a remote, mountainous region of Taliban fighters and Taliban influence on the local populace.

Fallujah and the Korengal each generated a large number of memoirs, non-fiction accounts, and in the case of the Korengal, movies. Judging by the numbers they seem to be the places where the fighting that mattered most in the Global War on Terror took place. What do I mean by “matter”? Here I’m not thinking about strategic importance or overall mission success-or-failure, but in terms of geographically-centered experiences that seems to have deeply impressed themselves on veterans, interested commentators, and reading audiences. By this point, the very names Fallujah and Korengal inspire a certain reverence, as if any story told about them is sure to be momentous.

On my bookshelf, I have the following books about the Second Battle of Fallujah: Bing West’s non-fiction account No True Glory, Nathaniel Helm’s biography My Men Are My Heroes: The Brad Kasal Story, David Bellavia’s memoir House to House, and Alexander Saxby’s memoir Fallujah Memoirs. Elliot Ackerman’s Places and Names also describes the author’s experience fighting in Fallujah, where he won a Silver Star as a Marine platoon commander. Interestingly, I don’t know of a novel that portrays Marines and soldiers fighting in Fallujah. And though there are several documentary movies about Fallujah, it has not yet been portrayed by Hollywood, as far as I know. A movie based on No True Glory starring Harrison Ford was once announced, but seems to have never been made. Still, the opening lines of Saxby’s memoir illustrate the allure of Fallujah:

I’ve been told you never forget your first time. Your first kiss, your first love, your first car. My first time overseas was an experience that I will never forget. I experienced something that many people only read about in history books. The Second Battle of Fallujah is a watershed moment in my life. It serves as a frame of reference for many memories; before Fallujah and afterward.

Regarding the Korengal, for non-fiction I’ve read Sebastian Junger’s War, Wesley Morgan’s The Hardest Place, and Jake Tapper’s The Outpost. I’ve watched the movie based on The Outpost, as well as Junger’s Restrepo. I’ve read Ray McPadden’s memoir We March at Midnight, and also Medal of Honor winner Dakota Meyer’s memoir Into the Fire. This list might be expanded by inclusion of books such as Lone Survivor about special operations in Kunar in the early years of Operation Enduring Freedom. The novels And the Whole Mountain Burned by the aforementioned Ray McPadden and The Valley by John Renehan are coy about actually mentioning the Korengal, but it seems clear both are either set in or inspired by the Korengal. The dust-jacket blurb for The Valley reads:

Everything about the place was myth and rumor, but one fact was clear: There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst. 

Scholars tell us that such places of lore and implication are tightly bound up with their geographical and physical setting. The idea is that the significant events were fated to take place on sites that lay waiting through the centuries for historical amplification. However that may be, the sense of the material look of Fallujah and the Korengal greatly impressed themselves on the participants who fought there as the right-proper backdrop for the events that subsequently unfolded. This heightened sense of possibility is reflected in the prose written by combatants.

Elliot Ackerman, in Places and Names, writes of Fallujah: We are four kilometers outside of Fallujah, the city of mosques: a forest of minarets rising from kaleidoscopic facades, all mosaicked in bursting hexagonal patterns of turquoise, crimson and cobalt.

Roy McPadden, in We March at Midnight, describes his first encounter with the Korengal: A six-hour voyage brings us to the maw of the Korengal Valley, a gateway of rock into more rock. Slicing out of the mountains here is a protean stream of the same name, which in spring and early summer is a ribbon of whitewater fed by a massif of twelve-thousand-foot peaks. By summer’s end, the peaks are naked of snow, and the stream slows to a dribble. I am no lover of rivers, only a field commander who has to cross them. 

Later, McPadden writes: Of all the provinces, I shudder at the word Kunar, for its black heart is the Korengal Valley. I harbor secret thoughts of a collision with it and confess that in this interlude of life, the valley has grown into a phantom of gigantic proportions.

As the quotes suggest, the upshot of this author-and-audience interest in Fallujah and the Korengal is that both places now resonate with higher orders of meaning. Through what one scholar calls “the complex alchemy of nature, history, and legend” books and films about Fallujah and the Korengal participate in a “collaborative process of creating significant places by means of story.” In other words, there are the things that actually happened in Fallujah and the Korengal, and the “textualizing” of spaces by which they have assumed prominence in veteran and public memory. The geographic “spaces” of Fallujah and the Korengal have become hallowed “places” that dominate and even define the two separate theaters. As a result, other places and other narratives struggle to command attention.

I know this is true in regard to Afghanistan. My own deployment to Afghanistan taught me that the Khost-Paktika-Paktia region was home to much fighting and many events central to the American story in Afghanistan. Those who fought in Kandahar might say much the same thing. But Khost and Kandahar do not loom large in American thinking about Afghanistan, and other provinces where Americans deployed such as Herat and Zabul even less so. Stories about those places just plain don’t excite readers as much as do those set in the Korengal. They fight uphill to assert their importance.

Taken together, books and movies about Fallujah and the Korengal accrue a momentum and logic of their own. To have fought in those places is one thing, to tell a story about them is another, and to read about them is another. The relation of stories to actual events and stories to other stories are both dynamic and reifying, with the underlying themes and structures of the events and narratives reverberating in odd correspondences. Events and description of events are related by layers of meaning that transcend simplicity. An event casually mentioned in one narrative become central in another; some events are examined in prismatic detail in multiple accounts. One story begets another, and though individual narratives may differ, together they constitute a distinctive collective memory and pattern of thinking about their subjects. To participate in the story-telling flow either as a writer or a reader is to further instantiate their legendary status. Doing so implicates the author and reader in the enterprise not so much of truth-telling as myth-making.

The objection, or fear, is that the men and women who fought in either Fallujah or the Korengal have accrued a superior wisdom predicated on what’s been termed “combat-gnosticism”: their participation in events gives them wisdom not available to the rest of us. If anything, though, each new narrative about Fallujah or the Korengal now has trouble transcending conventional themes and takes, adding only the idiosyncrasies of personal experience. As a quote from a reader of one of the books mentioned above puts it on Amazon: “30 different people, 30 different stories.” Some of the narratives emit a self-important aura, or verge on romanticizing death and carnage. But it is also true that each new story-telling variant piques the interest. And why not? The textual hegemony of Fallujah and the Korengal is not salutary in all aspects, but it is by now very real. I know there will be more books about these places, and I know I’ll read most of them. If conditions ever permit, I would like to visit Fallujah and the Korengal in the company of veterans who fought there, or the journalists and historians who have written about them, and listen to their stories on the ground they took place.

***

The quotes from academic sources came from the following scholarly studies of links connecting geographic places, historical events, and narrative memory:

Nile Green, Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India (2012): “booksphere” “textualizing space”

Virginia Reinburg, Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France (2019): “complex alchemy of nature, history, and legend” “the collaborative process of creating significant places by means of a story”

Hulya Tafli Duzgun, Text and Territories: Historicized Fiction and Fictionalized History in Medieval England and Beyond (2018) was also consulted.

James Campbell, in “Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry” (1999) argues that critics buy too readily into the idea that literature about war reflects “a separate order of wisdom.”

A review of Kimberly K. Dougherty’s Airpower in Literature: Interrogating the Clean War, 1915-2015

One of war’s most pernicious myths is that new technology will not only hasten its outcome but lessen its brutality. Paul Fussell describes this delusion in the first pages of his text Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, where he recounts American propaganda images from the 1940s showing “the newly invented jeep, an elegant, slim-barreled 37mm gun in tow, leaping over a hillock.” Such “agility and delicacy,” Fussell contends, conveyed the impression that “quickness, dexterity, and style, a certain skill in feinting and dodging, would suffice to defeat pure force” (1). Subsequently, as World War II began, “everyone hoped, and many believed, that the war would be fast-moving, mechanized, remote-controlled, and perhaps even rather easy” (1). The muck, grime, and hellish attrition of Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, the Hurtgen Forest, and Anzio testify to the contrary.

This myth is not merely restricted to land. Although the airplane has been deployed since the Great War, the enduring fable is that technology has advanced to such a degree that new airframes, because of their sophistication and speed and precision, will end wars quickly, cleanly, and with minimal loss. Such conceits show surprising longevity, being as old as the military use of the airplane itself, and have massive implications for aircrews, the bombed, and especially our beliefs about how modern wars are fought. In her text Airpower in Literature: Interrogating the Clean War, 1915-2015, Kimberly K. Dougherty takes these beliefs to task. Her central aim is to contrast these beliefs with various portrayals of the so-called “clean air war” in war literature. In doing so, she puts forward a compelling argument that airpower is an enterprise that is not only slow, messy, and deadly, but has even greater unseen costs, and is spoken about in such ways that the true price of its deployment remains always cloaked in euphemism.

Ironically, Dougherty’s “interrogation” is effective for its precision. She makes many keen observations about these unseen costs, noting that during war, for example, the bodies of air crews are often “hidden” from view by virtue of their manner of death, being incinerated or blown out of the sky, rendering their remains unrecoverable. Sometimes, these same air crews are presented as “becoming one” with their aircraft, such that what flies are not aviators but a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that is half man, half machine. Another insight is that in the numerical tally of an air war’s casualties, it is the number of aircraft shot down that seem to be given primacy over human casualties. She notes the long history of airpower’s description by military planners and strategists as being “above” the earth, in the domain of the sky, giving it a kind of omnipresence, and where it also gains omniscience, as aircraft can purportedly observe battlefields in ways unavailable to the mere mortals constrained to the ground. All these mythologies, says Dougherty, conspire together to present aerial warfare as “clean,” powerful, godlike, and unencumbered by the grotesque violence and terrain of traditional warfare.

Dougherty also makes much of “discursive distancing,” which originally refers to a kind of Foucauldian rhetorical analysis that assesses how subjects are allegedly dissociated from hegemonic social systems through discourse, despite ostensibly being benefactors of those same systems. Basically, her point is that the discourse surrounding the use of airpower contributes to its reckless mismanagement. Key to her exploration are two texts, Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, which both provide “stunning portraits” of helicopters, “the machine perhaps most associated with the Vietnam War” (145). She notes that the helicopter enjoyed special intimacy with the troops they ferried, being close to the ground and slow, and as such “this intimacy, perhaps, makes it all the more important to separate human from machine, as the borderlines becoming increasingly blurred” (145), and as such they merit a special kind of profile about how the rhetoric of airpower contributes to its inevitable misuse.

But it is Douhgerty’s concern over this melding together of man and machine that is, in my opinion, the apex of the book, as it leads her to surmise that the rhetoric surrounding the deployment of airpower lends itself to certain beliefs about technology and its use in war. As Dougherty so capably demonstrates, the infatuation with “clean” airpower is naturally sourced in its innovativeness. The trajectory of this infatuation is an alleged “technological war prosecuted solely by machines, with no threat to one’s own population” (145), where the human cost of war will have been supposedly entirely eliminated. This reflection becomes especially prescient when one considers the ongoing war in Ukraine, or the 2021 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where the use of lethal drones have been notably effective. Additionally, so-called “drone swarms,” theoretically composed of thousands of remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicles, so designed to overwhelm enemy air defenses, have gained currency in the thought of future military planners, both in the West and with our foreign adversaries. While it is not hard to see how Dougherty’s bone-chilling vision will manifest, given recent evidence, it is also not hard to see how her description of “clean” airpower’s trajectory—that is, its culmination into a supposedly bloodless “technological war,” fought primarily with machines—will be anything but another fable in the sprawling compendium of historical fables that have always surrounded how “the next war” will be fought. Propaganda will continue to assert the next war’s supposed “cleanliness,” highlighting how new technological innovations eliminate the need for the pointless suffering of those archaic and barbaric wars of decades past, only for the “on-the-ground” reality to offer different evidence—that is, the evidence of tens of thousands of mangled corpses of 18, 19, and 20 year-old kids.

All being said, a natural rejoinder to this—which I admittedly found myself asking as I read this text—is “so what?” Is Dougherty’s counterargument really that we should not substitute machine for man, given the capability? Or that Dresden or Tokyo should not have been bombed because the Allies unfairly privileged the lives of its own service members over unarmed civilians? Should a future defensive war fought by the United States not privilege its own service members over the unarmed civilians of belligerents, given such a tragic choice? It seems ludicrous to demand that wars only be fought by one side unilaterally leveraging itself into a potential disadvantage. The Second World War in particular was an existential struggle between mutually exclusive and competing visions for the world, the role of the state, societal organization, and how natural resources should be utilized to serve those ends. It’s not hard to see how Dougherty’s musings feel like a luxury good given this environment.

But I suspect such a rejoinder misses the point. Dougherty’s point isn’t to say such things are right or wrong merely—it’s that wars are fought with elaborately constructed mythologies about the use of technology (such as airpower), and that military planners and service-members alike not only believe these mythologies, but sometimes even believe them despite knowing they are myths. The cost of believing in such myths is unimaginable brutality and the loss of life to millions of people, as various truths are obscured or unable to be recognized because of the political nature of the war. The geopolitical environment of the Second World War, for example, not only made realities like the humanity of the enemy impossible to recognize, but exaggerated their costs and contributed to immense suffering both among the bombed and the bombers. Such calamity is worth recognizing.

On the more pedantic side, I sometimes found Dougherty’s emphases and language distracting, if anything because she too strongly relies on the kind of intersectional analysis and related academic jargon that dominates contemporary humanities publications. In one section, she also provides a summary of the causes contributing to the Spanish Civil War that are laughably uncritical and overly generous to the Republicans and the Popular Front, which made me suspicious of her framing of other historical events. But these are rather nitpicky when her broader contributions are taken into consideration. Dougherty has ultimately produced a razor-sharp text that attacks the fictions we all too easily attach to the role of technology in warfare. In uncovering beliefs about airpower’s “cleanliness,” she has produced something worth celebrating.

The opening of this month’s column repeats much of a Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature post I wrote in 2018. The rest updates and expands upon that post by reflecting on two recent Afghanistan memoirs by veterans who served in the same area of Afghanistan as I did in 2008-2009. Reader, read on!

***

My tour in Afghanistan as an advisor to the Afghan National Army was not over when I returned to the States in November 2009. Many things have happened since that have extended its reach deep into my post-deployment life. The list includes:

-the infiltration bombing of Camp Chapman in Khost Province in December 2009, a FOB I often visited before leaving Khost in July 2009.

-the awarding of the Medal of Honor to a fellow US Army advisor I knew from our train-up together at Fort Riley.

-a long article in a major weekly profiling the commander of the advisor unit two or it that referenced many people and places I knew well.

-the WikiLeaks release of classified combat reports, several of which recounted by the advisor team I led.

-a visit from Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) telling me that they had detained a Russian-born jihadist who had attacked us in Khost in June 2009, killing one of the members of my team, who was the gunner in a truck in which I was a passenger. (The last I time I checked, the jihadist was still in jail in America.)

-a visit from another CID agent doing a background check on one of my linguists who was now translating for an American one-star general—this after emigrating to the United States, serving a tour in our Army, earning an Associate’s degree, and gaining his citizenship.

-a visit from two lawyers on Bowe Bergdahl’s defense team, because my name figures in the Army investigation report of the severe wounding of one of the soldiers involved in the search for Bergdahl.

-a profile in a major media venue of an Afghan National Army officer whom I knew in Khost who has since emigrated to the United States.

-the chance to offer comments at the dedication of the Chicopee, Massachusetts, War on Terror Monument, a chance that arose because one of the six men honored by name on the Monument had been a member of my advisor team.

-efforts in August 2021 to secure the evacuation from Afghanistan of Afghans with whom I had served, efforts that largely failed but which continue today.

Now, within the last two years, I’ve become aware of memoirs written by two veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom in the Paktika-Paktia-Khost (“2PK” in military-speak) region at the same time I was there. One is by an Army sergeant who was a member of my Embedded Transition Team (ETT) in Khost province: Sergeant Major (retired) Chad Rickard’s Mayhem 337: Memoir of a Combat Advisor in Afghanistan. The other is by an Air Force lieutenant who served on the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Paktia province where I served out the last five months of my tour on a nearby FOB: Lauren Kay Johnson’s The Fine Art of Camouflage. Together, Rickard and Johnson superbly describe the two spheres of activity that concerned me most: fighting the Taliban and supporting Afghan governance.

I offered glimpses of my day-to-day activities in Afghanistan in my first blog 15-Month Adventure: Advisor Service in Eastern Afghanistan. But those blog posts were written in the heat-of-the-moment and suffer from lack of detail and insight on the events I experienced. Further, I seem to lack the instinct—or the courage—for memoir, and I’ve never since tried to deepen and thicken the narrative of my own deployment or link the many separate episodes into a cohesive whole. Both Mayhem 337 and The Fine Art of Camouflage do that for their authors in ways that bring my own memories rushing back and help me understand them better. Rickard and Johnson recount many events of which I was aware and sometimes those in which I also participated. Each does a great job establishing the overall ambiance of the mission and the physical characteristics of the operating environment. Both authors write perceptively about the factors that made success in Afghanistan difficult (and ultimately doomed it), while conveying a welcome lack of self-righteousness and self-aggrandizement in the face of the challenges we encountered.

Sergeant First Class Rickard (as I knew him then) impressed me from the minute we met in my first week as advisor team chief on Camp Clark in Khost in 2008. A rawboned former college football player who was now a member of the California National Guard, Rickard exuded competence and a quiet can-do spirit. He was an infantry veteran of two tours in Iraq, and my team lacked both infantry grit and combat experience. We were all willing, but I knew the coming months would be tense. Rickard immediately volunteered for our toughest mission—serving on a much smaller very remote combat outpost on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—and as the next few months transpired, I learned to ensure he was in the thick of whatever fighting was to be had throughout our sector. It was an unfair burden for Rickard to shoulder, but my thought was that our operations stood little chance of success without his presence. And as Mayhem 337 recounts, Rickard eagerly embraced these challenges, with little thought at the time of the consequences on him and his family in the years afterwards, which Mayhem 337 also documents.

Speaking frankly, and perhaps enviously, Rickard had the kind of tour most infantryman could only dream of. Duty on Spera Combat Outpost brought near-daily engagement with the Taliban enemy, and Rickard’s account of working alongside Brigade Combat Team soldiers, Special Forces units, and most of all the Afghan National Army are both riveting and highly instructional for any infantryman who might face similar circumstances in the future. Many episodes stand out, but for me most illuminating were accounts of in-battle coordination with Air Force jet pilots and Army attack helicopters, along with Army artillery, to bring American firepower to bear upon wily and determined foes. While in Khost, I often sat by the radio tracking Spera COP battles, feeling mostly helpless and anxious—reports of small Army outposts being overrun elsewhere in Afghanistan were never far from my mind. As I monitored radio reports, I was aware of how crucial air and artillery support were for saving Rickard and his men from death, but Mayhem 337 reinforces the point that for those in action their lives depended on allies in the sky. But don’t take my word for it, here’s Rickard’s account from his Acknowledgement:

I want to personally thank each and every pilot and aircrew member who flew in support of combat operations I was involved in throughout my time in Afghanistan. I would not be here today if were not for the daring courage of the pilots who supported our ground combat operations.

And here’s an excerpt illustrating that support in action:

Soon after the departure of the Kiowa’s, two F-15 fighter jets reached our location. The pilots conducted their fighter check-in as soon as they arrived. They let us know their call signs, what planes they flew and what weapons they had available. They also told us how long they could stay and help. This team flew a pair of F-15s; their call-signs were Dude 1-1 and 2-1. Dude 2-1 was actually a female fighter pilot, not a “dude” per se; she operated as the flight lead that night… We confirmed that all US and Afghan forces were within the [infrared] glowing perimeters on the mountaintops. After confirmation we said “Roger Dude 2-1, you are cleared to engage.” And engage she did. She dropped a 500 pound [Guided Bomb Unit] and scored a direct hit on that group of enemy fighters….

Lieutenant Lauren Johnson was Air Force, too, though by her own account anything but a hot-shot fighter pilot. Rather, she served as the “information operations” staff officer on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Paktia province. I make small cameos in Mayhem 337 (Sergeant Rickard thankfully goes easy on me), and though I’m not in The Fine Art of Camouflage, I may well have been in the same meetings as Johnson at many points. Provincial Reconstruction Teams were composed of military and civilian specialists charged with governance and infrastructure projects meant to enhance the “legitimate government of Afghanistan.” During my last few months in Afghanistan, I was one FOB over from Johnson and largely involved in much the same business. Specifically, our time in 2PK was marked by the run-up to the 2009 Presidential election. We all worked hard and worried endlessly about ensuring the elections were safe and fair, even as we strove to let Afghans “take the lead” as a measure of our faith in their capability and independence. That didn’t happen, unfortunately, and the disappointments and vexations associated with the endeavor foreshadowed the complete collapse of western-style Afghan governance in 2021. They also proved personally devastating to Johnson. The projects she was in charge of came to naught, and several experiences destroyed her idealistic attitude toward the overall mission and general faith in the competence and integrity of the military.

Among its other virtues, The Fine Art of Camouflage nails descriptions of the FOB, FOB daily life, and the stultifying and claustrophobic nature of staff work within Army headquarters. Johnson ventured off the FOB occasionally, sometimes for good, sometimes for worse, but the majority of her tour was spent in front of a computer generating the same reports she had filed the day before and in meetings with the same people she sat in meetings with every other day of the week. That business was my business, too, to a large extent. As a middle-aged middling rank officer, I did it all as well as I could and understood, kind of, its necessity. For an idealistic junior officer eager to lead troops and make things happen, such existence was spirit-killing. Though I was more senior to Johnson by far, I identified at many points with her recounting of staff-work trials-and-tribulations, and in particular the disconnected experience of trying to serve a Brigade Command Team whose commander—whom I also served—barely knew of her existence. A key episode in The Fine Art of Camouflage describes how a project of Johnson’s on which she worked for weeks goes to shit, and how on the nightly radio staff meeting, the Brigade Commander professes to not even knowing about it. For Johnson, being chewed out would have been better than the bemused nonchalance with which the colonel dismisses not just the project’s failure, but its worth and all her hard work:

The commander admonished the room to do a better job supporting the others and coordinating on missions, and then dismissed me with a brusque, “Lesson learned. These things happen.”

To my mid-ranks career-officer self, I kind of get where the colonel is coming from—he’s trying to be nice and not publicly crush a very junior office—but I also understand how condescending and demoralizing the experience must have felt for Johnson. Johnson also has a larger point to make, about how dysfunctional and uncoordinated was almost everything the military tried to accomplish in Afghanistan:

…how had the brigade commander been so unaware? The directive had come from brigade in the first place, and the plans had been in my report for a month, all the BUBS and CUBS and SITREPS and daily/bi-daily/weekly updates. As an official brigade tasking, the training had been monitored on …[the] PRT operations tracker too. I’d worked with the Department of State representative and with Army contacts at each of Paktia’s five combat outposts to finalize the attended list. I’d coordinated with pay agents, air transport, security, intelligence, convoy operations, and the mission commanders…. the crossed lines of communication were worse than the tangle of network wires winding through my office….

As the leader of a small element operating in support of the same large brigade, I also often felt marginalized and only intermittently supported. My remote perch led me to observe the internal machinations of the brigade with wry detachment that sometimes flared into frustrated outrage. My own dealings with the brigade commander were also characterized by paternalistic indifference on his part (though in all fairness, an episode toward the end of my tour in Khost rendered a more favorable impression). Along with Johnson, for me it was and is impossible not to think that our own travails mirrored in miniature the uncoordinated and un-sustained American effort throughout and over-time in Afghanistan.

There is much more to be said about each book and both books in tandem. While in some ways the two memoirs are juxtaposed—one a combat narrative by an infantry sergeant, one a story of nation-building staff-work by an Air Force officer with an eye on how tours in Afghanistan were experienced by women—there is also much that connects them. Each book, for example, situates the author’s story in the context of their personal and family histories before and after deployment; both works suggest that one reason it takes so long for memoirs to gestate is that their authors need time to measure the reverberations of their actions across the range of their closest social relationships. Also, I appreciate the authors’ even-handed depictions of the Afghans with whom they partnered. Neither Rickard nor Johnson had idealistic expectations nor perfect experiences, but neither were they reduced to sputtering contempt by their Afghan partners’ lack of military discipline, their potentially suspect loyalty, or their personal habits grounded in off-putting cultural and religious convictions. Finally, I’ve only touched on how emotionally debilitating their tours were for both Rickard and Johnson in their own long years after deployment.

There is also much more to be said about the overlaps between my own experiences and Rickard and Johnson’s descriptions of places, people, and events and my own. For readers interested in my own experience of combat, the 15-Month Adventure post titled “Gun Run” describes a mission in which I too relied on life-saving air support. I describe the staff-work misery I experienced and observed in a Wrath-Bearing Tree story titled “The Brigade Storyboard Artist.” Reflecting on the genre of memoir, I’ve always been hesitant to criticize the “self-writing” of fellow men-and-women in uniform. Every story is important, and who am I to judge?

Here though, I’ll say that though I’m sorry that the authors had to live through the hells they experienced, I’m glad Rickard and Johnson have written the books they have. They will long sit on my bookshelf as narratives that describe in familiar terms an intense period in my own life. Especially since I know (somewhat) both authors, I am happy that they have written such good books and that by their report writing them has helped them make sense of their own time in Afghanistan. Further, the appearance of the two memoirs makes me wonder how two such fine writers came to serve within my ken during my own deployment. It was obviously coincidence, but it seems like fate. The appearance of their memoirs now reminds me that my year in Afghanistan will never really be completely behind me.

Chad Rickard, Mayhem 337: Memoir of a Combat Advisor in Afghanistan. 2019.

Lauren Kay Johnson, The Fine Art of Camouflage. MilSpeak Foundation, 2023.

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/gun-run/

https://www.wrath-bearingtree.com/2020/01/fiction-from-peter-molin-the-brigade-storyboard-artist/

Humanity in Afghanistan

For the average American G.I. who served in Afghanistan, the country was of a different world. Most understood Afghans had relatively little in common with us, its would-be Western custodians. For starters, its population spoke obscure Indo-Iranian languages like Pashto and Dari, which had no share with our West Germanic-based English. It was universally Muslim, which while monotheist, had a variety of practices we found puzzling, or even less charitably, threatening, at least when viewed through the vaguely jingoistic shadow of 9/11. The day-to-day life of Afghans seemed to revolve around the dull monotony of subsistence agriculture, and moved at an unhurried, slow, perhaps even complacent, pace. Their households were multi-generational, with sometimes four or even five generations living under the “roof” of the same qalat. Whether in the bazaar or the fields, Afghans seemed to us frozen in amber, living a way of life that we ascribed to ancient times. Our assessment was that they were illiterate, poor, simple, and locked behind barriers of social custom and theology we could never hope to penetrate.

Much of this analysis is clearly retrograde and patronizing, but it was far more motivated by youthful hubris and ignorance than some sort of loitering colonial mindset. The average American G.I. in Afghanistan was not college educated. The extent of our education on Afghanistan had been delivered in a vulgar milieu of VH1, Comedy Central, cable news, and only the most remotely accurate Hollywood renditions. Most of us didn’t even own passports. In fact, for many American service members, their deployment was their first time abroad. One’s ability to empathize, or to even understand the Afghan way of life, was also limited by the task at-hand, which much of the time was unambiguously dangerous. Life experience and cross-cultural barriers only accentuated this divide. To put it bluntly, as has been true for the membership of all armies throughout history, we were really just kids, and therefore had an appropriately teenage level of understanding. It is hard to assign an “imperialist” mindset to what Robert Kotlowitz terms “adolescent fervor.”

Much of what we learned of Afghanistan has therefore come since our deployments, as a way to help make sense of what we observed. J. Malcolm Garcia’s Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful is one such continuation of this project, describing the innards of a world many of us only observed from a distance, despite being immersed in it. Garcia is a freelance journalist who appears to have a niche for war-torn or impoverished regions: his website reports he has also worked in Chad, Sierra Leone, and Haiti. The text in question is a collection of short stories that Garcia has compiled from his time in Afghanistan, all of them non-fiction.

As a writer, Garcia seems to be something of a Studs Terkel disciple, and the text is relentless in its centering of Afghans and capturing the raison d’être of social history: “history from below,” as it’s termed. In fact, we learn relatively little of Garcia himself, except for a tender chapter where he adopts and ships home an orphaned cat he names “Whistle.” At least, I interpret this to be Garcia, although it may not be, as he refers to the anonymous protagonist only as “the reporter,” and I can’t tell if this is Garcia’s effort at rhetorical humility or his description of a third party. Elsewhere, the text is mostly page after page of Afghans in their own voice, articulating their own feelings, history, and sentiment.

It seems notable that I cannot recall a similar literary project—one which centers the experience of the average civilian Afghan or Iraqi—sourced from any of our recent foreign entanglements. It is loosely represented in other journalistic media, like occasional pieces one may have encountered in The New York Times or The Atlantic, but these are news reports, not short stories collected into a single volume. Likewise, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is historical fiction, not documentary non-fiction. Garcia’s project seems unique in this regard. To be sure, Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful’s genre—which I classify as oral war history—was pioneered some 40 years ago in Terkel’s The Good War. But texts like these, especially when written by Americans, have primarily relayed the perspective of war veterans, not civilians in warzones. This underrepresentation of the noncombatant civilian is a tremendous disservice, especially considering the horrific suffering they often endured. That Garcia’s text makes this glaringly obvious is perhaps its most important contribution.

The stories shared by Garcia are wide-ranging. “Mother’s House,” the longest and most compelling in the book, tells of a recovery center in Kabul for narcotics addicts, likely the first of its kind, ran by a woman appropriately nicknamed “Mother.” “Feral Children” gives voice to the destitute children of Kabul, who are subject to collecting cans or polishing shoes. Garcia makes observations of Afghan society throughout these stories, noting, for example, the marked contrast these youths have with their Westernized counterparts, whose libertine style of dress and flamboyant mannerisms are nearly indistinguishable from an American teenager in, say, Atlanta or Houston. And while Garcia seems to gravitate around Kabul, commentary like this—and his occasional bravery in venturing out to rural areas, such as when he is confronted by what appear to be Taliban supporters while at “a graveyard for Arab fighters” in “In Those Days”—speaks to the unfathomable chasm that existed in Afghanistan between Kabul, where the decided minority of families who benefitted from NATO occupation usually resided, and the destitute rural poor, who did not share in those benefits. Garcia attempts to give voice to both, showcasing the country’s complexity and tremendous contradictions—ethnic, moral, economic, social, and otherwise—and how they defined both its people and the war writ-large.

In tandem with the text’s keen insights is the steady drumbeat of this book, which is poverty and relentless suffering. To be sure, the stories are varied and unique, but my sense is they begin to blend. They are stories of human suffering which manifest into clambering, scrabbling, and scavenging; people using what meager resources they have just to survive, whether from the war, disease, or hunger. But the themes become so common and consistent that I felt myself having the reaction ones does when they are exposed to homelessness or panhandling in a major city—“I’m not numb to your suffering, but this appears so ubiquitous that I don’t know how to help you address it, or if I even should, or if I even can.” I felt a sort of self-protective compassion fatigue while reading this text, or worse, that I had become a sadistic voyeur engaging in slum tourism. Perhaps this is Garcia’s intention, or perhaps it speaks to sneaking deficits in my own character as I continue to process my—and our—involvement in that country and our two-decade-long war. Regardless, Garcia has produced here a fine addition to this continued exploration, and gives us an exposure to the humanity of Afghans that we would do well to absorb.

“My father’s work takes you to the edge of the abyss and invites you to look.”   -Son of Rothko

Dateline South Florida, October, 1962: It was Monday 2:00pm EST when Sister Linus began to slap the living shit out of Louie V. The original offense was, along with Richard L., “jumping like a puppet into line behind the ring-leader”, that would be one Brian B. Except to exist, Brian had done nothing in the new school year. Richard was unpretentious, almost unconscious at times, naturally refined, and not a person even the most obtuse teacher would strike. But Louie was scrawny-strong, head rising on his neck like a bird about to eat something amazingly large; him one could smack, especially when he would not stop laughing. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Today this would be so viral. The nuns were not always wrong; Louie later went to prison, Richard became a junkie, Brian escaped to the West Coast and a long underground life as a political satirist. The three members of the puppet gang were given notes directing their parents to a meeting on Wednesday.

Up the coast in D.C. on that same date a bit after 8:00pm EST Secretary All Hail MacGeorge was shown U2 photos of possible missile launch sites on the cold war enemy-client island “ninety miles away”, and at midnight he informed Secretary Mac the K, and they decided to let J Fucking K sleep, because he might be needing same.

Parental or legal guardian conference would not be a big deal, another adolescent pain in the ass. Tuesday after school they were down at the back-to-back paddleball court off Dixie Highway, south end of town, in time for the surprise appearance over by the concrete wall of Louie’s father. Not exactly homeless, he lived by the good grace of an east coast Italian American network that did not include the nearby well-kept house of Louie’s aunt; from which he was likely on stay-away remittance agreement that he was likely in violation of by showing up in the park. Worse for the gang: in his hand were their packs of cigs taken from their designated concrete cubby-holes, and he was doing a thing all kids hate; keeping them in the dark. Fairly soon they understood that Louie’s father would be giving back the herbs, but of course he proceeded to fuck with them. Too bad they couldn’t bring him to the schoolhouse meeting, but here’s the way that worked: Louie’s aunt ran a prosperous mid-size I/A grocery store, and Richard’s father was a necktie manager with a wife who kept plastic covers on the living room furniture. From both of those families to the church the money flowed, actual appearance not required; for the Brian family, reverse that.

In the western-style democratic nation-state capital that morning J F-ing K had been informed of the photos, and later at the meeting with the Macs, the Brother (RFK), the “Birds” and others, options were discussed. Do nothing, as the threat of thermo-n annihilation was already completely and firmly in place, and new spots on the island, though psychologically and politically spooky, were window dressing. Another option: apply boiler-plate diplomatic pressure. Or: back-door a choice to the Bearded Man of Island Truth: split with your angel or we bring T fucking R back to life for San Juan Hill II. Maybe we can without further adieu just do that. Or at least an air-strike on the sites. (This last plea from General LeMay-I, hawk of hawks, always ready to bomb the East Wing and ask questions later – in fact all the joint big birds were doing that thing with their wings.) Finally, there was the Harvard Yard son of a whiskey runner way: set up a blockade, call it a quarantine. Peaceful co-existence as we know it on hold.

The female parent of Brian got home from her Nurse’s Aid night shift Wednesday morning and they went to school. (Da was out pushing a hack.) Brian was fairly quiet, appropriate for a celebrity in reverse, owing to a somewhat screwball-ish exit from parochial school into the public system, out of that into juvie home, then back into the arms of holy mother, all in one family-on-the-skids year; after that a year off for all concerned, and now a lecture was being delivered hard upon the kid’s denial, he was about to turn thirteen, how much is he supposed to be able to explain, but they all knew that something was up and so they treated him like Al Capone. Brian later in life learned that both parents had folded in a fair amount of boozing to make it through more or less undetected. Of the three friends, his was the only in-person meeting.

The flyboys were getting better and ID’d another site on the island that same day. The transgressor-sponsor nation was like the Brian family, with barely three hundred “Little Boys”, while the Big Dog had three thousand that they were admitting to, so it was the player with the smaller arsenal who had to issue forth the official denial that any missile sites existed on the proxy island. In J Big Dog K’s top desk drawer was a recon photo of something in a clump of palm trees.

At age twelve members of the criminal syndicate weren’t ready for the girls they had begun to notice, except for Richard. He was not loud or dangerous or great looking or especially witty, though like his friends he faked some version of all those things. He’d learned to carry himself in a way that was beyond his age, and had a natural sweet spot for girls that they responded to, including Susan S., queen of the grade level, who had a good personality and was developing nicely. Richard, Susan and Brian hung out briefly, significantly, Thursday after school till Susan was picked up, and Richard and Brian headed home in the other direction. Louie was not present because the aunt clan had him on close watch working at the store while gypsy dad was around. Richard and Brian decided that on Saturday morning they had to get the hell out of town.

DOOMSDAY UPDATE: OPERATION DOMINIC, JOHNSTON ISLAND, CENTRAL PACIFIC, WAS THE SITE EARLIER IN THE DAY OF AIRDROP TEST CHAMA, (PHOTO OF WHICH IS A ROTHKO); RESULTS WERE “THOROUGHLY SUCCESSFUL” WHILE THE YIELD WAS REPORTED TO BE BELOW THE PREDICTED VALUE.

The friends did a version of the Three Musketeers sword thing on the playground on Friday afternoon and headed off separately, Louie to the well-stocked Italian American store which had great food that was beyond the Brian family budget. Richard was picked up by his creepy stuck-up mother in their creepy Buick. Richard had learned to communicate succinctly, with a word or slight turn of head. Brian hit the sidewalk feeling that the week had been a seasonal hump and getting over it was an accomplishment. The school, Little Flower, on U.S 1, was too damn small, it got inside you. In the compact perfectly square back half of a duplex mini-compound of the Brian clan he had a place by the bedroom window, fan blowing in his face, to read every forgettable book in the Little Weed mini-library. Maybe he loved Friday more than the weekend it promised. On this particular one he looked out through the fading light and had a thought: I’m having a thought.

Up the road the photo-op boys were getting their meeting legs. Affairs of mutually assured destruction are best settled in the heat of the moment, within a few days the first best option was declared to be the thirty-knot ocean-going blockade, though if the other guy was rushed to get in and complete set-up operations, one might later have to deal with hot targets, thank you, Brother LeMay-I. 

Richard’s already gone brothers were twelve and fifteen years older, one of the curiosities of that mausoleum house was an untouchable double stack of Playboys on a corner hallway table, which entitled Richard to be unassuming. Brian was more familiar with the world of sidewalks than need be admitted. They were Saturday kids trying to not look like kids on tour down around 1^st Street in Miami before 9:30 am, having bused from Young Circle in Hollywood; they hit a few elevators, people were starting to look at them, self-appointed cop-types, they escaped across the street to Bayfront Park, where a certain amount of laughter ensued, the natives, the Cubans, the queers, everyone was funny; across the water was Arthur Godfrey Beach on the spit of land known as the Gold Coast. At certain ages one can complete an adventure by 1:30 in the afternoon. They trudged back to their respective homesteads. Richard’s house of sophisticated moral relativism had powerful A/C. At his de facto duplex Brian laid down on the terrazzo floor next to his bed where it was cooler. Richard was probably on the phone with Susan S.

DOOMSDAY RECORD CONTINUED  In the world of insanely significant meetings beware of what may follow a day when “nothing happens” except the discovery of other sites. Earlier on this particular date ninety vertical miles from a particular faraway atoll there was A SECOND SUCCESSFUL OPERATION FISHBOWL EVENT, ESSENTIALLY ABOVE THE ATMOSPHERE, SO NO LUMINOUS FIREBALL WAS FORMED; AT THE MOMENT OF DETONATION OBSERVERS IMAGINED A GREEN AND BLUE CIRCULAR REGION SURROUNDED BY A BLOOD RED RING GONE IN LESS THAN A MINUTE, AND BLUE-GREEN STREAMERS AND PINK STRIATIONS THAT LASTED HALF AN HOUR. Who knew about THE DEVELOPMENTAL EXPERIMENT, SAME DAY, IN THE IMMEDIATE ATMOSPHERE OF DISTANT SEMIPALATINSK, ABOVE THE FAR STEPPE IN NORTHEAST KAZAKHSTAN?

Sunday was traditionally the most dangerous day in Brian’s life, and more than twice he had been hauled in on the afternoon of the day of too much rest for normal types, and too much exposure for the new generation of under-financed freaks. After casing the church parking lot for cigs, he spent some time over in a half demolished, half interrupted construction area of a certain block where it felt “bombed out” and was interesting to be in. Get out of there, yelled a passing parishioner; Brian interpreted this as a warning from the small gods he’d learned to respect.

On that holy day up on the porch the Big Dog determined to continue the discussion of the future of the existence of the human race on the high seas where at least there was literary precedence for wit and wile.

Louie was installed Monday at the front of the line, the rightful place of Brian who was in the middle, and Richard was at the very end; in a barely covert manner they were all laughing because being famous is funny. Louie had a certain extra-nutty look in his over the shoulder eye and on the playground later with the dynamic diction that would later win third place (crowd favorite) in the speech contest,  confessed immortal inspiration for a caper; his neighbor across the street was gone for two weeks and Louie had a key to water the plants and turn on the hose in the yard; in this domain was much cool shit, and likely in an old world hiding spot, cash; on Thursday night the whole street would be gone to a big Knights of Columbus event, and yes he would be the obvious suspect, which was the perfect alibi! Louie had missed out on the weekend adventure, and anyway they had a rep to live up to.

On this date in the evening J Fucking K made a Big Dog dinner time TV speech revealing that their boats were steaming this way and our boats would be cutting them off because evil hardware will not be tolerated so near the Gold Coast even if it meant putting everything on the line. The TV store crowd chewed on that and it tasted like an opinion the populations of all nations are used to concealing.

Same date doomsday check-in:  AT 6:10 IN THE PARTICULAR TIME ZONE, TOP OF A VERTICAL ARCHIPELAGO JUST NORTH OF MOST OF THE MODERATE PART OF THE SOVIET, ABOVE CAPE DRY NOSE, ON AN ISLAND OF RED AND BLACK SHALE WITH STEEP CLIFFS FAMOUS AMONG LOONS, A THERMO-NUCLEAR POP QUIZ.

On Tuesday after school Louie had a fight with Patrick K, a stocky individual normally of no interest to the three immortals. At first it was even but at a certain point Louie’s strikes ceased to have effect so he picked up a piece of thin piping and delivered a whack across the shoulders and back, mainly an indication of true craziness. But Patrick was stocky of mind and body and barely blinked, and after that things wound down, and they even shook hands, not that any invitations to join any elite groups would be forthcoming.

Cargo was in the water and the whole world was chattering. N fucking K the Red Dog sent an unpleasant telegram. The secretaries and the Bootleg Heir continued discussion of the options as the cabinet-level brother played pocket-pool and LeMay-I danced up the wall and along the ceiling. There were further reconnaissance revelations and “states” lined up. Adlai the Intellectual Dog (and bald icon of loss at Brian’s) was working the U.N.

Louie didn’t make it to school on Wednesday and Sister Slappy made the mistake of advising stone-faced Richard and Brian to distance themselves from their friend with the crazy disposition. You’ll never learn, she said, and that’s when she predicted they would all wind up in the big house, which so nearly came true. Later Brian would not remember any practice ducking under the desk that week. Did the parochial world not get the memo from a fellow-travelling power-earthling who was the first Catholic in that high office? That day Richard and Brian were allowed to hang a bit, and it was noted that it might be OK if the following night’s somewhat screwy b&e caper were called off.

Out on the briny the boats came near the other boats and a holding pattern ensued. It was poop time in the meeting rooms; invade the former gambling and good music mecca and Arthur Godfrey was probably fucked. One more thing, said Mac the data genius of the automotive business who’d been installed in the cabinet to lend horn-rimmed credibility, the incoming vessels with the barely camouflaged decks are shadowed by a sub. Che Fucking G, Island Beard #2, said bring it on; said the yankee didn’t know or didn’t want to know that they would lose.

The foolish three, imagining that Thursday was a new day at school, gravitated along the lines of attraction, and so were taken to their assigned punishment places, Louie by the ear, Brian by the sleeve, and Richard, whose clothes, a version of the blue and white, one did not touch, by the little finger, whatever that was supposed to mean. In semi-covert caper-conference at recess it was decided that they would look at stuff but only take that which was irresistible. At an early hour of the night the three holy bums were spotted on the approach by a neighbor and had to veer off from the target house. They screwed around in the paddleball park for a while, waiting for the coast to clear, and then re-scheduled for Saturday daytime when walking around was not as conspicuous.

At the U.N Adlai the Man of Loss, an intellectual vivant who kept a social apartment on the premises, had big pictures and a pointing device, and the other guy, per a flyer in the original charter, refused to respond to direct or indirect questions. About that time a ship slipped red rover and made a run for the island. All right, they were warned, we know that’s not a serious tub, but don’t let it happen again or else. We and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which we and you have tied the knot, wrote one world leader to another. N Fucking K who had pounded the international table with his shoe, might be cracking but on-site construction continued, and the Bearded One demanded the big pushback if they were invaded, for which eventuality he correctly guessed the BD was in preparation. Someone came into one of the smallest meeting rooms with word that a U2, whose existence the BD denied, had been shot down out of the other motherland’s airspace, pilot probably dead. Life at the top can be embarrassing.

After school that Friday Brian reported to the back of the nun station wagon to be delivered for an hour and a half of weed-pulling originally scheduled for Saturday. He had toyed with the idea of trying to make it on the coming weekend day from the convent straight to the break-in, but nah. Louie was attuned to craziness, Richard was untouchable, but Brian was the slightly and essentially seasoned criminal. When Brian got home he received for his birthday a small money tree to which was attached eight one-dollar bills and one fiver on top. He thought of bringing his wad on the caper and pretending to find it. He didn’t exactly know why, the whole thing did not bear a lot of thinking, but he was feeling lucky.

Brother R Fucking K met secretly with one of the opposition’s Brothers Fucking K straight out of Dostoevsky, who put the parallel missiles of Turkey on the table with the one’s on the Island. The highly competitive presidential sibling left the room to make a phone call.

Doomsday Progress Report   EARLIER, JUST AS THE DAY HAD ARRIVED, AT AN ALTITUDE OF 31 MILES, 19 MILES S-S/W OF JOHNSTON ISLAND A SLIGHTLY DISTORTED BRIGHT MOON-LIKE SPHERE WAS SEEN, YELLOW AT FIRST, THEN GRADUALLY SHOWING GREEN, PINK AND VIOLET HUES. BLUE-PURPLE STREAMERS WERE FORMED AND TWO OBSERVERS WITHOUT GOGGLES IN PLACE SUFFERED RETINAL DAMAGE.

The first thing the juveniles did was get tired of watching the fresh white mouse cower in the corner of the cage of Louie’s pet snake. They took a circuitous route to the paddleball court that offered the broadest operational perspective. Damn if that same neighbor wasn’t about, but in a more oblivious mode. At the right moment they crossed over and entered the back part of the back yard. The grass was of a type too nice to walk on. Tom Sawyer and the two Huck Finns traversed the immaculate lawn in preparation of entry through a window left open and through which one could be boosted and then open the door from the inside. Why just use a key when one could ruin the end of a good story? In fact, at the last minute there was the sound of crunching gravel on the street, which was the residents returning a week early from vacation just because the world might blow up. Louie covered the retreat by turning the hose on the fantastic lawn. Brian spent some of his roll on fresh packs of cigarettes and soda and by the time they got back to Louie’s Mr. Mouse was barely a lump in the long throat of Mr. Snake.

It was Black Saturday, LeMay-I and his ilk of the various persuasions were bouncing off the walls and N Fucking K officially blinked, the hardware would be off the island and J Fucking K secretly blinked, the Turkey items would be removed without announcement, most boats turned back. A sub shadowing the flotilla in question was out of communication and came close to launching the first final torpedo. Apparently three guys down there argued it out correctly.

From the Journal of Doom  WITHIN THE DURATION OF THIS PARTICULAR ROTATION OF THE EARTH, NEAR THE USUAL ATOLL THE CALAMITY DOMINIC MUSHROOM CLOUD REACHED THE HINDU HEIGHT OF SIXTY-THREE THOUSAND FEET.

Brian determined to save his bread for a non-white shirt for the upcoming social season, a new concept, and so had a Sunday afternoon to fill somewhere besides the pinball arcade, without his friends. After eighth grade graduation the three went to separate schools and thereafter saw each other around town now and then. Louie developed a knack for hanging with an older crowd, making himself useful, and followed them into the county jail, where one time he dropped acid. Brian would rather die ten thousand deaths. Then Louie topped himself; after getting out on bail he went back on visiting day with a bag of weed down his pants to smuggle in, and on that particular Lord’s Day he disappeared into the correctional system. Same thing almost happened to Brian for a bogus pot bust, the judge fucked with him and then let him go to California, where one night at Barney’s Beanery he sat in a booth with visiting Richard, who was out on bail, and there is nothing like waiting for a court date. Richard had gravitated upwards, which is possible when money and a little finesse are involved, to a small group of rich kids who became practiced hedonists chasing after excellent junk in two-seater sports cars. Brian arrived at the little local deconstruction site thinking spot to find that a passing idiot had taken a dump in one of the half-finished rooms. He took a step back towards the street, and spotted just in time the front end of a patrol vehicle emerging to the left; his reflexes were sharp but he was still living too close to the line. The arcade was safe, and he could just watch.

N Fucking K was never the same, there was the old familiar low buzz in the politburo. J Fucking K had one year to live, but this Sunday was a good day; K Brother met with Brother K to finalized the deal and have some Chinese. Someone came up with the idea of exchanging phone numbers; the Man of the Moment had an exit line out of advertising: if one invades when the same result could have come through negotiation, then you don’t have a very good war.

Doomsday Nightly Sign-off   AT THE END OF THE KAZAKHSTAN STEPPE HARD BY THE SPOT CALLED SEMIPALATINSK ON THIS PARTICULAR DATE IN A BUSY YEAR, ONE COULD HAVE HARDLY HELPED BEING AWARE OF YET ANOTHER BEATIFICATION OF DUST.