Compared to the generous amount of contemporary war fiction published in the last few years, volumes of war poetry have been sparse. The fact’s lamentable, because war poetry, it seems to me, possesses vast potential to surprise and intrigue due to the malleability of form and the license granted the imagination. Philip Metres’ Sand Opera is a case in point. A rumination on our millennial wars, particularly Iraq and especially the brutality of Abu Ghraib, told from a a variety of American and Iraqi perspectives, Sand Opera doesn’t disappoint at any level—line, stanza, individual poem, or as a comprehensive whole. The poetry world agrees, for Metres has just been honored as the inaugural winner of the Hunt Prize, a new poetry award sponsored by Yale University that comes with a $25,000 prize. The striking cover of Sand Opera prepares the reader well for what’s inside: Metres has created a “terrible beauty,” to use Yeats’ phrase, out of the grimmest of grim subject matter.
Abu Ghraib, what a horrible and embarrassing memory. Like the worst mistake we ever made, could we please pretend it never happened, never speak its name again, and pray like hell it never ever reoccurs? That’s not going to happen, nor should it, much as we might desire it, but writing about Abu Ghraib artistically in ways that aren’t crudely didactic and sputtering with obvious outrage would seem equally impossible.
The poetic imagination goes where it goes, though, and thankfully finds ways to solve problems encountered along the way. As the title of Sand Opera implies, Metres draws on the idiom of music to recoup one of the nation’s most cringe-inducing moments ever aesthetically while retaining the sting of indictment. Sub-sections within the work are named “arias,” “lyres,” and “recitatives,” and individual poems “blues,” as in “The Blues of Charles Graner” and “The Blues of Lynddie England.” Collectively the assembled voices and musical motifs function as a libretto of horror and anguish—when read cover-to-cover in one sitting Sand Opera easily renders the impression that it would work impressively as a script for a staged performance blending multiple voices, sound, light, movement, and props.
Metres has more than musical motifs at his disposal, too. About half of Sand Opera’s poems are lyrics—expressions of thought emanating from the perspective of discrete poetic personas and employing traditional line and stanza forms. But others are full of postmodern linguistic and typographic trickery. One poem, for example, of a series with the same title—“(echo / ex/)”—consists of nothing but punctuation marks. Other poems draw on “Standard Operating Procedures” (get it?), official chunks of text and diagrams drawn from government documents pertaining to Abu Ghraib (and Guantanamo) that Metres rearranges spatially on the page and then edits, if that is the right word, by redacting words and phrases with the use of black bars—a reenactment of militaristic truth-suppression put to the use of art. Poetry lives and dies on its ability to keep the reader snared in the ongoing thought-image-story web it spins word-by-word and line-by-line, and I for one enjoyed Sand Opera’s showy effects. Postmodern textual experiments generally work as highly self-conscious permutations of what might be called “standard language operating procedures”; poets also employ them to complicate conventional notions of distinctive personas and chronological narrative. But that’s too theoretical and not really even true to my sense of what Metres is doing with language in Sand Opera. For me, the flamboyant page-faces function theatrically or, dare I say it, operatically, to infuse the ideas and words floating therein with the magic of performance.
The limitations of my webpage make it hard to reproduce Sand Opera poems here, but examples can be found at the following poetry websites:
To what end does Metres go to such lengths? What does he want us to think about Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo? Individual poems are related from the point-of-view of Iraqi prisoners and American guards with empathy, plausibility, and dramatic intensity. The perspectives of Iraqis are represented more cogently and compellingly than in any other contemporary war imaginative work I’ve yet read, while the poem-portraits of Graner, England, and their fellow military policemen manage the difficult feat of holding them accountable without bludgeoning them as sadistically as they tortured their prisoners or turning them into cartoons. Another set of poems report Metres’ own wrestle with the war from his perspective as an Arab-American whose father served in Vietnam. The last poem in Sand Opera, titled “Compline,” suggests that we are living in dark times, God-forsaken in ways that go past religious platitude, and the only thing worse than being God-forsaken will be to suffer God’s wrath if or when God returns. That idea, like Abu Ghraib, is so painful to contemplate that it can’t be done directly or for long, because it is like staring into a black burning sun. The only way to apprehend the horror is through artistic creations that leaven human and existential despair with as much imagination and love as can be mustered.
Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Phil Metres here.
Philip Metres, Sand Opera. Alice James Books, 2015. Cover art: “I am Baghdad II” by Ayad Alkadhi, Leila Heller Gallery, New York.
Thanks to Roy Scranton for recommending Sand Opera to me.
Lea Carpenter’s novel Eleven Days presents a different portrait of United States special operations capability than does Masha Hamilton’s What Changes Everything, which I reviewed two posts ago. In What Changes Everything, the wife of an American civilian kidnapped in Afghanistan refuses entreaties by US officials to deploy military forces—we can presume unconventional operators—to rescue him. She doesn’t trust the military; their track record of success is poor and they’re as likely to get her husband killed as save him. In Eleven Days, the mother of a Navy SEAL who has disappeared in Afghanistan places her hopes in his recovery in the hands of high-level Washington insiders deeply instantiated in the world of clandestine operations. Where What Changes Everything is skeptical of American military might, Eleven Days is admiring, especially of elite formations of those termed “special,” “unconventional,” “black ops,” or “members of the intelligence community.”
The polarized perspectives of the two novels reflect a deep military debate about the role of special operations in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that now is also playing itself out in the homefront cultural domains of art, entertainment, and the courting of public opinion.
In military terms, the question is to what extent did special operations save American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, vanquish our enemies, and help achieve our nation’s greater war aims, primarily that of forestalling further 9/11-style attacks on American soil, but also those related to nation-building overseas. In the art, entertainment, and public opinion domains, the question is whether the glamor of special operations will make any sort of reasoned consideration of the military issue possible.
The military question is explored at some length in this recent New York Times article titled “SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killers and Blurred Lines” and in even greater detail in Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill’s account of the rise of the military’s umbrella organization for unconventional and elite forces, Joint Special Operations Command. The Times report is ambivalent, while Scahill is scathingly critical about the now unquestionable prominence of special operations as a strategic and tactical capability within our military-defense apparatus.
The cultural question is reflected in the public’s fascination with films such as American Sniper and Captain Phillips, as well as the dozen or so books written by ex-operators, many of them Navy SEALs who seemingly have little regard for the dark-side credo of “silent professionalism.” That clear thinking about the military question has been complicated by the Hollywood glitz machine and the self-promotion of those involved is unfortunate.
It is unfair to hold Eleven Days’ feet to the fire regarding these ginormous questions, though. Carpenter’s admiration for SEALs is writ large on every page of Eleven Days, but the novel’s unique and valuable aspects are other than descriptions of SEAL training, equipment, culture, and history, of which there are many. Its most obvious interest is the mother-son bond that joins Sara, and Jason, the Navy SEAL lieutenant who goes missing while on an operation in Afghanistan. Actions in-country are barely described; the emphasis is on Sara’s turbulent emotions as she is subjected to prying media inquiry and intense deliberations with highly-placed government officials trying to secure Jason’s release. As Sara endures these extremely unwelcome intrusions on her privacy, her mind and the book’s narration ruminate on things past, especially Jason’s childhood love for all things military that led him as a young adult first to Annapolis, then the SEALs, and finally to combat in Afghanistan. As it happens, Jason’s father David was a decorated operator himself in Vietnam and remains deeply connected to the SpecOps and DC intelligence worlds. Though long out of Sara’s and Jason’s life after the brief affair that brought Jason into the world, he now returns to help facilitate Jason’s return. In conjunction with another DC insider known as “the godfather,” Dave arranges for a private jet to bring Sara and him to Afghanistan in hopes of reuniting with their son. The plot seems to stretch a bit thin in these parts, but who am I to say whether things like that happen or not? In any case, Carpenter’s imagining of Sara and Jason’s lived lives, their thoughts about things, their love for each other, and especially Sara’s distress when Jason goes missing, is moving and rich.
Eleven Days’ greatest interest for me, however, lies in its portrait of how our millennial wars are perceived and engaged in by upper-tier inside-the-Beltway older men such as David and the godfather. David especially has spent his long life matching his militaristic inclinations with the militaristic opportunities of the moment in ways that accord with his wealth, his educational pedigree, his social standing, his breeding and culture, his notion of public service, and most of all, his sense of belonging to a fraternity of manly men of adventure and accomplishment. Sara no longer lives in proximity to such men, but her dalliance with David as a young woman gives her permanent re-entry rights into their milieu of richy-rich-rich swashbucklers, men whose early CIA, SEAL, and Green Beret years are only the beginning of many decades spent doing clandestine things in exotic locales. This elite faction of the war machine is more James Bond than John Rambo, as reflected in a passage about David narrated through the perspective of Sara:
He is in his mid-seventies now, he has a beard, and he is thinner, but it is him. He is wearing a beautiful suit, his blue collar (always a blue collar) open at the neck just enough that she sees a glint of gold. A necklace. He always liked nice things, an air of disrepair shattered by the presence of a Rolex submariner or a double-stitched Charvat tie.
If one matches this description against any of number of passages from American Sniper, such as one in which Chris Kyle reports spending off-duty time in Iraq “watching porn, playing video games, and lifting weights,” we have the beginnings of a pretty good social analysis of an older and newer style of special operations culture. Jason, twixt the two eras, affects the tattooed, bearded, and iron-pumping mode of the modern-man-of-special-operations-war, while retaining a few traits of the gentleman-warrior, such as packing Seven Pillars of Wisdom in his rucksack when he heads off to fight, that are characteristic of David’s generation. We might usefully also compare David and Jason to men such as Blackwater founder and war profiteer Erik Prince—an ex-Navy SEAL who seems very much a man of our modern times, though one whose ties to the first wave of sea-air-land operatives who came-of-age in the Kennedy administration seem more superficial than profound.
I suppose there must be somewhere between 500 and 5,000 men like David in real life. Too old to be on the front lines, but still in the game at some rarified level of governance, industry, and social connection. As eager to get their war on as anybody else, how do they remain relevant? At what level do they still influence the things that matter? Are they vestiges of an aristocratic older style, unaccounted for contemporary power-brokers, or models for what may come as the dark-side operators of Iraq and Afghanistan themselves grow too old for ground combat and find new modes of serving the nation militaristically and fresh outlets for their thrill-seeking spirits? Eleven Days has piqued my interest in warrior greybeards such as David as much as it has in young operator-bucks like Jason and proud-but-worried moms such as Sara. That’s probably a reflection on my own long-in-the-tooth, white male, now-firmly-on-the-outside-looking-in subject position, but so it is. I invite you to read Eleven Days and consider for yourself.
The plot of Masha Hamilton’s novel What Changes Everything contains many threads, the most important being the kidnapping of Todd Barbery, the head of a refugee relief organization in Afghanistan, by Afghan opportunists seeking to barter his life with whoever might pay the most for it. Todd’s wife Clarissa, a New York City college professor, refuses requests by the US government intermediaries to use force to rescue Todd and instead relies on Todd’s Afghan assistant Amin to obtain her husband’s relief. As Clarissa waits, she meets Danil, a Brooklyn graffiti artist whose brother has been killed in a friendly-fire incident while serving as a soldier in Afghanistan that the military tries to efface. Danil commiserates with Clarissa and advises her to retain faith in Amin, who eventually succeeds in effecting Todd’s release through his cultural and negotiating savvy.
In telling this story What Changes Everything begins to complicate understanding of what war in Afghanistan and novels about war in Afghanistan entail. Hamilton, who has served in Afghanistan as a cultural advisor to the US high command, eschews portraits of troops and battle and instead offers a compelling story about how war ensnares a wide range of characters other than those in uniform. These include Afghan noncombatants, American aid officials, and American family members touched by the war’s destruction. Besides Todd, Clarissa, Amin, and Danil, major characters include Danil’s mother Stela, who writes grief-stricken letters to politicians and celebrities seeking understanding of her son’s death and others to Danil that Danil refuses to even open, and Mandy, the mother of a young soldier injured in Afghanistan, who flies to Kabul in a Quixotic effort to lend her training as a nurse to war-stricken Afghans. Though the novel is short, several minor characters also figure so prominently that they might well be considered major: Todd’s daughter Ruby disagrees with her stepmother Clarissa’s decision to trust Amin, and Mandy encounters first a mercenary operator who knew her son well and then Zashfelt, a mysterious Afghan woman implicated first in Todd’s capture and then his release.
As if that all weren’t enough, Hamilton also includes imaginary letters written by Afghanistan’s last pre-Taliban president, Mohammad Najibullah, to his daughters in the days just prior to his murder at the hands of the Taliban in 1996. The imagined letters serve the plot in that they tell us that Amin as a young man had missed a chance to save Najibullah’s life, which now makes him determined to save Todd’s. But they also remind us of Afghanistan’s history, good and bad, pre-2001. Najibullah was not a saint—he was head of Afghanistan’s secret police under the Russians—but he comes across beautifully in the letters. In contrast to the spasmodic pleas for help written by Stela and the cluttered and confused thoughts of the other American characters, Najibullah’s letters portray a man who is absolutely composed, intelligent, cultured, full of affection for his daughters, gifted with words, and proud of his achievements as head of a country he loves.
Hamilton keeps all of this together very well. Clarissa’s skeptical resistance to military action pays off and in so doing dramatizes What Changes Everything’s most trenchant theme: the US military, addicted to violence and incapable of subtlety, would do well to pay more attention to what vastly more experienced and wiser Afghans try to tell them. I didn’t like the novel’s early scenes that show Mandy arriving on her solo mission to Kabul without sponsorship or much preparation at all, but subsequent events confirm that Hamilton intends to portray her as a bit of a self-important fool. Todd Barbery is even more of a self-important fool, and he has only himself to blame for the trouble he gets into. Hamilton’s point seems to be that Americans, even or especially those eager to help Afghanistan, tend to be both oblivious and arrogant. Among many other problems, they are bad listeners and poor communicators, qualities at which Afghans such as Amin excel, their skills honed by endless struggle for survival. But Amin is not perfect, either, and the novel’s story of trial and growth is his, too, as we see him desperately trying to reap the lessons wrought by past failure to successfully negotiate Todd’s release.
Early in the book a scene in which Stela’s friend Yvette admonishes her, “You’ll do what you want in the end. But don’t do anything before tomorrow, Stela, promise me that much. We need to talk more, after you’ve found your tongue again.” Stela’s not ready to listen to Yvette, to Stela’s detriment, but later she will recognize the truth of her friend’s advice that communication is essential. Her plight is that of all What Changes Everything’s characters, and tips Hamilton’s hand. Obtaining freedom from murderous kidnappers is one thing, but learning to listen and trust, while slowing down enough to nourish family-and-friendship is what really matters, to answer the question implied by the novel’s title, when it comes to escaping the prison-house of self-absorption. And in contrast to stories about Afghanistan that portray American special operations daring-do or castigate a seemingly incorrigibly corrupt and backward Afghan society, What Changes Everything asks us to think that it is not like that at all.
Masha Hamilton, What Changes Everything. Unbridled Books, 2013.
My review of Colby Buzzell’s latest essay and magazine article collection Thank You for Being Expendable is up at The Bridge, a website dedicated to “Policy, Strategy, National Security, and Military Affairs,” as their Medium site explains. The Bridge has actually run three reviews of Buzzell’s latest, so let me salute my co-reviewers, a US Army officer who goes by the nom-de-plume Angry Staff Officer and a US Air Force officer named Blair Shaefer, both of whom turn many nice phrases. The ASO, for example, writing of the senior junior enlisted faction of the military known as “E4s,” who tend to be the most reliable indicator of unit morale, writes, “if there actually was an E-4 Mafia, Colby Buzzell would be the godfather.” Shaefer describes Thank You For Being Expendable the “punk rock alternative to Service Academy and/or Ivy League-educated military officer GWOT memoirs.” Like!
I connected with The Bridge managing editor Nathan K. Finney through my involvement with the Military Writer’s Guild. MWG has been around for a while as an organization comprised (mostly) of serving and veteran writers of the serious policy and strategy analysis persuasion, but it has lately reinvigorated its recruiting efforts and extended its reach to a few of us on the artistic side of things. I’m glad to be part of MWG and eager to see where it goes. Publishing on Medium and using Slack to handle internal business has already made me feel a good twenty years younger, so things are off to an excellent start, as I see them.
Colby Buzzell, Thank You for Being Expendable, and Other Experiences. Byliner, 2015.
Below are ten articles on contemporary war literature published in reputable mainstream press venues in the last two years. Some are by veterans, one is by a non-veteran author of fiction, and the rest are by critics and in-house book-reviewers, but all in my mind are major statements in regard to the imaginative literature written by Americans about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve listed them in chronological order, added a few notes and a quotation from each, and offered a few overarching comments at the end.
1. Brian Van Reet, “A Problematic Genre: The Kill Memoir,”New York Times. Van Reet asserts the superiority of war fiction over the glut of memoirs by service members a little too proud of the lives they took in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically praising David Abrams’ Fobbit and Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, Van Reet writes, “Though they are fictional, they read, in my mind, like more accurate depictions of the totality of what happened in Iraq than any of the supposedly factual accounts I have mentioned.” July 16, 2013.
2. Ryan Bubalo, “Danger Close: The Iraq War in American Fiction,”Los Angeles Review of Books. Bubalo calls Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk “the best of them,” and proposes a means of understanding the genre’s achievement as a whole: “In fact, the most striking similarity of these fictions is their overarching orientation toward the war. These are writers of different backgrounds and abilities, writing different types of war tales that independently confirm our national sense of the Iraq War as a great folly.” December 25, 2013.
3. Phil Klay, “After War, a Failure of Imagination,”New York Times. Klay asserts that it is an ethical imperative for both veteran authors and civilian audiences to understand war imaginatively. “To enter into that commonality of consciousness, though, veterans need an audience that is both receptive and critical,” Klay writes, “Believing war is beyond words is an abrogation of responsibility — it lets civilians off the hook from trying to understand, and veterans off the hook from needing to explain.” February 8, 2014.
4. George Packer, “Home Fires: How Soldiers Write Their Wars,”The New Yorker. Packer surveys fiction, poetry, and memoir written by veteran and offers the following categorical assessment: “Their work lacks context, but it gets closer to the lived experience of war than almost any journalism. It deals in particulars, which is where the heightened alertness of combatants has to remain, and it’s more likely to notice things.” Packer singles out Brian Turner’s poem “Al-A’imaa Bridge” and Phil Klay’s Redeployment, especially the story “Prayer in the Furnace,” for praise. April 7, 2014.
5. Roxana Robinson, “The Right to Write,”New York Times. Robinson argues that non-veteran voices should be welcomed in the war literature conversation. She reminds us that “Some of the greatest war writers were not soldiers: Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, the blind Homer. They entered the world of war through compassion, not combat. We judge them by their work, not their military service. And we benefit from that work; they have widened our understanding of war.” June 28, 2014.
6. Jeff Turrentine, “Review: Fives and Twenty-Fives, by Michael Pitre, a Tale of Dangerous Duty in Iraq,”Washington Post. In the course of his review, Turrentine calls the recent boom in war literature “a Golden Age,” and offers examples of excellence and a reason for the boom: “Although we’re still a few years away from being able to view the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the clarifying lens of closure, a number of writers have taken it upon themselves to put together the beginnings of a canon. The best of them, like the short-story writer Phil Klay (Redeployment) and the novelists David Abrams (Fobbit) and Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk), seem to understand that the protracted nature of modern war … can easily lead to chronic moral fatigue. That’s a highly troubling state for our fighting men and women to find themselves in. But for a fiction writer who’s striving to create believably complex characters, there’s no better place to start.” August 25, 2014.
7. Brian Castner, “Afghanistan: A Stage Without a Play,”Los Angeles Review of Books. Castner explores why so much fiction has been written about war in Iraq and so little about Afghanistan. After surveying a number of authors, veterans, and critics (including me), he writes, “All agreed on this: there is something different about Afghanistan, and it has affected our nascent literature on the war. Consider three factors: the United States’ relationship with the conflict, the type of soldier who served each theater, and the topography — cultural, historic, geographic — of Afghanistan itself.” October 2, 2014.
8. Michiko Kakutani, “Human Costs of the Forever Wars, Enough to Fill a Bookshelf,”New York Times. Kakutani writes, “So far, fiction about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has tended to have a chamber music quality, using short stories, fable-like allegories or keyhole views (from individuals and platoons) to open small windows on those conflicts. Why has there been no big, symphonic Iraq or Afghanistan novel?” Kakutani praises Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, and Brian Castner’s and Kayla Williams’ memoirs, among others, but saves her highest plaudits for Dexter Filkins’ journalistic The Forever War for how it combines “micro” and “macro” level reportage of damage done in Iraq. December 25, 2014.
9. Michiko Kakutani, “A Reading List of Modern War Stories,”New York Times. In a companion piece to the critical survey published on the same day, Kakutani names 39 memoirs, novels, and non-fiction accounts that, presumably, constitute the works about war in Iraq and Afghanistan to which we should pay attention to first. The list is idiosyncratic–why 39 titles?–and subjective—no Brian Turner Here, Bullet, for example, yet three novels unpublished at the time the article appeared—but conversation-starting, at least, if not canon-forming. December 25, 2014.
10. Roy Scranton, The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to Redeployment and American Sniper,“Los Angeles Review of Books. Scranton traces a war literature genealogy centered on what he calls the “trauma hero”—soldiers pained by their participation in war who then need therapeutic recoupment to become whole again upon return home. “By focusing so insistently on the psychological trauma American soldiers have had to endure, we allow ourselves to forget the death and destruction those very soldiers are responsible for,” Scranton writes. January 25, 2015.
And so we can see the outlines of a general angle of critique and praise: The wars as folly, though experienced painfully by participants. An interest in the homefront and the aftermath of war. The short story as the form best suited to wars that have resisted closure and were experienced fragmentally. A sense that what counts most are soldiers’ accounts—not civilians’–written by those with some reflective purchase on their experience and who question their choices, wrangle with their responsibility and complicity, and come to understanding of the immense wrongness of war and militaristic thinking. One subject our intellectual tastemakers don’t yet seem interested in is the new, substantial, and important presence of women in the ranks of war authors, which is curious, nor have we seen much effort to assay new war literature written by non-Americans.
We might add a few other features that are touched on only here-and-there by the critics: The corpus’s affinities and deviations from the writing inspired by other wars, especially that of Vietnam, World War I, and—going way back—the Homeric wars of ancient Greece. The quickness with which highly literary works began appearing so soon after the cessation of combat. In contrast to what the critics have noticed, the field’s inclusiveness of non-veteran authors eager to write about military and war-related subjects and themes. An interest, manifested fitfully, in depicting Iraqi and Afghan characters, and perspectives on war from those on the homefront or soldiers and Marines other than combat infantrymen. The implications of a small all-volunteer force that experiences war first-hand while the nation-at-large pays attention or not, as it will. Wars newly-defined by reliance on strategies and techniques—torture, drones, Special Operation raids, cross-international-boundary strikes never officially acknowledged, counterinsurgency and nation-building operations—ethically frowned upon or considered unimportant previously. A national war rhetoric characterized by respect for individual soldier service but ambivalent about war aims articulated by first President Bush and then President Obama. A war carried out by a citizenry and fighting force completely immersed in a new communicative realm made possible by technology. The difficulty of finding equitable ground for dialogue between veterans and civilians.
The critical evaluations so far have been complimentary, by-and-large, which is cool, but sharper-edged critique by sterner critics is sure to come. Speaking of which, Stacey Peebles’ Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq (2011) aside, we also await the academic community’s assessment of contemporary war literature using the current methodologies of literary analysis. In fact, we will soon have a survey of war literature written by Iraqis—Ikram Masmoudi’s War and Occupation in Iraq War Fiction (2015)—before we have one written about contemporary American war novels–another curious state of affairs. For any interested academics, Peebles and Aaron DeRosa are co-editing an upcoming issue of Modern Fiction Studies devoted to contemporary war literature, a welcome effort that will greatly accelerate the critical evaluation of our “Golden Age” of war literature.
The “take-one/leave-one” bookshelf, Camp Clark, Afghanistan
Photograph by Bill Putnam–please click to enlarge.
Memorial Day is the quietest of national holidays and probably should be even quieter still. It’s hard to say anything in honor of fallen soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors that isn’t inadequate to their loss and thus seems fraudulent and self-serving. Even so, it’s hard to resist saying something, and perhaps even necessary. Below are the names of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan with whom I served, taught, or knew well. All were good men, and their memory informs my sense of what war writing—to include Time Now—can do and be. Here’s to all the good men and women who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all those who died in our previous wars, too.
On the right in the photograph above is Captain David Taylor, one of my lieutenants when I commanded a company in the 82nd Airborne Division. In the picture, taken in 2001, he’s standing on a hill outside Gnjilane, Kosovo, where he served as a company commander in a task force of which I was the executive officer. In 2006, Major Taylor was killed in an IED attack in Baghdad.
I’m also thinking about First Sergeant John Blair, Sergeant First Class Kevin Dupont, and Staff Sergeant Alex French, all US Army advisor team members who died in action in Khost or Paktya province, Afghanistan, while I was there. Also, Specialist Peter Courcy and Private First Class Jason Watson, who were assigned to Camp Clark, as was I, when they died in an IED blast just outside Khost city. Colonel Ted Westhusing and Lieutenant Colonel Joe Fenty, friends who died in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively, and former students Captain Dennis Pintor, killed in Iraq, and First Lieutenant Todd Lambka, killed in Afghanistan. Finally, Major Bill Hecker, whom I knew only through email, but who before dying in Iraq in 2006, published a book on Edgar Allan Poe, an achievement that impressed me enormously.
In my thoughts, I also remember the deaths of allies who fought on our side in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the wars before.
Below is a photograph I took today in a small cemetery in Franklin Township, New Jersey, of a flag placed on the gravestone of a Revolutionary War veteran. I’m glad he is remembered and now add my measure of tribute.
My post last week about poetry written by Afghan women prompted one reader to ask me about fictional portraits of Afghan and Iraqi women and another to ask me about my own experiences with Afghan women during my deployment to Khost and Paktya provinces in 2008-2009. The first query can be answered quickly, for there aren’t many. In Sand Queen (2011) Helen Benedict features a young Iraqi woman named Naema. In The Watch (2012) Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya portrays a young Afghan woman named Nizam. In both novels, the women narrate their stories in first person in chapters that alternate with others that relate events from American point-of-views. In both novels, the young women have come to American bases or outposts to plead the case of relatives killed or captured by Americans. In Sand Queen, Naema wants to know what’s become of her father and brother, who have been imprisoned in Camp Bucca. In The Watch, Nizam wants the Americans to return the body of her brother, a vaunted Pashtun jihadist, who has been killed in an attack on their compound. The Americans intend to evacuate Nizam’s brother’s corpse to Kabul to verify his identity and publicize his death.
Naema and Nizam are more intelligent, more mature, and more articulate than the Americans with whom they interact. Their integrity and sense of ethics are also superior. Through them, Benedict and Roy-Bhattacharya suggest how ill-equipped most American soldiers were for dealing with Iraq and Afghan nationals, especially women, with anything approaching subtlety and sensitivity. Stupidity and brutality more accurately describe things.
Short story authors Katey Schultz and Siobhan Fallon also occasionally portray “local national” women in their fiction. Benedict, Roy-Bhattacharya, Schultz, and Fallon are all civilians who never served in the military. In the fiction about Iraq and Afghanistan written by veterans, Iraq and Afghan women barely appear. Survey The Yellow Birds, Fobbit, Redeployment, and the Fire and Forget anthology and tell me what you find. Of recently published fiction by veterans, Elliot Ackerman’s Green on Blue includes a young Afghan woman as a secondary character, but not so much Jesse Goolsby’s I’d Walk With My Friends I Could Find Them and Michael Pitre’s Fives and Twenty-Fives. Benedict, Schultz, and Fallon are all women, but not all women authors are given to portraying “host nation” women. None appear in Sparta, They Dragged Them Through the Streets, Be Safe I Love You, or Eleven Days, all written by women. Male civilian authors are more of the same: no Iraq or Afghan women in the male-authored Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Wynne’s War, or The Apartment.
So that’s an interesting but not very impressive record. I salute the civilian authors who have made the imaginative stretch to portray war from the viewpoints of Iraqi and Afghan women. The veterans, I’m thinking, just don’t have much real-world experience to draw on, for most of us spent our year or years overseas without any meaningful contact with local women. Here’s the sum total of my experiences, and I went “outside the wire” four or five days a week, at least in the first eight months of my deployment, to interact with Afghan civilians in one capacity or another.
Every woman we saw on the roads of Khost province wore blue burqas that covered them from head-to-toe. When we passed them in our trucks, they would turn away from us and hunch down in a ball until we passed. This behavior outraged our interpreters. “Do you know why they are doing that?” they would ask, “It is because the Taliban is making them.” But the times we saw women on the street were few. On most missions, we only saw men. Stopping to speak with the women we did see was unimaginable.
We hosted a shura on our camp and one of the speakers was a woman politician of some fame in Afghanistan. I wish I remembered her name, because I wonder how she came to prominence and what’s become of her. After the public shura, I was privy to an hour-long private meeting in which the woman-politician was the only female in a group of twelve (and I the only American). Her veil came off and she bantered back-and-forth, seemingly at ease, with the men, who also seemed to enjoy the occasion immensely.
A package bounced out of one of our trailers on a bumpy patch of road and was immediately picked up by a young Afghan male who carried it into a kalat. We stopped and sent our interpreter to retrieve the package. I watched as he was met at the door by a woman who vehemently denied that anything had happened. She and our interpreter jabbered back and forth for a few minutes and then the interpreter pushed past her into an interior room, retrieved the package and returned to our trucks.
Adolescent girls before maturity played on the streets without restraint, and it was heart-breaking to think about those obviously within a few months of disappearing behind the veil and kalat walls for the rest of their lives. We hosted weekly medical clinics on our camp and saw a steady stream of young girls there, but all were escorted to us by their fathers and older brothers, never their mothers and older sisters. My Afghan counterpart sometimes was visited by his seven-year-old daughter, who scampered about the office as a young girl would anywhere, alternately snuggling up to her father and then dancing across the room in peels of laughter. For a while, a young Afghan-American woman worked as an interpreter on our camp. We all liked her fine, but she had trouble relating to the Afghan officers. I think the problem was more that her command of Dari and Pashto were not great and also that she was demure by nature—a huge handicap in a nation made up of emotional and outspoken verbal combatants.
An ANA brigade commander, the governor of Khost, and the Khost police chief with a young girl in a downtown Khost ice cream shop.
So that was it—pretty slim pickings, all-in-all, and though I’m sure we could have done better, the pickings were certainly even slimmer for rank-and-file soldiers. The men and women who served on Provincial Reconstruction Teams, which were charged with nation-building and humanitarian missions, had more significant interactions, but their numbers were few. NGOs had developed a network of women’s schools, clinics, and centers in they years after 9/11, but by the time I arrived most had closed, if not been blown up. Maybe more was happening in Kabul and inside the Green Zone in Iraq, but I wouldn’t know. Much has been made lately of the Cultural Support Teams made up of women who passed rigorous qualification tests to work with Special Operations units to facilitate their interactions with women. I don’t want to gainsay anything the women on these teams accomplished, and I look forward to finding out more about them, but accompanying Green Berets, SEALs, and Rangers on midnight missions to seize High Value Targets in my mind unfortunately doesn’t qualify as a significant and sustained engagement with the women of Afghanistan, and in any case the whole effort came at least five years too late. If there were feminine hearts-and-minds to be won, or important intelligence to be gained from the distaff side of Afghan and Iraq society, we didn’t do much to glean them. That’s good news for military wives worried about their husbands misbehaving downrange or falling in love with an Afghan or Iraqi beauty, but bad news for war writers interested in portraying the full range of citizenry in the lands in which we fought.
A girl at the Camp Clark clinic, 2009. Picture by an International Security Force and Assistance Force photographer.
Washing the Dust from Our Hearts: Poetry and Prose from Writers of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project is, as far as I can tell, the second volume published by the organization named in its title. The first, The Sky is a Nest of Swallows, appeared in 2012, while Washing the Dust from Our Hearts is out just this year. The Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP), formed in 2009 by journalist and novelist Masha Hamilton, is a collective comprised of interested American writers and publishing world friends who facilitate via the Internet writing by women in Afghanistan. Most of the collective’s work is online, but Washing the Dust from Our Hearts and The Sky is a Nest of Swallows represent efforts–pretty substantial ones–to place in print female voices from a land often described as the worst place in the world to be a woman. Afghanistan is also said to be a land thick with poets, with a tradition dating back to the great 13th-century mystic Rumi, but it has been a male tradition never hospitable to women writers and now even less so under the pressure of the Taliban.
The Afghan poets who participate in AWWP do so at great risk—the hardship and danger of writing publicly, especially for Western audiences, is writ large in many Washing the Dust from Our Hearts poems. Women participate, they tell us, because they feel empowered by doing so and because they want the world to know their plight. They use the artistry of poetry to give shape to the suffering of women and the nation at large at the hands of the Taliban during an extended period of war. The beauty of poetry comes in the expression of loss, mixed with pride in their defiant survivors’ strength, and their ability to imagine a better Afghanistan that was and which might be again.
My favorite poem in Washing the Dust from Our Hearts is “My Beautiful and Lovely Kandahar”by a woman named Shogofa, the link to which is at the Afghan Women’s Writing Project website. Another favorite, a stanza from which I will quote here, is “My Wild Imagination” by “M”:
I am one of those women with a wild imagination
who yearns to see equality of Afghan men and women
in action and law. I want lovers to walk
in the streets of Kabul, Herat, Mazar,
holding hands, sharing hugs,
free of harassment and harsh looks aimed at them like bullets.
An interesting aspect of AWWP is that the women write in English; the poems in Washing the Dust from Our Hearts appear in their English original version and also in versions translated into Dari, the Afghan version of Persian, and then transcribed into Arabic script by a woman named Pari. This remarkable alchemy of poetic production and reproduction is made possible by the care and let us not forget resources of the American (and other international) members of the collective. I salute AWWP for their effort and achievement and encourage you to support them.
A photo of a Kabul bridge, by Roya, from the AWWP website.
Washing the Dust from Our Hearts: Poetry and Prose from Writers of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project. Edited by Lori J.O. Noack; translated by Pari. Grayson Books, 2015.
I’d Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them, Jesse Goolsby’s soon-to-be-released novel about three US Army male soldiers bound by shared horrific experience in Afghanistan, offers plenty of reasons to be excited about the expanding possibilities of contemporary war fiction. Both in subject matter and manner of narration, it does things no Iraq or Afghanistan war novel has yet done, which makes it fresh and delightful–though also harrowing–while its determination to tell a different story in a different way serves as a subtle critique of war fiction heretofore published. I’d Walk With My Friends’ greatest achievement is the rich imagining of its protagonists’ lives before they joined the military and long—generations long—after they returned from Afghanistan. Chapters set in Afghanistan ring true in terms of details and emotional exactitude, but Goolsby’s bigger point is that war experience exists in a continuum of life events that precede any soldier’s deployment and play-out directly and indirectly in the days, weeks, years, and decades following, with war’s insidious ruination affecting not just the returning veteran but his or her family and friends, too, incrementally mostly but often cataclysmically. It is this capacious ability to envision the “human cost of war” that distinguishes I’d Walk With My Friends from other war novels, whose tighter focus in comparison seems more a failure of imagination than a literary virtue.
Goolsby’s an active-duty Air Force officer, and I often wondered what the many Air Force personnel I met in Afghanistan thought about the Army folks who by-and-large did most of the fighting. I’d Walk With My Friends suggests that Goolsby, though not an Afghanistan veteran, has indeed been given to speculation about the men and women who volunteered to serve on the ground in the nation’s recent wars. A tour working in a DoD office charged with managing the military’s human resource programs seems to have made him especially sympathetic towards soldiers whose time overseas, let us say, did not go so well and left him curious about the long-term consequences. The novel’s protagonists are enlisted US Army soldiers who bring their distinctive regional backgrounds, personalities, and family histories to the shared experience of the warzone. Wintric Ellis is a chill rural California kid, a small-town hot shot who dreams of escape and grandeur. Armando Torres hails from an assimilated Colorado Hispanic family presided over by a charismatic con-man of a father whom Armando worships. Big Dax is a 6’6” New Jersey-ite, physically imposing and impressive at first glance, but actually timidly deferential to anyone more self-assured than he is and given to impulsive fits of bravado to try to prove himself. In Afghanistan, the three squad-mates endure a vexing humanitarian mission, survive a suicide bomber attack in Kabul, and together are complicit in the death of an Afghan girl who approaches them on checkpoint duty in the middle of nowhere. One of them is also victimized–let’s not be coy, the incident is a man-on-man rape–on-base in a way that is far more consequential than anything that happens outside the wire—a scenario that suggests the horrible possibility that it is American military culture itself, rather than war, that wreaks the most damage on its members.
But a mark of Goolsby’s skill is that he refuses to blame military service or war single-mindedly on the troubles that befall Wintric, Torres, and Big Dax. They are catalysts, certainly, but it’s more than that. The men’s personalities, as made clear in the scenes depicting life before service, shape—indeed, almost bring them inevitably to—the events they encounter in Afghanistan, as if the nostrum “fate is character” were all too true, and their personalities are also complicit in their unraveling afterwards. Goolsby excels at portraying the complex relationship between character and circumstance. Debilitated by inadequate personal resources, Wintric’s, Torres’, and Big Dax’s inability to deal with their Afghanistan experience is exacerbated by their crumb-bum high school educations and the impoverishment of the junk-food-and-pop-culture American milieu, both feeble preparations for life’s storms. And yet we feel for I’d Walk With My Friends’ tragic heroes, as quotidian as their downward spirals are, much as we do for the befuddled, overmatched heroes of Thomas Hardy novels such as Jude the Obscure and The Mayor of Casterbridge. We can’t hate them, because we recognize ourselves in them, and because Goolsby makes us love them by making their dissolution so vivid.
The vitality stems from Goolsby’s ingenious ability to devise scenes that portray characters in the full clutches of their unique defects and also from the manner of the novel’s narration. I’d Walk With My Friends is related entirely in present tense, which renders a real-time, documentary feel to the episodic events the characters endure. The protagonists’ sagas are not related in first-person, but the third-person descriptions are heavily focalized through the eyes of the main characters, so that descriptions of physical environment are limited to what Wintric, Torres, and Big Dax would actually be observing. There is almost no effort to render interior thinking, so the characters’ thoughts must be dramatized through spoken speech, though Goolsby’s ability to portray realistic and entertaining conversation is, again, excellent. What Goolsby doesn’t offer at all, though, is authorial commentary on the events he portrays, so readers are left to their own wits to make sense of the characters and events described. Nor does Goolsby employ much figurative language; if there is a metaphor or simile in the book that is not offered by one of the characters, I missed it.
So what to make of the lean-and-mean stylistic texture of the book? The parts that Goolsby leaves out by design are the parts his characters repress to their detriment. United by their horrible war experience, Wintric, Torres, and Big Dax lack the power of comprehension and articulation to resolve its complications. Instead, they lie, misrepresent, and refuse to confront what needs confronting most. Life metastasized by war for them is best lived by reducing things to simplicities, trivialities, escapes, half-measures, and evasions, which is basically what they did before before war, too. But now, following war, the consequences–self-destruction unto death and familial wreckage into perpetuity–are far more dire. The beauty of I’d Walk With My Friends lies in the fine-grained particularity with which Goolsby imagines how it is so.
Jesse Goolsby, I’d Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.
A “turn-and-burn” military convoy travels from one base to another, executes its business quickly, and then immediately returns home; the mission doesn’t allow for socializing or enjoying the destination post’s amenities. In Afghanistan, turn-and-burns were bummers, because, after risking our lives on the roads to ambushes and IEDs, we felt like we deserved to relax a bit before doing so again. My trip to the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, or AWP15, held last weekend in Minneapolis, was a bit of a turn-and-burn for me, unfortunately, for I arrived Friday morning and by mid-Saturday afternoon I was already heading back to the airport. I packed in a lot in my 30 hours in Minnesota, but I also missed a few panels and chances for fun before my arrival and after my departure.
Minnesota, first time ever to the home of so many of my musical heroes! Dylan, Prince, the Replacements, Husker Dü, and even now the great Hold Steady, and where T.S. Eliot once spoke to 17,000 people in a hockey arena….
Walking to AWP across the Mississippi River to downtown Minneapolis on Saturday morning
Musical and poetical rhapsodies aside, I wasn’t the only war writer who arrived in town possessed by a sense of purpose. For some, the urgency was born of dissatisfaction with the way war writing was represented at last year’s AWP14 in Seattle (though hopefully not with my panel there). Flashes of War author Katey Schultz, for example, explained that she left AWP14 feeling that civilian voices on war had been neglected.Siobhan Fallon wrote that she was glad to see so many women featured on war lit panels. Taking matters in his own hands, Benjamin Busch recruited an all-star line-up of war authors—Schultz, Fallon, Brian Turner, and Phil Klay—for a panel titled “Telling Our New War Stories: Witness and Imagination across Literary Genres.” Determined not to waste a second, Busch dispensed with author readings and and allowed for only a truncated audience Q&A. Instead, Busch himself interviewed the panelists, asking damn good questions about war-writing craft and politics that elicited thoughtful, thorough responses. For my part, knowing that I wouldn’t be on the ground long, I invited every war writer and scene-supporter I knew to dinner Friday night. It was a somewhat desperate ploy for company, but one that saved me from my usual conference fate—eating alone at McDonalds–so thank you everyone who came.
War writers, friends, and scene supporters at AWP15
My speaking role at AWP15 was moderating a panel titled “Who Can’t Handle the Truth? Memoirs by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans,” featuring Ron Capps, Kayla Williams, and Colin Halloran. I contributed ten minutes of editorial overview, all which proved totally superfluous given the power of the readings and commentary that followed. Capps, Williams, and Halloran are each fully at home behind the podium, and any one of them could have commanded the audience’s attention for an hour. Their readings recounted harrowing moments during deployment and afterwards; war, military service, and life afterwards have not been easy for Capps, Williams, and Halloran, and their memoirs unflinchingly portray events that made it so and the pain and turmoil that ensued. As I listened, the sense that I got from their books that they had been pretty damn good (conscientious, competent, and energetic) soldiers in uniform was reinforced, and I wondered about the difference between the squared-away soldierly performances and the unraveling of the personal lives—as if a mil-civ divide within had chewed them up and made their lives a tumult. Capps, Williams, and Halloran used the “T-word”—trauma—directly, but sparingly, as if mindful that the word has become an 800-pound IED in rooms where veterans and veterans writing are discussed. Speaking of PTSD, for example, Capps said, “You can control it, but you can’t hope to cure it.” Their readings made clear, however, that their service had been traumatic and that writing about it played a therapeutic, or at least an important part, in their restoration to healthy and productive happiness. The mesmerized audience had plenty of questions, so I didn’t ask the one I prepared:
“18th-century English author Samuel Johnson wrote that ‘no one ever regrets serving as a soldier or sailor.’ In your mind is that statement wisdom or foolishness, either generally or personally? To the extent that you might regret serving, was it war or military culture that did the most damage? To the extent that you do not, what got you through the hardest part—writing, medication, therapy, love, friends, time, or something else?”
Ron Capps, Kayla Williams, Colin Halloran, me.
Another panel, titled “Writing as Therapy for War: Developing Stories and Poems with Witnesses and Soldiers,” unabashedly promoted the use of writing as rehabilitative for individuals brutalized by war, as a means of documenting injustice, and as a means of expressing outrage to powers-that-be. Poet, playwright, and essayist Maurice Decaul, head of a New York University veterans writer collective, said that for the collective’s members “writing was not meant to be therapeutic, but it often was.” The new director of Military Experience and the Arts website, David Ervin, an Iraq veteran, spoke openly about how his road to recovery from being “pretty messed up” owed much to writing. Olivia Cerrone, part of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, described how writing gave voice to Afghan women repressed by their own culture and damaged by war, while Elena Bell said much the same on behalf of Palestinian women in Israel.
Ben Busch’s questions for his all-killer, no-filler line-up of authors focused on large issues of political implication and writerly issues of craft. Brian Turner spoke of “complicity”—his effort to imbricate civilian reading audiences in the circle of responsibility for the damage done by war. Siobhan Fallon explained that part of her motivation in writing You Know When the Men Are Gone was her sense that the American public knew little about the war experience that soldiers and their families were enduring. Phil Klay said that he began to write after returning from Iraq and asking himself, “What the hell was that all about?” Katey Schultz reported that she began to write about war when she noticed how language had begun to grow distorted and then change in the years after 9/11. “A story begins with an unanswered question, and I had a lot,” she said. Turning to issues of craft, she said, “It took me a year to get the uniforms and equipment right and another year to figure out who called who ‘sir’ and then six more months to make the characters come alive.” On a roll, Schultz explained that there are many ways to write authentically about war besides personal witness and first-hand experience. Empathy and research are great teachers, too, she said, and spoke of how Google and YouTube aided her while writing Flashes of War. All the panelists had great anecdotes about the importance of research in bringing not just realistic detail but life to their stories. Turner spoke of reading late at night about a butterfly unique to Bougainville that then became a detail in a passage in My Life as a Foreign Country about his grandfather who fought there. Fallon described asking her husband to send her examples of soldier port-a-john graffiti, which he did, but that she eventually had to make up her own to create the perfect effect in a story. Klay described trying to attain a “thick knowledge” (anthropologist Clifford Geertz reference!) that allowed him to be comfortable “making things up and knowing it’s not bullshit.” Exactly what model of PVS-4 Night Vision Goggles did the Marines use in 2004 anyway? It matters, said Klay, along with a lot of other things that matter. But each knew the limits of journalistic-like quest for verisimilitude, too. Busch quoted Ron Capps to the effect that, “We can all get the facts. It’s what you do with them afterwards.”
On the subject of trauma, though, the authors’ remarks minimized the references that were everywhere in the “Writing as Therapy for War” panel, and they turned to the topic directly only as the panel came to a close. Klay, for example, asserted that war writers should be on guard to avoid “flattening the story into trauma,” an idea echoed by Busch, who asked if we might be encouraging veterans to repeatedly tell a certain kind of story when they speak or write of war. Writing, or life, the sentiment seemed to be, need not be defined by all-abiding concern with suffering focalized through the experience of individual soldiers or non-combatants. I’m sure the panelists are sympathetic to the “Writing as Therapy for War” panelists’ goals–they would probably say they are working for the same thing–and it’s also obvious that the characters in their own stories, poems, and memoirs have been severely rattled by war. But rather than relying on trauma tropes, the authors expressed interest in thinking expansively about what war writing can do and be; even in time of war military service is not only about pain and outrage–and if it is, the subjects can be approached from a variety of directions and perspectives. “Widen the palette,” Turner urged war writers, “use more of the imagination.”
Brian Turner, Katey Schultz, Siohban Fallon, Benjamin Busch, Phil Klay
So, turning and burning, war writing unfolds upon itself, revealing new problems and possibilities, proceeding in different registers, with varying points-of-view, goals, and subjects of emphasis. A view of things clear-cut to one or many may be problematic or uninteresting to others. Interestingly, the non-war lit panels I attended wrestled with many of the same issues pestering the war writing community. Judging by the titles alone makes the case: “Blood Will Out: Putting Violence on the Page.” “The Politics of Empathy: Writing Through Borrowed Eyes.” “Writing Atrocity: The Novel and Memoir of Political Witness.” How sensationally or how subtly should an author describe graphic violence? What are the problems associated with white men and women portraying dark-skinned characters? Has a war novel other than Sand Queen portrayed the indiscriminate killing, torture, drone strikes, soldier misconduct, and general officer maleficence that are unfortunately-but-undeniably now part of the American way-of-war? I didn’t know the authors on these panels, but was surprised at many turns about the relevance of their comments to war writing, and I’ll be seeding upcoming posts with their ideas.
A blog post about AWP15 war lit panels by Christopher Meeks is here.
A blog post about AWP15 by Andria Williams of the Military Spouse Book Review is here.
A blog post about AWP15, racism, and violence by Vanessa Martir is here.
Thank you to my fellow panelists Ron Capps, Kayla Williams, and Colin Halloran. I’m humbled by your eloquence and bravery and honored by your friendship.
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Introductory Remarks, “Who Can’t Handle the Truth: Memoirs by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans”
The American Civil War, in my understanding of things, was the first war to generate a subsequent “battle of the memoirs” in which Union and Confederate generals entertained readers with first-hand accounts of battlefield exploits and decisions, while also serving as correctives to other accounts, all the while cajoling for their places in history.
After subsequent wars, such as World War I, World War II, and Vietnam, memoirs written by generals and statesmen were also common, but they were joined and even supplanted in public interest by accounts written by veterans far farther down the chain-of-command than the vaunted army commanders of the North and South. We value the private soldier’s memoir, we seem to feel, because we think his, and now hers, recollections speak most truthfully to what it means to serve in combat and within a military culture that seems so increasingly foreign to civilian and peacetime life.
We honor these personal testimonies because we see in them an honesty and authenticity about war that we are not likely to get from journalism and history. We enjoy these sagas because we respect the impulse to document war and suspect that memoir writers use the power of memory and language not just to tell us about places and events that are thrilling and exotic, but to remind us that war is a brutal experience—one that requires careful retrospective handling by its participants to assess the exact nature of its horror and aid the memoir writer’s transition to effective, contributing member of the society that sent him or her off to war.
Perhaps the most striking memoir of the kind I have in mind was J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. First published in 1959, 14 years after Gray returned from four years of combat in Europe to become a professor of philosophy, The Warriors contains many insightful formulations about what a memoir written by a veteran might be and do. Glenn writes from his position as a university teacher in 1959: “Now it is almost as though [the war] never took place.” But he immediately reverses that sentiment, in the next line stating, “Yet something is wrong, dreadfully wrong.” Tempted by the impulse to forget, he fights back, for he knows that forgetting is not just a cop-out, but ultimately impossible. “What protrudes and does not fit in our pasts rises to haunt us and makes us spiritually unwell in the present,” he writes, and commits himself to the act of remembering. Noting that “war compresses the greatest opposites into the smallest space and the shortest time,” he feels a personal and social obligation to not to “continue to forget.” Gray writes, “The deepest fear of my war years, one still with me, is that these happenings had no real purpose.” If the effort to remember through writing did not have “some positive significance for my future life,” Gray concludes, “it could not possibly be worth the pain it cost” [to either live through the experience or write about it afterwards].
Today, we have a chance to take stock of the Iraq and Afghanistan war memoir by listening to three notable authors of the genre. Each of our readers has explored not just what it means to go to war, and be in war, but to return from war and live healthily and happily afterwards. The journey for each has not been easy, and I salute them for the toughness they displayed in confronting challenging episodes in their lives and then the candor, insight, and sense of perspective revealed in their writing. I know from my own experience writing about war and its aftermath that such tasks are not easy—it means being honest with oneself and taking risk in revealing the full dimensions of one’s struggles with reading audiences. I’m honored to be the host and moderator for this panel and eager to hear what they intend to share with us.
Our first reader is Ron Capps, a retired Army and State Department veteran who currently is director of the Veterans Writing Project, a Washington, DC-based organization with national reach that promotes veteran writing through workshops and its publication 0-Dark-Thirty. The wars of the 21st century were fought by members of the millennial generation, a group of young men and women notorious for their disrespect or obliviousness to age and precedence. But Ron Capps has been at the military and war fighting business for a long time, and his memoir Seriously Not All Right (2014) documents not just his experience as an officer-in-uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a longer pre-history as a State Department official on-the-ground for extensive periods in Kosovo and Africa. It is this larger, broader, longer view that I think distinguishes Capp’s perspective.
Our second panelist, Kayla Williams, has written two memoirs about her service in Iraq and afterwards. Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army (2006) came very early in the game and immediately staked out a position as an insightful, almost definitive articulation of what it means to be a woman in uniform, in the 21st century, during not just war but a period of intense reformulation of our ideas not just about women-in-uniform but gender and sexuality in our society at large. To my mind, no one more than Kayla has spoken as frankly about these issues as they pertain to the military that took men and women for the first time in significant numbers together overseas to fight and when not fighting co-exist together. Kayla has also published a second memoir, Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War (2014) that is equally candid and insightful about the rocky road of marriage she and her husband Brian, who was seriously injured in war, have traveled together since first meeting on a remote hilltop in Iraq.
While Ron Capps represents age on our panel and Kayla Williams signifies what is strikingly new about contemporary war and war authorship, our third panelist, Colin D. Halloran, embodies a much more traditional authorial position—that of a young, literary, middle-class male—Colin was 19 when he deployed to Afghanistan as any infantryman—with no particular inclination or aptitude for soldiering before he joined “to see war” and “serve his country.” Colin turned to poetry to portray vividly the physical experience and even more intensely the emotional experience of combat, service, and life afterwards. His Shortly Thereafter (2012), a memoir that combines verse and prose, is not just one of the very few instances of poetry written by an Afghanistan veteran, but is one of the few biographies of war written by a young enlisted soldier—a doubly-curious phenomenon given the library shelves full of memoirs written by former officers and Navy SEALS. A few years older now, Colin teaches writing at Fairfield University in Connecticut. But Colin, as I know him, will be the last to ever forget where he came from and is currently at work at both another volume of poetry and a memoir that addresses his war years using the arguably more direct medium of prose.
***
Thanks to Roy Scranton for turning me on to J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors.
Yea for Minnesota, so below’s a special video insertion, the Hold Steady’s ode to the Minneapolis punk-rock scene, “Stay Positive”:
Compared to the generous amount of contemporary war fiction published in the last few years, volumes of war poetry have been sparse. The fact’s lamentable, because war poetry, it seems to me, possesses vast potential to surprise and intrigue due to the malleability of form and the license granted the imagination. Philip Metres’ Sand Opera is a case in point. A rumination on our millennial wars, particularly Iraq and especially the brutality of Abu Ghraib, told from a a variety of American and Iraqi perspectives, Sand Opera doesn’t disappoint at any level—line, stanza, individual poem, or as a comprehensive whole. The poetry world agrees, for Metres has just been honored as the inaugural winner of the Hunt Prize, a new poetry award sponsored by Yale University that comes with a $25,000 prize. The striking cover of Sand Opera prepares the reader well for what’s inside: Metres has created a “terrible beauty,” to use Yeats’ phrase, out of the grimmest of grim subject matter.
Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature 