Highbrow Magazine - the yellow birds https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/yellow-birds en Reading 21st Century War Stories (Part II) https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2545-reading-st-century-war-stories-part-ii <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 09:45</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumWar_0.jpg?itok=PLQOU1dg"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumWar_0.jpg?itok=PLQOU1dg" width="480" height="268" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> <strong><em>This is the second part of a two-part series. Read Part 1 <a href="http://highbrowmagazine.com/2420-reading-st-century-american-war-stories-heroes-hell-and-back">here</a></em></strong>.</p> <p> In <em>The Yellow Birds, </em>a priest, during a stop-off in Germany en route back to the States, speaks to Private Bartle of “an old saying,” warning him, “You are only as sick as your secrets.” Bartle hesitates, seems to think about speaking, but soon he has returned to the prison of his mind and his self-described mistakes. He considers the possibilities of the church and its rituals. “I could have wrung it out, hoping I might find an essential thing that would give meaning to this place or that time. I did not. Certainty had surrendered all its territory in my mind.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> <em>The Yellow Birds</em> is not messy, not in its construction or prose. But the chaos of war remains, along with the sometimes chaotic roles of memory and forgetting and the narrative fractures inherent to war. They are orchestrated—in theme, structure, and character—with the writer playing God. Upon leaving the priest, Bartle thinks, “My separation was complete,” and the separation from the church and from the Germans whom he is among en route home, has expanded into a separation from humanity. A separation made more forceful through his imminent departure from the army—leaving what he knows and returning to a place and a self (himself, post-war) that have become alien. This same departure from the familiar, and from Iraq where he had a job to do (whether that job was fighting or waiting to fight), intensifies memories of events he is growing more physically distant from, while mentally and emotionally drawing closer in.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <em>I felt an obligation to remember [Murph] correctly, because all remembrances are assignations of significance, and no one else would ever know what happened to him, perhaps not even me. …When I try to get it right, I can’t. When I try to put it out of my mind, it only comes faster and with more force. No peace.</em></p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/2mediumWar.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 401px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, seasoned writers and editors, in their engaging new book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Good-Prose-Nonfiction-Tracy-Kidder/dp/1400069750/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1366004518&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=good+prose+the+art+of+nonfiction"><em>Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction</em></a><em>,</em> write: “One can also use memoir to get <em>closer</em> to the past. …If you succeed [in storytelling], you replace the fragments of memory with something that has its own shape and meaning, a separate thing that has value in itself.” Some of this transit, from fragment to shape and meaning, occurs through the narrator in Powers’ novel; and we, the reader, inhabit or observe.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In <em>Dust to Dust</em>, Busch’s memoir, we are participants in the <em>process</em> of moving closer to—of moving <em>through</em>—the past. In order to look back; but just as essentially, in order to look forward. The memoir—many a valuable memoir (take Peter Handke’s elegiac, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sorrow-Beyond-Dreams-Review-Classics/dp/1590170199"><em>A Sorrow Beyond Dreams</em></a>)—occurs in the territory of introspection as much as story. And one might argue that the memoir form can be a realm of retrieving emotion. The subject moves from a fissured place of numbness, doing battle with complex experience (hurt; violence; ambiguity). In Busch’s case, the journey is toward greater understanding (pieces assembled to make a new whole), and, at least temporally, a more even peace.</p> <p>  </p> <p> This journey is, of course, not just for the writer instigating it; in deft hands one person’s necessary journey becomes the path others needed. The interplay of war and the subsequent deaths of Busch’s parents are unlinked yet deeply related events. They both force questions of mortality and grief closer to the forefront of consciousness. And they both take him back to origins of identity and consciousness: childhood. For Busch, and for the narrative and its readers.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Kidder and Todd also point out that for O’ Brien, his fictional representations of Vietnam grew richer than his memoir, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/If-Die-Combat-Zone-Ship/dp/0767904435/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1365897628&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=if+i+die+in+a+combat+zone"><em>If I Die in a Combat Zone</em></a><em>,</em> published prior to the stories of <em>The Things They Carried</em><strong>. </strong>“[O]nly by heightening reality could O’Brien communicate the true dimensions of his own emotions.”</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/dusttodust_0.jpg" style="width: 332px; height: 500px;" /></p> <p> Matt Gallagher, at a recent <a href="http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/76710">event</a> for the collection of Iraq and Afghanistan (fictional) stories <em>Fire and Forget, </em>which he co-edited with <a href="http://www.royscranton.com/">Roy Scranton</a>, expressed how it is easier to explore in fiction, rather than memoir or essays, how “we’re all shades of gray.” Gallagher published his memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kaboom-Embracing-Suck-Savage-Little/dp/B006CDL666/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1365885634&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=kaboom+matt+gallagher"><em>Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War</em></a>, soon after his return, portions of it written as a blog while overseas.  (Veteran Colby Buzzell, included in the collection <em>Fire and Forget</em> and on the event panel, also wrote a blog during deployment, which evolved into his first book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/My-War-Killing-Time-Iraq/dp/0425211363/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1366005839&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=colby+buzzell"><em>My War: Killing Time in Iraq</em></a>, followed by an American travelogue, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lost-America-Dead-End-Colby-Buzzell/dp/B007MXI9RO/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1366005509&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=colby+buzzell"><em>Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey</em></a>.) Gallagher, currently an MFA candidate at Columbia, is now working on a novel, perhaps on a path similar to O’Brien’s.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Similarly, Powers, in <em>The Yellow Birds</em>, has chosen fictional representation of real experience in order to allow him to make an experience of war more real, in order to deepen its truths. Through a fictional reality, a constructed story with constructed characters, Powers shapes his version of a war story. Bartle vacillates between hero and anti-hero, with the intimation that flaws are human and that solitude is a condition or effect of war.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The narrative moves back and forth in time, for most of the novel passing between a concise period in Iraq, September and October 2004, and the end of Bartle’s deployment—the <em>after</em> during which the reader is led to understand that something distressing has occurred, involving the younger friend, Murph, and his death. We read, in part, to figure out how much Bartle is implicated or to blame. Sergeant Sterling, an iconic character, steely, complex, and just a little reductive, serves as decoy; but we are not sure whether there is a point at which too much of the war will push the Sergeant over the edge and whether he will act unconscionably. Even before this tension fully takes hold, we are told, “I hated him. I hated the way he excelled in death and brutality and domination. But more than that, I hated the way he was necessary…how I felt like a coward until he screamed into my ear, ‘Shoot these hajji f**ks!’”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Bartle sees the Sergeant as experienced, evidenced in small ways throughout: dabs of Tabasco in his eyes to stay awake; a pat down of the men, almost tender in its thoroughness, after taping down anything on them that could jangle or make noise as they hike toward battle. And then we learn, with Bartle, that Sergeant Sterling is only 24, to Bartle’s 21. Sterling’s thoroughness holds the desire to keep the men alive; the scene conveys his need for control, where so much remains, nonetheless, uncertain. Even Bartle’s feelings are uncertain, towards himself and towards Sterling and Murph, only 18, whom Bartle foolishly promised to protect in the briefest of meetings with Murph’s mother, playing a role in Bartle’s nebulous and weighty guilt.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <em>I realized as I stood there in the church, that there was a sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told, and what was true. And I didn’t think I’d ever figure out which was which.</em></p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/obrienbook.jpg" style="width: 359px; height: 550px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> Powers’ prose is intoxicating, creating a mental state—an interiority—that feels at times like a prison, before the appearance of any actual equivalent. This is accomplished with great skill, distinct from Busch’s skillful memoir, which does, however, create a parallel sense of solitude: a place of reflection and synthesis. With Powers, the reader joins a frame of mind, including entrapment, innocence, fear, and rebellion. Bartle does not want to feel obligated. At the same time, he is resigned, and on a quest for something akin to sense. Narrator and reader need some kernel of understanding extracted from memory -- though memory is disjointed and attached to an almost unbearable helplessness.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The question recurs: to what extent are we helpless? Deaths are cruel and random, unpreventable by magical wishes or talismans. Or do we have agency? If so, how do we use it? Bartle attempts to wrest agency, with mixed results.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The skill of the writing that enables a reader to slip into Bartle’s mind risks pushing away readers with distinctly different experiences and reactions. The fine line between realistic details and the rendering of a story that might carry a summation of truth, but blur some specifics, serves as a reminder that one person’s iconic war novel is another person’s falsehood: truth is relative; it is experience-bound. And one Iraq novel, even a powerfully realized and beautifully written one, is not enough. We need room for varied voices; and voice and experience are inextricably linked.</p> <p align="center"> ~</p> <p> The writer <a href="http://www.sebastianjunger.com/">Sebastian Junger</a> embedded with a platoon in Afghanistan, writing in his resulting book, <em>War</em>, “I think I finally understand the idea of brotherhood and how—without that—almost nothing else is possible.” This is part of the tension of war. It is a deeply communal activity (we see this even in Swofford’s desert football game), involving a kind of mutual reliance seldom demanded in civilian life; and it is deeply solitary, even while surrounded by others. This solitude—aloneness—risks intensifying upon return: coming back home, when you can’t really go back to what was before. Whether or not home has changed, the soldier has. (Much could be said, too, about military families—home often <em>has</em> changed, absence grown customary. <a href="http://www.siobhanfallon.com/">Siobhan Fallon</a>, a military spouse, explores these themes, and more, in her story collection, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/You-Know-When-Men-Gone/dp/0451234391/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1366003642&amp;sr=1-1"><em>You Know When the Men Are Gone</em></a>.)</p> <p>  </p> <p> But what becomes of that “brotherhood” of war back home? A new kind of effort is required if community is to be maintained or built anew.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/fallonbook.jpg" style="width: 398px; height: 600px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> Tim O’Brien (narrator-character-author) tells us, still slippery and contradictory: “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end.” Matt Gallagher says something similar in his <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Kara%20Frye/Desktop/Kara's%20Files/2011__October%20-/KFK__Job%20Search__2012-2013/Highbrow__2012-13/which%20began%20as%20a%20blog%20during%20his%20deployment,%20Kaboom:%20Embracing%20the%20Suck%20in%20a%20Savage%20Little%20War">Iraq war memoir</a>: “We would always be there, even long after we left.” Powers’ novel thematically echoes this, though tries to slip away in the end. This could be construed as a result of necessary synthesis, or, perhaps as rushed simplification. The need for redemption risks trumping thornier portrayals of memory’s zigs-and-zags.</p> <p>  </p> <p> These stories and accounts emerging from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are as much about home, as war, about return and the tension between what is possible and what is not. The lessons of Vietnam can assist in this.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <a href="http://www.fireandforgetbook.com/?p=3">Mariette Kalinowski</a>, a contributor to <em>Fire and Forget</em>, appeared at the literary venue and gastro-pub <a href="http://www.thehalfking.com/calendar/2013/fireforget.htm">Half King</a>, co-owned by <a href="http://www.sebastianjunger.com/">Sebastian Junger</a>, this past March with other contributors, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/a-war-before-and-after-part-6/#more-141766">Jacob Siegel</a>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/a-war-before-and-after-part-4/">Phil Klay</a>, and <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/a-war-before-and-after-part-4/">Matt Gallagher</a>. Kalinowski remarked on the subject of reintegrating after deployment, and fissures between war and home: “I feel like there’s not a language or vocabulary that exists that can easily convey these things.” Writing is about “trying to find vocabulary, trying to find language that conveys” war experience, and the disjointed experience of return.</p> <p>  </p> <p> And yet through this need for a new vocabulary, to contrast with pre-war life, she creates the necessary language and narrative in stories like “<a href="http://www.fireandforgetbook.com/?p=3">The </a><a href="http://www.fireandforgetbook.com/?p=3">Train</a>.” This is the project each of these writers, and more, are engaged in. It’s almost a cliché at this point, an unfortunate one, this idea of the unspeakable. But what we can take from the paralysis established by <em>the unspeakable</em>—is that it, too, requires a language, a narrative that can render its secrets: horrors, fears, shame, confusion. Or else we find ourselves in the territory of the haunting secret the priest in <em>The Yellow Birds</em> made reference to. This is not a religious or spiritual matter, but one of survival.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In the March 15, 2013, <em>New York Times</em> article, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/fashion/the-family-stories-that-bind-us-this-life.html?pagewanted=all">The Family Stories that Bind Us</a>,” Bruce Feiler, author of the recent book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Happy-Families-Improve-Mornings/dp/0061778737/ref=la_B000APV4SW_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1365888226&amp;sr=1-1"><em>The Secrets of Happy Families</em></a>, reviews research clarifying how knowledge of a family’s past, stories passed on, including good times and bad, helped the family endure as a unit and the individuals better weather difficult experiences. This use of a unifying narrative has even begun to be employed in the military, Feiler tells us. The message, from science, from psychology, from observation and literature: All of us, those back from war and those who remained outside—have need for narrative, the goal and the attempt, as well as the result: to speak.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Sometimes our stories will end on that happy moment, a hero back from hell, even if reductive or just a moment in time; and sometimes the return will involve a different kind of hell, a reckoning with memory and the past, a reckoning with the schism between a then and a now. This cohesion and possibility for healing—and sometimes art—happens in the telling of the tales, the shaping of experience, character, setting, wherever the story may take us on that narrative arc. If we need redemption, it need not only come from a happy ending with straightforward message. Satisfaction, endurance, comprehension, even if incomplete, emanate from <em>fusion</em>; in this way all of us, including veterans and non-, begin to traverse that fissure.</p> <p>  </p> <p> As writer Phil Klay put it to the attentive audience at the <a href="http://www.thehalfking.com/calendar/2013/fireforget.htm">Half King</a> on Manhattan’s West Side, “People want to tell their stories, they want to be understood.” Some combination of skepticism and empathy, a departure from the limits of each of our first-person-constrained realities, moves us forward: individually, collectively.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Retired Army Lt. Col. Ron Capps, founder of D.C.-based <a href="http://veteranswriting.org/">Veterans Writing Project</a> and the new literary journal <a href="http://o-dark-thirty.org/"><em>0-Dark-Thirty</em></a>, spoke on NPR’s <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/11/12/164979747/writing-project-helps-veterans-cope-after-war"><em>All Things Considered</em></a> last November of his own writing, and how it initially arose from “looking for a way to get better control of the memories from five wars.” In addition to the literary intentions and possibilities in veteran stories, the skill and artistry and the satisfaction derived from adept honing of character and story, Capps speaks of wanting “to help bridge the divide between the less than 1 percent of Americans who are taking part in these wars and the 99 percent who are not.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> At a <a href="http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/76710">panel</a> in New York City on March 4<sup>th</sup>, discussing <em>Fire and Forget</em>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/a-war-before-and-after-part-2/">Roy Scranton</a>, co-editor and contributor, explained, “You move back and forth between” these two worlds “and you have to put that puzzle together somehow.” One of the questions, as a writer, and as the person experiencing an inversion of what’s normal, Scranton poses: “How do you make the war seem normal, and this reality seem strange?” (Scranton addresses this from a political standpoint in a 2011 <em>New York Times</em> “Home Fires” piece, “<a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/the-only-america-theyve-ever-known/">The Only America They’ve Ever </a><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/the-only-america-theyve-ever-known/">Known</a>.”)</p> <p>  </p> <p> While the population of veterans, relative to the rest of the population, remains small, the issue of reintegration is one we all face. Whether or not we consider the decisions of war to have been shared, or justly made, the outcomes belong to all of us. We are still learning this lesson from Vietnam. A reminder exists in ongoing silences, broached or preserved, between fathers of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, and their children; a subject that writer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Bissell">Tom Bissell</a> took up with skill and grace—and a sense of urgency—in his 2007 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Father-All-Things-Departures/dp/1400075432/ref=tmm_pap_title_0"><em>The Father of All Things</em></a>, recounting a return trip to Vietnam that father and son made together. Anthony Swofford confronts and struggles with similar silences with his father, who served in Vietnam, in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hotels-Hospitals-Jails-A-Memoir/dp/1455506737/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1365889394&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=hotels%2C+hospitals+and+jails+swofford"><em>Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails</em></a>, a follow up to <em>Jarhead</em>. Wounds and festering secrets yet remained, passed generation to generation, cohesive narrative unfulfilled.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Literature helps us share experience, myth, and story, sometimes querying belief (secular as much as religious): a shared endeavor. A haunting solitude lingers in Powers’ and Busch’s narratives; but books like these, and like <em>Fire and Forget</em> and the other memoirs, stories, and novels emerging, begin to build bridges, among veterans and between veterans and civilians.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Reading is actually a collaborative act,” Roy Scranton said with conviction in <a href="http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/76710">discussing</a> the remarkable compendium of veteran voices in <em>Fire and Forget</em>. “The reading and the writing come together to make something that doesn’t exist with either one of them individually.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Welcome to our shared narrative.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <em>“It </em>wasn’t<em> a war story. It was a </em>love<em> story.”</em></p> <p> <em>“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.”</em>- <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Carried-Tim-OBrien/dp/0618706410/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1366001203&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+things+they+carried">Tim O’Brien</a></p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio:</strong><br /> <em>Kara Krauze is a contributing writer at</em> Highbrow Magazine.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/war-literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">war literature</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/war-books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">war books</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/war-novels" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">war novels</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tim-obrien" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">tim o&#039;brien</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/yellow-birds" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">the yellow birds</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/dust-dust" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">dust to dust</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/veterans-writing-project" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">veterans writing project</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/zero-dark-thirty" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">zero dark thirty</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/siobhan-fallon" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">siobhan fallon</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Kara Krauze</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">New America Media</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Mon, 24 Jun 2013 13:45:56 +0000 tara 3059 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2545-reading-st-century-war-stories-part-ii#comments Reading 21st Century American War Stories: Heroes, Hell, and Back https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2420-reading-st-century-american-war-stories-heroes-hell-and-back <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Fri, 05/10/2013 - 09:46</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/2mediumWar.jpg?itok=YNYFE4LO"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/2mediumWar.jpg?itok=YNYFE4LO" width="480" height="321" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p><em>This is Part 1 of a two-part series. </em></p> <p> </p> <p><em>“What we didn’t know, even though all the old soldier stories say it clear as day: is that we would always be there, even long after we left.” </em>- <strong>Matt Gallagher, <em>Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War</em> </strong></p> <p> </p> <p>The 21<sup>st</sup> century in America has been permeated by war, almost from the start; even while most of America’s citizens remain unaffected—directly anyway—by its vicissitudes.  We need a literature that can begin to convey the multiplicities of war: the adrenaline; the sweat and blood; the isolation; the brotherhood; the memories and questions; and the return home. We need a narrative for America’s 21<sup>st</sup> century wars, and yet no single narrative will suffice.</p> <p> </p> <p>The literature of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is growing; polemics and essays increasingly augmented by memoir, stories, and novels. We will turn specifically to several here, focusing on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Busch">Benjamin Busch</a>’s memoir <em>Dust to Dust</em>, <a href="http://www.kevincpowers.com/">Kevin Powers</a>’ novel <em>The Yellow Birds</em>, and the short story collection <a href="http://www.fireandforgetbook.com/"><em>Fire and Forget</em></a>, co-edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher. </p> <p> </p> <p>Story, one of the richest and oldest traditions—conveying and sharing experience—transports an individual’s experience into a more compact vessel, delineating and shaping conflicting thoughts, feelings, and memories that clog the brain’s neurons and body’s senses. Stories illuminate, bringing specificity to the abstract—“war”— condensing and opening up the realities of recent conflicts for a larger audience, while deepening insight and community for those who served. These emerging stories are national imperatives: for successful reintegration of individual veterans; for veterans as a group; for veteran families; and for the rest of the population, with all of the complex relationships entailed by dissent, agreement, and the responsibilities of a nation towards its warriors.</p> <p> </p> <p>The subject of war quickly evokes perceptions and misperceptions, bound by era, politics, economics, history, and ideology, ideas of right and wrong. At the same time, many feel the urge to retreat. War affects few directly, or such is our perception. Let’s spend a moment with this essay’s title—with its <em>21<sup>st</sup> century</em>, the <em>heroes</em>, that <em>hell</em> and <em>back</em>—it's a mouthful. And right there, in the title, there’s an implicit search for redemption: in the arc of a story. It is hard not to look for the silver lining. Will we find it—in war, and the stories war compels? Do we need it?</p> <p> </p> <p>Much as we might try to formulate one vet, the archetype, war resists this, whether we think of this as a post-modern perspective or just a more open viewfinder. World War I brought us our early vision of the broken soldier, men traumatized by the first glimpse of modern weaponry: the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation">Lost Generation</a>. After World War II, came the G.I. Generation, later upgraded to the “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Generation-Tom-Brokaw/dp/0812975294">Greatest Generation</a>;” stoic and moving on—to green lawns, picket fences, wives home once again with the booming kids.</p> <p> </p> <p>Swiftly on the heels of World War II came Korea, later presented in the television show (and movie) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M*A*S*H_%28TV_series%29">M.A.S.H</a>., which was inflected as much by the Vietnam era in which it was made, as the post-World War II, patriotic introversion of the Korean-war era. Think about the packaging of that era—post-Korea and early or pre-Vietnam—still going on right now: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804503/plotsummary"><em>Mad Men</em></a> and Don Draper, a veteran scarred, his identity remade and fractured, but moving on, replete with beautiful surfaces—physique, wife, job, car—the interior hiding, complexity and lies, masking a shattered self. A mask so effective that the interior damage hardly seems to matter on the outside; and yet Don Draper’s risky or soul-searching choices (affairs) and his buttoned-up early married life both evoke the damage.</p> <p> </p> <p>But before the contemporary pretty packaging of earlier post-war life represented in <em>Mad Men</em>, complete with irony and fissures, came Vietnam. The word, in American lexicon, signifies an era, its upheaval and conflicts, the shattering of accepted values—honor and country—and the veterans who returned into this firestorm. <em>Vietnam</em>: for several generations of Americans, it has become more of an idea than a country. For many, its shadow is still here: the war that divided America, in stark contrast with earlier wars of the century, dissent overt and menacing: <a href="http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/times-they-are-changin"><em>The Times They Are a-Changin’</em></a>.</p> <p> </p> <p>Onward— the 21<sup>st</sup><sup> </sup>century: there is still something futuristic about the label, this era in which we live, still more to impact and mold. From early on, it has been infused with war.</p> <p> </p> <p>The year the Second Iraq War started in 2003, out came <a href="http://anthonyhswofford.com/">Anthony Swofford’s</a> memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Jarhead-Marines-Chronicle-Other-Battles/dp/0743287215/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1365701174&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=jarhead"><em>Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles</em></a><em>, </em>set during the <em>first</em> Gulf War. Canny timing, marking what can now be looked back on as the early stages of American 21<sup>st</sup> century war stories, though initiated by way of the late 20<sup>th</sup>. <em>Jarhead</em> began to reveal the next generation of American soldiers and veterans to a broader audience, almost before they had yet arrived.</p> <p> </p> <p><em>I look at the sky, blue like no blue I’ve known before, and at the desert that will not stop. This is the pain of the landscape, worse than the heat, worse than the flies—there is no getting out of the land. No stopping. After only six weeks of deployment, the desert is in us, one particle at a time—our boots and belts and trousers and gas masks and weapons are covered and filled with sand.</em></p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/dusttodust.jpg" style="height:500px; width:332px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>Now, 10 years since publication, more than 20 years since that war, the landscape is growing more insistent.</p> <p> </p> <p>Language, stories, and patterns in 21<sup>st</sup> century first-wave (American) war narratives begin to suggest maps for reading, and perhaps even for writing. Swofford’s <em>Jarhead</em>, and Vietnam era’s <a href="http://www.txstate.edu/rising-stars/tim-obrien.html">Tim O’Brien</a>, via <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Carried-Tim-OBrien/dp/0618706410"><em>The Things They Carried</em></a><em>, </em>assist in illustrating the circumstances of war narratives, the limitations and the possibilities. (Many more, that don’t fit here, add to this discussion: think Isaac Babel, Joseph Heller, Wilfred Owen, Virginia Woolf, William Manchester, Anthony Loyd, Janine di Giovanni, and on.)</p> <p> </p> <p>Tim O’Brien writes, in “How to Tell a True War Story”:</p> <p><em>A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.</em></p> <p> </p> <p>And in almost anything true, we can also find something false. O’Brien subverts and plays with notions of truth, and so must all writers, and readers. We ask questions, sometimes knowing there are too few answers, or too many.</p> <p> </p> <p>As O’Brien’s fictional character (also Tim O’Brien) tells us later in the same story: “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” And then, “In other cases, you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling.” And yet we try, we have to. Stories help us comprehend, vanquish, make order.</p> <p> </p> <p><a href="http://thephoenix.com/tools/print/?id=136841">Benjamin Busch</a>, veteran and actor, in his lyrical and introspective memoir, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dust-A-Memoir-Benjamin-Busch/dp/0062014854/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1365701852&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=dust+to+dust"><em>Dust to Dust</em></a><em>,</em> weaves together disparate experiences and stories—from childhood; from movie and television sets, where he has played the role of soldier; to Iraq where he has been one—all the while extracting meaning and searching for it. He carries the reader along in his particulars, from a boyhood spent with dirt and sticks and water to the adult he becomes, still attached and beholden to the elements: in similar ways, and in ways evolving and distinct. Busch’s evocative reincarnations of intent childhood days playing with toy soldiers, planes, and boats, daring bodies of water or building makeshift structures in the woods, remind of the adventure sought in not only imagination, but in activity and action: the heroes we make ourselves into, at first in play and later, in more fractured and increasingly less consistent ways, in adulthood.</p> <p> </p> <p>In <em>Jarhead,</em> Swofford describes a game of football out in the desert, a staff sergeant’s misbegotten idea to “play football for the reporters, wearing full MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture) gear and gas masks.” Ten-pound suits in 115 degree heat. The display escalates into a spiraling mouth-off, bravado and anger and agency—heroes of someone’s narrative, their own?</p> <p> </p> <p><em>I stand back from a turn with Kuehn. I feel frightened and exhilarated by the scene. The exhilaration isn’t sexual, it’s communal—a pure surge of passion and violence and shared anger, a pure distillation of our confusion and hope and shared fear….</em></p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/yellowbirds.jpg" style="height:600px; width:399px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>Swofford continues in a brilliant riff of expletive-filled flight, an all-empowering curse-off against the world, from the press-pool colonel, to President Bush and Dick Cheney and Saddam Hussein and “the sand and the loneliness and the boredom and the potentially unfaithful wives and girlfriends” and “the f**khead peaceniks back home, the skate punks and labor unionists and teachers” and “our confusion and fear and boredom” and “ourselves for signing the contract, for listening to the soothing lies of the recruiters”…and so much more. The passage speaks to the tension between power—wresting it, holding it—and powerlessness. Sometimes they coexist.</p> <p> </p> <p>The desire for agency and for adventure: this is strong, deep within us all, just as with the need for story. And again the dust and sand infiltrate everything, all that you touch or see or do. With his customary poetry of the sentence, Busch, in <em>Dust to Dust</em>, writes at first about soil but soon about dust and sand and transition from mere tangible to something ineluctable, not to be escaped, whether in earth, war, or life’s lessons in mortality: “There is a vastness to the underground. …Beneath us, veins of water are moving in the deep punctured by wells and the failures of dirt to know its place.”</p> <p> </p> <p>“I have always been a digger,” Busch affirms. Not 20 pages later, Busch is again a soldier, experiences woven through, rather than presented with straight chronology. “It was April 2003 and we were in the desert waiting to invade Iraq.” And, “I thought, as I sat on an abandoned sandbag bunker in the berm, that it was all for nothing, this life. All of this dust hurrying to be earth again.”….“I was listening to dust. We were waiting to invade a land composed of it.”</p> <p> </p> <p><a href="http://www.colummccann.com/about.php">Colum McCann</a>, in his foreword to the recently released anthology <a href="http://www.fireandforgetbook.com/"><em>Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War</em></a> reminds us, lest we forget, “These are wars that America is so determined not to see that we banned images of soldiers’ coffins from our nightly broadcasts….” If we need heroes, all of us, in some form, then we need also to forget—to forget what soldiers must do and what they witness, and to forget where we have sent them.</p> <p> </p> <p><a href="http://www.fireandforgetbook.com/?p=3">Jacob Siegel</a>, author of “Smile, There are IEDs Everywhere,” the short story opening the collection <em>Fire and Forget</em>, writes in that story, “I didn’t have any real plans or ambitions for when we got back. I only had fantasies of other lives, like the fevered dreams of a sick man growing bolder and more intense the closer he gets to death.” And is death near? The question that haunts and lurks during deployment mutates. What about the return home? If you can’t go back (home); or what if you are back there (inhabiting the war) still?</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/mediumIraqWar.jpg" style="height:279px; width:500px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>When Private Bartle, the central character in Kevin Powers’ debut novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Yellow-Birds-Novel-Kevin-Powers/dp/0316219347/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1365986164&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+yellow+birds"><em>The Yellow Birds</em></a>, arrives back in the States, met by his mother, she says, “Oh, John, you’re home.” Bartle’s voice intones to the reader, “I did not believe her.”</p> <p> </p> <p>But, let’s be clear, not everyone is like Bartle. Busch weaves his war experience into a before, a during (including time back in the States between deployments), and an after. Even more firmly landing on a positive experience of return, post-war, is blogger, writer, National Guard enlistee, former marine, and police officer, Chris Hernandez, who wote in the <a href="http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/opinion/veteran-reports-of-recruitment-tricks-and-trauma-m/nWxRF/">Austin-American Statesman</a> this past March:</p> <p><em>The public is constantly reminded of how much we veterans are suffering for our service. I’m here to remind the public of a counterpoint. We benefited from our service, and not just financially. We learned important lessons about the country, the world, our fellow soldiers, and most importantly, ourselves.</em></p> <p> </p> <p>The media speaks more openly now than even a few years ago of some of the nameable fissures and ailments of return, more invisible than missing limbs, physical wounds. We have to be able to talk about these realities, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicide, traumatic brain injury (TBI), depression, while remembering that’s not the whole story. Military suicides <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/14/169364733/u-s-militarys-suicide-rate-surpassed-combat-deaths-in-2012">rose in 2012</a>; and the total for the year was higher than combat deaths. In percentage terms, military suicides are lower than the overall population; but military suicides trend <a href="http://rt.com/usa/us-army-suicide-rate-025/">younger</a>: more life ahead, more life destroyed.</p> <p> </p> <p>David S. Cloud reports in the April 14, 2013, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-army-suicide-20130414,0,6499749,full.story">Los Angeles Times</a> on an intensive intervention program being used at Fort Bliss in Texas: "’If you get a soldier to treatment, the chances are he'll live,’ said Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, a West Point graduate who commands Ft. Bliss and once served as President Clinton's military aide. 'We're really emphasizing getting help.'  We continue to need improved programs, funding, and awareness about mental health issues, trauma, and TBI. While we also need to be mindful of defining individual vets by trauma they may or may not have experienced.</p> <p> </p> <p>Same wars, but the meanings shift, according to whose perspective we inhabit. Some of the experiences repeat, the sand, the dust, perhaps a misleading recruiter; and yet, the characters and voices—the realities—they change. Do we each look for the story that makes sense; do we look for <em>our</em> story, whether veteran or civilian? The one—like a wife or husband—that appears to complete the picture. The figurative children—more than one—that we understand came from our blood, sweat and cells, our experience. Something that makes sense, until it doesn’t. And yet it might still be ours—our war, our country, our triumph or mistake. The thing—memory, event, person—that makes us think or makes us want to forget, or both.</p> <p> </p> <p>In reading <a href="http://www.kevincpowers.com/">Kevin Powers</a>’ enchanting novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Yellow-Birds-A-Novel/dp/0316219347/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1365702995&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=yellow+birds"><em>The Yellow Birds</em></a>—one might ask, is it problematic to write an enchanting book about war? Through the lens of the narrator, Private Bartle, and his friend and fellow soldier Murph, we go to Iraq—specific in some of its details of place (“lounging in the dust beneath a large shade tree on base”) and yet generic enough that it <a href="http://chrishernandezauthor.com/2013/01/05/book-review-the-yellow-birds-by-kevin-powers/">has been argued</a> by veteran writers such as <a href="http://chrishernandezauthor.com/2013/04/04/two-essays-two-reactions-two-very-different-americas/">Chris Hernandez</a>, author of the novel <a href="http://chrishernandezauthor.com/about/"><em>Proof of Our Resolve</em></a>, this could be any war. Powers’ novel contains moments of tension and insight that speak to war from an internal place, the language more poetic and melancholy than adrenaline-infused, even in battle:</p> <p> </p> <p><em>I hated the way I loved [Sergeant Sterling] when I inched up out of the terror and returned fire, seeing him shooting too, smiling the whole time, screaming, the whole rage and hate of these few acres, alive and spreading, in and through him.</em></p> <p> </p> <p>Could be a father’s or uncle’s war—could be Vietnam—could be the war people want to read, something made bigger, less grounded in one immediate moment, than the intensity of battle if dramatized in any kind of real time. This is philosophical; and it is digestible. And then we wonder: is this a flaw; or is it the point?</p> <p> </p> <p>Who is the veteran-writer—who is Powers—writing for? For himself: to unpack the crushed events of experience, memory, an unreal reality. For other veterans: needing to see their own experience rendered. For those who did not go to war, but must, either as an act of empathy or for necessary cohesion of a nation—as readers and thinkers and members of a complicated humanity—must make the attempt to understand. For some ever-morphing combination of the three….</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Author Bio:<br /> <em>Kara Krauze is a contributing writer at </em>Highbrow Magazine.</strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>For Highbrow Magazine</strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Photos: New America Media; Dept. of the Air Force (Creative Commons)</strong></p> <p> </p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/war-literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">war literature</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/american-war-books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">american war books</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/war-books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">war books</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tim-obrien" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">tim o&#039;brien</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/dust-dust" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">dust to dust</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/benjamin-busch" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">benjamin busch</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/kevin-powers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">kevin powers</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/yellow-birds" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">the yellow birds</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/vietnam-war" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vietnam war</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/iraq-war" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Iraq war</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/war-afghanistan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">war in Afghanistan</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mash" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">MASH</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/jarhead" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">jarhead</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mad-men" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mad Men</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/chris-hernandez" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">chris hernandez</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Kara Krauze</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Fri, 10 May 2013 13:46:30 +0000 tara 2834 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2420-reading-st-century-american-war-stories-heroes-hell-and-back#comments