How to read a true war story

Some stories grab you by the throat, give you a shake, and knock the breath right out of you. I recently re-read Tim O’Brien’s “How to tell a true war story,” an oft-anthologized chapter from O’Brien’s emotionally eviscerating novel, The Things They Carried. People call The Things They Carried a novel because it’s book-length and loosely fictionalized, an account of the Vietnam War that seems to overlap with O’Brien’s own experience but which he never outright claims as autobiography. Sometimes the truest stories, O’Brien suggests, didn’t actually happen: sometimes you have to change the names, places, and other details–the facts of mere biography–to express a larger truth.

In my first-year writing classes at Framingham State, we’re discussing David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, this year’s common reading. Finkel’s book is “true” in a way that O’Brien’s book never claims to be. Finkel is a journalist who spent eight months embedded in an Army unit stationed in Iraq during the 2007 Surge: the exact point of American occupation when everyone had pretty much given up on the war. Finkel’s account of the 2-16 and their leader, Ralph Kauzlarich, is based on fact, as journalism is supposed to be. The names of the men in the 2-16 are real, as are the appendix photos of the 14 soldiers who were killed during their deployment. Finkel traveled with the 2-16 to Iraq–he lived with them at FOB Rustamiyah, a part of Iraq most Americans never see–and he made additional fact-finding trips to places like Fort Riley and the Brooke Army Medical Center to follow-up with the men he wrote about. Finkel, in other words, takes great pains to get his facts straight, as journalists are expected to do.

These facts matter, but they aren’t the part of the book that sticks with you. This is what O’Brien, for one, understood. Finkel gets his fact straight because history is built on facts, and it’s important to honor the legacy of those who fought and those who died. But when you walk away from a book like Finkel’s, those detailed facts are the first thing you forget.

At our first class session, I asked my students a seemingly simple question. Thinking back on The Good Soldiers, regardless of how far you got into the book, what do you remember? I didn’t quiz my students on names, dates, or other details (as they had feared) since I’m notoriously forgetful about those things, too. Walking away from a book like Finkel’s, I don’t remember the names or the dates: that’s why the names are listed in the appendix and why the date is listed at the start of every chapter. These details are important, but they aren’t what you remember.

What you remember after reading a book like Finkel’s is the same as what you remember after reading a book like O’Brien’s. You remember the stories and the scenes that moved you, viscerally. In Finkel’s book, my students remembered the same scenes I did: the part where a soldier shoots a man in the head, only to realize a terrified Iraqi girl witnessed the killing. The part where the soldiers’ Iraqi translator brings his daughter to the U.S. military base for medical treatment. The part where Finkel visits a young soldier who is hospitalized after losing multiple limbs and sustaining severe brain damage. The part where the soldiers try to figure out how to retrieve an Iraqi corpse floating in a sewage tank. My students and I remember these scenes not because we remember all the specifics: we forget the names of the people to whom these things happened, and we forget other factual details. What we remember, though, is an emotional response: a vivid, imagined sense of how we might feel if we were in a similar situation.

My students have been painstakingly schooled in a particular way of reading. According to this training, their job when they read is to find and memorize minute textual details, for these are the things teachers ask on tests and quizzes. What was the first name of the leader of the 2-16? What was the name of the first soldier to die? On what date did General David Petraeus visit FOB Rustamiyah, and on what date did the battalion finally go home? These are important details, and I’m glad David Finkel took great pains to get them right, because they’re in the book whenever I need to look them up. But when I walk away from The Good Soldiers, those details aren’t what stay in my head, because those details aren’t what matter to my heart.

What matters in my heart is that both Finkel and O’Brien, in their own, different ways, give me a viscerally vivid sense of something I have never witnessed myself. Reading either book, I learn that I don’t want to experience the things these men experience, and I don’t want anyone else to have to experience these things, either. Both Finkel and O’Brien describe events that are literally unimaginable: what does the rest of your life look like if you’re a young veteran who has lost multiple limbs and sustained severe brain damage, or what is it like to come home from war with your head full of nightmares? What remains after I’ve finished both Finkel’s nonfiction narrative and O’Brien’s novel is a clear, unassailable sense that war is entirely unlike all the pious platitudes we use to describe it. If you haven’t experienced war, you can’t really “get” it, but at the same time, it’s of vital, utmost importance that these stories be told, not so the tellers can “move on,” but so the stories themselves be remembered, emblazoned in our collective memory. It’s imperative that you know this is what happened, even if you can’t fully understand it.

So, how do you read a true war story? You let go of your desire to remember all the dates and names. This isn’t a history class; these things will not be on the quiz. Instead, you read with an open heart and an inquisitive mind, allowing thorny, troubling questions to take full root in your consciousness. Why exactly did we fight this war? Why exactly do we fight any war? How are soldiers, civilians, and people who literally get caught in the crossfire changed by the experience? How can you tell the “good guys” from the “bad guys” in a scenario where everything seems hopelessly complicated and confused? How can we honor the sacrifice of soldiers who serve, and how can we provide them with the support they need when they come home, forever changed by experiences we can’t possibly imagine?

One of the scenes I remember from The Good Soldiers, for instance, involves a soldier who finally opens up to his wife about what he has seen, prefacing his remarks with “How much do you want to know?” In another scene, a soldier tries to describe to his family the kind of place Rustamiyah is–a place where people literally live in shit, the ground being covered with trash and raw sewage–and his grandmother walks away, unable to stomach his descriptions. Neither The Good Soldiers nor The Things They Carried is an easy, enjoyable book: given the choice to turn away and ignore the stories they tell, you might decide you don’t want to know any of this. But one of the morals behind both books, I think, is that these are stories that need to be told. How can you claim to be informed about the world we live in–how can you claim to be an informed American citizen–if you have no idea what has been done in our name across the world, both to our presumed enemies and to our own troops?

One of the points that O’Brien makes in “How to Tell a True War Story” is that a war story is seldom what it seems. The chapter tells a pair of horrific stories: in one, a soldier named Lemon steps on a booby trap that shreds his body and leaves pieces of his flesh hanging in a nearby tree, and in the other, a soldier named Rat–Lemon’s best friend–repeatedly shoots a baby water buffalo just to watch it suffer. O’Brien describes how audiences of well-intentioned readers invariably misinterpret these stories, fixating on the pain inflicted on the baby water buffalo–an innocent creature–and in the process missing the story’s real point. This isn’t a war story, O’Brien explains; it’s a love story. The moral isn’t that war causes people to do horrifying things, but that love does. If Rat didn’t love Lemon, there would be no need to shoot the water buffalo. The tragedy of war isn’t simply that it is violent and deadly, but that it is also the setting for profoundly life-changing relationships. War, O’Brien suggests, is both hell and heaven, filled with an inexplicable mix of pain and poignancy.

One of the challenges in reading The Good Soldiers is advertised in the title itself: what exactly is a “good” soldier? If you’re fixated on memorizing the names and dates, you’ll miss that question: you’ll miss, in fact, the whole point of Finkel’s narrative. On the first day of class, I raised a question my students and I will continue to grapple with in coming weeks: why did Finkel write this book, and what does he want readers to get from it? This isn’t an easy question; the answer isn’t something you can locate in the text and then memorize. The people Finkel describes are a mix of good and bad, so it’s difficult to tell exactly who the “good guys” are. Opening each chapter with a quote from President George W. Bush that gives the politically-correct version of what happened during a given week in Iraq, Finkel then juxtaposes that scrubbed and sanitary account with what actually happened to the 2-16 at that same time. Given multiple versions of the truth, which one is “truly true”? Is Bush a bad president for giving the American people an optimistic and upbeat version of a deeply troubling war, or is Bush a good leader for trying to bolster military moral however he can, even if that means claiming victory when all the facts seem to suggest otherwise?

Ralph Kauzlarich deeply cares for the men of the 2-16 but seems over-optimistic, naïve, or even offensively insensitive when he intones his favorite saying, “It’s all good,” even in the face of tragedy. Seeking to strengthen ties with his Iraqi allies, Kauzlarich befriends the leader of an Iraqi police battalion who fears retaliation from neighbors who resent his involvement with Americans. Whenever one of Kauzlarich’s men is killed by a roadside bomb, his loyalty toward his Iraqi allies is tested. Kauzlarich wants to help the Iraqi people, but he also finds himself occasionally hating the very people he is trying to help. If you desperately want to believe your involvement in the war is “all good” because you are making a difference in the Iraqi people’s lives, you’re going to struggle with existential doubt and despair every time you realize how intractable the problems you face truly are. Winning over the Iraqi people isn’t as easy as handing out soccer balls to local children; when you can’t accurately assess who is your friend and who is your foe, you’re going to respond to even the most innocuous encounters with suspicion, dread, and fear.

I suspect my students think they were assigned to read The Good Soldiers so they could be better informed about the war in Iraq, and presumably that is part of the common reading’s purpose. But a good book, like a true war story, does so much more than merely inform. Given the pictures that both Finkel and O’Brien paint of war, what does either writer want us to “do” with that information? Once you get a vivid taste of what war was like for a particular group of soldiers at a particular time, how does that awareness change you as a reader and a citizen?

A good book, like a true war story, can help you become better informed, but it also can (and perhaps should) make you a more earnest asker of questions. Forget about what happened in Vietnam or Iraq; instead, raise the question of why it happened. If there is a lesson to be learned in any war (or in any war story), what are those lessons, and have we learned them? Getting the facts straight is difficult enough; grappling with the trickier question of why is infinitely more difficult. The Good Soldiers is sure about its facts but not nearly as sure about its conclusions. Given a true war story, how to you make sense of it, and what do you do with that information once you’ve received it?

Click here for more photos from Newton Cemetery, shot this past Memorial Day.

If you’re looking for an eye-opening, nuanced account of the 2007 Iraq War surge from an embedded perspective, I’d strongly recommend David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers. If you’re looking for a novel about the Vietnam War that will break your heart time and again, I’d strongly recommend Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

 

Bookends

Today is Labor Day, the bookend to Memorial Day, which marks the traditional start of summer. In this election year, we’ve become even more deeply divided between the right-leaning folks who commemorate the war dead on Memorial Day and the left-leaning folks who applaud common workers on Labor Day, as if one holiday were in direct opposition to the other. Labor Day celebrates the rise of unions, which have been under attack from the right this past year, and Labor Day honors the common workers who build the infrastructure upon which our day-to-day society rests. How can servicemen protect our freedoms overseas if there were not workers maintaining the structure of society here at home?

This year, the right is rallying behind the cry of “I built this,” a shorthand slogan pointing to the importance of individual initiative and industry. Labor Day is a holiday to acknowledge the workers whose collective effort make our individual accomplishments possible: I am able to build this because they worked so hard to build that. When you drive to work every day, who built that road? When you negotiate orderly, crime-free streets, who protects your safety? When you go to the grocery story to spend your hard-earned paycheck, who stocked those shelves?

Whenever I’m grocery shopping and see a delivery man stocking shelves, I smile because my Dad did that, driving a bread route for years. If there was bread on the shelf when you went grocery shopping this week, it was because some hard-working Teamster like my dad drove a truck to deliver it: it didn’t just appear there by accident or chance.

Given the goodies in your grocery cart, you can “build” all kinds of things, limited only by your own culinary initiative and skill. But don’t pretend that because you combined those ingredients into something tasty, you created those ingredients themselves. Somewhere, a laborer grew that produce, raised that livestock, or ground that grain into flour. If you’re able to read a cookbook, some teacher taught you how, and if your kitchen catches fire while you’re cooking, some firefighter will rush in to save you.

Focusing on one’s own accomplishments while ignoring the assistance one has received is arrogance, and thanking those who gave their lives in war while not acknowledging the living laborers who work for the common good is folly. Both kinds of service are essential, and both kinds of service demand their own kind of sacrifice. Honoring one without honoring the other is like cutting off your left hand to honor your right. The beauty of bookends is that they work together, this one supporting the other in a perfect metaphor of collective teamwork.

I snapped these shots of the Fallen Firefighters’ Memorial last summer, when J and I vacationed in Seattle.

 

Decorated

It’s become something of an informal tradition. For the past three years, J and I have walked to Newton Cemetery on Memorial Day to visit the decorated military graves there. Although we don’t personally “know” anyone buried at Newton Cemetery, we read the markers, set aright floral arrangements that have fallen over, and remember the stories we’ve heard on previous visits. It just feels right to “visit the neighbors” on this day devoted to remembrance.

Click here for photos from last year’s Memorial Day walk, or here for photos from 2010, or here for photos from 2009. Enjoy, and happy Memorial Day.

 

Sunday on the Charles

Yesterday J and I went to the Charles River Esplanade for the “Massachusetts Remembers 9/11″ concert and ceremony at the Hatch Shell.

Sunday was a mild and sunny day–a day reminiscent of that turquoise-skied Tuesday ten years ago–so the Charles River was dotted with sailboats and kayaks while the Esplanade was thronged with cyclists, sun-bathers, and families with strollers. It was a day so lovely, you could almost pretend it was any ordinary Sunday until you came to a colorful patchwork tapestry spread on the grass like an enormous picnic blanket.

Half the size of a football field, this American flag consists of 50,000 red, white, and blue squares that contain messages written by Massachusetts school children in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks: a two-dimensional time-capsule to remind us of darker days.

J and I arrived at the Hatch Shell early, so we were able to enjoy a pre-concert performance by the Berklee College of Music’s Rhythm of the Universe, a collaborative project consisting of musicians from 90 countries from around the world.

It seemed somehow apt that the first melodic line J and I heard as we approached the Hatch Shell was that of a headscarf-wearing woman keening to a Middle Eastern melody. It was a sound that was both moving and mournful, as clear and ethereal as a muezzin’s call to prayer.

The two-hour concert and ceremony featured prayers led by the Massachusetts Interfaith Leadership Coalition and musical performances by the Boston Pops Brass Ensemble and the Boston Children’s Chorus.

My thoughts, however, kept going back to the eclectic sounds of the Rhythm of the Universe, who illustrated quite vividly how the cultures of the world can come together to create harmony if they are united by a common melody.

Click here for a photo-set of images from the “Massachusetts Remembers 9/11″ concert and ceremony.

 

Remember Fred

This past Memorial Day, J and I took a walk (and took lots of pictures) at Newton Cemetery, as we often do. Cemeteries are lovely places to walk, and Memorial Day is as good a day as any to visit your deceased neighbors.

While J and I were respectfully examining some of the stones in one of the sections devoted to military graves, we struck up a random conversation with a man and woman who were trimming the grass around the marker of a man they referred to as Uncle Fred. Uncle Fred, they explained, was an MIT graduate who served as a Navy fighter pilot because he loved fast cars and wanted a job that satisfied his thrill-seeking nature. Although he quickly rose in the ranks and had the opportunity to train other pilots, he preferred flying combat missions. Uncle Fred’s military career was cut short when he was killed in an accident while landing his plane on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific in 1944. He was 27 years old.

Uncle Fred, it turns out, grew up in a house just a few blocks from ours, living the length of his too-short life a generation or two before J and I were born. Due to the contingencies of time, in other words, Uncle Fred is a would-be neighbor whom we never had the chance to know. As we continued talking with the man and woman who were tidying Uncle Fred’s grave, J and I realized that they’d never had the chance to meet him, either. The woman had married into the family after Fred, her husband’s brother, had died, and the man, her son, was born years later. “I’m almost glad I wasn’t a member of the family then,” the woman confided. “I don’t think I could have handled that kind of loss.”

I remembered this random conversation with two strangers about their Uncle Fred because it says so much about the power of memory. Neither this woman nor her son had met “Uncle Fred”; they’d simply heard the oft-repeated stories about him. And each Memorial Day, they kept these familial stories alive by visiting the cemetery where Uncle Fred and other family members are buried, bringing kitchen shears and garden tools to trim the grass around their graves.

Memorial Day is a holiday set aside to remember fallen soldiers, and November has its own share of remembrance days: All Souls’ and All Saints’ Days to remember the dead, and Veterans Day to honor living veterans and active servicemen and -women. Although a lot of folks dislike Veterans Day because of its association with war, in my mind today isn’t about anything so abstract.

Veterans Day isn’t a holiday to advocate war or support the troops in an abstract sense; instead, it’s a day set aside for thanking the real-life men and women–our neighbors, relatives, friends, and friends of friends–who have served or currently are serving in the military. As Algernon noted recently, “[p]eople join the military for lots of reasons”: some are in the military because they support and want to serve in a particular war, others enlist because they’re looking for adventure, and others join the military because they see it as their best chance of getting an education and starting a career. Each and every “Fred,” in other words, has a story all his or her own, and today is the day we remember those stories with gratitude. Veterans Day is an annual opportunity not only to remember but also to thank our own “Uncle Freds.”

 

Civic

Today is Election Day, and for the first time in a half-dozen years, I won’t be walking to my local polling place. Now that I’ve switched my official residence from Keene to Newton, I’m registered to vote in Massachusetts…but since I teach in New Hampshire on Tuesdays, I voted via absentee ballot a week ago.

I’ll miss voting in-person at my old polling place in Keene. As I described last year, my former polling place in Keene is the same place where my students vote, so there’s typically a line of young, first-time voters lined up to register, and this always strikes me as a cheerful sight: a tangible reminder of youthful hope and idealism in an age that too often feels jaded and cynical.

When you cast an absentee ballot, you miss out on the communal aspect of voting, with election volunteers checking your name off their rolls while other votes wait in line for their turn. When you cast an absentee ballot, you have an even greater sense of being just one vote–just one voice–in a sea of votes and voices. Dropping your ballot into a mailbox (like dropping your vote into a ballot box) feels like an act of faith: a love-letter to your fellow citizens that reads “I care enough to make my opinion known.” Wherever you live and wherever you vote, be sure to do so. Our country needs more love letters–more hope and idealism–and less jaded cynicism.

I snapped both of today’s pictures of the Newton City Hall and War Memorial on the sunny day last month when I applied for my absentee ballot.

 

Summer fun

Last Saturday, J and I took advantage of a sunny Saturday to tour the USS Whidbey Island, an amphibious warship that was docked in Boston Harbor’s deep-water port for this year’s Navy Week festivities. Just like our tour of the USS Bataan two years ago, last weekend’s tour of the Whidbey Island gave us a sense of how tough it is to be a sailor or Marine.

For example, after a friendly Marine explained the features on a standard-issue Light Armored Vehicle–the kind of Marine tank the USS Whidbey Island often carries to overseas deployments, and which Marines often live out of during desert deployments–J asked the obvious question: “How hot does it get in one of those things?”

The Marine smiled and nodded with an expression that said “You have no idea.” It turns out Army LAVs are air-conditioned, but Marine LAVs aren’t. After merely peeking inside the Marine version, I could imagine the claustrophobia–much less heatstroke–I’d feel if I had to share one. I guess there’s a reason Marines are both few and proud.

After we’d finished talking with this same Marine, J thanked him for talking to us and asked one last question: “Will you pose for a picture with my fiancee?” The Marine agreed and asked if J wanted him to pose with or without his gun. “Have her hold the gun,” J urged, and the Marine complied.

Joking that J won’t want to see me armed after we’re married, I took the gun, posed with our Marine friend, and smiled for the camera. Getting to tour a warship, look at tanks, and handle (unloaded) guns is all part of the Summer Fun that is Navy Week…but when the going gets hot, I’m glad these well-trained soldiers and sailors are doing a job that I surely couldn’t handle.

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Summer fun. Click here for more photos from aboard the USS Whidbey Island.

 

Saluting the colors

Happy Independence Day to you all, regardless of where in this colorful country you hang your hat.

Today’s image of two art-appreciating cowgirls comes from my 2007 visit to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which I’ve previously blogged. If you’re in the mood for some more conventional patriotic images on this July 4th holiday, check out my Memorial Day photo-set. Enjoy!

 

Passing the Bataan

It’s not often that I read news items about the President where I sit up and say, “I’ve been there,” but that’s exactly what I did today when I read about President Bush’s Veterans Day ceremony on the USS Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier that’s being recommissioned as a museum. Although I’ve never set foot on the Intrepid, I have set foot on the USS Bataan, the amphibious assault ship that was docked in New York harbor next to the Intrepid during today’s official recommissioning ceremony. In my book, that’s close enough.

I rarely have reason to hang around aircraft carriers or amphibious assault ships, the latter being (slightly) smaller vessels designed to carry the helicopters that deliver and support ground troops in an amphibious attack. But this past summer, J and I jumped at the chance to tour the USS Bataan while it was docked in Boston Harbor over Independence Day weekend. When else, we figured, would we have the opportunity to tour a vessel we automatically began referring to (at least when we were out of earshot of any of its crew) as the “big-ass boat”?

As a civilian, I typically take for granted (read: don’t take time to consider) the things enlisted men and women do for their “day job.” In my online teaching, I frequently encounter military personnel (many of them in the Navy) who rely on distance education to pursue their degrees during deployment, but I don’t often consider how these students’ day-to-day lives differ from those of my civilian students.

Touring the USS Bataan gave me a renewed sense of respect for the men and women who choose to serve in the armed forces. As a college instructor, I know the enlisted men and women in my online classes are usually my most dependable students: they do their work, they submit it on time, and they don’t complain about busy schedules or other distractions. As befits their military training, my enlisted students simply Do Their Job without excuses. Having visited the Bataan, I now have a mental image of what life for my Navy students might look like as they live and study at sea, the big-ass ships they call home serving as self-contained cities. Juggling the demands of my adjunct teaching load seems downright simple when compared to the demands of juggling school and military service, but my enlisted students seldom complain: they just get the job done.

As a civilian, I’m often ambivalent when it comes to military matters. On the one hand, my inner-pacifist believes any loss of life in the defense of any cause is a price too high; on the other hand, my inner realist realizes freedom is not free. The very fact that I don’t normally have to think about who is protecting my freedom–the very fact that I and other civilians can rest in the bliss of ignorance while someone else guards the ship–is itself a luxury paid by someone else’s sacrifice. Although the USS Bataan is designed as a warship, perhaps its finest hour happened here at home, when it was among the first to deliver aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While the rest of us were wringing our hands, helpless, at the horrendous images of natural destruction we saw on TV, the sailors aboard the Bataan sprung into action, rescuing stranded citizens, delivering water and relief supplies, and providing medical treatment.

Although I can’t see myself serving on either an aircraft carrier or an amphibious assault ship, I’m grateful for the men and women who have chosen that path. As President Bush prepares to pass the baton of leadership to President-Elect Obama, I know that the men and women aboard the Bataan will continue to get their job done, their service and commitment transcending the vagaries of mere politics.

Click here for a photo-set of images from the USS Bataan, and a special thank you to veterans past and present.

 

Audacious!

I knew I’d find President-Elect Barack Obama on this wall in Cambridge’s Central Square because of Steve’s photo from October. I had no idea, though, that the President-Elect has been keeping company with none other than the legendary Goldenstash.

Earlier this month, Steve had posted another photo showing the pro-Obama sentiments of at least one Brooklyn street artist. “When in the past,” Steve wondered, “have we seen such motivation that people would paint a huge graffiti piece on a candidate’s behalf?” In the aftermath of Obama’s decisive win, some commentators have pointed to the Obama campaign’s skillful use of social networking tools as a way of motivating and mobilizing young voters. If online services such as Facebook and MySpace (as well as the President-Elect’s blog and Flickr photostream) can keep the Prez-To-Be in touch with the Wired Generation, why can’t street art, the most democratic of genres, serve a similar purpose?

Here’s an audacious proposal. Why not create a cabinet-level position in charge of graffiti propaganda? I hereby nominate the one and only Goldenstash as the first U.S. Secretary of Street Art. Yes, we can!