Fire and Forget
FIRE AND FORGET
FIRE AND
FORGET
SHORT STORIES
FROM THE LONG WAR
EDITED BY
ROY SCRANTON AND MATT GALLAGHER
DA CAPO PRESS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
FOREWORD BY COLUM MCCANN
Copyright © 2013 by Da Capo Press.
Foreword copyright © 2013 by Column McCann.
Preface copyright © 2013 by Roy Scranton.
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“Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek” first appeared in
The Southern Review 45:3 (Summer 2009);
“Redeployment” first appeared in Granta 116 (September 2011);
“Tips for a Smooth Transition” first appeared in Salamander (June 2012).
Editorial production by Lori Hobkirk at the Book Factory.
Book design by Cynthia Young at Sagecraft.
Set in 11.5 point Adobe Garamond Pro
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available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-0-306-82117-6 (e-book)
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CONTENTS
Foreword: Eclipsing War, by Colum McCann
Preface: On War Stories
1 Smile, There Are IEDs Everywhere | Jacob Siegel
2 Tips for a Smooth Transition | Siobhan Fallon
3 Redeployment | Phil Klay
4 The Wave That Takes Them Under | Brian Turner
5 The Train | Mariette Kalinowski
6 Raid | Ted Janis
7 Play the Game | Colby Buzzell
8 Television | Roman Skaskiw
9 New Me | Andrew Slater
10 Poughkeepsie | Perry O’Brien
11 When Engaging Targets, Remember | Gavin Ford Kovite
12 Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek | Brian Van Reet
13 Roll Call | David Abrams
14 And Bugs Don’t Bleed | Matt Gallagher
15 Red Steel India | Roy Scranton
Contributors
Credits
FOREWORD
Eclipsing War
Colum McCann
All stories are war stories somehow. Every one of us has stepped from one war or another. Our grandfathers were there when the stench of Dresden hung over the world, and our fathers were there when Vietnam sent its children running napalmed down the dirt road. Our grandmothers were there when Belfast fell into rubble, and our mothers were there when Cambodia became a crucible of bones. Our sisters in South Africa, our brothers in Gaza. And, God forbid, our sons and daughters will have stories to tell too. We are scripted by war.
It is the job of literature to confront the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us. It is also the job of literature to make sense of whatever small beauty we can rescue from the maelstrom.
Writing fiction is necessarily a political act. And writing war fiction, during a time of war, by veterans of the conflicts we are still fighting, is a fervent, and occasionally anguished, political act.
The stories of the wars that defined the first decade of the twenty-first century are only just beginning to be told. Television programs, newspaper columns, Internet blogs. We’ve even had a couple of average Hollywood movies, but we don’t yet have all the stories, the kind of reinterpretive truth-telling that fiction and poetry can offer.
It is the dream of writers to get at the pulse of the moment. To inhabit the depth of the wound. E. L. Doctorow gave us the Civil War in The March. Jennifer Johnston gave us the First World War in How Many Miles to Babylon? Tim O’Brien gave us Vietnam in The Things They Carried. Norman Mailer gave us World War II in The Naked and the Dead. Edna O’Brien gave us Ireland in House of Splendid Isolation. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave us the Biafran War in Half of a Yellow Sun.
We are drawn to war because we are, in the words of William Faulkner, drawn to “the human heart in conflict with itself.” We all know that happiness throws white ink against a white page. What we need is darkness for the meaning to come clear. We discover ourselves through our battles—our awful revelations, our highest dreams, our basest instincts are all on display.
For the fifteen writers of this anthology, the war is not simply a sequence of unpleasant images or unremitting woes. By entering into the lives of their characters, they allow the reader access to the viscerally intense but morally ambiguous realities of war. The consequences echo back to the American culture that our soldiers have emerged from. This, in turn, kicks forward into a global culture. Each bullet is inevitably followed by another. One story becomes all stories. And we have to keep on telling them. It is our duty to continue spinning the kaleidoscope.
I have a special and abiding relationship to this anthology. Along with several other writers and teachers, I was also honored to be a guest at New York University. It was ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith—one of the great humanitarians of our time—who called me up and asked me if I would attend. It was my privilege—and indeed my education.
The group was intended to be non-ideological, focused purely on the craft of writing and free to all veterans. Six of the writers in this anthology (Matt Gallagher, Gavin Kovite, Phil Klay, Perry O’Brien, Roy Scranton, and Jake Siegel) met at the program where the veterans discussed fiction, read each other’s work, and had an opportunity to share their ideas about representations of the wars. The group began reaching out beyond New York, and connections were established between veterans across the country committed to writing serious, literary fiction.
The war went literary. And the literature broke our tired hearts. The fact of the matter is that we get our voices from the voices of others. Most prominently we get our voices from those who are on the front line. This anthology is a testament to that. It is something to be taught down through the years. There are stories by infantrymen, staff officers, public affairs Marines, a military lawyer, an artilleryman, a military spouse, a medic, an Army Ranger, and a Green Beret. This is not simply the first fiction anthology by veterans of those wars, it is also a harbinger of the novels and short story collections we will be seeing in the future, as those who served continue to try to make sense of our wars for us in the most rigorous way possible, through fiction.
As a teacher at Hunter College, New York, I am always looking for new writers who are prepared to wake me up from my stupor. I will never forget the day, four years ago now, when I opened up the file by a young Phil Klay. The first line stunned me. “We shot dogs.” I knew from that very moment that I was in the hands of a masterful young writer. The story, published here as “Redeployment,” puts you in the boots of a Marine returning home but still besieged by memories of the Second Battle of Fallujah. It unflinchingly explores the effects of battle and the bizarre challenges of returning home. The truth of the matter is that you can’t go back to the country that doesn’t exist anymore.
More recently I stumbled upo
n the fiction of Mariette Kalinowski. She is the sort of writer who is prepared to step off cliffs and develop her wings on the way down. In this anthology, her story, “The Train,” puts us in the head of a female veteran who obsessively rides the New York City subway back and forth, back and forth. Her combat trauma forces her underground, farther from her time in Iraq and from the friend that she lost there.
Here it is, the cyclorama of war.
In Roman Skaskiw’s “Television,” a lieutenant handles the aftermath of an engagement where, “No one was hurt, just a local kid they shot,” and has to deal with the murky realities of a war where enemies are hard to spot, and some soldiers are overeager to pull the trigger.
In “Roll Call,” by twenty-year career Army non-commissioned officer David Abrams, a memorial ceremony held in the country becomes an occasion to reflect on all the dead, and on the individual soldier’s chances of survival.
Renowned poet Brian Turner, in “The Wave That Takes Us Under,” turns a lost patrol into a meditation on death and the dying.
“For us, there had been no fields of battle to frame the enemy,” writes Jake Siegel. “Our shocks of battle came on the road, brief, dark, and anonymous.” But in Siegel’s story the terrors of the road seem almost simple when compared with the narrator’s difficulties in truly coming home from his war. Unable to talk about his time in Iraq, he opens up only when two buddies from overseas meet him for a night of drinking in New York. What he finds, though, is that even that camaraderie he cherished is nothing but a memory.
Other authors give us different homecomings, intersecting the memories of war with an American culture far removed from the worlds of poverty, violence, and pain the veterans have experienced. Siobhan Fallon, author of the short story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone, tells the other side of the story, from the perspective of an army wife. Though her character’s guidebook offers helpful suggestions, (“Typically, a ‘honeymoon’ period follows in which couples reunite physically, but not necessarily emotionally. . . . Be patient and communicate”), she finds the actual experience of putting that advice into action challenging and terrifying.
In this anthology, the authors deal not just with the raw reportage of war, but with its aftermath too.
Brian Van Reet, awarded the Bronze Star for valor, writes of the soldiers receiving medical care for horrific burns. These men, some without faces or, in one case, without genitals, go on a fishing trip that is meant to boost their morale but which turns into a potentially violent encounter with a pair of civilian girls. Colby Buzzell’s “Play the Game” details the limited options for an infantry veteran who doesn’t want to stay in the Army but can’t find a job in an America wracked by recession. Former Green Beret Andrew Slater, in “New Me,” puts the reader into the mind of a soldier with a traumatic brain injury, whose past enters his dreams and overshadows his new life. Matt Gallagher, author of the memoir Kaboom, dramatizes the strange difficulties in adjusting to life back home with “And Bugs Don’t Bleed,” a story where a soldier’s increasing alienation ends in a small act of perversely cruel violence that seems directed at himself as much as it is against the complacent and happy civilian world.
These are wars that America is so determined not to see that we banned images of soldiers’ coffins from our nightly broadcasts, as if the clean lines of a flag-draped coffin would somehow convey the disturbing ugliness of the exercise of military power. The writers in this anthology don’t just show you the dead, they put you in the minds and hearts of the men and women who fought on the ground.
Gavin Ford Kovite’s “When Engaging Targets, Remember,” is written as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, albeit one where the reader is confronted with the restricted options of an American soldier in a convoy and the horrific, moral seriousness of decisions that have to be made in a split second. Ted Janis’s “Raid” chronicles the special operations life, where the most proficient—and most lethal—of America’s military forces raid targets every night in a haze of shadows and night-vision green. Roy Scranton’s Beckettian “Red Steel India” reduces the scope of the war to what is seen through a gate guard post, where routine and boredom rule and bizarre acts of childish defiance punctuate the days more than the deaths that are happening all around.
There is humor too. Perry O’Brien’s hilarious “Poughkeepsie” tells of an alienated, AWOL soldier and his fantasies about training the rabbits at his ex-girlfriend’s college to take over the school. The absurd premise and wild imagery keep the story feeling lightly comic, even as it slips into an increasingly dark satire of American military ambitions and their effects on the psychologies of American soldiers.
That these stories are important to the national conversation (or the lack of a national conversation) on our use of violent military force goes without saying, but this anthology did not come about simply because of the efforts of these veterans to transmute their experience into fiction. It has its origin in the necessity of truth telling. Facts are mercenary things. Deep truths know their correct battlefields.
As a civilian, I salute these writers. As a protestor, I salute them. As one who was protected by them, I salute them yet again. These men and women have gone away and come home. They speak of those who haven’t. Their words eclipse war, and bring back the very humanity we have always desired.
PREFACE
On War Stories
One thing a vet will always tell you is that it’s never like it is in the stories. Then he’ll tell you his.
We convened at the White Horse Tavern, under the glum and bleary eyes of Dylan Thomas, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac. It was a warm March day, not spring yet but with winter fading, eight years and change since we’d invaded Iraq. Afghanistan loomed shadowy behind that, then 9/11, then the Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, Pickett’s Charge, the Battle of Austerlitz, the conquest of New Spain, Agincourt, Thermopylae, and the rage of Achilles—stories upon stories—stories of war.
We had our own stories to tell, and in each other had found just the right audience to test the telling. There’d be no bullshit, yet we shared among us a subtle understanding that the real truth might never make it on the page. We each knew the problem we altogether struggled with, which was how to say something true about an experience unreal, to a people fed and wadded about with lies. As Conrad’s Marlowe put it, somewhere in another “war on terror”: “Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams. . . .”
There’s always that wobble in war between romance and vision, between reality and imagination, between propaganda and what you lean on to survive. Each story has one ending, the same ending, and it can come sudden, silent, unseen: the street blows up under your feet or a sniper gets lucky. Who knows? Meanwhile, home is a place you lived once, a different person, a different life, and all the people you loved somehow alien. You come to depend on the hard matter of things, because what’s “real” so quickly goes up in smoke.
How do you put that on a page? How do we tell you? How do we capture the totality of the thing in a handful of words? How do you make something whole from just fragments?
We’d met, the five of us, through the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop and other vet events in New York City. There was Jake Siegel, Brooklyn-born, still serving in the National Guard; Perry O’Brien, Airborne medic turned peace and labor activist; Phil Klay, Dartmouth grad and smooth-talking Marine public affairs officer, earning his MFA at Hunter; Matt Gallagher, a rangy westerner, once a cavalry officer in a big blue Stetson and now fighting for vets’ rights with the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America; and myself, college dropout and one-time hitchhiker made good, now at Princeton earning a PhD in English. We came from different places and had di
fferent wars, but we shared a common set of concerns: good whiskey, great writing, the challenges and possibilities of making art out of war, and the funny gray zone we found ourselves in, where you shape truths out of fiction pulled out of truth—which might only be the illusion of truth in the first place.
We made a date for the White Horse, where this anthology took root. Over the next year, we collected stories, soliciting, nurturing, pruning, trying to put together something we could feel proud of, something if not representative, at least vivid enough to inscribe on the wars our mark—our signature.
Truth, truthiness, in this mass media cacophony we live in, comes up something for grabs. Well, here’s some. Grab it. We were there. This is what we saw. This is how it felt. And we’re here to say, it’s not like you heard in the stories.
* * *
We the editors owe a tremendous debt of gratitude, first, to all the writers who trusted us with their work. We were lucky to attract talented, hard-working craftspeople, who thought highly enough of us and our project to throw their chips in with ours. We thank our fellow writers for their work, faith, and steadfastness.
We owe as much of a debt to the people who fostered and aided us along the way, who made the collection happen. The NYU Veterans Writing Workshop was a place to come together and meet other vets, men and women who had different stories, but the same interest in bridging that gap between here and there. A free workshop with open enrollment to anyone with military service overseas, it helped establish the community of literary-minded vets now thriving in New York. Thanks to everyone involved, most especially Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith, Laren McClung, Deborah Landau, Zachary Sussman, Sativa January, Brian Trimboli, Emily Brandt, Craig Moreau, and the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust. Thanks also to the many mentors and role models who came through and gave so generously of their time and advice: Kevin Buckley, Bruce Weigl, our own Brian Turner, Yusef Komunyakaa, E. L. Doctorow, David Lipsky, Joseph McElroy, Megan O’Rourke, Breten Breytenbach, and of course, Colum McCann. We’ve been honored and privileged to share in their wisdom and craft.