Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from Afghanistan

On Teaching Writing to Soldiers and Veterans

131 On Teaching Writing to Soldiers and Veterans The terrain is harsh—plateaus and deserts, rugged mountains, dry open plains. The wind blows with unprecedented violence. But it is the uncertainty of man-made events, such as the rockets and mortars ripping into the supposedly safe zones of military camps, that keeps even those who live within the concertina wire on edge. In need of diversion, groups of soldiers gather in whatever vacant rooms can be found for creative writing and English classes. They open the plywood door to the B-hut that serves as a classroom on this particular night. Desert combat boots thump across the gray tiled floor. Each soldier places an M16 upright into a primitive pine gun rack. Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy—the minutes leading up to class are a noisy clutter of war talk and home talk. These deployed men and women have little inhibition about writing what they live or what they left behind. War is immersion into the senses, the sound of an F-16 roaring up the runway in the middle of the night, the smell and vibration of a mortar attack, the taste of a rocket erupting a quarter mile away. War makes good story. But on the first night of our creative writing or English class, my student-soldiers would typically do all they could to excuse themselves from the expectation they would be “writers.” The range of comments would include, “Yeah, needed this credit for my associate’s degree,” “Nothing else to take,” “Hell, tired of playing video games,” or “Only other thing offered is math.” They made excuses and joked, the way soldiers do before going to battle. Few had ever written for outside readers, whether about personal experience or, in the case of research papers, for academic correctness. To the young specialists and privates, the pen often seemed more intimidating than the sword. But as always they took up arms with passion and conviction. “I did my hell’s best,” was what they often said. Think what it takes to produce a research paper in a war zone, with so little personal time, stressful living conditions, urgent calls to duty, few available computers and printers, and then the continual frustrations of frequently dropped computer connections, or, say, of locating an ideal source for a paper, only to have the screen freeze 132 ON TEACHING WRITING TO SOLDIERS AND VETERANS and then blacken. Yet their final papers, both in depth of research and correctness, were equal in quality to those written by civilian students in college classes back home. During our first meeting, in both creative writing and English classes, I showed my student-soldiers the National Endowment of the Arts video Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. The accompanying collection of soldiers’ writings was also one of our course texts. Against the guttural roar of C-130s and the wup, wup, wup of helicopters lifting up from the runway only 75 yards away, the film carried an immediacy and poignancy impossible to describe. Student-soldiers were mesmerized by the dramatization of other soldiers ’ stories that were so similar to their own. They listened with fervor to men and women “just like them” not only talk about their own creative writing process but describe their reactions to the fear, terror, angst, boredom, uncertainty—and definitely the humor—that make up the stew of emotions all soldiers negotiate while deployed. Written across their faces I read, “Hey, somebody captured the whole damned thing!” The second night of class I handed out copies of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” I shared with them O’Brien’s quote “The thing about remembering is that you don’t forget,” making the case that writing is remembering of the highest order. Writing records not only the facts, which we may or may not remember, but the emotional truth. My students gave this idea some thought, and after reading O’Brien’s piece they were convinced: creating personal history is necessary. My students in Afghanistan read a good deal of work by other professional writers who have been to war: Brian Turner, Yusef Komunyakaa , Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller. Introducing them to these “brothers” was an effort to reinforce the idea that real soldiers do write. By no means did I require my students to write about their deployment experiences; yet day-to-day life against the backdrop of war made conflict their theme, whether acknowledged, by default, or by omission...