Fire and Forget (2 page)

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.

 

 

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 different 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.

Our thanks to our tireless agent, E. J. McCarthy, and to our editor at Da Capo, Robert Pigeon, will be never-ending, and even so we'll never do justice to the great boon and opportunity they've given us. Thanks to them both for believing in the work. Thanks also to Lori Hobkirk at the Book Factory, who saw this book through production.

We all have our personal thanks as well—to those who brought us home, to those who helped us along—and our personal remembrances—to those who didn't come back—or to those who did, but found themselves so weighed down by what happened that they couldn't make the transition. In a sense, this entire volume is dedicated to every soldier and Marine who found coming back to the Mall of America stranger, even, than their first time under fire. We thank our fellow veterans, the ones we leaned on, the ones who carried us.

Finally, a word about the title. We tossed around several ideas, including
Did You Kill Anybody?
and
I Waged a War on Terror and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
, but stuck with
Fire and Forget
because it seemed to touch so aptly on the double-edged problem we face in figuring out what to do with our experience. On the one hand, we want to remind you, dear reader, of what happened. Some new danger is already arcing the horizon, but we tug at your sleeve to hold you fast, make you pause, and insist you recollect those men and women who fought, bled, and died in dangerous and far-away places. On the other hand, there's nothing most of us would rather do than leave these wars behind.
No matter what we do next, the soft tension of the trigger pull is something we'll carry with us forever. We've assembled
Fire and Forget
to tell you, because we had to—
remember
.

THE EDITORS:

Roy Scranton

Matt Gallagher

Jacob Siegel

Phil Klay

Perry O'Brien

I
GOT OFF THE SUBWAY AT THE PORT AUTHORITY
and waited outside for the buses to arrive. The after-work rush still echoed in the half-empty streets but the city almost looked peaceful in the faded light of this in-between hour. You could stand still without feigning purpose.

When I saw Cole, he just laughed. We had a long embrace, squeezing and clapping each other hard on the back. I was still thinking about the last time I'd seen him when it hit me that he was here, in front of me now.

“What time's Jimmy getting in?” he asked.

“We've got a while,” I said.

After the Army released us, we rushed to find those we hoped had been waiting. All of us but Cole. He cut the other way, turning back in the airport with a plan he carried through the long hours in Iraq, and went rogue, all over the world.

We had talked since he got back. He was applying to law schools and I asked how the applications were going.

“I might end up here,” he said. “I'll live with you and Annie. You got a couch, right, and plenty of time to loaf around? We could grow beards and walk around in our DCUs. Go to parties and stand next to girls and talk about the horror of it all.”

“I sold my DCUs to a protester, or maybe it was an art student,” I said. “Anyway, I got more than I paid for them, and then I saw them on the news when those kids burned that effigy.”

This was the rhythm we knew from overseas. With just the right amount of disinterested aggression you could talk about almost anything.

I remembered that he used to talk about finding a government job when we got back. “Law school sounds exciting. That helping-the-troops racket couldn't compete huh?” I was looking for a rise, but his eyes were hard and steady.

“You know,” his head turned toward the line of taxis at the curb, “I just want something new.” He smiled and looked back at me. “After I got back from Tokyo, I actually thought about reenlisting to catch another deployment. Things were fine at first, leaving right after we came home was good, I pretty much got everyone happy to see me without too many long looks and worried questions about how things were
over there
. But after I'd been home a couple weeks, I just felt the whole world slowing to a crawl. I had a couple of long nights where I thought, what the hell, you know? Like if I do it one more time then I'll be able to work things out, and when I get back then I'll be back for good. I figured that whatever I wanted to do would be here but the war could end and it still needed me.”

“The war needed you?”

“Or I needed it, but what's the difference. It went away.”

“The war's still there.”

“The feeling went away.”

“So it's all about your feelings.”

I was joking but it felt good to goad him. Cole was the last one I would have picked to go back into uniform, I thought he had figured out how make a clean break. Besides, he had things going for him when we left, the reliable kind, not the sort that could leave in the middle of the night. He had the kind where if you devoted yourself, it wasn't insane to expect some kind of return.

I couldn't remember what I had going before we left. There must have been plenty, a whole life probably, but it wasn't what I thought of when we were overseas. It shamed me to think now of what I had imagined over there. 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.

I dreamed of whole cities in heat. Ribald boulevards flushed with women. Greatness around every corner, New York at my feet, the buildings bowed, the whole city supine.

We could see up 42nd Street. Movie theaters, marquees, and theme restaurants lined both sides. Crowds began to gather. Cole looked nothing like he had overseas, nothing like a soldier or veteran. It wasn't hard to imagine him in a suit, laughing with coworkers.

“Where does that energy go?” I wanted to know. “I thought when we got back I was going to step off the plane and pounce.”