JP: Good evening. I’m John Pettegrew from the Lehigh University. I teach history there and I also direct the Southside Initiative.
Before I introduce the next speaker, I want to announce the ongoing film series that the Southside Initiative is sponsoring with a couple of specific films I would like to underline. One relates to tonight’s topic it’s a film on military industrial complex entitled “Why we Fight” from 2005 which will be shown on Tuesday evening April 1st at 6:00 p.m. on Lehigh’s campus and the next film in the series is entitled “Crossing the Line” which is a study of the Allentown Abortion Clinic and civil and sometimes not so civil discourse about the purpose of that institution and people who have personal opinions on both sides of the essential issue in which it’s engaged. That will be introduced followed by discussions by the filmmaker herself, Kate Mendierry, who is a professor of Documentary filmmaking at New York College. That will be a week from tonight, February 5 at 6:00 p.m. in 102 Geddes Hall on the Eisenhower Campus.
Two years ago, we hosted town hall discussion that focused on the great distance between American war making and life in the United States. The great distance between the men and women who serve in the U.S. Military and most of the rest of us who don’t know battle and its death and destruction. That town hall featured two veterans who worked at the Veteran Sanctuary Institution in Allentown as well, who spoke quite eloquently about the countless of problems that veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan wars were experiencing: from addiction… to domestic problems… to suicide… to post traumatic stress disorder. Something they described as a public disorder and whose severity dramatically increased in their estimation from this ever widening gulf between those who served in our armed forces and the rest of the American citizenry. And tonight we’re joined by a speaker who will help us continue this discussion of America and war. Some of you already know Eric Fair: he is a native son of Bethlehem; born and raised here; he graduated from Liberty High School in 1990; went to Boston University where he studied history and graduated in 1994; he enlisted in the U.S. army from 1995 to 2000 where he studies at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California and learnt Arabic there; after which he was deployed to Egypt, Israel and Jordan; he came back and joined the Bethlehem Police Department in 2000 and served until 2003; he then worked for the Department of Defense from 2003 to 2004 as an Interrogator in Fallujah he worked for the National Security Agency as an Analyst from 2004 to 2006 spending time in Baghdad in that incredibly torturous era of 2005. He attended Princeton Theological Seminary from 2007 to 2008. There’s much, much more to Eric’s biography, believe me… the most pertinent part of it for tonight though, is that Eric took pen to paper to write about his experiences in Iraq including sharp criticism (if it’s fair to say) about what went on at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Visits from the Defense Department and the U.S. Justice Department, followed because it turns out that Eric is an unusually effective writer, in my estimation, and he got people’s attention. He has had pieces published in a score of places: the Philadelphia Enquirer, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Ploughshares, the Columbia Literary Journal, Harper’s Magazine, in the Anthology of the 2000 Pushcart work. He honed his craft at New York University’s Veteran Writers’ Workshop and he’s slated to teach a course on creative writing at the Lehigh University this coming fall semester. His most recent piece appeared just this past Sunday in The Morning Call and it extended this sharp message that Eric has been writing about over the past few years, including the simple, flat, the powerful statement that “war is a bad idea.” Eric ended that piece perhaps somewhat pessimistically in stating that nobody is listening and I think that’s one thing he’s written that I’d like to take some issue with, actually. In fact, looking at the online version of that, I’d say today, I see that one commenter said “this is powerful stuff.” And from social media, I know as I checked this afternoon, somebody just simply repeated “war is a bad idea.” I’ve spoken of the past computers and introduced in time for lectures and didn’t sense the purpose of the Southside Initiative as being a number of things but including having a certain aspirational, almost utopian dimension to what we’re trying to do in joining the discussion about local issues and other matters that should engage us and as far as that utopian message goes (I mean) could you imagine the world in which we live if that message “war is a bad idea” just spread out from here, from Eric’s writing, from that website, from this discussion tonight! It is an incredibly powerful and yes, perhaps, utopian notion. I can’t guarantee that exactly, what I can guarantee (and in helping me welcome Eric to speak tonight) is that we’re going to listen to you tonight. So, Eric, please have your say.
EF: I’m going to stay away from the microphone if that’s not a problem for anyone. John, thanks for the kind words. I would also like to thank Abby for helping me put this together, as well as Lehigh University and the Southside Initiative. For those that had read the Morning Call piece, I did end it by suggesting that no one was listening and I think I was just in a bad mood. [Audience laughs] I think I’ve been reading on Afghanistan, the article about the idea of sending trainers back to Jordan or some place to train the troops to retake Fallujah and Ramadi just annoyed me. So, I think the way I ended it in that piece was by suggesting that…that maybe there’s a movement…that all writing may not have succeeded doing all that it has been trying to do all these years since we’re essentially war, but maybe there has been some progress and if we keep pushing eventually the pendulum will swing in that direction. But then I think as I said, that I have read an article that pissed me off and so I ended it far more pessimistically.
A couple of quick, administrative things before I start: as I am speaking tonight, I might use the term “veterans” and I try not to do that so if I say “veterans do this or veterans do that” – veterans are an incredibly diverse group. I think that has been one of the misconceptions about the army in particular is that our veterans are somehow poor, young, dumb kids who have been recruited into something they don’t understand and then you have sort of a dumb army. There are certainly dumb people in the army but there are also some very intelligent, very thoughtful, good people and there’s no way I can represent them all so some of the things I’ll say tonight it might be veterans who agree with me but there’ll be plenty of things I say that some veterans will not. So, if you catch me grouping veterans together please feel free to stop me.
The other issue is a strange one, I’ve had some minor surgery a few months ago and there are some complications involved; there are some very powerful cocktail drugs which suppress my immune system and it also gives me the shakes, so I may be nervous while I’m up here but it is exacerbated by some of the drugs that I take so if you see me shaking up here, it’s just the drugs. But it’s also, and this would be the strangest thing, I’m sure this will be the greatest presentation you’ve ever heard and afterwards you wanna come and shower me with praises and shake my hand. I’ve been told by my doctor not to have physical contact so if you do approach me afterwards and I have my hands in my pocket, I’m not being rude it’s just a reminder to me that I try not to extend my hand.
I started my writing about war in 2006. I was working for the National Security Agency in Maryland, I was an Arabic linguist, I had a high level security clearance, I had a pretty good skill set that had taken me back to Iraq for a second tour, so I had now done two tours in Iraq and it was clear that because of my background, that I was gonna go back again. That was 2006, we were just about to have the debate now about the surge, the surge looked like it was coming soon and it looked like we were gonna be in Iraq for a long time and I, at that point, didn’t want to be a part of that anymore. My first tour in particular had been very difficult and my second tour was not a vacation and I couldn’t tolerate going back for a third. Now, at the time, two tours seemed like a big deal, if you told somebody that you did two tours in Iraq that would have been an impressive thing. Today, it’s not, two tours in Iraq is almost commonplace for most veterans or at least a tour in Iraq and a tour in Afghanistan, which is an issue we may be able to address later with some of the reading I think distinguishes this war. The idea that you have people going four or five times up to eight or nine tours, maybe not for a full year but they now go back for three or four months here and there. Returning to war that many times – returning to war twice for me was devastating, I can’t conceptualize what it is to go back for a third. So, I quit and came back home to Bethlehem and started writing and I had wanted to be part of the voice in opposition to the surge and I started out with some articles in The Morning Call, some letters to the editor, they were eventually picked up by the Philadelphia Enquirer and some of those articles I think I mentioned that I had been an interrogator in Abu Ghraib and then an editor from the Washington Post called and showed an interest in some of the work that I had done and they wanted me to write an essay about Abu Ghraib which was a subject at that point which I avoided. I wrote a few or, I tried to write a few and they were mainly policy debates about what was good about interrogation and what was bad but that wasn’t what they arranged to do was more personal essay and so over the course of a few months I worked with the Post and eventually penned an essay about my experience at Abu Ghraib, some of the things that I had done, things that I was guilty of, things that I was not proud of and the essay, which was very difficult to do, in 700 words to write about your experience like that and then put it out publicly was difficult and unpleasant. And there was a great deal of fallout from the piece as I sort of knew there would be but then there was also an opportunity to do more publishing, so I immediately started getting phone calls and emails with opportunities to publish. And I was able at that point to look at my writing and I knew that it just wasn’t very good, I could get my point across in the 700 words and generally say what I wanted to say but it had a certain cringe back then when I would read it and so I wanted a way to improve. I looked for a way to improve and I stumbled across a creative writing course in New York City hosted by NYU, specifically designed for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. And over the course of two years, every Saturday morning I would drive down to New York City and meet with this group and we started exchanging our writing. And there was no place that I found where I was able to get the kind of benefit that I got there because that community of veterans was so critical I think sometimes I was treated me with kid gloves prior to that, if I said I wrote about Iraq someone assumed it was good writing because there were so few people that knew about what was going on over there and they were thirsty for anything about Iraq. But at the workshop full of veterans, the veterans were more than happy to call you out and tell you what was not right and what might have been BS, what might have been embellishment, what might have been a true lie and so it was a really difficult place to write but also an important stage for me. After about two years of publishing in New York, I had some small publications there, an editor from a literary magazine called Ploughshares contacted me and asked me to write a longer article about Abu Ghraib That’s eventually what sort of got my writing groove going.
So, what I’d like to do tonight is I’d like to start by reading my essay or parts of it, it should take about seven minutes and we can talk about that briefly. And then I’ll read some other – I brought some other classics sort of war literature books, I’d like to read some things from those too and talk about how these maybe influenced my piece and how also those pieces are now influencing our current crop of war reps. So this piece picks up immediately after my Washington Post piece published, it has to do with some of the emails I received and the adjustments I was trying to make back home. And there should be a caveat, as you see upon the screen Mr. O’Brien said so well, there is some obscenity here, not much, I’ve cut out some but the only way we can do this for real is to include what I saw.
The piece is entitled “Consequence.” I entered my name into a search engine. There were thirty-seven hundred results and there was torture appearing in most of them. I read the blogs, I read the comments that follow, I find more blogs. I pretend those don’t bother me either, I check emails…thirty-eight new messages…
”Dear Mr. Fair, I’m not at all sure why you have your pennies in a choice that seems clear you were a willing participant as a civilian contractor in the interrogation process in Iraq, this is old news.”
I navigate back to the opinion page of the Washington Post, the comment section is still growing, more than 800 now. I read the new ones and some of the old ones too, I read my emails again…I have fifty-seven new messages…
”Dear Eric, your words are empty and hollow I do not accept a single one of them, but let me offer you a suggestion if you want to do the honorable thing, kill yourself, leave a note, name names. Until that day I hope you never sleep another hour for the rest of your life.”
I keep pretending not to be bothered but then I drink. In the mornings I pretend to have slept, my wife Sarah drives off to work, we both pretend our marriage isn’t suffering. During the day I pack boxes, we’re moving to Princeton, I’ll be staying at The St. Mary pursuing Ministry at the Presbyterian Church, I hope no one there reads the article.
I enroll in a summer language class, I study Greek in order to read the New Testament more effectively. It reminds me of the army; I studied Arabic in order to interrogate Arabs more effectively. I settle into a life of muggy morning walks to class followed by chilly afternoons in a library. I arrive on campus in the early morning review my homework, attend class, eat lunch and then spend the rest of the afternoon memorizing verb charts and case endings. I return home in the early evening, tell Sarah about the day, eat dinner, watch the news, get drunk and read emails with subject lines like: “Iraq” “Interrogation” and “torture.”
“Dear Mr. Fair, I still have a 45 caliber 1911. I suspect you know the firearm. I would loan it to you gleefully if you get really depressed and happily take whatever legal consequence might come my way for having done so. You’d be doing the world a favor by removing yourself from the gene pool.”
As grief consumes my mornings and afternoons at Princeton, I would break down and hate what remains of my day. I would return home to the apartment and field phone calls from reporters in Philadelphia, filmmakers from Norway, Psychologists from Boston, authors from the world of academia, lawyers from Amnesty International and investigators from the Department of Justice. I told my professor I’m sick, I put away verb charts, participles and lexicons, board a train for Washington DC and meet with Department of Justice lawyers and investigators in the shadow of the U.S. capital. I disclose everything: I provide pictures, letters, names, firsthand accounts, locations, techniques, I talked about the hard side of Abu Ghraib, I talked about the interrogation facility in Fallujah, I talked about what I did, what I saw, what I knew and what I heard. I ride the train back to Princeton, I start drinking more, Sarah takes notice, I tell her to go to hell.
The semester begins and I make new friends. I join a flag football team. I agree to volunteer as a referee, I show up for a game, don my stripe shirt, blow the whistle. Players from both teams are furious, I am a terrible referee. One player was particularly incensed, he approaches me, grabs my shirt and pulls me towards him and then shoves me to the side: “see, this is what they’re doing, they can’t do this it’s called holding.” In Fallujah I’m grabbing a detainee, shoving him to the side, moving him through a line of Iraqis who have just been taken from the battle field, some are still bleeding, one is missing part of his face. We are processing them, sorting them into groups for future interrogation: well dressed ones to the right, shabby looking ones to the left, faceless ones to the medic. The well dressed ones are likely gonna influence the shabby ones or the cons; but the shabby ones never seem to understand directions they just stand there looking dumb, so we grab them and push them and shove them.
I return to the apartment after the game and I find Sarah. I tell her about the student who shoved me, I tell her I’m gonna kill him; I’m angry, I’m yelling, I’m yelling at Sarah. Thirty minutes later I’m still angry, I’m still yelling at Sarah, I say something terrible and I leave to buy whiskey. I visit the seminary chaplain, she directs me to the Office of Student Counseling. There’s a questionnaire with multiple choice questions, I elaborate on additional sheets of paper. The head counselor calls the next day, then could see me personally. We meet, we talk about terrible things, she tells me I’m smiling, she calls it a defense mechanism, I tell her more terrible things, I ask her if she thinks I’m a terrible person, she smiles, she says “no.”
I meet with a PhD. student from South Africa. He’s doing his dissertation and wants to talk to me about forgiveness. He talks about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid. Men would run in amnesty and then return for their confessions. He believes we should consider the same thing in this country and he thinks I would be a good candidate for such a process. The other option he says is Nuremberg style trials, he doesn’t think that’s a good idea but there must be consequences; he insists, forgiveness requires consequence.
At the end of the semester I interview for summer internship. A church is looking for someone to run a youth program and preach on a set number of Sundays. We talk about my background, my education and my interests. They ask about my first semester at Princeton. I tried to talk about class but they read newspapers so they talked about Iraq. They say I should preach about war. We talk about interrogation, they are interested, they ask more questions, I’m tired so I answer them.
I talk about Abu Ghraib, I talk about the detainees; none of them would co-operate, none of them would work with us, none of them would tell the truth, they all pretended to be farmers or mechanics or fishermen, they pretended to be drivers or crooks or clerks. No one was republican guard, they all hated Saddam, they all supported America and no one was hiding weapons in their backyards or explosives in the irrigation canals, none of them knew about the teams of men during our killer rounds on the highway, they insisted it was all a misunderstanding, that the rockets and mortars kept coming, incoming rounds killed detainees, melted their bodies into a mass of blood and pus, IEDs killed our friends. And so we deprived the detainees of sleep or made them stand for long periods of time or shoved them or grabbed them, manipulated their diets, we blared loud music, kept them cold, kept them lonely, kept them scared. It made some of them cooperate and maybe it would work on others too; but I went to Fallujah it was worse. More people were dying. My friend was standing next to a vehicle, it detonated, he disappeared, the found parts of him the next day. We detained and bribed and grabbed and shoved and isolated and abused as best we could. I grew weary, I went back to Baghdad. It was quiet there. I thought about where I’d been, I thought about what I’d done. I quit, I went home, I applied t seminary and published an article in the Washington Post.
The interview ends, I return home. The nightmares are waiting on me, I dull them the best I can. The church calls the following week and offers me the job. Eventually I quit and drop out of seminary.
In Iraq I attend chapel. I recite the Lord’s Prayer taking me in and say the apostle’s creed. The chaplain offers a benediction “may the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, may the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.” I go to work, I review the next interrogation which would be the youngest brother again. He frightens easily, I tell him I will protect him, I tell him that he will remain anonymous. I covered his head with a burlap knapsack, I muzzle his father and brothers with strips of duct tape and file them into the room. I tell him any confession will free his family. It won’t, it works, I remove the sack, he cries, I pretend not to be bothered.
So, it’s not the most pleasant of pieces and it doesn’t necessarily paint me or the wars in Iraq in a great light but then I was directed to O’Brien. As I was preparing to write the piece two authors in particular took me under their wing; one was named Nick Flynn who lives in New York City. He’s written a memoir entitled (it has an offensive title), “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.” Nick’s mother committed suicide when he was in high school and his father was in and out of prison. Nick eventually graduates from college and he goes to work at a homeless shelter in Boston and one of his jobs on cold nights, not unlike tonight, is to take a van and go out on the streets of Boston and find the homeless and either give them a blanket and something to eat or encourage them to come back to the shelter; and on one of these outings he actually comes across his father who is out on the street. And so the book is about coming to terms with the relationship with his father, coming to terms with his mother’s suicide and also coming to terms with addiction and alcoholism and it’s a powerful, powerful memoir. And the second author was a man named Bill Clegg who is a literary in New York City and Bill built up a very impressive list of clients but he also had a very impressive addiction to crack cocaine which he would hide for a while until he crashed and burnt and the book is about the addiction and then how he tried to rebuild his life. Both men, as we sat and talked about how I would write my Iraq and how I would write about tragedy, echoed in some ways what O’Brien had said but they also had phrase that was “lean in” And it was the idea that you start writing about your life experience and when you come across the issues that are most painful or are most embarrassing or that you would prefer that not come to light, the things that you would rather not have people hear, the concept I would rather not be talking about tonight, those are the issues that you need to lean in as a writer and that’s what you need to put on the page and examine and explain – that’s the stuff that readers would be interested in but it’s also the stuff that’s honest and that’s the only honest way to tell somebody’s story. So, I’m not proud of anything that I did in Iraq and even now, even today I could feel the urge to stand here and defend myself and say “you can’t imagine…you can’t imagine what was going on in Abu Ghraib, you can’t imagine what it was like to get in a car and drive from Abu Ghraib Back to Fallujah back to Baghdad but that’s the stuff that both Bill and Nick had warned me to stay away from (you know) the situation would sort of defend itself. So, that was, in many ways that was the inspiration for that piece.
Let’s shift gears now and I would like to read selections from some other books, most of them well known, most of you enjoyed them when you read them. For me growing up All Quiet on the Western Front is the first sort of war book I remember reading. Probably in high school, I probably read Vonnegut and I probably read Crane and some others but I don’t have a really good memory of reading those books. All Quiet on the Western Front I read as a sophomore in college and it had a huge impact on me. In fact as I was getting ready to graduate I met with one of my professors and he was talking about… recommending that I go on for graduate studies and he was recommending some colleges and universities that I should look into and I told him that I had decided to enlist in the army and he was kind of shocked (you know) he thought that four years of education was a kind of a waste…to go and enlist; I thought my parents were shocked too that that was the decision I was going to make. And he asked why, what had influenced me and I told him it was I this book, which was ironic of course because many would have thought this was a very anti-war book but after reading this I wanted to see what the army was really like. Now, coming back from Iraq I had a much different…I re-read the book, I re-read it a number of times and I have a much different perspective on the book. Some of the same passages that I was familiar with, I suddenly saw them in a different light. So, I’d like to read two from here and then talk about it again how they’ve either influenced stuff I’ve written or sort of transcend onwards.
In this first passage, Paul the main character has returned home, he’s been out on the front, he’ been in the trenches fighting and he gets a mid-tour leave which is not unlike today because soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan for a year still do get mid-tour leaves. So, he’s been home for a week or two and he goes off to see his teachers and some of his other family members and friends. And now it’s the night before he needs to return to the front. So, he’s at home and he’s having a conversation with his mother. Some of the language is dated but all in all it’s still very current. And so his mother is giving him items to take to the front and he said to her “you ought not to send your things to me mother, we have plenty to eat out there you can make much better use of them here…how destitute she lies there in bed, she that loves me more than all the world, as I’m about to leave she says hastily I have two pairs of long underwear for you they’re wool, they will keep you warm, you must not forget to put them in your pack. Ah, mother, I know what these long under wears must have cost you in waiting and walking and begging, mother, how can it be that I must part with you, who else is there that has any claim on me but you. Here I sit and there you were lie with so much to say and we shall never say it.” The room is dark and I hear my mother’s breathing , the ticking of the clock, outside the wind blows and the chestnut trees rustle. On the landing I stumble over my pack which lies there already made up because I have to leave early in the morning. I bite into my pillow, I grasp the iron rods of my bed with my fists. I ought never to have come here. Out there I was indifferent and often hopeless I will never be able to be so again. I was a soldier and now I am nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother for everything that is so comfortless without end, I ought never to have come on leave.
So, again, some of the language is dated. When we talk to our mothers we don’t say ‘ah, mother, mother’ but it’s amazing as I re-read this passage (I think when I got back from Iraq) I was shocked – and this is 1918, I think he wrote it in 1918 – how it could be written today. One of the key issues is this idea of leaving early in the morning. It seems that anytime you’re deployed with the army and you know we have overnight flights in modern transportation but we always seem you’re leaving early in the morning. Both of my deployments to Iraq I would have to be up at 5:00 a.m. and off to the airport and every time I was deployed within the army it was always early in the morning and it’s something that’s kind of a universal experience with all soldiers. He talks about the ticking of the clock, sitting in his house in his room and hearing the ticking of the clock and I remember before deploying for my second deployment we lived near 378 the spur route and it had kind of this constant flow of traffic that we could hear – this is my childhood home – so I was at home, I think it’s a week or so before I was getting ready to go back and this noise which annoyed so many people over the years you know people would visit and say “how do you live here?” you know – there’s constant signs of trucks and cars. Over the years I was soothed by it, in fact when I would go away and not hear the highway, not hear 378 I’d be uncomfortable. So, I remember sitting at home and hearing 378 and just wishing that I could stay and just wishing that I could just be soothed by that sound, so much so that I’ve now moved back home and we still live near 378 [the audience erupts in laughter] and so I still get to hear the traffic.
One more passage from All Quiet. There’s another great scene – he’s gone back to the front and one of his friends is wounded so ended up at a catholic hospital with nuns and sisters and the sisters are waking up early in the morning for prayer and they leave the door open and they’re praying with the hope that their prayers will sort of walk over to these soldiers and have some influence on them and the soldiers just want to sleep, so it’s a scene between the soldiers and these sisters.
He said “shut the door, will you sister?” said someone and the sister said “we’re saying prayers that is why the door is open.”
Soldier: “But we want to go on sleeping”
Sister: “Prayer is better than sleeping.”
She stands there and smiles innocently. “It is 7 o’clock in the morning.”
Albert groans again.
“Shut the door,” I snorted.
She’s quite disconcerted, apparently she cannot understand. “But we are saying prayers for you too.”
“Shut the door anyway.”
She disappears leaving the door open. The intoning of the litany proceeds. I feel savage and say “I’m gonna count to three, if you don’t stop before that I’m gonna let something fly. “Me too,” says another. I count up to five and take hold of a bottle, aim and heaves it through the door into the quarter. It smashes into a thousand pieces. The praying stops. A swarm of sisters appear and reproach us in concert. Shut the door, we yell. The little one who came first is the last to go “heathen” she chirps but shuts the door all the same. We have won.
And so this great scene is a dichotomy between – you often hear the phrase ‘there are no atheists in a fox hole’ and I think…I was going to say most veterans but I’m not going to do that…I’ve spoken to other veterans who have been over there and they agree with me, if anything it is the opposite there are a lot of atheists in fox holes. Now, I understand the sentiments which is when you’re scared you pray to God but I think it has to do with having experienced war it forces you to question maybe either “can there be a God, or is God kind, or is God cruel and so you would think that a group of soldiers would enjoy the idea of being prayed over and would want those types of prayer but it just simply doesn’t work that way and that amazing scene where they are essentially telling these nuns to shut the door and leave them alone, the very people who maybe could save their should as they go off to die in the trenches that they want nothing to do with these people and it’s…even though I’ve gone through that passage for so long it’s still difficult for me to explain how that plays out. There I was in seminary at Princeton having my two tours behind my belt, preparing for my ministry and I knew within a month or two at seminary that I was not going to survive, that I had no place there. But there I was at Princeton drinking and talking, sending emails about war and thinking and talking about war and that was all I could talk about, it just dominated my thoughts every day. In fact, I failed Old Testament because I didn’t get my paper in on time because that’s all I was doing was writing about Iraq.
Vonnegut. I grew up reading Vonnegut thinking that he was the Vietnam vet because he spoke about sort of the stupidity of war and I didn’t have a sense that World War II veterans did that. In growing up I was under the impression that it was ‘the good war’ and that’s the title of the book here and that nothing bad came out of World War II so I thought that it must have been a Vietnam vet and as I grew older I found that I was wrong. The scene with Billy Pilgrim, if you’re not familiar with Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim is his main character. He’s being captured by the Germans and taken to a POW camp and he is now in the latrine.
Billy moved the long screen and reached the point where he could see a message freshly painted on the tar paper wall. The words were written in the same pink paint which had brightened the set for Cinderella. Billy’s perceptions were so unreliable that he saw the words as hanging in air, painted on a transparent curtain, perhaps, and there were lovely silver dots on the curtain too. These were really nail heads holding the tar paper to the shed. Billy could not imagine how the curtain supported nothingness and he supposed that the magic curtain and the theatrical grief was part of a religious ceremony he knew nothing about. Here is what the message said ‘Please leave this latrine as tidy as you found it.’ Billy looked inside the latrine, the waling was coming from inside there; the place was crammed with Americans who were taking their pants down. The welcoming feast was making him as sick as volcanoes, the buckets were full or had been tipped over. An American air billy wailed that he had excreted everything out except for his brains. Moments later he said “there they go, there they go.” He meant his brains. That was I, that was me, that was the author of this book.
I picked this for two reasons; one was the Billy having trouble figuring out what’s real and what isn’t and most of us have found that our memories of Iraq are unreliable and it’s hard…if you’ve had nightmares for a year or two post Iraq, it’s hard to start deciding what actually happened in Iraq and what you’ve just sort of imagined happened in Iraq. And so, Vonnegut gets this very well by making these sort of…well, all sorts of different roles throughout the book. And the other key thing with Vonnegut …and again, I could sit here and read the whole book but at the end there where he said “that was I, that was me, that was the author of this book” that speaks to the idea of writing war fiction and good war fiction I think is essentially in somebody’s autobiography. You have to, in some way, insert yourself into the story and most war stories if they’re good, have something to do with the author’s experience. There are instances for sure where people who have not been to war have written amazing books Stephen Graham easily being the most obvious example. But also, maybe the greatest war book of all time, War and Peace, written by Tolstoy – Tolstoy was not a veteran in the Napoleonic Wars, he’s not been there but he wrote about it in an amazing way. He was a veteran, I think, in the Crimean Wars but not in the Napoleonic Wars.
And then the last two selections, maybe three, are from the current book and it’s from a collection of short stories are from a current book called Fire and Forget, and it’s a collection of short stories. Let me advance the slide. That’s a collection of short stories about modern day wars about both Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these authors are from a group at NYU. One in particular, Phil Klay…who you’ll likely…if someone gives a presentation in fifty years, talking about war literature that came out of Iraq, there’s a good chance that a couple of books by Phil Klay will be up here. His first collection of short stories comes out in March. This is a short story he wrote called Redeployment. He was a Marine Corps officer in Iraq. He says:
“We shot dogs, not by accident we did it on purpose and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot. The first time was instinct – I hear O’Leary go “Jesus” and there’s a skinny brown dog lapping up blood the same way he’d lap up water from a bowl. It wasn’t American blood, but still, there’s that dog lapping it up. And that’s the last straw, I guess, and then it’s open season on dogs. At the time, you don’t think about it. You’re thinking about who’s in that house, what’s he armed with, how’s he gonna kill you, your buddies. You’re going block by block fighting with rifles good to 550 meters, and you’re killing people at 5 in a concrete box. The thinking comes later, when they give you the time. See, it’s not a straight shot back, from war to the Jacksonville mall. When our deployment was up, they put us on TQ, this logistics base out in the desert, let us decompress a bit. I’m not sure what they meant by that. Decompress. I took it to mean jerk off in the showers, smoke a lot of cigarettes and play a lot of cards. And then they took us to Kuwait and put us on a commercial airliner to go home.”
And it goes on and the main character in the story eventually arrives back home to find that his dog that he’s had for ten or twelve years is very ill and he’s forced to put the dog down. It’s a story about readjusting to home life and how difficult and painful that can be.
The second passage from this book is by Mariette Kalinowski and I think it’s critical for a number of reasons. When people ask what role distinguished this war from the others, I think the particular role from a literary perspective it’s gonna be women authors. The argument about women in combat is asinine, it’s already settled. Women are already in combat. They’re fighting, they’re shooting rifles, they’re dying, they’re getting injured. So, you can have a superfluous argument about whether they belong in the Infantry or the Special Forces or the Rangers that’s all well and good but women are already in combat and I think you’re gonna see over the next year or the next decade or two far more stories than now about women. This one is a short story written by Mariette Kalinowski and entitled The Train. She’s trying to get into the turnstile of the New York subway system.
The fear consumed her until the two year old in the apartment above was no longer just an annoyance. A bratty child who stomped on the floor would soon tire out but the pounding through her skull. In that pounding her body remembered the concussive blow that threw her down, the reverberation of that day through her skeleton over and over. The fear and the pounding brought on the tightness like a hand across the face. Her neck, and squeezing all her breath out until spots danced before her eyes. In a panic she bolted, ran out the door, down the stairs up the short road to the subway station. Her hands shook so much, she couldn’t swipe her card right; first too fast, then too slow and the screen repeating ‘please swipe again’ over and over with that shrill beat needling her. If you can’t do it right step aside let other people go, the voice behind her was sharp commanding. The woman stood with her arms crossed and glared hard at her. More people drifted up with curious looks but most of them kept their distance. ‘I’m trying’ was all she could manage ‘and failing’ the woman snapped ‘now get out of the way’. The woman approached and prepared to shove through.
The story goes on and she eventually does get on the train and also has some other interactions with the people on the subway. You often read stories…it’s essentially a story about PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and you’ll often read those stories coming from men and hear about them but women are also susceptible to it like anybody else. So, that’s a story that fifty years ago would have been written by a man and only by a man. But with these wars I think one of the things that’s going to distinguish it is that you’re gonna see more and more of these stories coming from women and hopefully a different and better perspective. As are some of the other either women keynote writer that are up there or issues, if you remember anything from tonight I’ll draw one thing to your attention: Maurice Decaul, who was also a part of the NYU group has written a play called Lioness and they’re producing it down in Washington to get funding to pay their actors and actresses and so if you have any interest, please look up Lioness on the internet and if you’re willing you could donate to that. It’s going into production I think in another month or two and I’m looking forward to going down to Washington and seeing that.
Siobahn Fallon is an excellent writer. She’s not a veteran but she is married to…and she writes about what it’s like to be at home during the deployments and that’s a very good pleasant short story, You Know When the Men Are Gone. It’s about living on base and this idea of banding together when all the men are gone and not being able to fix like a leak, not being able to mow the lawn. And I think as veterans what we all thought would be going on in the United States is that everyone would be banding together and cooperating and if the only place you saw that happen was on the larger military bases where the entire military population would deploy and leave behind nothing but the families. And the military, I think, especially the Infantry was 85 or 90% male so in most cases it was the women who were left behind. But there were men as well, husbands whose wives…
Kayla Williams wrote the book Love My Rifle More Than You. The title is from a cadence we would sing in the military which I’m not gonna sing for you now but an excellent book. Offensive, very offensive [Mr. Fair looks at his watch] I’m not gonna read from that section.
And then the other thing that I can draw attention to is a documentary by Kirby Dick The Invisible War. And it’s about sexual assaults in the military and how the chain of command deals with those issues and it’s extremely disturbing and upsetting which is maybe not a great endorsement to watch it but I think it’s an issue…again as we talk about women’s issues moving forward and then becoming more involved in the conversations about the wars in Afghanistan the issue of assault and how to double up in the chain of command is gonna be a critical issues.
I could go on and we could sit here and we could just do a whole reading of all these books but we don’t have that time, so at this point I’d like to open it to questions if there are any and if not we can go home and get warm. [Audience chuckles]
Ques1: What do you think of Chris Hedges’ take on war?
EF: Has he written a book? I’m not familiar with Chris.
Ques 1: War is the force that gives our lives meaning. That’s an approximate… He’s a war correspondent.
EF: A war correspondent? So is he supporting the concept that war has a purpose or function?
Ques 1: He’s very anti-war.
EF: Well as I said, I’m not familiar with… and that’s an issue, there are so many books about war and whether the memoirs about being an army ranger or an NCO or something or whether it’s more sort of literature… I confess that there are hundreds of thousands of books that I haven’t read on the subject but that’s one I’ll certainly keep in mind. Anything else?
Ques 2: Can you comment on the difficulty in Iraq of distinguishing friend from foe?
EF: I can comment on what that was like in 2005 but it’s… (you know) the war in Iraq went through so many different phases. When I was there in 2005 we were fighting (and I was in Fallujah), we were essentially fighting and trying to kill the same people that eventually became the awakening counselors - The Sunni tribes. So we were in 2003, 2004, 2005 (the years when I was there) we were pursuing the old Saddam Hussein troops, the guys that had aligned themselves to Saddam. Thinking that we had eliminated them or just got them under control two or three years later those were the very same troops that we were then engaging in trying to use in our fight against what we were calling Al Qaida even though it probably wasn’t Al Qaida. Now it’s probably ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). So, it was impossible to know the difference between friend and foe. In fact so difficult that literally within a week or two you could be working with one group and then fighting with that group a week later. When I was in Iraq the second time I was in a command centre and I think I was listening to a briefing and they declared at that moment that the Mehdi army suddenly was our enemy. So the Mehdi army was the Shitte group that was running around, that we had worked with when we invaded Iraq. This was the Shitte group that had fought against Saddam but they suddenly took up arms against us and we suddenly took up arms against them. So, it literally could change day by day and it did. Once I left in 2005 to 2006 they continued to change…even today I’m not even sure what we had tried to accomplish through the war.
Ques 3: [Unable to hear question]
EF: It’s hard to talk about how things are necessarily received. I guess the only way to really judge that are the numbers. There aren’t a lot of people that read fiction and short stories and yet that seems to be easiest (not easiest) but the most effective way to sort of tell a war story is in fiction which doesn’t seem to make sense. But the books that draw the most attention are those that have been labeled The War on Terror Kill Memoirs and there are only two of them I have up there but there are dozens of them. The most notable are Carnivore by Sergeant Dillard Johnson he claims he had killed 2700 people which has since been bumped because it’s ridiculous. But the book is about all the things I did at war and all the people I killed…all in all it is the victorious story about the wonderful things one person accomplished. The best known is No Easy Day and the author published it under Mark Owen but his real name is Matt Bissonnette. He’s the gentleman that apparently killed Osama Bin Laden…and again there’s since been some controversy over whether he was the actual person who pulled the trigger but again, and here I go saying ‘most veterans’ and I know I shouldn’t but most veterans don’t brag about the people they’ve killed or the things they’ve done. That’s not something you want to brag about, it’s not something you’re excited about or you want people to know but for some reason that’s what audiences read or at least the publishers seem drawn to it. I don’t know if that answers your question.
[Unable to hear]
EF: So, I’ve written some fiction and had some short stories published and quite frankly, I’m not the greatest fiction writer in the world, so that’s my short coming, but I would say that yes it is easier to write fiction. I mean, if you’re doing it well it’s going to be difficult and painful but at least, I have not found it as difficult as writing what essentially is memoirs like the piece that I wrote for the Tribune. That’s extremely difficult…that’s where you kind of lean into your more difficult experiences where you’d rather have yourself shine in a better light but that’s not the honest way to write.
Ques 4: During your tours in Iraq did you have time to gain any insights as to nature of the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shittes?
EF: If I answer that question there might not be a war in Iraq. There are simplistic ways to answer that question and then there are probably more honest ones that are far more complicated. The simplistic one is an economic issue and it’s about controlling. As a protestant Christian we have what is called a tithe and you tithe 10% of your earnings to the church. Islam has the same thing, I can’t think of the term for it right now but you give a certain percentage to your mosque or to your religious leader. And so a lot of it, and I get a lot of push back on this, but a lot of it has to do with controlling money like so many other things. And so whoever controls – certainly the government controls the state mosque, who controls those funds that come in. That being said it’s a historical conflict that goes back to the very beginnings of Islam, and I don’t know that there’s an end in sight. Here’s another issue – the conflicts in Iraq and Syria as well are what we might call ‘brush fire wars’. So we see them as big conflicts because of all the money we’ve invested in CNN and Fox and NBC. But for most Arabs they are not huge conflicts, they are not world wars these are small sort of conflicts being fought by the most extreme elements in their communities. Most Arabs in places like Iraq and Syria are just trying to get by and make a living, get the kids to school, not be killed by car bombs, go to the mosque. And so, for those of us who have participated…there may remain terrible conflicts but for most Arabs… I don’t think…view them that way.
Ques 5: Earlier you said that memory can be fickle, or more or less you said that, how do you grapple with that issue?
EF: Well, when writing memoir you have to be careful and so if you’re gonna quote someone who said something you’d better be something…I mean, there are certain instances in Iraq where I can think back and I know exactly what someone said and that’s crystal clear. And so you write around those issues, so you use that as a starting point and then write off from there. Now the further away you get from those crystal clear memories, you do have to sort of be cautious about what you’re writing and any judgment you’re going to pass. I’m careful with other characters in my stories I often dump names and then if I do I change their names because I think it’s important that they speak for themselves. But there are crystal clear memories of people doing specific things and saying specific things you just have to focus on those.
Ques 6: One of the things that I’m concerned about is this issue of many tours and how it relates to previous wars in which combatant serve from the beginning to the end and the issue of post traumatic stress disorder which is a modern term and maybe shell shock was a previous concept of the same idea and whether the trauma for the duration soldiers face versus to repeat deployment trauma, can you distinguish…is there something that distinguishes it? Like the good war, World War II which when I first learnt the rights and conscientious objectors to World War II that was my first surprise on World War II, because it seems like there wasn’t a reason to…[unable to hear clearly] …but anyway I just kind of wondered…are these issues that haven’t been talked about for previous wars when people serve for the duration?
EF: I think…and I was gonna read a selection from World War II, there is certainly a concept that World War II was a good war. World War II, you’re right, you went off for the duration. You’re shipped off to war whether it was Europe or the Pacific and you stayed until it was over and you may have been lucky and gotten shipped home a little early after it was done but you were there for the duration. Vietnam was you did your twelve months and you were done. You could re-opt if you chose but my impression is that most people didn’t. Certainly there were people who went back but for most of us we did one tour and we’re done. And yes, it was a little different for these two but it’s just repeating tours. I don’t think there’s much of a difference between the after effects of when you come back home. I think one of the misconceptions about World War II is that those guys were ok, or most of them were ok and this is my own personal opinion. And I’ve talked to some World War II veterans about this, I did a few years ago, there was this idea that you almost honored people for not talking about their service. There’s the idea that these guys have gone off to war and they came home and they were quiet and they sucked it up and they didn’t complain about the things that had happened. And it could come to self fulfilling prophecy where you could tell someone I’m really impressed because you don’t whine and you don’t complain about this stuff. Then that person is almost obligated not to whine and complain about this stuff because then they’re not the kind of person they are held up to be. So I think that there was this sense that you don’t talk about it and you get a pat on the back for not talking about it and you want that pat on the back but you also probably want to be talking about it and again, I think that was an issue. I think that Vietnam was probably in the middle where it was ok to start talking about some of those things but I still hear people talking today that ‘my grandfather was a Vietnam veteran and he never talked about his service and we always admire him for not talking about his service’. Well (you know) maybe he wanted to talk about his service. So I think it’s a little bit different for Iraq and Afghanistan in a good way that there are more opportunities to start sharing the things that happened and what more really is. It’s not really honorable or wonderful or great, it may be necessary, I’m not a complete pacifist but there’s no sort of redeeming quality there.
Ques 7: The other thing I’m wondering about is it seems like in international relations or national conflicts in school we can talk about peer mentoring and …concept but when it comes to finding peaceful solutions to national conflicts and international conflicts that still seems to revert to that the only answer is…
EF: And the classic phrase is you’re getting on to issues that are above my pay grade. That I don’t know. I’m still sorting through my own sort of two war experiences and there are still days when I’d like to go back, I’m still connected to the guys that are over there. So even though I’ve said that two is enough and I was kind of devastated and I’ve spoken out publicly about it, you know, I still want to go back. After my first tour at Abu Ghraib and my family can attest to that I was very much against the conflict at that point, I was very anti war but I was determined to get back because the guys I had served with were still over there and I felt like I had to do my part so, that’s…I can’t answer that.
Ques 8: That’s very much like what Chris Hedges writes about in that book
EF: Is that right?
Yes.
Ques 9: My question for you is, what do you think of writing versus film as a way of communicating to people who are not experiencing war, what the war experience is like? And if you’ve seen it what do you think about the Ground Truth?
EF: Yeah, I’ve seen the Ground Truth and I think that raises a bigger issue, the idea of the role of film and media in communicating these wars and I think that’s gonna be a far more (I don’t know if I should say ‘effective tool’) but it will be a far more…there will be a lot more (I think) visual remembrances of Afghanistan than there will be written. YouTube in particular, you can on go to YouTube and write in Iraq or Afghanistan and there are thousands of videos that soldiers have taken from their Hummer cams and their own sort of personal experiences. Some of the videos are graphic and just sort of obscene and not necessary but many of them give you a firsthand look of what it is to go to war. Most of them are just boring videos of driving down the road – maybe there’s explosion, maybe there isn’t. There’s a classic one where there’s a couple of guys out trying to ride a goat in Baghdad and (you know), playing with kids. So, yeah, I think film and media in particular the movie I had mentioned before [speaker points to screen] that will play a critical role in talking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ques 10: [unable to hear clearly] My question is in fact on something that you had said actually at the outset, it’s the idea that war writings’ aim is to end war, it’s this idea that war writings, war literature ideally performs a kind of cultural work that’s about to end this wide scale…and then you also expressed the sense that perhaps it was failing and [unable to hear clearly].
EF: Yeah, I’d mentioned before that it was a losing battle and I had written the piece in the Morning Call suggesting that it was failing essentially but again, I think I also said that at the time I think I may have said that in depression and anger and so, there is a part of me that does feel… So there would be people who write about war who would disagree with me and say ‘no, war literature is not intended to end war’ (you know) and there are people who have made a living off war and maybe addicted to it. Let me not say that they like the idea but it’s a sort of who they are, so there are people who would say that war literature is not to end war it’s just to sort of give you a sense of what our experience is at war. But then many of us have no other reason to write about war than in the hope – and I have a six year old son at home – and wars can go in these phases, so we’re in a phase now where we’re drawing down and American people are not really interested in war and it’s going to quiet down again but in twelve years he’s going to be eighteen and that’s roughly around that cycle time when we start to get that itch again. So, for me it’s really personal and an idea that I hope…I mean, ideally yes, something that I write about Abu Ghraib or my experiences coming home will somehow infect a senator or congressman or maybe a president and say maybe we should think a little more strongly about this particular intervention. But, I’m also under no illusion that we’re going to have world peace in twenty or thirty years based on a book that I or someone else pens. But then you hope that the movement is such that the overwhelming number of voices of people who have been to war and are writing about it at least show and suggest that… I often say I’m not a pacifist and I recognize that there may be a need to go back to war at some point but if that happens, if we do decide to return to war I want there to be a much better understanding of what we’re getting ourselves into and the kind of damage that you’re doing to the people that you’re sending. It may be necessary to send them you know, you can make that argument but you’d better be ready to deal with the consequences of when they come home and I would be the one to disagree with this idea that you treat these people. I don’t think you can treat for PTSD, these are just consequences of the decision. I don’t know if that answers your question. John…
JP: I think we have come to this great puzzle about war and why your very simply stated and understandable point of “war is a bad idea” is not universally embraced and I think it goes to the compulsion towards war. Chris Hedges’ book War is the Force that gives us Meaning is as anti-war as you can get. When he was visiting Lehigh some years ago I asked him about that title and he said ‘I was being ironic in that title, I was being critical’ and as you read the book he has these incredibly moving descriptions of battle and combat and war. He is indeed critical of those but the cultural work that these descriptions do I think pull people towards battle in their imagination perhaps in their lives close to as much as it pushes them away. You pushed the All Quiet on the Western Front and want to go to war, you have since spent a great deal of your insight in criticizing those wars and particular parts of them that are especially egregious and yet you’re speaking about this primary pull. What is it? What is it?
EF: I can’t identify it but I can tell you that it’s real though. The idea that even as much as I’ve read and said in opposition to the war there is still a part of me that thinks there is a good war out there and I think for me that was a part of the desire to go back. The idea that I had gotten it wrong the first time – it was all wrong as an interrogator but I can go back and I can do it right – I can do war right and it can be sort of the heroic experience (that’s too simplistic) but there is that desire somewhere to go back and do war right. I’m not sure I’m convinced that that can be done but…
Ques 11: [Unable to hear some parts] What do you make of the fact that after Vietnam war or during Vietnam war the government fought veterans’ efforts to get benefits for PTSD and after the Gulf war the government fought the… After this war the government has minimized in many ways the PTSD experience… What do you think of that?
EF: I think when you say the government, I would say more specifically the Department of Defence and Veteran Affairs and I think part of that just comes out of a culture that you are ingrained with from day 1. The minute you enter the army it’s shut up and do as you are told and as you progress in the army you learn to tell others to shut up and do what they are told. And when everyone shuts up and does what they are told it is a well-oiled machine, I mean, it is about as efficient as you can possibly imagine. If there’s an acre of ground out in front of the headquarters building and you want the leaves raked, the army and the marines are the people to call. It gets done quickly and efficiently, no one’s complaining about the blisters on their hands, it’s done, it’s done right. The problem of course is when you apply that to other things like PTSD and the after effects of war. There are still those who have that idea that (you know) – shut up and do what you’re told and we don’t want to hear about what Iraq was like, we don’t want to hear about what Vietnam was like or we don’t want to hear about what’s going on everyone else had the exact same kind of experience, we’re moving forward and you need to move forward too, so… It just sort of ingrained in the system, the very same thing that makes the army so efficient and in some ways so wonderful also I think curses it and not just the army but all of the armed force services.
Ques 12: What I’m thinking about is that it seems that the physical injuries were dealt with. To me it’s curious that “new” injuries of the Middle East wars, the traumatic brain injury and yet in a sense PTSD is traumatic brain injury but one is physical and one is psychological; one is more acceptable and it seems like even though we’ve had decades of so-called acceptance in Psychology/Psychiatry (whatever) it still seems that if you can’t see it, feel it, touch it, smell it whatever you’re still … like it isn’t really true.
ER: You know, I think that might be another misconception about the way injuries are treated in the army; the idea that physical injury is treated and taken care of but mental is not. Physical injury isn’t treated either. You know, when you’re in the army and you wake up with the flu and you’re sick on that day, you go to something called ‘sick call’. They call it sick call, they don’t call it going to the doctor they call it sick call and you have to stand in formation and wait for your number to be called then you go in to see a doctor, then you have to go back to your unit and you’re put on profile so you don’t have to do certain jobs and you are shunned by the people you serve with. In the same vein you sprain an ankle out on a formation run or hurt a shoulder you are instantly shunned, that’s not an acceptable part of army life. And again it goes back to the idea that if you’re deployed in the army for war you can’t be slowing down for injuries. And so that same attitude is passed on to certain emotional and mental injuries. I know the sort of common thread is that the army avoids or ignores those types of injuries, I would say that the army kind of ignores all types of injuries. I know there are reports of prosthetics and treating people well but there are also those terrible reports coming out of Walter Reid about all those things that are done to injured veterans and again, it’s just part of that mentality, which in some ways can be a great mentality but obviously has some nasty side effects as well.
Ques 13: Just thinking about you being with undergraduates and teaching; and my daughter studies Environmental Sciences as an undergraduate and she says if you are gonna study the environment you have to be ready to be sad and learn how to be sad and so, I am just curious about whether you…in what way you’re thinking about being with these young people…introducing…helping them move forward in their looking at what seems tragic and sad and if there’s any particular ways you want to deal with them around that – in a pedagogical way or as a mentor?
EF: I think…you know I’ve written in the Morning Call a few days ago that there’s a terrifying truth to face about certain war literature and as I think about the incredible privilege of teaching younger people about war literature I also know that there’s that terrifying truth to face. And maybe this is too pessimistic but there won’t be necessarily much I can do because here is me [speaker picks up ] in my junior year in college reading All Quiet on the Western Front and saying hey, I wanna do this, I wanna see this. So, I do this with a great sense of caution (you know) exposing people to work books like Vonnegut or Crane or O’Brien and not wanting to instill that idea that ‘oh, that is something I wanna see’. So, I don’t know how I’ll do that. I know that I won’t use it as a platform, so I won’t preach and say that these are things you shouldn’t do because that’s not my right, but yes, there’s also a great deal of fear associated with approaching some of these subjects. You know one of the criticisms – it may not be a criticism – but one of the aspects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that we have this divide where so few have served and the civilian population has kind of been insulated against the wars. And maybe in a way that’s a good thing or maybe people are just so insulated they don’t want anything to do with the wars and maybe we will just move in a direction where nobody wants anything to do with the military. That’s probably a little optimistic but at this point maybe that’s the best we can hope.
Ques 14: This may be very simplistic but you mentioned that you hope for something like out there is a good war or a worthwhile war or whatever you said. What’s your opinion about the Revolutionary war, the Civil war?
EF: Yeah, it’s funny but this goes back to saying that there’s still a part of me that thinks there’s a way to do war right, that there are good reasons for war. But even something like the American Revolution and I would probably be thrown out of most rooms for saying something like this, but in retrospect, what really did the American Revolution accomplish that likely wouldn’t be accomplished in the next fifteen to seventy five hundred years? And what would have been so bad if we were essentially still England? Our lives wouldn’t be that much different. The flip side of that is the horrendous and horrible injuries and deaths that people suffered on battlefields across America. What was really going on? And there are all sorts of ideas about liberty and freedom and the necessity in wanting to kind of live like an independent country and I’m a soldier so I can be as patriotic as anybody but there’s still a part of me that can say that the American Revolution was a waste of lives. Having seen what it looks like to have somebody’s arm blown off or seen the pieces that could be picked up after a bomb goes off, there are days when even I can say that the American Revolution wasn’t worth it. But there are all sorts of impossible arguments world war II - what do you do about the holocaust? Civil war - what do you do about slavery?
Maybe I can finish with one passage that addresses some of those things and some of the other questions asked. I wasn’t gonna read Crane but…I don’t… I’m actually one of the few persons who criticize Crane. It’s an amazing book, I can never write the way he does. The language is unbelievable. But his conclusion it speaks, I think, to some of the things we’ve talked about, so here is Crane who I think is trying to write a book about the realities of war and how far he’ll go to try to get the message across that war is a bad idea but I think he get it wrong at the end.
So they’re marching away…in the story… he goes to battle and civil war and he survives one sort of engagement and then he runs from another one and he’s ashamed of himself, he gets injured, issued with the red badge of courage, then he goes back to the line and he fights with his friends. So, now they’re marching away from battle, and it says:
yet gradually he mustered force to put the scene in the distance and at least his eyes open to some new ways. He’s found that he can look back upon the grass and bomb blast that was earlier gospel and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them.
So he’s talking about this idea that he loved war and wants to see it but now he’s glad that he despises war.
With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive but a sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point, he had been detached to great death and found that after all, it was but a great death. He was a man!
And so now Crane is talking about a guy who’s made this progression, maybe kind of like mine where he wanted to see war and was very interested, and then saw it and then realized that it was a bad thing. And yet still, he is determined to have his character at the end declare himself a man and the only reason he’s declaring himself as a man is because he’s been to war. And that speaks to that whatever is inside of me (and I know other veterans as well), still thinks that war somehow proves something – war still accomplishes something. Even as horrible as it is, as I have seen it, there’s still somewhere in me wanting to walk away and say “here I am, I’m a man for having gone.” So, that’s not fair to criticize Crane in one short paragraph but I did it. [The audience erupts in laughter]
JP: Thank you very much.
