Write On

“Imagine you have a 38-pound, canvas rucksack you must hump along the long miles of the Song Tra Bong River, a rucksack containing many items.  With this weight strapped to your body and with the miles stretching ahead of you, it does not matter what particular items are in the rucksack to make it thirty-eight pounds.   It does not matter whether the pack contains rations and gear or just a heap of rocks.  What matters is the rucksack weighs thirty-eight pounds—and that you have to carry it.”

This is how I closed out a 2007 grad school paper about one of my favorite books, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I asserted that O’Brien “uses his untruths and half-truths and stories and memories and imagination to cope with what he sees and lives.  Truth and fiction are not strangers or opposing ideas in the book, but are one and the same and yet separate and distinct.”

I left the double spaces above after each sentence intentionally—that’s how we did it back then. And though not a veteran, The Things They Carried remains one of my favorite books.

It’s worth a reread this Veterans Day, especially in this age when fiction and truth seem blurred. One of my other favorites is Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds, for its poetic language and the anguish of the novel’s main characters. I got to know The Yellow Birds when it was a One Book, One Philadelphia selection in 2014. What I remember most about the book is how a normally jovial security guard at the Free Library read The Yellow Birds. He told me he hadn’t cried in decades, but this novel worked him to tears. He’d served in Vietnam, and had much to say about how the draft swept up Black working-class teens. His life was different from author Powers, who grew up white in the South and, like me, had the privilege of a graduate degree. But the guard felt they were brothers in experience.

Another powerful book I find to be a touchstone is Here, Bullet by Iraq vet Brian Turner. It’s a book of poetry, each seemingly magnetic and a level of powerful that cannot be dodged, the way a bullet destined for your body might be.

There are other books to think about: Phil Klay’s Redeployment, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, and Youngblood by Matt Gallagher. Kayla Williams, an Iraq War linguist, writes compelling nonfiction. So does retired Gunnery Sergeant Tee Marie Hanible, who channels her bravery into badassery with The Warrior Code: 11 Principles to Unleash the Badass Inside of You. A book I’m really wanting to read is Danger Close by Amber Smith, a memoir about her harrowing time as a helicopter pilot. Smith was one of few women to fly a Kiowa Warrior helicopter which “required its pilots to stay low and fly fast, perilously close to the fight.” Those are big, dark, chunky choppers that somehow remind me of a scary-looking insect. Even without enemy fire ruining my day, I can’t imagine being at its wheel or throttle or controls or—how do you fly a helicopter, actually? I guess Smith will tell me.

Whatever the answer, there’s no reason for an empty rucksack this Veterans Day Weekend. The words of talented veterans who share their experiences in fiction, nonfiction, or some weaving-in-and-out are weighty with emotion, guidance, and insight.