The lessons of war must be learned anew by each generation, soldier by soldier, grief by grief, grave by grave. Unlike the scientific discoveries of each era, that gradually rise to make a pile of new facts upon which subsequent researchers can stand, the wisdom about war feels raw and new each time it is compiled. It is a horizontal truth instead of a vertical one. It doesn’t climb toward a transcendent realization, after which nobody can be surprised by it, ever again; it spreads until it touches everyone, then it moves on to the descendants of those people, and it touches them too. It doesn’t go up. It goes out.
The special and clarifying beauty of two new books about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their effect on American families, comes from just that, from the fact that we have to learn about war over and over again. The knowledge is completely familiar and expected, but it still packs the force of revelation. We already know, and know well, that mothers love their sons and worry when those sons are away at war, which is what “The Warrior” (Viking, 2008), is about. We already know that war is difficult and dangerous, which is what “Operation Homecoming,” originally published by Random House and recently released in paperback by the University of Chicago Press, reveals by gathering the letters, essays, journal entries and e-mails of military personnel and their families.
But what we don’t know is how these people — these folks, and no others — feel war, intersect with war. And the wisdom gleaned from past wars isn’t relevant. To a good writer, abstraction is the enemy. A good writer looks at a platitude the way a drill instructor looks at a soldier with an untucked shirttail: It’s sloppy and it’s wrong.
Fiercely authentic
In “The Warrior,” a poetry collection by Frances Richey about her son’s two deployments to Iraq as a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, and in “Operation Homecoming,” culled from some 50 writing workshops conducted in five countries and on an aircraft carrier, you’d have a hard time finding a cliche even with a pair of night-vision goggles. While the books are very different — one is poetry from a sole voice, the other prose from a variety of voices — they are linked by the wars that made them essential, and by their fierce authenticity. That authenticity burns in every line.
The 28 poems in Richey’s collection are suffused with the poet’s love for her son, Ben, a West Point graduate who is sent to Iraq, where he joins his comrades both literally and figuratively: “I see him / in the faces on the news, / In the Times — / The voice / in my mind, like the tune of a song / I hate but I can’t forget…” she writes in “The Aztec Empire.” She visits him during his training and finds herself fascinated by his gun, needing to see “how he carried it, / if he cradled it, / how it fit against / his body, to see / the side he hides / from me, the dark / beauty,” as she puts it in “One Week Before Deployment.” And in “Thetis,” she finds herself, like the mother of another soldier, wanting to “whisper in the ear of / any god who’ll listen: Please, / protect him.”
Visceral feel of war
In “Operation Homecoming,” the visceral feel of these wars — the heat and dust of Baghdad, the towering mountain ranges of Afghanistan — is conveyed through the weary voices of the soldiers, in poems, stories, jokes, observations. You’ll know what it’s like to be on patrol, to see friends wounded, to wait through tedious hours, to help rebuild cities — and you’ll see what happens when the coffins are unloaded at Dover Air Force Base, and how diligently and reverently the military performs its most solemn responsibility.
It is no accident that “The Warrior” is being released around Mother’s Day, a holiday often engulfed in schmaltziness. Yet neither “The Warrior” nor “Operation Homecoming” has anything sentimental about it. These are tough-minded books. They’re about parents and children, about families, about ties that bind. These ties stretch across oceans and deserts. Sometimes they must stretch across an even greater distance — the chasm between life and death.
They speak to soldier and civilian, to hawk and dove, to warrior and pacifist. They are about pain and choice and confusion and dread, and for every crisp detail about Humvees and night-vision goggles, there is a balancing fact about the thing we can’t see at all, and never will, but that fills the world with its force: love.
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jikeller@tribune.com
See also “‘I thought I had lost him …’,” Arts & Entertainment section, Page 13
