This is the full introduction to "Can't Give This War Away: Three Iraqi Summers of Change and Conflict." Preview (and purchase) the whole book here.
Can't Give This War Away: Three Iraqi Summers of Change and Conflict
Poetry and War: An Introduction:
"Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things." - Robert Frost
"Any idiot can face a crisis. It's this day-to-day living that wears you out." - Anton Chekov
New Hampshire poet Robert Frost’s quote compared his profession to baseball games - the dramatic moments need patience between long intervals. His observation - whether he’d appreciate it or not - applies to war and poetry equally as well.
The intervals are the tough things; the day-to-day living is what wears one out, as a soldier overseas and far from home. Not the moment; moments require action, and action needs training and good training took passion. Of course a soldier can face the moment. That’s why they’re there. But they can’t train for a war’s interval. They can fill it up - burn the latrine’s shit barrel, clean weapons, shave so they don’t get yelled at - but it’s all just time killing until what they’re really there to do finally comes along.
Doesn’t mean combat, just means the mission. Might mean standing around while a platoon sergeant chats with a Sudanese gas station owner; or walking down a country road, telling farmers to drive another way because of a building demolition; or having dinner with an Iraqi sheikh; or waiting on the roof outside while someone else has dinner with an Iraqi sheikh.
Soldiers choose what’s a moment or an interval. It’s their war, big or small. They can mock it, exaggerate it, glorify it, try to forget it, but once a boot goes in the sand, it’s theirs for good.
I know the feeling, went as a soldier to Desert Storm all those years ago. I’ve talked it up and I’ve played it down. In the end, my war reduced itself to a framed trophy hanging on a wall - a hand-drawn diagram of a MiG fighter cockpit I carved from its original frame in Tallil Air Base in southern Iraq near Nasiriyah, carefully shepherding it back home.
If I took the poster from its glass frame today, I’m certain the dry laminated paper would still smell like the desert, and the desert always smelled like tent canvas and boot leather.
The musty perfume that always takes me back.
“Were you here for the initial push?” A soldier asked me, meaning 2003 - not 1991. “Must have been a lot different.”
“Yeah, it was definitely a lot different,” I said. I didn’t correct him, but I wasn’t lying. Depends how you define “initial.”
Operation Iraqi Freedom isn’t my war. I was just a short-term visitor, a narrator, there to write about men (and a few women), going out to work. It’s their war, with these stories placed within the intervals I witnessed, briefly experienced, photographed and documented. This is the day-to-day living that wore them down; then they got up and did it all again.
I arrived, an embedded photojournalist, as 2007’s “surge” began, meant to give the conflict back to the Iraqis, and bring US soldiers home. Each new veteran’s war could then linger in their past. What a laugh. Nobody’s giving this war back to anyone. Not with so many debts to pay, soldiers to heal, memories to remember.
Give the war away? Who would take it if you could?
If they lived it, they don’t want it.
If they didn’t, they can’t have it.
Better, then, to give the war to nobody.
Share it, instead, with everybody.
Robert Frost wrote another poem, not about war, but it could be:
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain - and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane.
In “Dispatches,” Michael Herr answered with, Yes, but there were some nice ones too, even during the bad old days of jubilee.
The stories in "Can't Give This War Away" begin with an interval spent beneath a bridge, along a road, on a hot day in July...
Go here: 2007: Break Beneath a Bridge for the next excerpt, and then each subsequent entry.
Contact me directly at rahfa@comcast.net or "Like" on Facebook if you're interested in a signed copy, or have a website or other public outlet and would be interested in a complimentary review copy.
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