Presented as part of the After the Yellow Ribbon Conference at Duke University on November 12, 2011.

Writing, Reflection, and Narrative — 2011 Conference Session

Okay — Hannah is away, so I'll probably take a little while to get situated. I've called this session "Writing, Reflection, and Narrative." It's actually a filler, so props where props are due: Joshua Casteel was originally going to give a session on arts and social trauma. Unfortunately, Joshua can't be here with us today, so I had to think of something quickly — and I happen to be writing a book.

What I'm hoping to do is talk briefly about my own trajectory, where I've come from and what got me here, why I decided to write and what struggles were part of that, and then talk about how writing has been a tool — a resource — for me to process my experiences and get them out.

I brought some books with me; I'll hand these around now. Just so you know what you're holding: Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan is basically a transcription of an event in March 2008, during which a veterans' group publicly shared somewhere between seventy and seventy-five vetted testimonies. Aaron Glantz, who put it together, compiled them all — it's not the greatest editing job, honestly; a number of the facts are a little off. In mine, for instance, it says I was a medic. The next one is Joshua Casteel's Letters from Abu Ghraib — he literally compiled emails he'd sent back and forth with family while assigned to Abu Ghraib prison, shortly after the scandal broke there in late 2004. Then there's Packing Inferno by Tyler Boudreau — a very honest, poignant account of his deployment to Iraq as a Marine infantry company commander. I also have Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic — a classic, also made into a film. And the last one is a compilation of poems and prose called Warrior Writers, part of a series, two volumes of which already exist. It's not conventionally published — it's self-published, so you have to track it down and order it online.

I'll talk about those more later, but I wanted to get the titles out before I forgot them.

Writing has been a common way for people to explore their own experience, so let me give you a little background on mine. I'm currently writing a book titled Reborn on the Fourth of July: The Challenge of Faith, Patriotism, and Conscience, coming out with InterVarsity Press sometime next summer. The title was actually inspired by Ron Kovic, who writes about his own deep investment in the American project, his two deployments to Vietnam, being injured, and then experiencing the veterans' healthcare system as he came home. He grew disillusioned, began protesting, but insists throughout that he never stopped loving America — that never changed, but he felt called to speak out. (Feel free to keep passing the books around, or just leave them on the table over there.)

I called mine Reborn on the Fourth of July because I was actually baptized on July 4th, 2006, and Kovic himself was born on July 4th, 1946.

A lot of the books I've handed you — I've read some much more closely than others — share a certain anger at what happened to their authors, some more than others. Two more I didn't bring: Camilo Mejía's The Road from Ar Ramadi and Aidan Delgado's The Sutras of Abu Ghraib. A lot of these books are primarily interested in the political ramifications of what their authors went through; some aren't especially spiritual at all. Paul Rieckhoff, the director of IAVA, wrote one too — I can't remember the title offhand. There's a whole shelf of these Iraq-veteran memoirs by now, and by and large I found them angrier than I wanted my own account to be.

I went into the military in 2000, before the USS Cole bombing — that actually happened while I was in basic training, and the drill sergeants came out screaming that we were going to war. It didn't happen. On 9/11, I was at Fort Bragg, about an hour and a half south of here, sitting in the dentist's chair that morning getting a couple of teeth pulled. I walked back to my training room pretty groggy, saw the World Trade towers on the news, and thought, "That's old news — why are they rerunning this? I saw this in high school." I started to doze off again on my way to get my pain meds, and then I heard everyone start shouting again — but I had a dental profile, so I wasn't expected in the office, since I just needed to make sure my gums weren't bleeding. I didn't take it very seriously. When I came to, I somehow made it out to my car and started driving to the pharmacy, and that's when I finally heard on the radio that the World Trade Center really had been attacked — that it wasn't a rerun of the '93 bombing.

I honestly didn't know what to think. I was angry, but I don't remember that anger being primarily directed at al-Qaeda. What I remember is thinking: okay, this is real now, and I knew America had changed, was going to change, in some major way. I knew that much, and it made me frustrated and anxious. At that point I'd been in a little over a year and a half — I'd gone through Airborne School, and the 82nd is a genuinely enthusiastic unit. I happened to be in a brigade that wasn't going to deploy right away, so a number of us lower-enlisted guys tried to put in requests to transfer to a unit that would deploy sooner. I hadn't been in that long, but a lot of people felt like we'd been training and training since the early '90s as though something was coming, and nothing ever did — there was talk of "taking the kid gloves off," that kind of language. A lot of people were eager to deploy just to see if they had what it took. Others, I think, were genuinely energized by something closer to revenge. My request wasn't honored, and it would have been at least another year and a half before I deployed.

In the meantime, I was coming up on discharge, and I had a choice: get out and go to school, or re-enlist through a program called Green to Gold — re-enlist, go to Hawaii, where I'd already been accepted to a private university, enter an ROTC contract, keep all my veteran's benefits including the GI Bill, and get a scholarship and a stipend on top of it. That seemed like the obviously better deal — get out, get money, go back in as an officer. So on my two-year mark, August 9th, 2002, I re-enlisted, got my assignment in Hawaii, took a small bonus, and a couple of months later, on December 20th, I left Fort Bragg. I remember there was ice on the windows of my old GMC Sonoma, and even after I rolled the windows down, there was still ice on them — a very clear memory.

Driving cross-country, I called my friend Craig Lapine, who's usually good about picking up right away. He didn't answer for a couple of tries, and when he finally did, he was very soft-spoken: "I can't really take a call right now — we're on lockdown." I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "Yeah, we're going to Kuwait." I'd just missed my own opportunity to deploy with them, and I remember being furious with myself, wondering if I should try to do something about it. Nothing came of it. I ended up in Hawaii right as my friends were staging in Kuwait ahead of the initial invasion, and I watched a lot of that on TV in the chow hall during my first year there.

I spent a year and a day in Hawaii before we deployed. We were originally told we were going to Afghanistan for six months; that quickly changed to Iraq for twelve. In the meantime, my Green to Gold application was denied — because when I was fourteen, I'd been picked up for shoplifting (not even really an arrest, barely a misdemeanor, but it was on my record somewhere), and afterward I'd started going to church, thinking that's what you did when you'd done something wrong. I'd told my recruiter but never told ROTC, so I had a choice: file a small waiver and continue on the ROTC track, or deploy with my unit. I chose to deploy — partly for the camaraderie, partly to see if I had what it took.

I found myself on the tarmac at Hickam Airfield on January 19th, 2004, shaking hands with General Olson, commander of the 25th Infantry Division, and thirty-six hours later I was in Kuwait. I crossed into Iraq on February 2nd, and on February 4th we hit our first IED — nobody seriously hurt. That night I had my first nightmare that I'd attribute to PTSD; I won't get into the details here. I spent the first month or so in a battalion tactical operations center, until the night shift just didn't agree with me, and they moved me out to a line company. I spent about twelve months in an infantry platoon in Iraq, moving from place to place, rarely staying anywhere more than a couple of weeks, since we were assigned quick-reaction-force duties — filling in for units going on leave, or units that had taken heavy attrition and casualties.

The transformative moment of my deployment came on November 14th — the anniversary's coming up again. We were called to a vehicle accident site: an exhausted driver, unable to see clearly through his night-vision goggles, had missed a turn and gone over a twenty-foot drop, and the vehicle had come to rest half over a small reservoir and half on the concrete siding. My platoon was among the first to arrive after the convoy itself, which had its own medics; we brought ours too. I learned that combat triage is essentially the inverse of hospital triage. In a hospital, the most urgent cases go first, because the less urgent ones can wait. In combat, if someone is judged unlikely to be saved, you try to make them comfortable as they die, but you don't spend limited resources on them — you save those resources for the people on the borderline, and the walking wounded get buddy aid.

There was one young man in particular. We helped with the rescue — I had to go into the water and search for bodies; nobody was missing, everyone was accounted for. So I started helping in other ways, circling the overturned truck, where everyone's attention was on the cab, since three people were trapped upside down inside it. As far as we knew, nobody there was seriously hurt. There must have been close to a hundred people on scene by then, lights everywhere — I have no idea why we weren't mortared. As I kept circling, I noticed someone I assumed was a rescuer, lying face down, seemingly consoling the man whose leg was pinned between the truck and the reservoir's concrete siding — that man had already been given morphine. After three or four passes, I realized this "rescuer" hadn't moved at all. I tapped his leg — nothing. I lifted the leg of his uniform pants: he was still warm, and I found a pulse. He was actually injured, and unconscious.

I told the medic we had to get him out. Everyone had the pry tools — the "hooligan tools," the jaws-of-life-type gear, the axes — but they were focused on using them for the men who were judged non-emergent, because the medic told me this guy was too far gone. I'd felt his pulse myself; he was still warm. I wasn't willing to just accept that. I spent the next hour and a half trying, unsuccessfully, to help free him. Eventually Special Forces arrived with a crane and lifted the truck. One of the SF medics pulled him out, right after the man whose leg had been pinned. As they pulled him free, his face was a very particular shade of gray — I still remember it exactly. The SF medic gave a thumbs-up, which in my mind meant he was going to be okay, that they were getting him to the clinic.

On the ride back, we got the call over the radio that he hadn't made it to the clinic in Kirkuk.

That was profound for me in a way I hadn't expected. I'd already seen a number of bodies, especially in Samarra during Operation Baton Rouge the month before — bodies that didn't have skin like mine, that didn't speak a language that sounded like mine. And I realized there was a real conditioning at work in me. I'd gone through the whole deployment thinking of myself as Chris Taylor, the Charlie Sheen character from the 1986 film Platoon — at one point I'd genuinely been worried, after we were ambushed at an intersection and had to secure it with suppressing fire, because word got around that I hadn't fired my weapon, and that's genuinely dangerous — if people think you won't react the way you're expected to, you become a liability yourself. I'd told myself I was being a good moral agent, a discriminating soldier, not taking any more shots than necessary. I believed I was doing good, despite everything going on around me.

But realizing that I'd had this profound reaction to watching one American soldier die, without anything close to that same reaction to all the Iraqis and Arabs I'd seen die — that really got to me, and I don't think it ever entirely left.

I came home in February 2005; we'd stayed through the election period. I didn't think to put any of it behind me, or to rehash it, or process it. I just wanted to get back in the water and go surfing, sit on the beach. Around that time I met a woman, and we started dating — her family was very religious, Protestant evangelical. Where I'd grown up, in Orange County, religion was pretty superficial — church on Sundays, maybe, plus Christmas Eve and Easter. I'd always treated it as something you kept off to the side. They showed me there was a way to live your Christianity much more deeply and meaningfully, and that completely changed my paradigm. Once I started down that road, I realized you have to accept your beliefs all the way to their core, not just the convenient parts. For me, that meant reckoning with what it meant for my professional obligation to be ready to kill another human being. As a Christian, I felt I couldn't do that anymore. That began my path toward conscientious objection.

In the military, you get sensitized to the assumptions people make about war. I'd heard plenty of pacifist arguments, read plenty of pacifist writing, read plenty of just-war writing — though in actual conversation, all I was really ever offered was just-war reasoning. I wasn't fully satisfied with either. The generic pacifist argument treats the military as a relatively homogenous, uniformly bad institution — abolish war, abolish the military, fill in the blank. On the other side: war might be bad, but you're a hero, thank you for your service, and so on. When I came home — we'd left Mosul on February 10th, and had an intense firefight on the way out; one guy took a round in the toe and got a Purple Heart, I remember — within forty-eight hours I was in the Dallas airport being hugged by complete strangers. I'm something of an introvert. That discomfort became, for me, paradigmatic of the other end of that spectrum — a response that wasn't nearly as critical as it should have been.

I wasn't happy with either extreme, so I tried to find a way to stay true to both my convictions and my actual experience — including the camaraderie I'd had with the guys I deployed with. Eventually I requested non-combatant status. My unit happened to be under orders to return to Iraq, and I told them, "My bags are packed, I'm ready to process out, but as a Christian, I can't carry a weapon again." Long story short: what started as a real possibility didn't pan out. From where I was sitting, my unit wasn't doing much to show they were actually processing the request, so I found a lawyer. As soon as that lawyer contacted the legal division about my packet, word trickled down, and within forty-eight hours I was forcibly reassigned to a unit that wasn't deploying. I watched my friends deploy without me — eleven of them were later killed in a helicopter crash.

That's the quick version. But the processing of it, for me, didn't happen in the moment — I was trying to be as deliberate as I could, but here I am, five years out of the Army, and I'm still discovering things I hadn't quite pieced together.

After discharge, I went to live in Philadelphia for a while with friends — a community that was definitely pacifist, and I think a lot of them would describe themselves as progressive. They gave me a space that was non-judgmental and supportive; a couple of them happened to be prolific, semi-famous writers, so there was a kind of replacement sense of belonging there. I think I was spared a lot of the dissociation a lot of other veterans go through, purely because I got lucky enough to find that community right as I was starting my CO process — and right as the military wasn't just letting me leave quietly. I was kicked out the door. My commander accused me of being a traitor and a coward. My pastor at the time wasn't happy about it either — I'll read a bit of what he wrote later. But I had this other community forming right around the same time, a lot of overlap, and when I got pushed out of the plane, I had a parachute waiting in that community.

So that's roughly my trajectory. A lot of the reflection happened in that Philadelphia community — I was encouraged to write, almost without anyone really thinking it through; they just believed I should. I put together a book proposal, similar to what I'm now pursuing with IVP, and it wasn't accepted. I'm actually glad I didn't start writing back in 2007, because I don't think I could have reflected on any of this as meaningfully as I've been able to in the three years since.

I want to do a quick reading from the manuscript, to give you a sense of where it stands — this is the uncopyedited version, what Anne Lamott would call my "shitty first draft." I'll read three short segments and then talk a little about whether writing it down actually helped.

This is how the manuscript opens:

"That gun still working? Light those cars up. Light 'em up." The next thing I sensed after Sergeant Huggins' muffled yell was a piece of lightning making contact with my neck, tumbling down the skin of my back, having slipped within the plate of my improved body armor. The loose brass tumbled electrically down my spine. Specialist Bunton, our .50-cal gunner, had let loose, turning the exteriors of a few white trucks into dimpled golf balls.

I have to read fast — I want to make sure we leave time for questions.

More brass rained down around me as I radioed the command vehicle to report that we had made contact. By our sixth month in Iraq, our ears had all become accustomed to the roar of gunfire, as had my own radio procedure — keying the hand mic only between loud bursts of semi and automatic weapons, and trying my best to listen in the same brief moments of relative silence. Just a few minutes before the ambush, I'd commented, ominously, that I had "a bad feeling about our circumstances." It sounded like a bad movie, so cliché it almost hurt to say out loud.

It was June 22nd, 2004, and my infantry platoon was in Najaf, providing security for a long convoy of HEMTTs — Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks — many more than our nine up-armored Humvees could reasonably protect. An explosion had rocked an intersection as our vehicle passed through, without injuring anyone. Our vehicle ground to a halt to secure the intersection for the passing HEMTTs, since many of the drivers were particularly vulnerable without vehicle armor or heavy weapons mounted on their cabs. I was positioned behind Sergeant Huggins on the passenger side, away from the line of heavy trucks we were tasked with securing.

Specialist Dye, our driver that day, joined Huggins outside the vehicle in a heartbeat, their twin M4s blazing. I raised my weapon to return fire, but my priority was raising the lieutenant, who'd failed to respond to my repeated radio calls. My anger spiked, both at the ambush itself and at the junior officer's failure to stay in touch at such a critical moment. My blood felt like it was boiling, like a pot of water might in the desert heat we'd endured all that July. When Dye ducked back into the vehicle to clear his jammed weapon, I forced the handset into his hand, insisting he keep trying to raise the LT. With that, I threw my door open and moved my selector switch from safe to semi in one fluid motion, rehearsed endlessly since we'd arrived in Kuwait more than six months before.

Huggins was near the hood, scanning an arc from roughly twelve to four o'clock, if our truck were the face of a clock. From the turret, Bunton could sweep from about six to one, slightly overlapping Huggins' field of fire, exactly as we'd trained. My own field ended up being about three to seven — which also happened to be exactly where the HEMTTs were rumbling past. Nonetheless, I scanned my lane for actionable targets: anyone with a weapon, or anything resembling a remote control. We'd heard small-arms fire just before the explosion, so we were expecting resistance. With Bunton on the .50-cal and Huggins working his M4, my heart raced with a kind of morbid anticipation. My eyes darted left and right, eagerly searching for an excuse to fire.

Down an alley, a small crowd was scattering for cover, trying to avoid the Americans and their guns. I raised my rifle to eye level and looked at them through my sight. My attention settled on one man in particular, who kept glancing back at us despite the danger. Everyone else in the crowd had tunnel vision, hunting for any alley or crevice that might shield them from a stray round, but this one man kept looking over his shoulder. Was that a radio in his hand, or was he just biting his nails? My index finger dropped from the magazine well down onto the curved metal of the trigger, as I weighed whether this particular target was actionable.

I move on from there fairly quickly — I only spend about two of five sections on the deployment itself, because the point was to begin there but move fairly quickly toward my baptism, and toward Christian hope as the defining thread of the manuscript. We'll see if that comes across. But I did want to make sure readers had some real access to the brutality of it. Tim O'Brien, in The Things They Carried, says you'll know a war story is true by how grotesque and obscene it is. I try to be honest about the deployment, but also honest about where the actual center of Christian experience lies — that we're called to hope and joy, but that only really comes through a clear-eyed reckoning with the problem of evil in the world.

This next section I've titled "War Is Hell":

While the failed rescue attempt in November was the most tangible and immediate fear I would experience in combat, there was something worse that haunted me throughout my deployment. I thought I had hedged my bets before leaving Hawaii for Kuwait, by getting my affairs in order and telling myself I was already dead. Several of us did this — it seemed like the only way to carry on with any real sanity in combat. For me, it worked like this: I wrote letters to everyone I loved before I left, sealed each in an envelope, and gave them to my dad to distribute after my death. The thinking went something like — I've said my goodbyes, my affairs are in order, so I might as well already be dead. If I was dead before I ever set foot on the plane, coming home would just be a bonus; and if I was mortally wounded, maybe the emotional distance I'd have left to cross would feel shorter, more bearable, as I drew my final breaths.

It was a horrible, inconsiderate burden to put on my father, even though he was a Vietnam veteran himself. But that morbid ritual didn't spare me from the most haunting thought I carried in combat. Our platoon interpreter, Case, once asked me about hell. He'd seen Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey — not the Excellent Adventure — and thought the American idea of hell was enduring, for eternity, the worst pain you could imagine, different for each person. He asked me what hell was, for me. This is what I told him: "I'm sitting in the living room of my home in California. The doorbell rings, and I hear my mom come downstairs to answer it. She doesn't notice me, just goes to open the door, so I stand up to get a better look at her visitor. He's wearing an Army uniform, and he's with a chaplain. They've come to tell her I've died in combat." "And how does she react?" he asked. "Imagining her reaction is my hell." "And it happens again and again?" "No," I told him. "Just once. That's all it takes."

I'm trying to work in some lightness alongside the pain, because — I said in one of the interviews I did for this event — there was a woman in one of my precepts last year, part of a Pentecostal church, and we were going through Lamentations in Old Testament, and she genuinely couldn't understand why we couldn't just clap our hands and praise God in church. She was completely sincere; she just didn't get it. I couldn't bite my tongue hard enough. I finally said that we only get to do that once we've reckoned with the presence and the problem of evil — we don't get to have joy just because things are going well; that seems shallow to me. We have joy because we actually know what it means to be joyful in the middle of the world's suffering.

I try — not always well, and I haven't reread the whole draft yet — to work in a few moments that make people smile. This last piece I'll read describes my pastor.

"So — have you been reborn?" he asked me. The question caught me off guard, not because it was asked, but because of when and why it seemed to be asked. I'd waited over two weeks to see Mike Stangel, the pastor of North Shore Christian Fellowship Church. On my lap rested a stack of papers — my application to become a conscientious objector. Part of that application requires information about the pastor or leader of the religious community I identified with. I'd been attending NSCF a few months by the time I saw him, in mid-June, so Mike was the natural fit. I'd been put in touch with him directly by a church secretary, after letting him know about my CO application and why it seemed prudent to involve him. It seemed like there were so many other ways to start that conversation than a question of such theological weight. Something lighter — "how are you," "how was the drive." Instead, it felt like he was asking whose team I was on. After all, if my answer was no, did that mean I'd need to reschedule? "Yeah, I think so," I said.

He only had a few questions about my history — how long I'd been attending NSCF — but our conversation never went beyond logistics. It wasn't until weeks later that I followed up with him about the packet, catching him after church one Sunday, once most of the congregation had cleared out. I was hoping for some real critical engagement with the specifics of my request — whether he thought returning to war as a noncombatant made theological sense. Instead, he seemed fixed on my apparent lack of faith in just war, invoking Pearl Harbor — which, in parentheses, everyone on Oahu has a strong connection to — but nothing substantive, I felt. His deeper thoughts came out later, in an email: "Okay, so you've become a pacifist. You would rather let an evil enemy kill you, as well as innocent American women, mothers, and babies you swore, as an Army soldier, to defend and protect, than kill the same evil enemy. Now, to be fair, you'll argue that's not what I said, but it's the only logical end to your Pacifist" — capital P — "ways. If every soldier in the US Army lays down their weapons, we in effect surrender the USA to the militant Muslims." His response, tragically, didn't surprise me. One night, at a gathering at his home in Haleiwa, I noticed a placard in his kitchen: "Strengthen my heart, O Lord, that others might know me by my love — but hobble my enemy's feet, that I might know him by his limp." I cringed as Kathy Bates' scene from Misery popped into my head.

The manuscript goes on for another hundred pages after that, including seven pages of footnotes — we'll see how IVP feels about that.

One thing that's important to me here — I'll try to wrap up — is narrative theology, which is tied up with virtue theory and virtue ethics. We are, in a real sense, who our community says we are; we come to know ourselves through the stories that surround us. I think that's part of why autobiography or memoir matters, whether it's detailed like mine, or more philosophical, like Tyler Boudreau's. The title Packing Inferno comes from Boudreau literally packing Dante's Inferno in his sea bag before deploying — reading it, identifying with Virgil descending into hell, and then trying to climb back out and bring people with him.

There's something to be said for processing through writing, through self-reflection, through simply getting the words out. When I sat down to write the November 2004 section, I remember sitting in the parking lot of a coffee shop, knowing I had to write it, facing a deadline, but also just knowing how important the event itself was. I nearly came to tears just trying to open the car door, go inside, get coffee, and write the damn thing. I sat in front of my computer for probably fifteen or twenty minutes before I started by writing, "What I'm about to type, I've never actually written out before." I think I ended up cutting a couple of the paragraphs I wrote that day, I'm honestly not sure. It was genuinely difficult — the words had been there all along, the images had been there, but trying to get the images onto the page, knowing how insufficient they'd inevitably be. That tension — the insufficiency of language alongside its necessity — is something I think every one of these authors wrestles with.

In a lot of the interviews we recorded for After the Yellow Ribbon, Stanley Hauerwas, Sam Wells, and Anathea Portier-Young all had something to say about silence and confession, and it keeps coming up again and again as this conference continues. The written word holds a particular place — there's a longevity to it that can be daunting, because once I put this out, people will hold me to it. They'll think they know me. I've deliberately left a number of things out, because they just don't belong to the broader arc of the story.

But it's mattered. I had a reading with friends a few months ago, right before I finished the draft, and the most nerve-wracking moment of the night was realizing someone had brought a friend I didn't know. I remember thinking: this makes me nervous, but I'm about to put this in front of thousands of people, so I'd better get used to it.

That gets me back to narrative theology, and I'll close on this. What matters, I think — especially for veterans — is finding yourself inside a community that has a story, and that knows the story is still unfolding. One thing I've always made clear to friends: at some point, I need them to know me as just Logan, not "Logan the veteran." That's actually part of why I was so deliberate about making my baptism, not my deployment, the climax of the book. A lot of veterans — especially older ones — seem to operate as though those twelve months in Vietnam, or that stretch in Korea, are the single most definitive thing that will ever happen to them. For some people that's pragmatically true, because they never get to stop, never let themselves come out of it — we never fully welcome them home. Part of me wanted to get the experience out; part of me wanted to tie it to something with a broader arc, like the church.

In that same reading, I'd written about the time I spent in that frigid water in the middle of the night, searching for bodies. Later — completely without meaning to — I wrote about my baptism, in a swimming pool at night, just before a round of fireworks, in a passage that unconsciously echoed the earlier one about IEDs and explosions. Someone in the room raised her hand — I was taking comments, nervous about it — and pointed out that the November event and my baptism were actual parallels: the warmth of the water and the pool light in one, versus the frigid water in Iraq, being pulled out bodily by two friends in both cases, blood on concrete in one, fireworks in the other, surrounded by death at night in one, and two men lifting me up out of the water in both. When she pointed that out, I realized — it was all true, I hadn't embellished any of it. Having someone else in my community notice something God seemed to be doing, that I hadn't seen myself, was one of the most profound experiences I've had since the baptism itself.

Not everyone should write a book, to be clear — not because it competes with mine, but because I want to respect how differently people experience this. Mine was probably a relatively mild experience, compared to a lot of what's in Warrior Writers, which is full of much shorter pieces — some angry, some hopeful, some rambling, some very short, some just images. One more thing, and then I'll close: words aren't always the most effective way to convey meaning. One of the most profound moments in the manuscript, one I genuinely didn't know how to put into words, was when a close friend of mine — a civilian, someone I surfed with — came home on R&R. We were at a party, and he asked me if I'd killed anybody. As soon as I started writing that scene, I realized I wanted to leave a blank space on the page — I think what's in the manuscript now is just an ellipsis. Even that didn't feel like enough. Everything just stopped, in that moment, when he asked me that, and I tried to explain in the manuscript why it hit me the way it did. I honestly don't know if I succeeded.

Sometimes writing it out just isn't the right tool for everyone. But it was one way I could locate myself — within my immediate community, within the broader church, and within the broader veteran community too. Hopefully that explains why I named this session what I did — I really did come up with the title at the last minute.

We have about two minutes before lunch, but lunch runs an hour and a half, so we can take questions for as long as anyone wants. There's only six or seven of us, so —

Discussion

Pilar asked a question here that wasn't picked up clearly on the recording — from Logan's answer, it seems to have touched on the title and the idea of "confession."

Logan: That title was already taken, a couple of years ago, by St. Augustine. Augustine's Confessions — most of us probably know this, but I'll say it for the recording, in case someone doesn't — were quite possibly the first autobiographical work in history. It's interesting to think about how arrogant, or how confused, he might have been, and what purpose the writing actually served for him. I used the language of confession at that Brown Bag session, "Narrating War" at Duke, which is up on iTunes now — but I want to be careful with the word, because I think there are different levels to it. There's the immediate, personal level — confessing to a trustworthy, non-judgmental figure of authority, and I think authority there can include friendship; done well, friendship itself can be a means of confession.

But on the macro scale — Hauerwas talks about this too, in his video for the After the Yellow Ribbon series — there's also a need, and I'll speak through the language of the church here, though I don't know if this maps onto the VA or the broader veteran community. On the micro scale, in the church, you confess to a priest, and then you go out and do penance after absolution. But there also needs to be some way, some point, at which that confession becomes public — not forced, but so that it enters the collective narrative. Look at the abuse scandal in the church right now: a minority of priests are rightly under intense scrutiny, in large part because the institution failed to say anything for so long. I think that's a failure of confession — when you refuse to acknowledge something, it just persists. Someone mentioned last night that everyone has secrets, and that Grossman argues secrets themselves are corrosive — I can't remember his exact wording. I think there has to be a point at which, say, my local parish recognizes these experiences exist in its midst — a point at which the broader national community reckons with what we've asked people to do, and with how we've failed to actually welcome them all the way home.

Kelly and I were talking about this last night — how insulated we are. I'd been listening to something by the photographer Ben Lowy, who had an exhibit at Perkins — he talked about sitting with a satellite connection in the middle of the invasion, reading baseball scores. In World War II, baseball stopped. Everything stopped — we rationed food, we had a tangible, immediate connection to what was happening thousands of miles away. Now we're supposedly the most connected society in history, and we're almost completely insulated from what we're doing overseas — we have no real ownership of it. I think that has to change, whether that means more veterans writing books or something else entirely. At the very first "Narrating War" session, back in March 2011, someone asked what we should actually do about all this, and I said: more veterans need to start talking, openly. Not uncritically — not just throwing it open and being maximally vulnerable to everyone — but we need more people willing to say, "I just heard you say something I can't excuse as a veteran, and I'm not going to stay quiet about it." That's something Alaina Klinbeck has talked about too — that refusing to say nothing, for her, was formative.

That's what I'd call, in my head, a kind of macro-confession. I think it's important to find something that plays that role for the wider society — I don't think society is going to offer absolution and penance the way the church can, but the experience that's become so concentrated in this less-than-1% of the population needs to be diffused more broadly. You drop the red droplet into the water and let it disperse, instead of keeping the red water penned off in one corner while everyone else stays "clear." So — yes, on one level it's a confession; on another, it isn't. I left out plenty of things I'd probably need to confess that have nothing to do with this particular story — I was married for a while, and it doesn't come up at all in the manuscript, because it's just not relevant. So: a limited confession, I suppose.

Q (unclear from the recording, likely something along the lines of "what do you not want people to take away from your book?"):

Logan: I think there's a real danger of glamorizing almost any account of war — because, honestly, some of what I experienced, in the military and in combat, really was good. David Crabtree, the WRAL anchor, once asked me and another veteran he was interviewing, Alan Felton, whether we regretted our experience. I said no, immediately. Alan wasn't as certain. But I wouldn't be who I am today without those experiences. That said, the last thing I'd want anyone to take from my writing, or any veteran's writing, is license to glamorize or sanitize what we went through. Kovic, for what it's worth, was largely satisfied with how the film handled his story — a few details he disputes, but on the whole he felt it got it right. I probably wouldn't let anyone make a movie out of anything I've written. There's a very thin line between honestly sharing the brutality of war and turning that brutality into spectacle. What scares me here at Duke is when people I know only in passing stop me in the hallway and just say "thanks," or "I heard about the conference" — and that's it. I feel like a spectacle sometimes, like because I've made a point of not staying silent, the experience itself becomes something to be consumed rather than reflected on.

I thought hard about the press. A smaller press had also offered to publish this, but they couldn't have given me the editorial support I wanted as a first-time author. InterVarsity is a well-known press in Christian circles, especially on college campuses, and one of my real hesitations is the notoriety, the "celebrity" of it — how that sits against what I'm actually trying to do, which is to humanize and de-abstract war. If what comes out of Reborn on the Fourth of July ends up being just a consumer product, I'll consider that a failure, and I'll ask them to stop printing more. It's not really up to me, obviously, so — as cliché as it sounds — I've really tried to just trust God with the decision to publish. I'm something of a Christian anarchist, an anarcho-pacifist; I don't especially trust corporations to do the right thing. IVP is technically a nonprofit, though, so maybe that's some reassurance.

Dr. Kudler: It's nice to be in a non-medical setting for these issues. It's funny you quoted Tim O'Brien — I mentioned yesterday that one of the things he says is that a war story can't actually be told. There's a nice dynamic in what you've described here — you needed to set this narrative down, and you also pointed out that even within your own story, there are parallels, actions, dynamics you weren't fully aware of yourself. That's very much where O'Brien plays with that idea artistically, both in the reader's mind and in his own — the sense that "I'm telling you a story, but you don't know what story I'm telling you — and neither do I." The real value of a narrative like this isn't that it defines your experience once and for all; it's that it keeps growing, in your own mind and in other people's. It can't ever be fully told — but you can build a kind of platform where people can wrestle with it. That's maybe the best anyone can hope for. And it's more than most people ever get.

Logan: Yeah — it's funny, actually. I use a lot of song lyrics in the manuscript, because music has always been genuinely helpful for me. I'm an introvert — when I go to the skate park, I put music on and stay in my own world the whole time. A friend came with me once and told me, "I think you're being an asshole," because I was ignoring everyone. For me, that's the point — I'm not there to socialize, I'm there to decompress and burn off energy. So I wrote a fair amount of song lyrics into the manuscript, quite deliberately. One band I used is Thrice — I really like them, and they're from where I grew up in California. They came through town a couple of weeks ago; I already had tickets, and it occurred to me it might be nice to give them a copy of the manuscript. I found one of their stage managers and said, "I'm writing a book, maybe your publisher's already reached out, but I marked the places where I quoted your lyrics." She said, "Oh, great" — and twenty minutes before their set, the frontman emailed me directly.

In one footnote — near the end of the section processing the November event — I quote a lyric from one of their faster songs, which I generally don't love, because that kind of tempo tends to amp me up in ways that aren't always great for me. The lyric is: "Am I a good man? I thought I was. Everything has changed in this pale light that death has cast on all I've done." I explained, in the footnote, that the tempo mattered to me — I listen to their slower material when I skate, because I can actually channel that energy physically: I'm skating, I'm sweating, sometimes I'm getting hurt, and that helps. I'd rather do that than get into something like cage fighting, which apparently a lot of veterans turn to as a way of decompressing. But I hadn't fully explained, in the footnote, why I wasn't as into their faster stuff. He read it and asked, essentially, "what do you mean by that?"

So I looked him up on my phone, and it turns out he's part of Mark Driscoll's church movement — which I have real problems with, particularly how it frames masculinity — and I learned this right before they went on stage. Suddenly I was hearing his music differently, and sure enough, everything they played in the encore was older, faster material I wasn't into. I thought, if he asks again, I'd tell him: the trouble with writing lyrics — or any art — into something like this is that meaning is a two-way street. Once it's out in the world, the interpretive work belongs as much to the audience as to the person who made it. I don't get to control how what I've written gets absorbed, any more than he controls how his music gets absorbed. I don't have control over how anyone reads what I say. Someone with a far worse combat experience than mine might read this and think it's a joke, or that I'm just clapping my hands for Jesus. But that lack of control was actually part of what tipped me toward doing this at all.

I'd actually proposed a different, more general book first — about soldier-saints and patriot-pacifists — and that one got picked up, so now I'm technically writing two books. What really brought me back to this project, after I'd more or less put it aside — I wasn't eager to put another ten months into a second IVP proposal — was accumulating moments like the orientation story I mentioned, people laughing at the idea that someone might need to talk to a counselor about having killed people, or that woman in my Old Testament precept. I kept walking around exasperated, honestly still do sometimes. But it came back to something I'd said myself, at the very first "Narrating War" session: more people need to step up and say something. Those words stuck with me.

I worry about narcissism in all this. I worry about vanity. The book isn't even out yet, and people are already thanking me for saying something new — though I don't think it's actually all that unique. But I do think there's real value in trying to increase people's awareness of the nuance of war, in trying to de-abstract it, and in making myself vulnerable — vulnerable to critique, which is going to be rough, but also vulnerable to the possibility that maybe I am, in part, a narcissist. I'll deal with that when I get there. It matters, though — it's a form of citizenship, in a sense. I want to see my community improve, and if that means sticking my head up above the mound and possibly getting shot at for it, well — I already did that once, in the military. The parallel's there.

I'm getting hungry — does anyone want to stick around or ask anything else? No? Okay, let's eat. Thanks for coming down. There are cards from the publisher, but I left them in the car — I'll bring them up to the merchandise table if anyone wants one. Thanks for coming, everybody.