Philip Klay, one of the writers who will be reading at Brooklyn Reading Works’ Veterans Day event, Writing War: Fiction and Memoir by Veterans of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, has an essay in the Opinionator blog of the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt from Death and Memory, how photos from a trauma ward in Iraq brought home the impact of the death of a fellow Marine:
When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me. As a public affairs officer in 2007 and 2008, I never saw combat, only its aftermath. I saw women and children wounded or dying in trauma centers. Ruins left by explosives in towns and cities across Anbar province. I saw surgeons who could do no more because the body they were trying to repair was too badly destroyed. I stood in formations as the bodies were taken away.
And when I try to describe that death, the telling tends to decay into a kind of pornographic, voyeuristic experience. I feel I do disservice to the enormity of my subject by making it a subject of conversation. And yet I know that keeping a hushed silence is a failure, too, because by not telling these stories we fail to process them.
Most of the suffering I have seen has not affected me as it should have. While I was in Iraq I never cried over the bloody children I helped carry to the Navy doctors, or the two men who’d been tortured with drills through their ankles. Only one death out of the many gave me pause. It was of a Marine who died, not in front of me, but near me. Near enough for me to see it happen, had I been paying attention…
On Veteran’s Day, November 11 at 8PM: Brooklyn Reading Works at the Old Stone House presents Writing War: Fiction and Memoir by Veterans of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan with Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom, Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, Juri Jurjevics, Roy Scranton, Philip Klay and Jacob Siegel.
The Old Stone House, the site of the Battle of Brooklyn, one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War, is an appropriate setting for this literary event, which will highlight writing by those who know war first hand. All of these writers have transformed their experience of the violence, the chaos, the devastation, pain, fear and even hilarity of war—in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan—into honest and searing prose. As Roy Scranton writes in an essay published in the New York Times that chronicles his path from youth to soldier to civilian writer in New York City “The prior four years of my life hung over my days like the eerie and unshakable tingle of a half-remembered dream — “my time in the Army” — and the sense of chronic disconnection was getting to me. I walked between two worlds: the New York around me and the Army in my head.”
Writing War begins at 8PM and there will be a Q&A following the readings. A $5 suggested donation includes refreshments and wine.
The Old Stone House is located at Fifth Avenue and Third Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. 718-768-3195. Click on read more to read the author’s biographies.
Author Bios
Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom, Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, joined the U.S. Army in 2005 and received a commission in the armored cavalry. Following a fifteen-month deployment in Iraq, Gallagher left the army in 2009. Originally from Reno, Nevada, he now lives in New York City. In a Wall Street Journal review, Bing West wrote of Kaboom: “Understanding that comedy best captures the irony of the human condition, Mr. Gallagher pokes fun at himself, his soldiers and those above him. Above all, Kaboom is about the day-to-day travails of a typical platoon set smack among thousands of disillusioned and war-weary Iraqis. Without a trace of sentimentality, Mr. Gallagher draws the reader into the everyday complexities of leading soldiers from every strata of American society.
Juris Jurjevics was born in Latvia during WWII and grew up in Displaced Persons camps before emigrating to the US. His first publishing job was at Harper & Row, beginning on May 21st, 1968, about twenty-five days after he left the war and Vietnam. He subsequently worked at Avon Books, E.P. Dutton and the Dial Press as editor-in-chief before starting the Soho Press in 1986 with a friend. He stepped down as its Publisher and President 20 years later on the anniversary of its founding, a few months after the publication of his first book, The Trudeau Vector. Besides working on his next book, Red Flags, he wrote articles and interviewed authors for the San Diego Reader and taught publishing in the graduate program at Emerson College in Boston.
Phil Klay is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq. He grew up in White Plains, New York and now lives in Manhattan. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he is currently completing an MFA at Hunter College. Klay has an essay, Death and Memory, in the Opinionator blog of the New York Times.
Roy Scranton served in the U.S. Army from 2002 to 2006, and deployed to Iraq with the 1st Armored Division from 2003 to 2004. He recently finished an M.A. in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research and is beginning doctoral study in English at Princeton University. His work has been published in New Letters, Theory & Event, LIT, and elsewhere. Scranton has a series of essays called War and the City on the Opinionator blog of the New York Times.
Jacob Siegel is an Army veteran who served in Iraq. He is a Brooklyn Native and still resides in the borough. Mr. Siegel’s work has been published in New York Press, New Partisan and The Arch. Currently he is writing a book, which he describes as a pulp detective novel set inside an epic detective novel. He would rather not say anything more about it but if agents or wealthy patrons are interested the working title is Lucifer’s Nightgown.