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.
Continue reading Philip Klay: Death, Memory and Photos from a Trauma Ward →
