FIRE AND FORGET

Fiction

Sunglasses, attitude, and charred boots

FIRE AND FORGET:

Short Stories from the Long War

Edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher

Da Capo Press

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

Fire and forget. Shoot and shake it off. Kill and care less.

None of the above is possible. So say the authors of this collection of 15 stories from the Gulf Wars, who – it is clear – have been there. The detail, the veracity, the inner hurt could not be replicated by anyone just making it up.

The editors put it best in the preface: 

We each knew the problem we all together struggled with, which is how to say something true about an experience unreal, to a people fed and wadded about with lies…Meanwhile, home is a place you lived in once, a different person, a different life, and all the people you loved somehow alien.

These fifteen authors are all veterans (except for one very perceptive military wife). The nucleus of them met in New York at the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop. They shared common interests: 

good whiskey, great writing, the challenges and possibilities of making art out of war, and the funny gray zone we found ourselves in, where you shape truths out of fiction pulled out of truth – which might only be the illusion of truth in the first place.

The obvious theme arises in the first story, Jacob Siegel’s “Smile, There Are IEDs Everywhere”: the impossibility of explaining to anyone else what these wars are like.

For us, there had been no fields of battle to frame the enemy. There was no chance to throw yourself against another man and fight for life. Our shocks of battle came on the road, brief, dark, and anonymous. We were always on the road, and it could always explode. There was no enemy; we had only each other to hate.

These people are not heroes in the classic, idealized sense. They are bored, profane, cynical, confused, hardened, and adept at the coarsest humor to deal with their situation. David Abrams’ “Roll Call” describes a platoon’s memorial service. It’s what you might expect: an M-16 upended beside a pair of empty boots, dogtags dangling from the rifle. Only “those boots weren’t Carter’s – his had cooked to char in the Bradley. These were a fresh pair someone had procured from Supply. In front of the boots is a picture someone had printed out on a computer and taped to the front of an MRE box. The face, at least, was Carter’s. He was all sunglasses and attitude, real Clint Eastwood. The dumb fuck.” There’s roll call, Carter’s name not answered, and then the men line up “to have our moment with Carter, saying whatever we needed to say to his rifle and boots.” Afterward the men huddle against the wind, smoking, and with foul-mouthed ribaldry call up the names of all the lost men they can recall.

In “When Engaging Targets, Remember,” Gavin Ford Kovite satirizes the military mind and militaryspeak. Quoting directly from the Rules of Engagement, a “small yellow folding card that you keep in your left chest pocket,” he illustrates succinctly the impossibility of making the right decision in a place where you can’t tell innocents from the enemy. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic.

Ringing especially true is “The Train” by Mariette Kalinowski, whose protagonist is a female soldier who (like all others we encounter here) can’t re-enter her old life, can’t talk to her mom about what it was like, can’t go with her to the Vermont house for an idle month. The narrator’s flashback conjures the day she was on duty with her best friend checking local workers entering the base, where they do menial jobs. The entry control point is a long and wide sandy lane framed on both sides by tall Hesco barriers, canvas and wire baskets filled with sand to absorb shrapnel and small-arms fire.

In her memory the corridor narrowed and stretched for miles and miles, the Hescos rising into the air, reminding her of the skyscrapers along the spine of Manhattan, like the entire world that day was the ECP and nothing else existed… There, a man of medium height, with a full head of shiny black hair combed and parted. He looked normal, but something wasn’t right. He wore a clean white robe and no coat despite the cold…She saw the man’s lips move, a slight trembling of words in a language she’d never understand. Then she saw how, for such a slight man, his belly protruded in a strange way. His torso was too big for his body.

As might be expected, these stories are intense; it’s hard to read many of them in a single session. Yet contrary to expectations there’s not much sameness in the telling. Each man or woman has his or her own story, each one unique. These are voices we all need to hear.