Sun Tzu & Sneetches: New War Poetry Now on Sale!

In her second electric collection, "Permanent Change of Station," poet, mother, and U.S. Marine Corps spouse Lisa Stice lovingly interrogates and illuminates life in a modern military family. The 96-page trade paperback is available for $11.99 U.S. purchase via Amazon and other booksellers worldwide. A $5.99 U.S. Amazon Kindle edition is available as well. Via Amazon's "MatchBook" program, a bonus Kindle copy is available FREE for instant download to purchasers of the print edition.

Here's what people are saying about Lisa Stice's "Permanent Change of Station":

"Lisa Stice's new poetry collection [...] is spare and lovely. Shadowed by deployments and military moves, Stice demonstrates how the smallest, most tenuous moments in life can illustrate a family’s larger joys and fears."
—Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone and The Confusion of Languages

"By using a language [...] that plays philosophically with the meanings of military terminologies, Lisa Stice produces a cartography of domestic space that is riddled with loss. [...] Stice celebrates the moms and kids who 'hold down the fort' back home, expressing awe at all the ways they find to survive and thrive."
—Lynn Marie Houston, author of the poetry collections Unguarded and The Mauled Keeper

"The experiences [Lisa Stice] writes of—the losses and realizations—are part of a military life that often feels simultaneously impenetrable and inescapable. Absence, isolation, and relocation become habit we don’t often read about, because part of us breaks in every move we do not choose, every uncertainty we are told to sustain […]"
—Abby E. Murray, author of the poetry collections How to Be Married After Iraq and Quick Draw: Poems from a Soldier’s Wife

Together with her toddler daughter and little dog Seamus, Stice explores the in-betweens of separation and connection, and the quest for finding one's place in the world—whether child or adult.

Stice's signature style is open and accessible—this is poetry for people who think they don't read poetry.

Frequently, for example, she borrows phrases from texts she finds readily at hand around the house, including quotations from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," and Dr. Seuss's "The Sneetches."

In another point of entry, the family's beloved Norwich Terrier often appears as a sentry, companion, and guide.

In one poem, "The Dog Speaks," Stice writes:

He says, I can't leave.
This place is mine—
I claimed all the trees.

I say, There will be more.
After all the temporary homes
and all the stops in between,

this whole country
will by yours.

Lisa Stice is the author of a previous poetry collection, "Uniform" (Aldrich Press, 2016), in which she explores her experiences as a military wife. A former high school teacher, she volunteers as a mentor with the Veterans Writing Project; as an associate poetry editor with 1932 Quarterly; and as a contributor for The Military Spouse Book Review. She received a BA in English literature from Mesa State College (now Colorado Mesa University), Grand Junction, Colo., and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. While it is difficult to say where home is, she says, Stice currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, her daughter, and Seamus, a Norwich Terrier.

For a Red Bull Rising review of Stice's previous book, click here.

For a "5 Questions" Aiming Circle interview with poet Lisa Stice, click here.

Middle West Press LLC is a Central Iowa-based editor and publisher of non-fiction, fiction, journalism, and poetry. As an independent micro-press, we publish one to four titles annually. Our projects are often inspired by the people, places, and history of the American Midwest, as well as other essential stories.

Comics Journalism Book Review: "Rolling Blackouts"

Book Review: "Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq" by Sarah Glidden

Sarah Glidden's "Rolling Blackouts" is an essential exploration of what it means to ask questions and tell stories. You should experience it.

I say "experience," rather than "read." Or "view." Because "Rolling Blackouts" is what other people might dismiss as a comic book.

What should one call, however, a 304-page illustrated navigation of national identities and communications theory, one that crosses borders and shares private experiences, and that seeks concrete answers while also celebrating ambiguity and complexity? Is the preferred term "graphic non-fiction novel"? A work of "Comics journalism"? To the uninitiated, these terms seem dismissive, inadequate to the artistic and rhetorical accomplishments at hand.

Although it defies easy labeling, Sarah Glidden's second book is imminently accessible. Each page is designed on a 9-panel grid, and filled with elegantly drawn pictures, warmly colored with watercolors. Action and exposition is primarily driven by dialogue—interactions among characters—rather than by authorial narration. To put it another way: There more word-balloons more than text boxes.

The illustrations offer setting and mood, giving readers a more-immersive experience than what might be possible via text, or even photo.

The book relates the 2010 story of four friends who make up a Washington-based non-profit journalism enterprise called The Seattle Globalist, who travel to Turkey, Syria, and Iraq in search of stories regarding the Iraqi refugee experience.

Glidden goes along for the ride, intending to observe and report on the process itself. Dialogue and events depicted in the book are based on her recordings, impressions, and memories of events. She notably and explicitly avoids labeling the work as memoir.

Multimedia journalists Sarah Stuteville and Jessica Partnow are life-long friends, who also knew former Marine artilleryman Dan O'Brien from high school days. As a military veteran, O'Brien goes along to file occasional video impressions of what it's like to return to Iraq, having deployed with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines to Ramadi in 2007. Alex Stonehill is the team's photographer.

Via Stuteville and others, Glidden learns about nuts-and-bolts journalism terms like "lav-mics" and "B-roll," and experiences first-hand the embarrassing, excruciating pain of transcribing interviews from digital recordings. Meeting other journalists in the field, she explores the limitations and advantages of embedding civilian journalists with U.S. military personnel, and how various types of sources are sometimes limited in their abilities to directly tell the stories of the refugees they're trying to help. Language is sometimes a barrier to effective reporting, a problem that Glidden's own visual, sequential medium seems uniquely able to depict.

Stuteville's standards of journalism are appropriate to all forms of non-fiction storytelling, whether blogging or Tweeting or writing for an old-school print publication. As such, "Rolling Blackouts" would be a useful text in journalism and communications classes:

• Is it informative? Is it trying to inform people about a topic or a time or a person?

• Is it reliable? Is it true and can we find out that it's true?

• Is is accountable? Do we know who did it, and if we find out that something was untrue, will they take responsibility for it?

• And is it independent? So did the person report this for no reason beyond getting to the truth, or did they do it because they were paid by an interested party?

"[Journalism's] not a medium and it's not a result and it's not a voice," Stuteville tells Glidden. "It's an expectation."

For the most part, Stuteville and her team are pragmatically idealistic, recognizing the freelance realities of marketing stories to editors. Some stories are necessary, because they'll help pay the bills. Other stories just won't sell.

Some of the dramatic tensions lay between individual team members as characters. Stuteville, for example, openly wants to leverage the powers of journalism to document a narrative change in her Marine friend O'Brien, but is repeatedly frustrated by her professional and personal inability to make that connection:

Dan O'Brien: "I feel a lot of pressure to give you good sound bites right now. I feel like the fate of your entire project is resting on me and I'm just blowing it and you guys are like, 'This guy hasn't said anything cool yet.'"

Sarah Stuteville: "Not at all. A good journalist doesn't go into a story already knowing the conclusion. People never say the stuff you want them to say … and the revelation that happens is never the revelation you were expecting. The story never goes the way it's supposed to. Which makes it kind of fun!"

Contrast this statement of editorial zen, however, with a later conversation between Stuteville and Alex Stonehill, the photographer:

Stuteville: "To me, the story of Dan is in the things he asserts that aren't true. The louder he says, 'I'm not that f---ed up veteran, the war didn't define me, I don't have bad dreams or anxiety …' the more I know it's true." […]

Stonehill: "Yeah, the best way for this to go from an editor's perspective is for Dan to meet some Iraqis and then have a nervous breakdown and be like, 'Oh, I'm so f---ed up over what I did and I have PTSD and war is so terrible.' That's the Hollywood narrative they want. But that's so f---ed up!" […]

Stuteville: "Dan was a little hippie kid from Seattle who was completely seduced by the bravado and romance of the military. He went in and he felt like he became a man, and some guys died, but he's glad he did it. And I don't get the sense that he will ever be un-glad that he did it. And you're not supposed to tell that story. No editor wants that story."

In a work full of professional trade secrets, clear-eyed self-examinations, and celebrations of ambiguity, Glidden has told a series of stories that is simultaneously behind-the-scenes, and insightful meta-commentary. She has effective captured the journalistic yin-yang by showing, not telling. As a non-fiction storyteller and as a military veteran, Stuteville's struggle is my own, as is O'Brien's. Glidden has provided a bridge, which privileges each perspective without judgement.

That's not just story-telling. That's art.

"Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq" is available in hard cover via Amazon and other booksellers.

Poetry Book Review: 'Operational Terms and Graphics'

Poetry Book Review: 'FM 101-5-1 MCRP 5-2A: Operational Terms and Graphics' by Paul David Adkins

This recently published book closely follows Adkins' cheekily gothic war-poetry collection "Flying Over Baghdad with Sylvia Plath," also published by Lit Riot Press. Where the former explores modern wartime experience armed with Addams Family quirkiness and clever literary references, this recent entry leans into the foxhole walls of military vernacular and symbology.

Stick with me, soldier. It's funnier ... and "funner" ... than it sounds.

Rather than as a list of titles, the Table of Contents is presented as series of map overlays, each over an abstracted Baghdad. On these pages, each of the book's 43 poems is associated with a particular rune-like symbol. Those symbols mark kidnappings, convoys, Improvised Explosive Devices (I.E.D.), and other battlefield occurrences, per the current military reference. (In military fashion, the runes are explained in the poetry book's appendix.)

For various assumed reasons, Adkins does not explicitly address his many years of uniformed service. His opening poem, however, points to experiences as an analyst of patterns and terrain—a worker or manager in intelligence, located in a Tactical Operations Center ("TOC"). In "Military Intelligence," he memorably demonstrates that one does not have to be a front-line soldier to feel and act like a sheepdog. I'll not reveal the punchline—it is thrilling and artful and tragically, heroically true—but here's the set-up:

I did not see bodies,
blood nor burning trucks.
I did not brush aside
shrieking women in the flaming market
nor ignore their sobbing children.

I stayed on the FOB.

But I knew.

I did not see
but knew the way
I knew what happened
in the room next door
in college […]

A Red Bull Rising review of Adkins' first book is here. In that review, I lamented that examples of Adkins' more absurdist humor, such as the joyous "Helicopter Ride with a Cadaver Dog" and the true-life latrine humor of "Iraqi Army Unit on Camp Striker, Baghdad Iraq"—were AWOL in that collection. I am pleased to report that these favorites, however, as well as new works, are now present and accounted for in "Operational Terms and Graphics."

Each poem is a war story, a slice of Forward Operating Base life, a storyboard about battlefield actions that range from the significant to the mundane. Adkins' touch is light and direct, even when his subjects are dark. His reports and anecdotes include: observations on how male soldiers cover for female counterparts when they need to urinate during convoy missions ("Poncho Liners"); how distributions of "humanitarian supplies" are either received or rejected by Iraqi civilians ("Water Bottle Delivery"); and how IED-aiming markers removed by U.S. troops are soon replaced ("Tree of Woe").

Given my own attempts toward depicting Forward Operating Base ("FOB") life through poetry, I particularly appreciate when Adkins casts his gaze inside the protective wire. There are any number of poems that turn me green with envy. In "Passing the Flags," for example, he accurately and humorously depicts the flowery displays found at every Army shower point:

Throughout the shower trailer,
amid the steam and hiss
and shaving men
hung towels of every color.

The Army issued brown terry.
We buried
those spares in duffel bags
deep as tulip bulbs.

But in the trailer—yellow bath,
lime green beach, purple, chartreuse hand.
Sky blue, orange, even a pink washcloth

— Excuse me — it's salmon. […]

Adkins' humor is never offered without purpose, however. His work provides a necessary and complicating perspective, a counter-narrative designed to cut through the jingoistic fireworks of more mainstream military story-telling. As his narrator says in the persona poem "Iraqi Barber on FOB Barber":

[…] I noticed soldiers rush.

No time, no time

for a shave, an eyebrow trim. […]

[…] I clip and snip.

They tap their fingernails
against the armrests—
trigger-clicks
on empty guns.

Like the soldiers held briefly in a barbarous hair-cutters chair, Adkins' work should give us all pause.

Savor it. Revel in it.

It is sneaky. It is snarky. It is ... insurgent.

"Operational Terms and Graphics" is available in trade paperback here.

Poetry Book Review: 'The Ghosts of Babylon'

Book review: "The Ghosts of Babylon" by Jonathan Baxter

In his 2016 collection "The Ghosts of Babylon" (Blackside Publishing), former U.S. Army Airborne Ranger and private military contractor Jonathan Baxter has produced a sublimely profane work of war poetry, one that is full of soldierly humor and gritty experience. The 142-page book has a punchy, pulpy sensibility, aided in part by integral black-and-white illustrations by Mark Reeve. In addition to dramatic splash pages, some of Reeve's artwork is incorporated behind or placed into specific poems, illuminating particular stanzas as if they were comic-book panels.

It is heady, grabby stuff: Real "Biff-Pow" Poetry.

More generally, Baxter's verse glides in and out of rhymed couplets and quatrains, blended with less-structured streams of consciousness. It sometimes feels like one of those loopy foxhole conversations with an incessantly nattering battle buddy—that one guy in the platoon who won't shut up, who reads a lot of books. That guy you begin to wonder about, after a while. The guy who seems on the cusp of either losing his sh--, or figuring out the punchline to the universe.

Baxter's smorgasbord of literary references include the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," and Shakespeare's "Hamlet"—nothing too foreign to scare off the grunting, guard tower crowd, but, at the same time, exotic enough for ivory tower tastes. It is a heady and surreal buffet, full of jester skulls, ecstatic latrine episodes, and the occasional giant robot. As he writes in "The Thieves of Baghdad": "I'm getting my myths all mixed up now / so busy writing my own down."

Throughout this chaos, Baxter captures scenes, moments, and aspects of 21st century soldier life that I've not seen addressed in any other poetry. Don't get distracted by Baxter's fireworks—he's out to illuminate some particular truths. There are moments of wisdom and insight that ignite like tracer rounds, spaced throughout Baxter's threads of feverish, belt-driven deliveries of language and image. It is either mad genius, or inspired madness. It's a roller coaster, but worth the ride. Just hold on.

In the "Ghosts of the Khyber," for example, he relates a haunting series of stories, and connects Rudyard Kipling's "Young British Soldier" to the fighting men of Alexander the Great, Soviet-era Spetsnatz, as well as 21st century fighters. In "When That Was Your War," he similarly compares and contracts his own fate to that of soldiers in World War I:

[…] You tripped on the bodies of your brothers
As you walked through the smoke and the fire
And lay down before the God of War
Like offerings at a funeral pyre […]

[…] And I sit, relaxed and serene
On a secure forward operating base
In my climate-controlled KBR unit
It is a most comfortable place […]

[…] Tonight I'll go to the gym and work out
Go to the chow hall and grab a plate
And later in my climate-controlled bathroom
I'll leisurely masturbate [...]

In "The Assaulters," Baxter explores the experience of serving on a Quick Reaction Force (Q.R.F.), unpacking the universally magical moment before something explodes, reality intrudes, and the mission starts:

the assaulters lounge
sprawled languidly in the oppressive heat
like so many hunting dogs

on the Stryker's ramp
relaxed, our heads back against the door frame
muscles charged with latent energy

leaning back in our kits
we sit, helmets off, radio traffic
idly crackles in the background

waiting on THE WORD […]

It is in this pre-contact purgatory that Baxter identifies a camaraderie that will be lost to veterans in peacetime:

[…] some of us try to settle
into the REAL WORLD, where we try to speak
a new language unstained by tobacco

or dead baby jokes
where civilians measure your cock by your
salary, car, or social status

and not by your competence
or by how well you shoot or by the
weights you can throw around in the gym

or that certain assurance
in your voice as you cross that last threshold
in that yawning and hungry darkness

lit only by your taclights […]

In "//NOTHING FOLLOWS," he leverages the end-line found on the DD-214—the form that summarizes a soldier's active-duty time upon separation from service—as something of a recurring refrain:

[…] The six deployments fit into one box
a jumble of numbers, lines and dots
I sift through the dates
each recounting a different place in my life

That one was my first
That one there was the worst
We lost Ricky there
That one was my first to Afghanistan
the land where time began
That one was my favorite and
//NOTHING FOLLOWS […]

But some things do follow, of course. We continue to carry the things we carried. In a wonderfully concrete addition to his barbaric yawping, Baxter's publisher devotes a number of back-pages to sharing some on-line, non-profit, and other resources, prompted by questions such as:

• Are you contemplating suicide or experiencing a psychological health crisis?
• Do you demons stir and murmur deep?
• Are you struggling to find a purpose and a mission?
• Do the deep wounds of war possess your mind?
• Is the bottom of the bottle numbing your inner war?

Ideally, poetry inspires empathy, questions, and conversations. Baxter has seen fit not only to prompt such moments, but to offer his fellow veterans some potential solutions as well.

Baxter's "The Ghosts of Babylon" is available in trade paperback here.

Book Review: 'The Warbird' by Tara Copp

Book Review: "The Warbird: Three Heroes, Two Wars, One Story" by Tara Copp

In a fast-reading 240-page book, journalist Tara Copp weaves together her own war narratives with those of her World War II fly-boy grandfather, who flew B-24 "Liberator" bombers out of England and Italy, and her Band of Brothers paratrooper great-uncle, who was among the first to parachute into France on D-day.

Along the way, readers are introduced to the U.S. Air Force security team with whom she shared as a newspaper reporter her first battlefield experiences in Iraq, and to the behind-the-scenes reality of the Rose Will Monroe, a civilian industrial worker who was one of the inspirations for the iconographic Rosie the Riveter.

Conceptually, the whole thing seems so heavily laden with editorial ordnance, you might wonder at it's ability to take flight. In Copp's sure hands, however, the book quickly achieves both speed and altitude, and cruises on to deliver bombshell after bombshell. It's an entertaining, insightful read. There are punchy anecdotes about student-pilots falling out of planes, for example, and bombing missions gone wrong. ("We Bombed Switzerland"?!) There's even a little infidelity tossed around. Nothing salacious. Just the facts. And more true to the military experience than other war stories currently on bookstore shelves.

Copp is a memoirist's memoirist. While still sentimental enough to address her grandfather's ghost directly in her ongoing internal monologue, she also casts an unblinking, realistic eye toward both familial faults and her own actions. The tone is conversational—at times, confessional. There's sex and bombs and divorce and death, but it's straightforwardly reported, rather than sensationalized.

During the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Copp was a Washington, D.C.-based reporter for Scripps Howard News Service newspapers in Texas. In 2011, she returned to Iraq as a Government Accountability Office employee. (She's now returned to journalism, a Pentagon correspondent for Stars and Stripes.) From these bookend experiences, she derives both a personal and philosophical response to war:

The allure of war took an early, fast grip upon me in 2003. It was though wiser eyes that I watched that same spell be cast […] eight years later at U.S. Embassy-Baghdad. The embassy was fortress America, a pressurized pit of high policy stakes with thoughts of men and women, so far from home. The excitement of war enveloped them too. The trysts that launched that fall, as they had every year before, became the tight-lipped fodder of friendships to last forever, because the people who went through this assumed no one back home would understand.

I finally understood it, and I didn't want to begrudge them the experience. But I still didn't want to go to dinner on those nights of steak and lobster, under festive bunting and enormous American flags. I wanted to honor war and the men and women who fought it for what it was, not how we wanted it to look. I knew that 2011 was no different than 2003 was not different than 1944. There was still cheating and drama, deaths and injury, greed and heroism. […]

On the ground, the B-24 Liberator is an ungainly, swollen-looking craft. In the air, however, and in the right hands, it delivers its payload, right on target. Tara Copp's "Warbird" is a great potential summer read, a fine Father's Day gift, or a unique find for the World War II aviation enthusiast who thinks they've already read it all.

Available in trade paperback, hardcover, Kindle, iBooks, and other formats.

Book Review: 'Private Perry and Mister Poe'

Book Review: 'Private Perry and Mister Poe: The West Point Poems, 1831' by William F. Hecker

Nineteenth century poet and short-story author Edgar Allan Poe is one of those Dead White Guys that keeps a dead-hand grip on the American scholastic canon. Even with increasingly diverse reading options in high school, it's unlikely that even the least Goth teenager won't encounter Poe's big 1845 hit, "The Raven," at least once or twice in English classes.

Beyond black birds squawking "Nevermore," however, few are privy to some surprising facts about Poe's early literary life:

• In 1825, at the age of 16, Poe served as a junior militiaman in a ceremonial escort for a touring French Gen. Lafayette. In 1827, Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army as an artillery soldier, under the assumed name of "Perry."

• Poe quickly promoted first to company clerk, then to the double-pay technical position of "artificer," a manufacturer of bombs and shells.

• Poe achieved the rank of sergeant major within two years, then asked for a discharge in order to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

Poe was at West Point from 1830 to 1831, at which time he decided to return to civilian life in order to focus on his literary career. Even today at West Point, campus myths and legends surrounding Poe's short career often regard drunkenness and other infractions. In reality, he excelled in his studies, particularly mathematics and French. When he decided to leave and his estranged foster-father's permission to leave was not forthcoming, Poe systematically engineered through absences and derelictions a court martial that required his expulsion. On his way out of Army life, he crowd-funded from his fellow cadets money to publish his second book of poetry.

Some historians speculate that his buddies likely expected a volume of satirical light verse, similar to that which he'd entertained them in barracks. What they got was far more serious: A collection of 12 new and revised poems.

Along with the facsimile reproduction of that 1831 poetry collection, a 2005 book by fellow West Pointer William F. Hecker opens the crypt for new insights into Poe's life, work, and motivations. The 248-page book includes an extensive introduction, offering Hecker's insights and analysis of Poe's military career, as well as a afterward by West Point faculty Gerard A. McGowan.

Poe's poetic imagery is never more detailed than an occasional reference to battle, writes Hecker. Poe is also given to evoking martial tradition through the selective use of names, such as "Helen" "Tamerlane". As such, many write off Poe's short time in uniform as little more than an historical hiccup. For Hecker, however, Poe's Army career indicates a desire for validation and glory, and for connection to his grandfather's uniformed service during the American Revolution:

Just as an artificer's failure to construct a bomb properly always results in the failure of the round to achieve its effects and potentially results in injury to the artificer himself, failure to construct a poem well renders its effects impotent and damages the reputation of the poet. The attention to details, the appreciate for minute nuances of sound, and the modulation of rhythm that Poe built into his verse to achieve his aesthetic of beauty were reinforced by the artistic craftsmanship require to build a functional artillery bomb.

For those who celebrate oft-overlooked poetic traditions with the U.S. military, Poe's career was brief but notable. One wonders what soldierly poetry could have been brought to life, had Poe become an officer and gentleman. His favored themes of loss and death and lives cut short, after all, are constant companions to those who serve.

Sadly, William Hecker, the insightful editor of "Private Perry and Mister Poe," was killed in Iraq in 2006. Having met him only through his first and only book, I feel the loss deeply. I have no doubt he had many more words to share with the world.

'She Went to War' Opens at Guthrie Theatre March 17

Opening Friday, four military veterans perform a script based on their military experience in The Telling Project's "She Went to War," The 50-minute production will play Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays March 17 to April 2 in the Guthrie Theatre's Dowling Studio, Minneapolis.

Friday and Saturday performances are 7:30 p.m., while Sunday matinee performance are at 1 p.m. General admission seating opens 30 minutes before curtain. Tickets are $9 and may be reserved on-line here.

Cast members include:

Jenn Calaway, who enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2006 as public affairs specialist, and later deployed to Afghanistan. She says struggled with the constraints of a male-dominated organization (the American military) in a male-dominated country (Afghanistan) “If it was known that the American military had a female in their ranks, they would lose respect from the Afghans. They wouldn’t want to have conversations with them or do business or work with them. I had to disguise myself as a guy most of the time."

Gretchen Evans, who served in the U.S. Army from 1979 to 2006 as an intelligence analyst and paratrooper. According to press materials, Gretchen’s career put her in the crosshairs of conflict around the globe, including Grenada, Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In 2006, while working as a sergeant major in Afghanistan, a mortar blast threw her into a concrete bunker wall. She suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (T.B.I.) and lost 95 percent of her hearing, ending her career in military service. "I always tell everybody I had 27 good years in the military and one really crappy day," she says. She now works as al lead veteran outreach coordinator at the Emory Healthcare Veterans Program. 

Tabitha Nichols, who served in the Army National Guard from 2003 to 2011. At age 19, Nichols was injured in a mortar attack in Forward Operating Base in Kalsu, Iraq, just days after her arrival there. "When I got out, it was like cutting loose a ball and chain. I’m gonna keep that ball and chain, but it’s not holding me back anymore. I just put it on a shelf, look at it sometimes, maybe polish it now and then,” she says.

Racheal Robinson, currently serving in the U.S. Air Force, who originally enlisted in the Army National Guard as an emancipated minor at the age of 17. “The military has been my whole adult life," she says. "It’s who I am." 

Since 2008, the Austin, Texas-based non-profit Telling Project has presented nationwide more than 40 community-based performances by military veterans, service members, and family members. Each production's script is based on interviews with cast members about their military experiences.

The all-female theatrical presentation "She Went to War" is a first for The Telling Project organization.

A website for The Telling Project is here.

A public Facebook group for The Telling Project is here.

The "She Went to War" production is also part of the Guthrie Theatre's "Level Nine" series, through which the Minneapolis organization creates opportunities for community engagement and dialogue.

Poetry Review: 'Flying Over Baghdad with Sylvia Plath'

Poetry Book Review: "Flying Over Baghdad with Sylvia Plath" by Paul David Adkins

Having served in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. Army veteran and poet Paul David Adkins has created a little black book of Gothic kiss-and-tell. The objects of his passions are not necessarily the living, but poets and their ghosts. Each poetic entry—26 in all—seems like a letter, crafted in the off-duty sanctity and seclusion of Adkins' Containerized Housing Unit ("CHU") downrange, and explicitly addressed to a given poem, a poet, or book.

His titles are dense with information, over-stuffed and dripping with names and other references. Rather than driven by a desire to impress readers with his poetic literacy, however, Adkins' purpose may only be to point out opportunities for further reading. After all, in some on-line military circles, it is popular to post "shelfies"—photographs of one's personal professional library. The object is not to show off how widely one has read, but to illuminate possibilities for fellow travelers.

Admins introduces his book with a note of manifesto:

All the poets introduced here have literally plucked me from flames. I had to make sense of Afghanistan, Iraq, The Surge, our Senate's approval of The Surge, my family's struggles in my absence, and the moral decrepitude of the undertakings of conflicts, these ones, and all the ones before. […]

Recognizing that poetry cannot stop war, he continues:

[T]hese [poets] have denied war the ability to traverse their land, in the time-honored guerilla fashion of refusing an enemy sustenance […] While I served in President Bush's wars, their work became a series of safe houses, places I could find sympathy and support. So now, having departed these conflicts, reviewing my experiences, I pin these tiny medals on the poets who did a hero's work […]

The tome's black cover image is oil-slick cryptic, an abstract casket, a boilermaker's vault. Inside its 108 pages, the book's eerie images often include insects, birds, and skeletons, more than the expected military equipment and settings. Recently published by Lit Riot Press, the work has a lengthy formal title: "Flying Over Baghdad with Sylvia Plath: Experiences, Through Poetry, with Poets and Poems in Iraq and Afghanistan." Given that wall of text alone, some readers might be scared off. Pushing through that veil, however, soon reveals some light-hearted potential cracks in the coffin.

Consider, for example, the inherent insurgency underlaying such titles as "Circumventing the Army's Pornography Ban with Anne-Marie Levine's 'Bus Ride to a Blue Movie'" and "The Day I Lost Lisa Olstein's 'Lost Alphabet' in my CHU." The author has obviously not surrendered his sardonic, soldierly humor to the void. If Adkins' approach is truly morbid, then, it is a Gothicism that smacks of Charles Addams or Edward Gorey. It is smart. Occasionally cartoonish. Dark, but fun.

(For other examples of Adkins' works, more lightly and less abstractly titled than those presented in this collection, check out the joyous "Helicopter Ride with a Cadaver Dog" and the true-life latrine humor of "Iraqi Army Unit on Camp Striker, Baghdad Iraq".)

In "The Commanding Presence of Karen Fish's 'The Cedar Canoe,'" Adkins reads the poet Karen Fish like a book. Note how he effectively laser-designates the original material through his use of italics, and blends the scene with military metaphor:

[…] There's not one soft edge
even when she's as open
as a map.

When she observes
     the water isn't keep
and points out danger zones
     The dirt road that runs down the hill
          --her dust jacket gleams like polished boots.
Her pages are creased sharp
as the starched sleeves of First Sergeant.

Adkins' arsenal of images includes bees, bugs, and even dead birds. There are also scalpels, bayonets, and boxcutter tongues. Again, however, even cutting tongues are set in stony cheeks. For example, in "Kathleen Graber's 'Correspondence' Gives Me a Paper Cut After a Hard Day in Iraq," he mixes blood and oil, poetry and history:

[…] She knows that men are dying
My cut merits
not even half caesura
in the war's least readable history

It doesn't stop here--
Blood for oil, she laughs […]

In "Explaining Why I Bought But Couldn't Open Weldon Kee's 'Collected Poems,'" originally published here in the literary journal Scintilla, Adkins writes:

[…] I recognized the apocalypse he wrote of
on the squalid streets of Baghdad,
trash-flags flapping on the razor wire,
and the young men
gunning for us
nightly with their eyes
and AK-47s.

Kees’ poems were as keen
as Kukri blades,
sharp as a set of ginsu
thrust in a maple block.

So I buried them in a foot locker.

Unsheathed,
they would chant of nothing
but a furthering
of the violence.

Rather than end in burial and repression, however, Adkins pulls off an ascendent flourish in the final two poems in the book—otherwise unrelated flutterings of doves, and movements of wings and blades. In "I Consider Similarities Between Baghdad's Al-Furat Mosque and the Dresdner Frauekirche After Reading Cynthia Marie Hoffman's 'Sightseer,' he writes a drive-by scene that includes a mosque "sculpted the shape and color / of a Vidalia onion." He writes:

[…] In a second
we pass
its burr of doves which lift as one
disintegrating sheet
before a pair of passing choppers,

the sound of their rotors
slapping against the mosque
like a panicked woman
finding the doors
locked, and bolted, and chained.

In a lovely echo of that avian imagery, in a similar tragically tinged scene of travel, the collection ends on "The Books I Brought to Read While Flying Home":

[…] I watched my books
flap and catch and rise
on the rotor wash,
then explode in twin turbine back blast--

flushed doves wheeling
before their white feathers
burst on the wind.

The book isn't all darkness and gallows, then. Or dense, name-dropping observations and cheeky, cutting remarks. There is an upliftedness of spirit to be encountered here, even in the melancholy of war, and in saying good-bye to it all.

Poetry Book Review: 'Warcries' by Nicole Goodwin

Poetry Book Review: "Warcries" by Nicole S. Goodwin

Packed in plain-spoken language wet down with break-free, poet and Iraq War veteran Nicole S. Goodwin's 2016 collection "Warcries" is equal parts earthy, insightful, dark, and dense. The 82-page book contains more than 50 poems, which range from sniper-shot aphorisms offering pithy wisdom, to multi-sectioned, multi-page paeans to her fellow humans. There are plenty of fireworks along the way, too—including an unsent letter to Chelsea Manning.

The book is broken into three sections, an arc Goodwin has described in interviews as an awakening or coming-of-age narrative in poetry. In the first section, she illuminates her experiences as a logistics soldier in Iraq. In the second, she explores her relationships to New York City, before, during, and after her deployment. The final section illuminates various the various existences she now inhabits, in past and present: war veteran, mother, multidisciplinary artist, advocate for the homeless, citizen.

The poet says her central purpose was to paint war as "a beautiful hell."

Over the course of the collection, Goodwin's poems grow and branch to consider complex messages involving skin color, urbanity, sexual assault, consensual sex, nationality, homelessness, a parent's separation from her child, and imprisonment. First, however, she grounds the reader in some familiar, soldierly basics. Troops of every stripe and color, for example, will recognize themselves and their days in poems such as "Boots":

My feet ache from
the long, long march.

The vengeful desert sun
hangs high in the virgin sky. […]

Reborn into Atlas, I bear
heavy rusted chains.

Dead weights that fester in their
own stew!

Their aromatic horrors
lingering indefinitely.

The great equalizer of guard duty presents a recurring setting for Goodwin. In "Lightweight, Heavyweight," she relates the story of watching over a captured High-Value Target—"Number 86 on Bush II's list"—in punchy jabs and fragments. Again, the soldierly gruff is unmistakeable:

Guard duty again.
Pulled.

As if my name was the only one,
written in the hat. […]

If he gives a problem.
Would have to shoot.
Never took a life before.

Knew how to avoid catastrophes
In New York.

Not New York though.
Another ghetto battlefield.

Hands feel bloodied already.

Later in the book, in "Unsaid (Confession)," Goodwin compares and contrasts her guarded calm to that of some fellow female soldiers: "Boy, how those white girls would powertrip. […]"

Was like waiting for a grenade to blow.

Banshees.
Screeching at the inmates.

[…] I and the other black girls.
Never did that.
Never lost cool.
Not on my watch.
Not once.

Maybe 'cause we knew.
We saw.
How they looked.

The resembled us.
Family distanced by time.
This war separated us by nation.
But shade united us.
Akin. […]

In the book's final poem, "Iraq," Goodwin revisits her experience of the country as a human terrain. In my ear, her voice takes on the tone of a Biblical psalm. As they so often do, Goodwin's words beg to be read aloud, spoken in the wilderness, offered to the desert wind.

[…] Inheritors of the new ghetto.
I have something to tell you.
It shall be harsh, because it is truth.

Your playgrounds are now our landfills.
Our dumpsters, your mattresses.
All too well I know the sight of desolation.

Underneath the dust covered tracks.
Where you and I buried—your one, solitary tear.
When flickering lights were our altar posts.

We shared the same skin.
The same face.
Our shadows young-elderly, and forgotten.

Crossed and have never unlinked.
Under this sky you will die—mistaken.

My, theirs, our visits were false ones.
I collapsed in sadism, erasing.

My origin.
Forgetting.
Once, I was born of it too.

Goodwin's work is an essential addition to 21st century war poetry: unique in voice and perspective, unflinching in calling attention to how different our experiences of conflict can be, while hauntingly reminding us of the humanity we share.

Contest Solicits 'Lessons-Encountered' Essays

Editors at Small Wars Journal have teamed up with Military Writers Guild to conduct an essay-writing contest focused on lessons-encountered at the tactical and operational levels of war.

Word count is 3,000 to 5,000. Deadline is Jan. 15, 2017. Winners will be announced in March 2017.

According to the announcement, the project takes inspiration from the publication of "Lessons Encountered: Learning from the Long War," a National Defense University project that explored similar theme at the strategic level.

That book, available for FREE in e-book reader formats here, was "intended for future senior officers, their advisors, and other national security decision-makers. By derivation, it is also a book for students in joint professional military education courses, which will qualify them to work in the field of strategy."

In the announced contest, Small Wars Journal editors are soliciting takes on what worked and what did not work in modern wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. They suggest two lists of maxims as a potential launching points, the first from former commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Anthony Zinni, and the second from civilian strategist David Kilcullen. Both lists appear here.

Writers are encouraged to use incorporate one or many of these maxims into their submitted works, and also to base their writing in first-hand experiences, told in the first person.

Functional areas and applicable topics suggested by the editors include, but are not limited to:

Insurgency/Counterinsurgency

Terrorism/Counterterrorism

Stabilization, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations

Unconventional Warfare

Foreign Internal Defense

Civil-Military Operations

Information Operations

Military Intelligence and Counterintelligence Activities

Transnational Criminal Activities that Support or Sustain Small Wars / Irregular Warfare

Law Enforcement Activities Focused on Countering Irregular Adversaries

Writers may enter in three categories, including: U.S. Military, Non-U.S. Military, and Non-Military (U.S. and Other). First ($1,000), Second ($500), and Third Prizes ($300) may be awarded in each category, in addition to up to 20 honorable mentions ($200).

Full details, including submissions formats and process, are to be found here.

iFanboy: 'Sheriff of Babylon' Comic was First a Novel

Cover artist: John Paul Leon

In a June "Talksplode" interview with Josh Flanagan of the iFanboy comics podcast, writer Tom King and artist Mitch Gerads discussed their creative collaboration in producing the critically acclaimed series "Sheriff of Babylon."

The 72-minute interview is full of technical and personal insights. Flanagan, King, and Gerads are long-time acquaintances, and the conversational vibe is relaxed and candid. The interview stands as a must-hear primer in military- and comics-writing how-to. Podcast listeners can access "Talksplode No. 67" via iTunes and Stitcher, as well as directly via the iFanboy website here.

Set in 2004 Iraq, "Sheriff of Babylon" is a wartime crime drama published monthly DC Comics' Vertigo imprint. A 160-page trade paperback collecting the first 6 issues is scheduled to be released July 19, 2016. The volume will also be available digitally on Comixology and Kindle. The series is currently scheduled for 12 or more issues.

The story is loosely based on writer King's experiences as a former operations officer for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The series is located in a very specific time and place, King told Flanagan:

I try to describe everything in the book as someplace that I've actually been or [...] seen. The book nicely gets approved by CIA, so I know I'm not going to get […] arrested. Part of this is just me, having gone through that, and working those issues out. Which is what I think all good comics should be: It should be bleeding onto the page, and putting your hopes and fears into it.

I should caveat, however: I feel that some of our audience is people who have served in Iraq, and served there for years. I was there for […] five months, in the spring and summer of 2004. So I only write about the exact time I was there […] It felt like you were in a weird, Casablanca place, like the normal rules of human society don't apply here, but we're all trying to apply them here, so it's this weird double-standard. Like, "We don't have laws, but we kind of have fake laws. How real are those laws"? That's why it's called "Sheriff of Babylon," because there is no sheriff. There is no law there. And how can you have a crime story where there is no law? There's no government. There's no one there to tell you not to do things.

In news releases earlier this year, DC Comics has announced that King and Gerads were each signed as creatives working exclusively for that company. King is slated to take over writing duties at DC's flagship "Batman" title. Although Vertigo titles are not strictly "creator owned," as briefly covered in the interview, King and Gerads apparently each have a partial ownership stake in "Sheriff" as intellectual property,

King's first novel, "A Once Crowded Sky," was a literary book-length story about superheroes published in 2012. In an iFanboy exclusive, King revealed to Flanagan that "Sheriff of Babylon" had been written first as a literary novel, which remains yet unpublished. He typically does not write from an outline, he said, but the novel's manuscript provides him the structure for the comic's first narrative arc.

"I sort of had a choice, whether to publish it as a novel or as a comic book. I chose comic book," King said. "The outline for the first 12 issues is a novel I've already written. So that makes it both easier and harder to write. It's a bizarre transcription, with me deciding what to leave and leave out, of me editing myself."

Originally from Minneapolis, artist Gerads is celebrated for his realistic depiction of military action and equipment—in the interview, King called him the greatest military artist working in modern comics. While he has never served in the military, he notes he does have immediate family members who have served in the U.S. Army and Air Force. Nobody in his family was Rambo, he said, and he doesn't consider himself a military brat. Still, he takes the responsibility of telling military-themed stories very seriously.

Along with writer Nathan Edmondson, for example, he was co-creator of the 2011-2015 Image Comics series "The Activity." In early 2015, the series, which focuses on U.S. special operations forces, was reportedly being adapted into a screenplay. Gerads is also well-known for his 2014-2015 run on "The Punisher," which focuses on a paramilitary vigilante character in the Marvel Comics universe.

"Originally, when 'The Activity' started out, it was going to be way more science-fictiony," Gerads told Flanagan ...

It was going to be more "Mission Impossible"-esque. We were going to come up with all of these crazy gadgets. In issue 2 or 3, we had some sort of crazy gadget where a guy was driving a little drone-thing with an Xbox controller. We just thought that would be cool. We got an e-mail from someone in some branch of the military, saying "Hey, super cool—that was my job when I was over there." We sat down and realized […] the reality is so much more interesting than the stuff we were coming up with in our heads."

However cutting-edge, the stories in "The Activity" became more non-fiction. "The challenge then was to keep it as real as I could, while also keeping it as entertaining as I could. And that's still the rule, through 'Punisher' and into 'Sheriff.'"

Gerads compared "The Activity" and "Punisher" to producing big, bombastic action movies. However, he said, "Sheriff" demands more nuanced story-telling: "Giving respect to the characters, and giving respect to the fact that this is […] a 'real' story, a time and place that actually happened." Gerads has to infuse the characters found in King's scripts with unique physical identities and facial expressions. He gives each character "some little trait so that you remember them, even if it's subliminal," he said.

King said that the team's ultimate objective is to deliver a compelling story without value judgments. "I think people feel that's it's going to be preachy, that it's just going to be 'War is Hell,' 'War sucks,' or it's just going to be 'Republicans suck' or 'liberals suck.' I don't want a message in my comics. It's not about the politics. It's not about the [Weapons of Mass Destruction] or 'Mission Accomplished' or anything like that. It's just about the day-to-day of what it was like. It's not about winners and losers. It's about a good story."

*****

Gerads and Edmondson's "The Activity" has been previously mentioned on the Red Bull Rising blog here and here.

'Incoming: Veteran Writers on Returning Home'

Book Review: "Incoming" edited by Justin Hudnall, Julia Dixon Evans, Rolf Yngve

Exploring themes of home, homecoming, and finding one's place in the world, the anthology "Incoming" hits a sweet spot on the terrain of contemporary veteran-voiced literature, and is certain to expand and enrich future conversations between civilian and military populations. The 190-page trade paperback delivers 36 short narratives—mostly essays, with a few poems and possible short fictions thrown in—and features authors from a diverse range of eras, genders, and military branches.

The book is a product of "So Say We All," a San Diego, Calif.-based non-profit publishing, performance, and education effort focused on telling the stories of marginalized populations, including military veterans. A companion podcast for the "Incoming" project is here.

In his introduction to the book, editor Justin Hudnall writes:

What was it like to return? We gave one line of guidance in our prompt, that the writers could speak to any subject matter they wanted, but were not obligated to anything. The result, this book, contains responses from activity duty and veterans alike, men and women, gay and straight, across the multitude of ethnicity. In total: our military as it serves, free of politics, free of censure, a citizen army.

Some of the authors are previously published in books and literary magazines, while others are entirely new to print. Most of the pieces are short—only a few pages in length. Nearly every work, however, contains something—an image, a metaphor, a turn of phrase—that invites re-reading or considered contemplation.

Former Marine Benjamin Busch, for example, narrowly escapes injury when falling through a rotten floorboards in an abandoned training site building. While on a creekside jog, Air Force officer Brandon Lingle shares a murky exchange with another veteran, an Army artillery guy chucking beers off the pier. Brent Wingfield is celebrating getting his squad out of Iraq alive, when a negligent discharge cuts short his reverie.

With a humorous how-to, almost field-manual style, Coast Guard veteran Tenley Lozano issues "49 Steps to Owning a Service Dog." Benjamin Rothman—a former member of the Iowa Army National Guard's 2nd Brigade Combat Team (B.C.T.), 34th Infantry "Red Bull" Division—speculates on why many veterans hit the road on two wheels, after they get back to the world. Military police soldier Mariah Smith describes trying to catch connections off Kandahar in order to make her husband's Purple Heart ceremony.

There is, in short, something for everyone in this book: the profane, the sublime, and the mundane. There is also death, and divorce, and drugs, and domestic abuse. There are moments of great joy, and revelation, and relief. All are worthy, and all are shared here without the usual pomp and drama that sometimes surround the "homecomings" you see on YouTube, or during football games.

This is clear-eyed. This is heart-felt. This is the real deal.

*****

A website for the San Diego, Calif.-based non-profit "So Say We All" is here.

A Facebook page for the non-profit organization is here.

Book Review: 'Terminal Lance: The White Donkey'

Review: "Terminal Lance: The White Donkey" by Maximilian Uriarte

As mil-humor enthusiasts and web comic fans can attest, Maximilian Uriarte's graphic novel "Terminal Lance: The White Donkey" has been a long time coming. And it has been worth the wait.

The Iraq War veteran and former Marine successfully funded his magnum opus in August 2013. The 284-page book released on Feb. 1, 2016, and quickly sold out. The creator has hinted at making arrangements for another print run.

The White Donkey tells the story of Abe and Garcia, two fictional characters who have previously appeared Uriarte's "Terminal Lance" three-panel comic, which publishes twice weekly on-line, and weekly in the Marine Corps Times print edition.

The titular white donkey is a beast of Uriarte's own memory and experience—an animal that he once encountered in Iraq. The donkey is real. Uriarte writes:

We had five fully armored vehicles, 23 Marines loaded to the teeth with rifles, grenades, crew-served weapons, and all the might and power of the United States Armed Forces. All of it was brought to a screeching halt by the most benign of animals.

A lone White Donkey made us all look like asses.

The donkey is also metaphorical. The white donkey could be Abe's version of Ahab's white whale. It could be his white buffalo. It might symbolize Iraq, or the Middle East. It might even be God.

Nested within such rich ambiguity, Uriarte has created a smart-bomb of a literary device: A graphic novel that's graphic enough to portray the necessary bits about war being an ugly thing; sweet enough to depict the boot camp bromance of battle buddies on the road to war and back again; and downright beautiful enough to be regarded as mother-effin' literature.

It's an asymmetrical weapon designed to breach the civil-military divide. A Trojan Horse, potentially getting veterans and civilians to open up about their respective wartime experiences. Yes, there are jokes. Yes, it is entertaining. Yes, it is a "comic." It is also an important book.

As Brian Castner, Iraq War veteran and writer of "The Long Walk" and the upcoming "All the Ways We Kill and Die" tweeted earlier this month: "Every non-writer vet I know, the guys who don't professionally talk abt books, is talking about this @TLCplMax book."

That's because Uriarte is a skilled observer of the human condition, as well as Marine life. He's an effective writer—direct, to the point, no B.S.—and a fantastic visual storyteller.

Artistically, the book is a tour de force: Freed from the black-and-white tyranny of the newspaper page, Uriate's confidently executed linework is now augmented with a full-spectrum of mono-colored, ink-washed effects.

He varies his color palettes, spread by 2-page spread: Greens for boot camp scenes. Khakis and dusky rose for 29 Palms and Iraq. Blues and grays for home in Portland, Ore. Purple for dream sequences.

Occasionally, Uriarte punches a single object into reader awareness by depicting it in fuller color: An Iraqi flag. A U.S. shoulder patch. A bottle of Gatorade.

Uriarte also experiments with splash pages—scenes that cover a whole page or spread—and occasionally fades to white during transitions. In a few climactic scenes, he boldly keeps his readers' gaze on hard-to-stomach realities, creating slow-motion sequences, splash page after splash page.

This story could not be told as effectively in any other way—screenplay or novel—without diminishing the magic.

In short, "The White Donkey" turns out to be a unicorn. A bright, shiny, mythical ride. A beast capable of inspiring, informing, and enlightening. Do not look away. Do not frighten it. Follow it, if you can.

You might find what you're looking for.

'Line of Advance' Retools, Launches Writing Contest

Darron L. Wright PHOTO: Line of Advance

Creators of the Chicago-based digital military-lit journal "Line of Advance" recently announced the creation of the Col. Darron L. Wright writing award. The contest is named after a U.S. Army officer and author who served on three Iraq War deployments, who was killed in a stateside parachute training accident on Sept. 23, 2013. He was 45.

Line of Advance Editor Chris Lyke writes:

Thanks to a generous donation from the Blake and Bailey Foundation, Line of Advance is presenting the Col. Darron L. Wright Award. Like us, Darron Wright was a soldier: a larger than life infantry commander with several tours under his belt. And also like us, Col. Wright was a writer: a thoughtful, reflective artist, eager to tell the truth about his men with compassion and a commander’s eye. This award is presented in his name in an effort to honor his memory.

The contest is currently accepting both prose (category includes both fiction and non-fiction) and poetry. Deadline is April 1, 2015. Contest is open to military service members and veterans.

Three finalists will be named, with $250, $150, and $100 prizes each to be awarded. Submissions may be made via the journal's website here. Make sure to specify "contest" at the end of the title field.

According to a corresponding note on the publication's Facebook page, all contest submissions will be published on the website, and winners will be chosen by a panel of veteran and non-veteran writers and poets.

In addition to other assignments, Darron Wright served as battalion operations officer for 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo., with whom he deployed to Iraq from 2003 to 2004. Wright was next assigned as brigade executive officer with 4th Brigade, 4th Inf. Div., Fort Hood, Texas, with whom he deployed to Iraq from 2005 to 2006. He commanded the 1st Battalion, 509th Parachute Inf. Reg. at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, La. in 2007. From 2009 to 2013, Wright was assigned as deputy brigade commander for the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Inf. Div., with whom he deployed to Iraq from 2009 to 2010.

A graduate of the U.S. Naval War College, Wright authored "Iraq Full Circle: From Shock and Awe to the Last Combat Patrol in Baghdad and Beyond." in 2012.

Wright's full biography appears here.

"Darron L. Wright was a larger than life Soldier’s Soldier. He was a physically imposing, direct, and skilled warrior," the Line of Advance editors write.

He was also witty, hilarious, generous, kind, and wholly consumed with love for his family. He will certainly be missed but he will never be forgotten. His intellectual curiosity, boundless optimism, and untiring work ethic, allowed him to reach heights he could only dream of as a young boy growing up in Mesquite, Texas. It is in this spirit that the Darron L. Wright Award was created, to inspire fellow military writers and poets to aspire to become better and more accomplished at their craft and at telling their story.

The Line of Advance journal has previously been mentioned on the Red Bull Rising blog here and here, and individual issues reviewed here and here.

Following a tactical pause in 2015, Lyke tells the Red Bull Rising blog that the once-quarterly subscription-based e-journal is transitioning to a free website model, and will publish one or two waves of submissions annually. Content published in four previous issues of Line of Advance will be anthologized and re-published on the new website.

Finally, Lyke plans to regularly engage and feature artist-veterans with interviews on their passions and projects. One of the first "Veteran Spotlights" focuses on former Marine and Iraq War veteran Jacob Faivre, a blogger on healing and music at A Marine's Life in Lyrics. Faivre is also a video documentarian who successfully crowd-funded a 10,000-mile car and hiking trip, working toward a film titled "To See Them As They Are." Read the interview here.

10 Things One Gulf War Memoirist Says Not to Forget

Editor's note: Earlier this week, Minnesotan Joel Turnipseed wrote these 10 aphorisms while musing about the recent 25th anniversary of the start of the Persian Gulf War. As a member of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve's 6th Motor Transport Battalion in 1990-1991, Turnipseed deployed to Saudi Arabia as a tractor-trailer driver—part of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

After writing a 1997 article for GQ magazine about the experience, the former philosophy major later expanded the work into the 2003 book "Baghdad Express: A Gulf War Memoir." It is funny and unique—a "modern bohemian war memoir." You can still find it in both hardcover and trade paperback editions.

While he originally shared these thoughts with family and friends via social media, Turnipseed has graciously granted permission to the Red Bull Rising blog to publish it here.

*****

Turnipseed writes:

Today is the 25th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm. I've already written plenty about the subject—and I'm not really looking to editorialize (not comprehensively, anyway) ... but there are few things we somehow always seem to forget that seem worth remembering today:

1. War does not turn boys into men—it turns them into endangered boys. 

2. War does not solve problems—it just creates different problems to solve. 

3. There is no such thing as "protecting our troops" (from injury, from PTSD, from ...) during a war. Go ask the alcoholic and suicidal drone operators, who conduct war from a video game machine, how "well-protected" they feel from war. 

4. Never ask anyone to tell you a war story unless you want to risk feeling like a terribly shitty human being when they're finished. 

5. Never tell a war story unless you, too, want to risk feeling like a terribly shitty human being when you're finished. 

6. Never trust anyone who denies numbers 1 through 5: They are either hurting way more than they're letting on or they're incapable for other reasons (personal or professional) of telling the truth. 

7. Turns out people live effective, interesting lives in surprising and wonderful ways after they've been injured … which in no way erases the fact that they've been hurt. I recently saw a man with both arms blown off at the elbows work the TSA line like a champ. I wanted to cheer him, until I recognized what that meant ... 

8. Any time someone uses war to inspire you, run like hell. 

9. Veterans make terrible sacrifices for their country, in the act of killing the citizens of others'. Nurses, doctors, police officers, EMTs, firefighters, construction workers, fisherman, truck drivers, miners, and any number of other workers make terrible sacrifices for their country, to make life longer and safer. Go thank a truck driver for his sacrifice; buy a nurse a drink. 

10. We've now been (including "No-Fly Zones" & Operation Desert Fox & ...) at war in Iraq for 25 years. Stop and think about that. There are college graduates who have never known a period when we were not at war in the Middle East. Something scarier? Many of them have no reason to believe they are in any danger ...