What They Don't Teach at Journalism School

A mortar explodes in non-combat Afghan National Army training incident, Laghman Province, July 2, 2013, killing four and injuring 11 others. Photo by: U.S. Army Spc. Hilda I. Clayton

There's a short video posted by Kurdish fighters that went viral earlier this year, in which one of their members swaggers through a field with a cigarette in one hand and a small pioneer tool in the other, casually harvesting land mines as easily as if they were clumps of potatoes. He swings his pick downward into the soft and sandy soil, and skewers thick, plastic-wrapped mines the size of dinner plates. Then, after he pulls them out of the ground, he follows wires to other mines interconnected to the first.

I'm not an combat engineer, but I've hung out with enough to assume he's poking and prodding anti-tank mines—weapons designed for use against vehicles, rather than personnel. Still, the soldier's practice and technique seem dangerously ill-advised. I know the engineer job often boils down to "poke it with a stick," but I wouldn't touch those explosive rocks with a 10-foot pole.

*****

"Sappers … with balls of steel." says DoctrineMan!!, posting the Peshmerga video on his Facebook page March 27.

Some guy called Charlie Sherpa comments: "Camera guy not following at max focal distance is no slouch, either."

*****

It is the early 1990s, and I am a reporter at The Osceola (Iowa) Sentinel-Tribune, circulation 5,000. Located in south central Iowa—just down the road from the place with all the covered bridges—Clarke County is home to my first journalism job out of college, delayed by a stint of six months of Army communications school at Fort Gordon, Ga. The latter was all about radios and telephones. Journalism school, on the other hand, was all about writing under deadline in sub-optimal living conditions, and paying more in annual tuition than a newspaper reporter's starting salary for the privilege of doing so.

What they don't teach you at journalism school: Blue blazer and khaki pants make a good work uniform. Add a clipboard and blaze-orange hat while visiting any crash or crime scene, and people will assume you know what you're doing. You're either Crime Scene Investigation or a municipal official, or maybe you're with an insurance company. Also, keep a pair of boots in the trunk, because you never know when a story will literally take you into the muck. Finally, if you're chasing a fire truck out in the country and can't see smoke in the distance, your best bet is to follow the dusty road.

*****

The newspaper's owners and publishers were a married couple, Frank and Sally Morlan. I'd spent more than four years in school learning how to write and edit news copy, and the first thing they did was issue me a 35mm camera big attached flash. I was expected to shoot photos well enough to illustrate my words in print, not because that old cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words, but because the right pictures can help sell newspapers.

Photographs of state-fair-sized vegetables went over big with readers. So did jackpot harvests of morel mushrooms—just don't ask where the people had found them, because it's impolite to ask such secrets. Visiting celebrities and small-town-boys-and-girls-made-good made for decent coffee talk fodder. The best way to bump newspaper sales, however, was to put a picture of fire in progress on the front page, above the fold.

Frank and Sally also issued me a RadioShack-brand police-band scanner, for monitoring local emergency channels. I didn't chase ambulances as a reporter, but I did go after fire trucks.

As a backup to the scanner, during business hours, I could also keep an eye on Ed, one of the guys who ran the printing presses. He was a member of the volunteer fire department. Probably saved my life a couple of times, too.

*****

Once, a farmer's pick-up truck caught fire in the middle of field.As I angled for a good shot of a firefighter extinguishing the engine area, Ed waved me away from the vehicle's front, and called out to "watch out for the bumper." Later, he told me that the shock-absorbing compressed-gas design of some bumpers can cause them to "cook off" when hot. The resulting explosion could knee-cap a firefighter.

Another time, a vehicular accident had damaged a city utility pole. From his position doing traffic control, Ed pointed behind me, to where da owned power line drooped from overhead. Message: The blue blazer and orange safety vest were no protection from high-voltage. "You touch that wire, and I'm not going touch you with a 10-foot pole," Ed joked.

A favorite story involves a fire in a large pasture area: Knee-high flames cut a ragged edge though the grass. From atop their small brush truck, firefighters sprayed a misty cone of water, attacking the fire from one side. I knew I was getting good pictures, despite the relatively low height of the fire. There was flame, and the stark contrast of black earth and green grass would show up dramatically in black-and-white. Water droplets offered some artistic visual possibilities, as did the heat and smoke rippling off the fields.

My firefighting buddies on the truck started shouting at me, and motioned toward my feet. I looked down. Nothing there. Just grass. What's the problem?

What they don't teach you at journalism school: If you are standing on something green or brown, the flame is headed toward you. You are standing on fuel for the fire.

*****

In my foreword to "Reporting for Duty: Citizen-Soldier Journalism from the Afghan Surge, 2010-2011," I liken U.S. Army public affairs soldiers to community journalists. They cover their respective units like hometown reporters cover their beats, telling stories about regular people doing regular things. That often means writing about humdrum stuff like speeches and shuras and change-of-command ceremonies. And taking pictures of visiting important people and celebrities. Sometimes, however, there are opportunities to cover sexy, dramatic, and compelling topics. Big-ticket items that people will be sure to talk about the next day, like championship football games and three-alarm fires.

While they don't teach you in journalism school about the practical techniques, say, of covering small-town fires, but Uncle Sam makes sure you know the deal upfront: No job is without risk. You could die just as easily in civilian life, of course—death is always a car accident or gas-leak explosion away—but the Army job overtly and explicitly puts you in harm's way. Even if you don't sign up to be a trigger-puller.

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U.S. Army Spc. Hilda I. Clayton

On July 2, 2013, U.S. Army combat camera soldier Spc. Hilda I. Clayton, 22, of Augusta, Ga. was killed in Eastern Afghanistan's Laghman Province, when a mortar being fired by Afghan National Army soldiers during a training exercise exploded just feet away from her camera position. Clayton was attached to 4th Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, then based at Forward Operating Base Gamberi. At the time, reports indicated the blast also killed three Afghan soldiers, and injured an additional 11.

The shot Clayton was taking was released by officials earlier this week, and published in the May-June 2017 issue of Military Review. A second image, shot by the Afghan public affairs soldier she was training, was also released.

The Military Review's editors state that Clayton was the first U.S. public affairs soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. They note also that Clayton was serving shoulder-to-shoulder with her Afghan counterparts:

At the critical juncture of the war, when it was necessary for the ANA to increasingly assume responsibility for military actions, the story was not in the fighting but in the partnership that was necessary between U.S. and Afghan forces to stabilize the Afghan nation. One of the Afghan soldiers killed was a photojournalist that Clayton had partnered with to train in photojournalism. Not only did Clayton help document activities aimed at shaping and strengthening the partnership but she also shared in the risk by participating in the effort.

Finally, they note the relevance of her death to the topic of gender equality in the military. "Clayton’s death symbolizes how female soldiers are increasingly exposed to hazardous situations in training and in combat on par with their male counterparts."

*****

The "Reporting for Duty" book project was recently recognized, albeit indirectly, via an essay contest co-sponsored by the Small Wars Journal and the Military Writers Guild. The exercise assignment was to document operational lessons from tactical soldiers working at lower, tactical levels. In Army jargon, a "lesson" is knowledge gained from experience. A "lesson-learned" is knowledge gained from experience that changes subsequent behaviors.

Drawing on some Army lessons-learned training, as well as my experiences as a former small newspaper editor, I wrote an essay titled "Telling the Brigade Story: A Case Study of U.S. Army Public Affairs as an Engine of Operational Effects, Organizational History, and Strategic Narrative," which I'm pleased to report was a finalist in the contest. The essay notes how nearly every article and photo produced by public affairs soldiers deployed to Afghanistan with Iowa's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry "Red Bull" Division (2-34th BCT) was tied to one of three narratives of counterinsurgency: Clear the countryside of insurgent fighters. Hold the terrain, alongside Afghan security forces. Build infrastructure, commerce, and rule-of-law on behalf of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA).

Anything not related to "clear, hold, build" was a human-interest story. And even those stories, like that of Clayton's death, could also be arguably linked to the mission. We stand, in the words of one NATO training mission in Afghanistan, shohna ba shohna. "Shoulder-to-shoulder." We share in hardship and sacrifice. Our soldiers are just people, like you.

*****

I've got mixed feelings about the public release of the Clayton photographs. Journalism school was filled with classroom discussions about balancing the public's right to know with a subject's right to privacy. If an image only served to entertain, to titillate, to shock without moral or purpose, we taught ourselves to keep it off our pages, no matter how many magazines or newspapers it might sell.

Those were the days, of course, before the Internet. Now it seems that everything is up for grabs, regardless of good taste or facts.

I am publishing the photographs in question as part of this blog post. That's because you have to see them to understand what I'm talking about. Also, you can see them easily via the Internet. Neither of those reasons, should be an automatic indication that they're journalistically OK to publish.

Was releasing the Clayton photo the right call editorially? I don't wish to aggressively probe the ground with my own pole or pick axe, of course, but I am conflicted. As Time magazine notes, there is precedence for publishing the last images seen by war photographers. It also seems, however—that without a countervailing public need to illuminate a flaw in policy or procedure—the moment of a soldier's death might be best kept private.

Certainly, the image is not longer any sort of news flash. Released four years after a 2013 incident, its value as an artifact of current events faded long ago. Also, if value of the image is due to its representation of U.S.-Afghan security partnership, why is the name of one U.S. soldier privileged over the names of three or more Afghan soldiers, equally deceased?

Things once taught in journalism school (and, one hopes, that still are): Interrogate all messages and motivations, including your own. Make sure implied meanings match those more overtly stated. Actions speak louder than words. So do pictures.

*****

In the poem "toward a poetics of lessons-learned," which first appeared in "Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors Vol. 5," I write generally about five lessons from military service. The poem ends with this insight:

In war, doing everything right
can still get you killed.

Try not to learn
that last one
the hard way.

*****

July 2, 2013 mortar training incident from unnamed Afghan soldier-photographer's
perspective. Photo courtesy U.S. Army

In the Afghan soldier's image, everything and nothing is happening, all at once. You can see two Afghan soldiers, identifiable mostly by the fact that their Kevlar helmets lack the cloth camouflage covers usually worn by U.S. soldiers. A ball of flame hangs between them, centered in the image like a sun. The soldiers are facing the explosion. The soldiers' faces are obscured by light, and by the hands they have raised to their ears in anticipation of the mortar round's launch. In the lower-left corner, a camera lens invades the frame.

The camera was Clayton's.

Clayton's perspective is from a lower angle, and her photo depicts only one Afghan soldier, standing, hands to ears, facing the fire. Clayton's image captures rock and shrapnel from the exploding mortar tube. It seems somewhat overexposed, desaturated like World War II combat footage, or the 1998 war movie "Saving Private Ryan."

Editorially, I'm not sure there is much to be learned from viewing these. There are no potential lessons here, other than don't stand so close to the weapon. After the world sees these images, soldiers will still conduct mortar training. Soldier-journalists will continue to take photographs. Soldiers will continue to fight in an open-ended war. The images will eventually—perhaps quickly—fade from public view and consciousness and memory. The realities of service will remain. Afghanistan will remain. No job is without risk.

Perhaps we should regard Clayton's image as an artifact of fine art. One that hangs, suspended, out of time, and invites further contemplation. Or, better yet, conversation.

The mortar blast images show everything, and nothing. They should not have been released. They are essential for understanding the war. We are still in Afghanistan. Discuss.

Veterans Day Delivers Cornucopia of Literary Promise

In the United States, Veterans Day has become an annual center-mass for publishers of books and journals that regard military experience, personal history, and the relationship between our armed forces and our civil society. If you're in the market for some good reading over the upcoming U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, and into the New Year, however, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more target-rich environment. In fact, it can seem a little overwhelming.

In the spirit of many Red Bull briefings past, what follows is a quick once-around-the-world. Each of the following titles is notable, and worthy of further consideration and review. I look forward to doing my part—to further digest and disseminate these—in the coming weeks and months. That includes other military-focused titles or projects, too, such as those forthcoming from "War, Literature & the Arts" and "Drunken Boat."

Some of these listed publications appear on-line, some are print-only. Many, gloriously, are FREE. Regardless of cover price, however, I'd encourage you consume and to contemplate these words and pictures, and to consider making purchase or donations where possible. Veterans Lit is a community effort, and every little bit helps.

(Full disclosure; Careful readers will detect my own byline appearing in a few of these projects. While I'm very proud of that, I'll leave specific mentions for another day. Let us celebrate the group, not the individual.)

The on-line literary journal "Collatoral" recently published its inaugural edition. Created by students and staff at the University of Washington, Tacoma, the free publication features poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and art. "Collateral explores the perspectives of those whose lives are touched indirectly by the realities of military service," write the editors. "Numerous journals already showcase war literature, but we provide a creative platform that highlights the experiences of those who exist in the space around military personnel and the combat experience."

The 2016 fiction, non-fiction, and poetry anthology "Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors," Vol. 5 is available for $15 directly through Southeast Missouri State University Press here. Previous volumes are also available via the SEMO Press, as well as vendors such as Amazon:

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4

West Virginia-based non-profit Military Experience & the Arts released its Fall-Winter issue of "As You Were," a FREE on-line collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and more from military service members, veterans, and family. The energy and purpose of the MEA is evident, I think, in the widening variety of voices and talents evident in these offerings. Some of the writers presented are well-seasoned, and confident in their aim. Others are just starting out, probing carefully into the gray light. All, however, are engaging their targets with precision, and moving out smartly to face the new.

Edited by "O-Dark Thirty" non-fiction editor Dario DiBattista, along with introduction by Veterans Writing Project founder Ron Capps, the newly published anthology "Retire the Colors" presents essays from 19 veterans, each exploring themes and experiences of homecoming. Want more info? Check out this book review from the always-insightful Andria Williams at the Military Spouse Book Review.

The Wisconsin-based Deadly Writers Patrol has released its eleventh issue of its literary magazine, which features fiction and poetry from military veterans of all eras. You can purchase your copy for $10 from the group's website here.

The non-profit Veterans Writing Project, Washington, D.C. recently released its Fall 2016 issue of its "O-Dark-Thirty" literary journal. Available FREE on-line here as a PDF, you can also subscribe to a print version here. Moving into its sixth year, Publisher Ron Capps promises that the journal will continue to tell stories of military experience through poetry, prose, interview, and art.

In introducing the latest issue, Capps writes: "We’ll be looking to publish works on a wider variety of subjects. Several times in the past we’ve published themed issues: the ghost issue, an all fiction issue, and a women’s writing issue. That will continue. This year’s theme will be 'identity.'" Capps also announces a VWP anthology project, planned for Fall 2017 release.

That's something, certainly, to which to look forward. Perhaps next Veterans Day?

Deadline for 6th Veterans-Lit Anthology is June 1, 2017!

Deadline for submissions to a sixth volume titled "Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors"—an anthology of military-themed fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, oral histories, and photography—is June 1, 2017. The project is open to all military personnel, veterans, and family members.

According to the call for submissions, entrants can submit to a contest in which each category carries a first-prize of $250, or submit to the anthology alone. All entries will be considered for the anthology. There is no entry fee to the contest or publication.

Through the efforts of the Warriors Arts Alliance, the Missouri Humanities Council, and Southeast Missouri State University Press, the first "Proud to Be" volume was published in November 2012.

"[T]his series of anthologies preserves and shares the perspectives of our military and veterans of all conflicts and of their families," reads the Southeast Missouri State University Press contest page. "It is not only an outlet for artistic expression but also a document of the unique aspects of wartime in our nation’s history."

With second, third, and fourth issues, the press established itself as a leading venue for "veterans-lit," consistent in both quality and quantity. In 2014, the press also published "The Shape of our Faces No Longer Matters," a poetry collection by U.S. Marine veteran Gerardo "Tony" Mena.

Red Bull Rising blog reviews of past issues of the "Proud to Be" anthology appear here and here.

For a 2012 Red Bull Rising interview with series editor Susan Swartout, click here.

To submit only to the 2017 anthology, mail previously unpublished work with self-addressed, stamped envelope (S.A.S.E.) for notification to:

Warriors Anthology
Southeast Missouri State University Press, MS 2650
Cape Girardeau, Mo. 63701

To submit to both contest and anthology, e-mail previously unpublished work to: upress@semo.edu. Also note:

• Entries must be sent electronically as Microsoft Word files (.doc or .docx).

• Keep poems in one document (with 1st poem as title).

• Put your name and contact info on first page and nowhere else on the manuscript.

For all submissions, whether mailed or electronic:

• Limit one submission in each category per person.

• Poetry: up to 3 poems (5 pages maximum).

• Fiction, essay, or interview: 5,000-word limit.

• Photography: up to 3 good-quality photos (will be printed in the book as black and white).

• Submissions exceeding the limits will be disqualified.

• Include a biography of 75 words or less with each submission. Explicitly mention author's connection to military.

• Winners and contributors will be notified by Nov. 1, 2017.

Funny Veterans Video Launches: 'Soldiers Period'

A short Internet video featuring the opinions and experiences of women U.S. military veterans pulls no punches—period—particularly when it comes to a May 2015 RAND Corp. report, titled "Considerations for Integrating Women into Closed Occupations in the U.S. Special Operations."

The Not Suitable For Work (Unless You Work with Veterans) result is a hilarious mash-up of soldierly sensibilities—sort of like a Ranger Up! movie meets "The Vagina Monologues."

The video opens with an animated proposal to weaponize Premenstrual Syndrome (P.M.S.) by deploying platoons of hormonally synchronized soldiers. "Once synchronization has occurred, at the peak of PMS," the narration states, "these women warriors will be deployed as the fiercest fighting force in military history."

Later, four women veterans give voice to a collection of social media comments, delivering a blistering barrage of sarcasm and spit-takes. One of my favorites? The eminently quotable, "Watch out ISIS, here comes my vagina!"

The video released earlier today, Wed., Sept. 7, 2016. You can watch it FREE on Vimeo here:
http://vimeo.com/180313801. More background on the project is here.

The veteran cast includes those from the Cold War and Operation Desert Storm, through to Operation Iraqi Freedom. A press release from the video's directors reads, in part:

From athletes at the Olympics to these women warriors, women are going public about menstruation. The rawness of the women's responses reveals the misogynist nonsense they confronted while serving. Their responses were not scripted.

The short was directed by Patricia Lee Stotter and Marcia Rock, the film-making team that delivered the 2011 full-length documentary "Service: When Women Come Marching Home." That work eventually aired on more than 87 percent of PBS stations nationwide, and via the World channel. A bipartisan group of four women senators even hosted a screening of "Service" on Capitol Hill!

I wonder if anyone will have the ovaries to do the same with "Soldiers Period"?

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.

Lit Journal 'As You Were' No. 4 Available FREE On-line

"Hunter or Hunted?" by Josh King. oil and pastel

The fourth and latest issue of the on-line literary journal "As You Were" lands today, Jun. 1, 2016, disgorging stories and art via the non-profit organization Military Experience & the Arts. The journal is published twice annually, and includes poetry, short stories, non-fiction, and visual art produced by veterans, family members, and others with connections to military service.

The journal can be read on-line for FREE here.

In the international "veterans lit" publishing space, the journal uniquely packages its submissions process as something akin to a virtual writing workshop. Unlike the thumbs-up-or-down approach of other journals, writers of all experience levels may engage in multiple drafts with peer editors and readers, while preparing pieces for publication. Regardless of whether a piece is accepted after one edit or many, however, the objective, however, is always the same: Help writers find new ways to document and communicate the military experience.

To do otherwise, as Frank Blake cautions in his poem "I Didn't Keep a Diary," runs risk of losing the war:

[…] The mission was accomplished
so we moved into an abandoned school house in between attacks
The war was young and our true enemy wasn’t born yet.
I sat down to write but how could I
the depth of a few weeks without running water made my memory too cloudy
I couldn’t recall the amazing detail I felt I needed
So I didn’t

"Camouflage" by Susan E. Kashmiri, 

mixed media on paper

The issue's fiction section delivers a wide range of images and voices. Not surprisingly, the stories often center on themes of loss and homecoming, and are driven by memorable and compelling characters. Seth Harp's "Jeremiad in Nuevo Laredo" tells the story of a possibly AWOL soldier motorcycling in Mexico, who encounters a prophet who sounds like something from a post-Apocalyptic fever dream. In "The Gadfly," Christopher Lyke tells of Eugene, a much-loved, good-natured Hoosier who suffers from a potentially terminal case of the hooahs:

He’d come to us straight out of basic training. And that had come directly after a lackluster four years in high school. He was light, and tough, and easily wore the smallest uniform in the platoon. Sometimes he’d ask out of the blue, "Sarn't, permission to smoke myself?" Then he’d jump to the ground and bang out fifty push-ups or mountain climbers and pop up laughing at the big joke and at being so hooah. His buddies were also super gung-ho and had a sense of humor about it too. They started copying him with the whole push-up thing when they felt like it. When he insisted on being on a gun team, his friends did, too.

Kyle Larkin's "The Night Before Christmas" introduces a background character who brings to life the careful routine of memorial services downrange. Consider this vignette:

I notice a young soldier setting everything up. He’s obviously done this before, and has a specific routine. He even looks bored as he brings out a green wooden stand, which I’m pretty sure was built specifically for these memorials, and stacks MRE boxes on top of it, which are probably the same boxes used for each ceremony, and then he covers this all with camouflage netting. He laces a brand new pair of boots and places them on the wooden stand in front of the boxes, adjusting them slightly until they are just right. He brings out a rifle and attaches a bayonet, clicking it into place. He turns the rifle upside down and sticks the bayonet into a pre-cut slot on one of the MRE boxes, confirming my guess that the same boxes are used each time. Then he pulls a set of dog tags out of his pocket and hangs them from the pistol grip of the rifle. A clean, new-looking helmet is placed on top of the stock. He walks away for a moment, and then comes back carrying a table with folded-up legs. He stands it up, sets a laptop on the surface, and attaches two small computer speakers with some wires. He looks at the screen, clicks a few times, and then walks away and lights up a cigarette.

It occurs to me that this might be his actual job. I want to ask him if there’s a closet where they store all of this stuff—a dead guy closet; and I want to ask him how it is that he got stuck doing this; if maybe he got suckered into the first couple ceremonies, but then they decided to just keep tasking it to him since he already knew how to do everything. I want to ask him how often he does this; if he wakes up and looks at his schedule and says, "Son of a bitch. Five memorials this week."

"Wall and Trench" by Seth L. Lombardi, digital

In non-fiction, the issue's offerings provide just as much drama and energy as the short fictions. In "Why Not Me?", essayist Howard B. Patrick provides a clear-eyed reflection on the vagaries of war, in which the author carefully interrogates more than a handful of times he or his soldier buddies should have been hurt or killed in Vietnam. Patrick's tone is neither boastful nor incredulous. Helicopters crashed. Duds impacted at their feet. On one patrol, Patrick writes:

During the night we heard noises all around us, but no voices. The flares were not tripped, and we didn’t see any movement on the trail, in the bushes, or in the trees behind us. I made sure every man maintained extra vigilance, with rifles ready and hands on the Claymore plungers, but told them not to detonate them unless we actually heard voices or saw movement.

Luckily, we never set off any of the Claymores, and in the morning we realized just how fortunate we were. The noises we heard were indeed the enemy – hoping we would set off our Claymores, because they had managed sneak up and turn them around to face us.

Patrick's titular question is as matter-of-fact as it is full of wonder. These things happened. And the worst did not. And neither luck nor God may have had anything to do with it.

In "Friendly Fire," Jim Bryson illuminates the uneasy relationships between an aircraft carrier's assigned crew and the itinerant air wing personnel that fly in and out of ship life. In the 1980s, Bryson was a supervisor of electrical shop charged with maintaining the catapult and arresting gear on U.S.S. Nimitz. His prose is full of grease and steam, and lands with a satisfying bump:

Imagine a thirty-ton jet crashing onto the deck, jerking a steel cable connected to a hydraulic piston below decks that absorbs the momentum of this massive bird plus the thrust of its engines raging for the sky. Failure to blast the engines can mean a quick dip into the sea. Jets sink fast and pilots are notoriously poor swimmers.

The good ones never miss. The bad ones forget they are fallible.

Disclosure: The writer of the Red Bull Rising blog is also the poetry editor of the journal "As You Were."

Lit Journal to Focus on Military Stories Beyond Service

Faculty editors at the University of Washington—Tacoma have announced "Collateral," a twice-annual on-line journal, published in summer and winter issues. The journal will feature creative writing and art that "explores the impact of the military and military service on the lives of people beyond the active service person." The editors seek fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art that illuminate these "collateral" narratives.

Submissions are via the publication's website here. Microsoft Word or PDF files are preferred. The journal requests first serial Internet rights. All other rights remain with the author. Simultaneous and multiple submissions are acceptable. Notifications within an anticipated average of 8 weeks, depending on time of year.

The publication's mission statement reads:

Collateral explores the perspectives of those whose lives are touched indirectly by the realities of military service. Numerous journals already showcase war literature, but we provide a creative platform that highlights the experiences of those who exist in the space around military personnel and the combat experience. 

We feel these voices sometimes go unheard, and this journal captures the "collateral" impact of military service, whether it is from the perspective of the partner or child; the parent or sibling; the friend or co-worker; or the elderly veteran, the refugee, or the protester. In any issue, you might find the haiku of a seven-year old girl whose father is in Afghanistan alongside the short story of an award-winning fiction writer. Or the first-person essay of a military spouse alongside the critical essay of an academic.

Editors suggest submission of 3-5 poems or 1-3 pieces of prose, with no length requirements.

In addition to creative writing, editors plan to include feature articles and interviews in future issues. Query the editors via e-mail: submissions AT collateraljournal.com.

Review: Danish-language Film 'A War' ('Krigen')

Dar Salim ("Najib Bisma") and Pilou Asbæk ("Claus Pedersen") in the Danish-language film "A War" ("Krigen"). 

Review: "A War" (originally "Krigen") by writer-director Tobias Lindholm

Currently nominated for an Academy Award in the foreign language film category, the 2015 feature film "A War" tells the story of a Danish Army company commander deployed to southern Afghanistan. The movie opens in U.S. theaters Fri., Feb. 12, 2016.

After his unit's morale implodes following an I.E.D. attack, Danish officer Claus Pedersen chooses to leave the relative safety of the Tactical Operations Center ("TOC") to patrol alongside his troops.

From this vantage, Pedersen witnesses the life-and-death results of his decisions, both for the men and women under his command, and for the Afghan men, women, and children who are his mission to help. Meanwhile, at home, his wife Tuva navigates the challenges of raising three young children. When a command decision results in possible civilian casualties, and is questioned and investigated by the military police, Pedersen returns to Denmark for civilian trial.

The film is an accessible, realistic depiction of conflicting perspectives, and nuanced responses to war. Civilians and military superiors have the advantage of hindsight and high morality, and desire to see a situation retroactively resolved as either black or white, wrong or right. Troops on the ground know that there are no easy answers, and that many tactical choices are gray with uncertainty or lack easy ethical reference. Spouses understand the sacrifices soldiers make in their separations, but also live with the daily wear and tear those absences demand of family life.

Despite the high stakes, the film is not sensationalistic. In its content, the film evokes similar events and emotions depicted in the 2009 Danish documentary "Armadillo," without that production's highly stylized soundscape or surreal saturations of color. Instead, "A War" is a straight-forward, somewhat stoic story, in which are distilled many internal conflicts: What's right for the mission vs. what's right for the troops? What's "right" for the military vs. what's "right" for civilians? What's the right answer for legal purposes vs. what's the right answer for family? The movie quietly asks hard questions, and often provides tough, if subtle, answers.

(For a brief Red Bull Rising review of the Afghan War documentary "Armadillo," click here.)

Perhaps counterintuitively, that the film regards military and legal contexts other than that of the United States makes it potentially more accessible to U.S. audiences, and particularly U.S. military veterans. As a foreign language film, a U.S. viewer is likely to see all parties in "A War" equally as the "other."

Freed from internal questions about the verisimilitude of how U.S. troops should look or act (Danish troops are allowed to grow beards, for example), or the proper U.S. court-martial procedures, the viewer-veteran is free to consider the moral questions laying beneath the story's surface. Were "A War" to portray a U.S. military experience, it would be too easily viewed by soldiers as "Us vs. Them."

"A War" isn't about Us vs. Them, however. It's about all of us.

*****

For a trailer of "A War," click here. Or view the embedded video below.

For an Internent Movie Database (I.M.D.B.) listing, click here.

A Facebook page for the movie 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.

Photo Book Review: 'War is Beautiful'

Book Review: "War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict*" by David Shields

*In which the author explains why he no longer reads The New York Times

David Shields' "War is Beautiful" is an evocative, coffee-table-worthy critique of an art form that seems increasingly irrelevant to how popular impressions and opinions are generated today. In an Age of "We Can Haz" Cat Memes and Pick-Your-Spin TV news, does the front page, above-the-fold photographic paper-space of The New York Times still represent anything like the key terrain for the hearts and minds of John and Joan Q. Public?

Probably not. But to over-focus on the deflating state of old media, in this case, would be to miss a larger tableau. In journalism schools and practice, at least in the reviewer's admittedly 20 century experience, the oft-stated goal is to teach people "not what to think, but how to think." Framing his explorations in an extremely tight shot—here, the example of one still-influential newspaper's hardcopy coverage—Shields is out to teach people how to think about journalism, and how images of war are developed and fixed, even in our digital age.

The 112-page, landscape-format book is largely composed of photographs treated as fine art—crisp-white pages heavy with saturated inks, interrupted by occasional set of quotations to cleanse the palette. The hardcover's book jacket is cleverly constructed as a newspaper page, with blurb-quotes and actual analytical content. (No fake filler text here!)

In the book's introduction, Shields says he started from a suspicion that "the governing ethos [of The New York Times aesthetic] was unmistakably one that glamorized war and the sacrifices made in the service to war." In the resulting intellectual exercise, Shields considered the front pages of New York Times published since 2001, curating the war-themed photography (the Gray Lady went color in 1997) into a taxonomy of 10 extremely useful visual tropes, or themes:

• Nature

• Playground

• Father

• God

• Pietá (war scenes of death that echo themes of Christ's death on the cross)

• Painting (war scenes rendered so abstractly and beautifully as to become unreal)

• Movie (technology- and action-centric scenes depicted with cinematic sensibilities, and video game verve)

• Beauty (portraits of women and children amidst scenes of war and male sacrifice)

• Love

• Death

Armed with knowledge of these themes, any reader of "War is Beautiful" will walk away with a new tool in their media-analysis kits. Shields' system of classification is, after all, potentially applicable to other mediated sources of war images. That includes those generated by governmental and military public affairs, as well as civilian media embedded with governmental agencies. In the latter, independent journalists are still dependent on their U.S. agency hosts for access, security, transportation, and food, potentially skewing views and access to events, places, and sources.

Shields locates responsibility for the Times' distortions of reality to the newspaper's historically chummy relationship to governmental power. "Throughout its history, the Times has produced exemplary war journalism, but it has done so by retaining a reciprocal relationship with the administration in power […]," he writes. "[I]t knows precisely what truth the power wants told and then prints this truth as the first draft of history."

In a short, back-cover essay to "War is Beautiful" (there's a newspaper-like "jump" to interior pages), art critic David Hickey blames the collaborative tribal practices of a traditional newsroom, a process that still involves many editors' eyes and hands:

Newspaper photographs have always had a job to do, but combat photographs today are so profoundly touched in the process of bringing them out, that they amount to corporate folk art. […] The exoticism of war and the Middle East has been suppressed almost completely on the American premise that anywhere an American hangs his hat is home. This whole book, in fact, could have been photographed in California and Nevada.

[…] The total effect of these photographs is to portray an American industrial project in a desert somewhere with swimming pools, basketball, and baseball being played. Lunch is being served. The commander and chief is giving his soldiers noogies. There is some fire, of course, but we love fire. There are echoes of the elaborate German films and photographs that created a fantasy world of the Russian front where millions were dying. Summing it up, these pictures generate more distrust of American military adventures than I had before, and I had a lot.

While I might enjoy jousting with Hickey over his characterization of "war photography" as "combat photography"—personally, I would limit the latter term to describe images of actual weaponized conflict—I agree with his conclusions. I agree that most images of war that I encounter as a consumer of news, on-line and in print, present a world comfortably at war.

That's mostly because the American way of war has become banal and boring and repetitive. Long in the tooth, as well as the tail. We export American suburbs as Forward Operating Bases ("FOB"), and staff them with endless rotations of soldiers and contractors. The "Long War" seems ... endless.

Having once been a small-town newspaper editor, I can tell you that coming up with artful new ways to present the same schedule of events—fun runs, weather and fire pictures, county fairs, funerals, restaurant openings—is a challenge. In size, scope and function, a FOB is analogous to a small town. In a current side project (www.fobhaiku.com), I am myself curating "small town" photography generated by military public affairs photographers, with the intention of subverting it toward what I hope are poetic, humorous, and socially constructive purposes. Shields and Hickey go beyond such passive-aggressive snark, of course, and directly attack the images, along with their implications.

The Home-Sweet-FOB picture show is a reality, but not the only reality.

Another reality is that war is a meat-grinder. Today's news consumers are buying the tasty sausage, without having to visit the butcher shop.

What's the fix to all this? An informed and media-savvy public. A more critical attitude in both news rooms and living rooms. "War is Beautiful" is a good first step. Maybe some veterans should crack open their hard-drives of deployment photos—the ones that run counter to General Order No. 1 (no, Cpl. Schmuckatelli, not the pornographic "field manuals")—to better share what war can be. IF bridging the civil-military gap requires turning off some of the puppies and rainbows, let's break some things and hurt some feelings. If we continue to picture war as routine, our society will deserve what comes next:

More of the same.

Video Depicts How and Why We Remember the Fallen

Iowa Remembers from The Woods on Vimeo

Often featuring dramatic music and sexy pictures of hard-charging soldiers, motivational and inspirational videos are something of a tradition in the military. I've been waiting for just the right moment to share this one. It's more thoughtful and less hooah than those training videos from the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, Calif., but I find it motivational as I reflect and resolve toward writing down another year. I think you'll like it.

Produced by the award-winning Todd Cerveris of The Woods Productions, in collaboration with Iowa Remembers, Inc., this 7-minute video depicts the 6th Annual Iowa Remembrance Run conducted Sept., 27, 2015, which was Gold Star Mother's and Family's Day. The run is the primary fund-raiser for the 501(c)3 non-profit organization, which, in turn, underwrites an annual retreat for survivor military families from Iowa conducted on the same weekend.

PHOTO: The Woods Productions

Readers of the Red Bull Rising blog may remember previous mentions of the Iowa Remembrance Run. For the past few years, I've also been honored to participate in the event, reading the honor roll of those Iowans who have died in service to their country since 2001.

Throughout the video, survivor families offer their thoughts and memories—about their loved ones, and about the Iowa Remembrance Run and annual retreat. Listen carefully, and you'll also hear the honor roll being read.

Started in December 2009, the Red Bull Rising blog has evolved from a mil-blog about one family's pre-deployment experiences; to one about the 2nd Brigade Combat Team (B.C.T.), 34th Infantry "Red Bull" Division's 2010-2011 deployment to Afghanistan; to one seeking, more generally, creative ways to remember and celebrate military service members, veterans, and families. In 2016, with humor and heartfelt thanks, these missions continue:

• To explain in plain language the roles, responsibilities, and routines of the U.S. citizen-soldier, with particular focus on the U.S. 34th Infantry "Red Bull" Division.

• To illuminate ways in which citizen-soldiers past and present—as well as their families—can be remembered, supported, and celebrated.

As always, thank you for your support, and for reading the Red Bull Rising blog. (Thanks also to all of you who recently purchased or gave as gifts my book "Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire"! More such hijinks continue at: www.fobhaiku.com.)

Here's to a fun and productive new year!

"Attack! Attack! Attack!"

Review: 'Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors' 4

A rule of thumb, in both newsrooms and Tactical Operations Centers, is that "two times is a coincidence, but three times is a trend." Four times? Four times must make something an institution.

Now in its fourth consecutive volume, and published annually on or near Veterans Day, the military-writing anthology series "Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors" is arguably the high-point of the 12-month veterans-lit calendar. In partnership with the Missouri Humanities Council, the series is published by Southeast Missouri State University Press, Cape Girardeau, Mo. Comprising short fiction, non-fiction essays, interviews, and photography generated by or about military service members, veterans, and families, no other book publishing effort so regularly portrays the scope and depth of U.S. military experiences.

World War II is here. Korea and Vietnam are here. Iraq and Afghanistan are here. The home front is here.

The Navy is here. The Army is here. The Marines are here. The Air Force is here.

The memories of 80-year-old veterans are here. The words of a high-schooler from Gilman, Iowa are here.

It's all here. Every year.

In reading across the most recent edition's 270 pages, one is struck by the chorus of voices. One hears harmonies in times and places. One hears differences in experiences, but never dissonances. In short, the book seems to embody the sentiment: "Everybody has their own war; no one has to fight it alone."

Keeping with the choral metaphor for a moment, the solo performances are stand-out. Each issue features a winner and two honorable mentions in five categories: fiction, essay, interview, poetry, and photography. (Disclosure: The writer of the Red Bull Rising blog was a runner-up in this year's poetry category.)

For example, photography winner Jay Harden's image, "Planning for Peace," graces the cover of the book. Harden was a B-52 navigator on 63 missions over Vietnam.

This year's fiction contest winner, Christopher Lyke, weaves a braided narrative of loss and return and fighting against—or maybe for—the routine. A former infantry soldier, Lyke is a Chicago-area writer, musician, and teacher. He is also the co-editor of the literary journal "Line of Advance." You can hear the Chicago in his prose, in story titled "No Travel Returns":

He woke up and ran the dog and showered. He dressed and woke up the kids. This kept happening. Then he made breakfast for the kids and woke up his wife. This happened every day, too. He made it happen, this routine.

Essay category winner David Chrisinger delivers a profile of U.S. Marine Brett Foley, an Afghan War veteran. Chrisinger, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, interviews Foley and Foley's wife, and grounds the resulting conversation in grief theory. Chrisinger is the son of a Vietnam-era veteran, and the grandson of a World War II veteran. He teaches a student-veteran reintegration course on campus, and counts Foley as his best friend. The resulting exploration is, then, both personal and professional:

What helped to increase Brett's resilience and help him move toward a productive and purposeful life was talking about his trauma and remembering the good men he served with. Only then could he move on. And even though he never discovered the complete and final truth of his experiences—no one ever really can—Brett did create meaning out of them by organizing his memories and creating a coherent narrative. […]

In the winning poem, titled "nights," Navy officer Nicholas J. Watts writes an hypnotic, rhythm-infused ode to sleep and memory:

nights
I visit dark places
where war still rages
and I didn't fight
like I should have
where whiskey flows
from plastic jugs into Salvation Army cups
to be cast away
like dead children from suicide bombs
or Talib cattle shot for sport […]

Such exemplars are indicative of the qualities to be found throughout the book. In a poem titled "TBI" (which stands for "Traumatic Brain Injury"), VA nurse Susan K. Spindler delivers a punch to the gut with lines such as:

[…] A brain weights three to four pounds.
It floats in a fluid that protects it.
You floated in me once, Josh.
I gave up pot and booze and moved
us far away from the man that was half of you.
I thought you would be safe. […]

In a war story titled "How I Almost Lost the War for the U.S.A.," Korean War veteran and former U.S. Marine George Fischer tells a hilarious and harrowing tale. He was driving a WWII-era amphibious truck called a "Duck," one laden with ammunition destined for the front, when he ran over a long-haul communications cable presumably used by much-higher headquarters. The Duck gets stuck. He walks over to a nearby artillery unit, to radio for assistance:

While I waited for that wrecker, the 155 guncrew listened on the phone to announce the next target. Some of the crew asked me how the hell did I get to this howitzer emplacement. I pointed to where my truck rested in the dark across the meadow at the road. They were amazed and astonished as they told me that field I had walked on was thoroughly mined.

In her introduction to this year's volume, series publisher Susan Swartwout describes some of her lessons, taken from four years of compiling, editing, and producing "Proud to Be":

Just a few of the things I've learned include that some veterans carry their stories inside and won't speak their war burdens to friends and family—but they will write them to the world when the have a place and invitation to do so. […]

I've learned that a veteran's coming home to loved ones and civilian life can be yet another battle with its own version of firestorm. […]

And I've learned that many veterans and military personnel have an awesome sense of humor, brilliant with word play and pranks.

Sherpatude No. 26: "Humor is a combat multiplier …" And thank goodness for it. World War II veteran Bill McKenna was an infantryman with the U.S. 24th Infantry Division in the Philippines, when his buddy took off, suffering from the "G.I.'s" (gastrointestinal distress). A Filipino leading a squad of Moro tribesmen happen upon McKenna. After a wary stand-off, they mention in passing to McKenna the recent death of the U.S. President:

For every G.I. in a far-off battle zone, it's great to hear from home—a letter from Mom, Sis, or Sweetheart. But today I got news delivered first-hand to me on a Philippine jungle road. Not the usual way to hear the news, I suppose, but damn, it was exciting.

Later, I learn that the news of the Roosevelt's death was delayed for troop morale considerations.

Where else are you going to hear a story like that? Who else but a veteran would be the one to tell it?

*****

For information on the 2016 military-writing contest and anthology, click here.

A Facebook page for the project is here.

A St. Louis-area book launch event is planned for 1 to 4 p.m., Sat., Dec. 19, 2015. The event is free and open to the public. Information here.