Sometimes the first days are the worst days, as one Air Force veteran described during an interview how mortars hit Camp Bucca on his first full day assigned to guard duty in Iraq. Other times little memories, simple things stick out. An Army veteran who showed up for the Warrior Writers workshop at The Suffolk Poetry Center last Wednesday wrote about her first day back from Afghanistan. After reading what she’d written on the fly, she described noticing the smell of the rain at the airport. She put her face out of the window of the car as she left the airport, heading home.
Reading a poem by John Rodriguez published in a journal of war art and writing, Zero-Dark-Thirty, we discussed first experiences, how we describe them and how they take shape in our memories.
First Night in Country
by John Rodriguez
Packed like sweaty sardines
Body armor and helmets
Big men in tiny seats
The bird twists and turns
Corkscrewing to land
Mouth waters
Bile in the back of throat
Dinner wants to say hi.
Just heat and motion
Or nerves?
Ramp lowers, and escape.
Greeted by a hot blast of air
And darkness.
A sky black as all blackness
Punctured by the control tower lights and
Bright blue jet cones
Racing down the runway,
A roar and rumble fades,
Never leaves, never stops.
Guided to a tent, in briefing orientation
Welcomed by word of Wanat
Nine killed, twenty-seven wounded
A platoon decimated.
Walk to the pisser,
Alone with my thoughts
Confronted by mural to the fallen
”Living a life worthy of their sacrifice.”
John Rodriguez is an infantry officer in the United States Army. He served on active duty from 2006-2012 and currently serves in the Maryland National Guard. John served in Afghanistan as a rifle platoon leader and rifle company executive officer in Kunar Province from 2008-2009.
(Fall 2016, page 57-58)
Notice how Rodriguez splinters his language using the present tense, and sentence fragments, conveying some detachment in his memory of landing in Afghanistan. He writes in the frank way one might speak in conversation.
First Day in Theater is published by The Veteran Writing Project, founded by Ron Capps. You can read all of the old pdfs on the journal’s website, and the fall 2016 issue with Rodriguez’s poem here: https://odarkthirtydotorg.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/odt_4-4_web_version.pdf
At Warrior Writers workshops we generally start each prompt by reading a piece of flash fiction or a poem, like First Day in Theater, discuss it and then we write for 10 or 15 minutes straight. Often writing with a group helps discipline the mind to focus on the task at hand. But if you have the warewithal to write alone, maybe post whatever you come up with on Reddit.com/r/warriorwriters for friendly comments and revision suggestions.
Write about a first day: leaving on a deployment, a first day home, your first time jumping out of an airplane, launching off a carrier, cooking in the galley, on watch or patrol, whatever. Think about the sights, the smells. How did your senses react to the new environment? Maybe you’d rather write about the first day that pops to your mind. Go with it. Explore that memory. Set a timer to write for 15 minutes. Don’t stop.