Writing About War
How do you write about a war? The answer is simple. You don’t.
Instead, you write about men walking in a line. It is a long line, with many men, and the men walk one step behind another. Near the back of the line, one of the men drags his feet. He is thinking with the red embarrassment on his face that men wear when they relive regret. In his mind circle the words he said that send his gut plummeting. “Smells like shit,” he thinks, struggling to comprehend that he’d said it. “Like shit,” he repeats. “I said that.”
And that’s all there is, really. One man in a long line of men all walking single file. One man’s foot replaces the left foot of the man ahead of him. That man picks up his left foot and moves it forward to replace the left foot of the man ahead of him, and so on.
Granted, this isn’t how the journalists would write it, or even soldiers in the war, because what happens when you’re caught up in a thing like war is that it becomes everything and the only thing when really it’s just a context. For instance, add that these men are American military in Afghanistan marching ranger file. Now you’ve got a context. The context affects things because now the men must carry rifles. They must wear Kevlar armor with desert-camouflaged uniforms, and on their backs must be massive packs filled with gear. They must also be retreating from a nameless village outside of Kandahar.
Near the end of the line of soldiers is the grunt dragging his feet. His boots kick up dust for the cloud of dust settling around the men, and you notice that his rifle is slung loose about his shoulder as he runs the words through his head. “Your junk,” he repeats, “smells like shit,” wondering if it was the stupidest thing he’d ever said. Wondering if anyone had ever said anything stupider. Even the officers and higher-ups—the jackasses who decided that their company was “combat weathered” for learning not to step on IEDs where somebody had already set them off—even those guys might not have been stupid enough to tell a wounded man that his junk smelt like shit.
But, given the context, you might’ve found that it made sense. None of them had showered in days. Desert heat and stifling Kevlar armor fermented a body odor so rank that it was indistinguishable from shit. Not to mention the wounded guy’s pants being cut to dress the dozen bullet holes in his abdomen. So, really, it was a plausible conclusion. His junk was just sitting there, hanging out on the stretcher as they carried him to the Medevac, filthy and probably smelling like the shit that they smelled.
This is what the soldier at the back of the long line of soldiers is telling himself. There are over 200 of them, retreating from a village by Ghundy Ghar, but it’s the one at the back who consoles himself with the image of the wounded soldier laughing. He had laughed when the one told him his junk smelt like shit. He’d believed it. They both had. Because there was no way that the wounded soldier could’ve realized he’d shit himself. How could he? Or maybe he had, and the laughter was for the irony of it all. Either way, they were the last words the wounded soldier responded to. The last words he heard. Because shitting yourself can mean a lot of things in writing; but in a war, when you’ve been shot in the gut a dozen times at point blank, it almost always means the end.
Stephen O’Shea is a Texan author studying a PhD in creative writing at the University of Strathclyde. His current project is a collection of short stories based upon the narratives of combat veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.