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Writing About War<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n How do you write about a war? The answer is simple. You don\u2019t.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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. \u201cSmells like shit,\u201d he thinks, struggling to comprehend that he\u2019d said it. \u201cLike shit,\u201d he repeats. \u201cI said that.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And that\u2019s all there is, really. One man in a long line of men all walking single file. One man\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Granted, this isn\u2019t how the journalists would write it, or even soldiers in the war, because what happens when you\u2019re caught up in a thing like war is that it becomes everything and the only thing when really it\u2019s just a context. For instance, add that these men are American military in Afghanistan marching ranger file. Now you\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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. \u201cYour junk,\u201d he repeats, \u201csmells like shit,\u201d wondering if it was the stupidest thing he\u2019d ever said. Wondering if anyone had ever said anything stupider. Even the officers and higher-ups\u2014the jackasses who decided that their company was \u201ccombat weathered\u201d for learning not to step on IEDs where somebody had already set them off\u2014even those guys might not have been stupid enough to tell a wounded man that his junk smelt like shit.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But, given the context, you might\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019d believed it. They both had. Because there was no way that the wounded soldier could\u2019ve realized he\u2019d 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\u2019ve been shot in the gut a dozen times at point blank, it almost always means the end.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Stephen O\u2019Shea<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Writing About War How do you write about a war? The answer is simple. You don\u2019t. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11721,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11720\/revisions\/11721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}