Our Best War Stories: Prize-winning Poetry & Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards. Edited by Christopher Lyke. Johnston, Iowa: Middle West Press, 2020.
“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do.”
—Tim O’Brien, “How to Tell a True War Story”[1]
Our Best War Stories from Middle West Press is a collection of war stories from veterans, service members, and their families. This collection is remarkable because, whether or not everything in each story is strictly speaking factual, everything is true.
It perfectly navigates the reality that telling war stories is a tricky thing—for the audience as much as for the storyteller. By its very nature, military fiction by veterans inherently raises the issue of what’s factual. There is always the possibility that this story, these particular circumstances, are documentary. They’re the actual facts on the ground, some set of events that occurred on a specific day. Many war stories stake out precisely this epistemic territory and survive off the pedigree of merely being factual.
Our Best War Stories, to its great benefit, does not trade on the sensationalism of merely being factual. There are thousands of books of military history and dry memoirs that list dates, the units involved, the territory won or lost, and the casualties that resulted from a given engagement. These stories are true, but they sometimes lack truth.
Tim O’Brien, one of the preeminent figures in military fiction and memoir, often muses on this. His concept of a “true war story”—the idea that we must lie and embellish to tell the truth—treads the line between fact and fiction. O’Brien believed that fiction was necessary for the author to convey truth. How can mere facts relay the staccato hell of adrenaline surging and subsiding, or capture the sound of hot metal passing through the atmosphere in a way you can feel? Can facts capture how harmless a human being can look after death or how hot the sun can be as it cooks you into the earth? How beautiful the night sky is when you are bored and reliving innocuous high-school memories while thousands of miles from home?
How can mere facts relay the staccato hell of adrenaline surging and subsiding, or capture the sound of hot metal passing through the atmosphere in a way you can feel? Can facts capture how harmless a human being can look after death or how hot the sun can be as it cooks you into the earth?
O’Brien argues that the only way to tell a true war story is to merge moments across time, to invent, to exaggerate—to make things up. The reader gets, O’Brien says, empathy from these stories.
Our Best War Stories is a collection that embodies the “True War Story” concept and uses it to inspire empathy. These authors tell the truth even in the stories that are clearly invented. This is a collection that helps readers to understand how mutable actual experiences are. The reader’s certainty is undermined so that they can view the world with less biased eyes.
This notion of truth has become something that I, a civilian academic who teaches classes on war fiction and conflict literature, have come to rely upon. This is the kind of truth this collection conveys. It’s more honest than the numbers, more important than whether this particular gunshot happened on this particular day. Stories like those found in Our Best War Stories are the kind of stories that lead my students to see the truth of warfare alongside the facts. The abstract of casualties, cost, or achieved objectives are something very different from the actuality of truth.
Our Best War Stories from Midwest Press is a collection full of the most important kind of truth, the kind O’Brien extolls. It’s a collection of short stories and poetry (written by American veterans—from the Vietnam conflict to the present day—and their families) that have been selected or have received honorable mentions in the Darren L. Wright Memorial Awards.
This collection of prize winners, of course, features a number of stories and narrative poems that almost have to be factual. They’re filled with details that could not be imagined and minutiae that would escape someone outside of the military. More importantly, however, this collection is filled with writing that is true. And this truth comes by way of many different perspectives, writing styles, and experiences within the armed forces. These truths are what makes the book stand out amongst its peers.
…adhering to their task of relaying the experience of war while staying firmly in the realm of art. Truth never gets thrown out in favor of style, and art never seems to be discarded in favor of the dull facts.
It’s fitting, then, that the book begins with a story laced with magical realism. David R. Dixon’s “The Stay” is the tale of a man who can touch other people and delay their deaths. But not forever. It’s fantasy (or perhaps magical realism), but it captures the true pressure of someone who understands why and how death comes, but who cannot delay it. The story kicks off a string of extremely memorable and gripping stories that run the gamut of subject matter, ranging from time in theaters of war to the feelings of rotating home or deploying.
On the more realistic (but not more true) end of the spectrum is Brian L. Braden’s “Green,” a stark, quiet recounting of a mid-flight refueling taking place in the night sky. The author manages to make such a process seem both routine and dangerous, both dreamlike and incredibly real. The reader is entangled in the moment-to-moment dance of a delicate operation while simultaneously being uplifted by the gorgeous prose describing the milky spray of jet fuel parting like a veil, or afterburners lengthening in the night. Many of the stories in this volume are characterized by this adroit double-duty—adhering to their task of relaying the experience of war while staying firmly in the realm of art. Truth never gets thrown out in favor of style, and art never seems to be discarded in favor of the dull facts.
“Farragut Square” by Jillian Danback-McGhan is a tight mystery that deals with sexual assault in the military, houselessness, and a number of heavy, important subjects that are usually unaddressed in military fiction. Her story unfolds through a charming, unsteady narrator who has remade her life outside of the armed forces even as she struggles with a sexual assault that occurred inside her branch. As she attempts to live her life, a chance encounter gradually draws her into a bracingly-paced, noir-esque plot that makes her question everything around her.
On top of the excellent content in this collection, this book yields some significant insights when analyzed from a sociological perspective. The stories were published from 2016-2020, and it’s fascinating to see how the subject matter changes alongside the culture of the armed forces in any given year. The stories and poems in 2016 differ greatly from those in 2020. Social issues, the hierarchy of the armed forces, and gender politics are much more evident in the later stories in the collection. We can see how writers in different eras feel empowered to tackle subject matter that is important to them.
If you’re interested in military culture, the ongoing cultural change in the armed forces, or just looking for excellent writing from veterans and their families, this is a book that belongs on your shelf. I know I’ll revisit the short stories in this collection in years to come and that they’ll find their way in my coursework in the future.
Scott Noon Creley is the Director of the Whittier Scholars Program at Whittier College. Creley lives and writes in Los Feliz with his wife, painter and photographer Carly Creley.
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Header Image: U.S. Marines with Beach and Terminal Operations Company, 1st Landing Support Battalion, 1st Marine Logistics Group, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, California, 2021 (Joel Rivera-Camacho)
Notes:
[1] Tim O'Brien, “How to Tell a True War Story,” The Things They Carried (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin), 1990.