Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning. Elliot Ackerman. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2019.
Over Memorial Day weekend in 2019, two seemingly unrelated events occurred. Elliot Ackerman, in the New York Times, wove the government’s language in his citation for the Silver Star into his own to tell his version of events in his own voice, and the U.S. Army Twitter account asked a question that received more than 11,000 responses: “How has serving impacted you?” Ackerman’s article is drawn from the final part of his 2019 memoir, Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning. In both his memoir and in the article, Ackerman writes over official language. He explains in The New York Times, “When I look at that account now I see gaps. I want to add things, details, that a formal government account could never capture, personal reflections that fill the spaces between the lines.” The citation says one thing, but he remembers or experienced something not fully captured in the citation itself.
The U.S. Army directed its question to servicemembers, but some responses came from people who weren’t serving; instead, they spoke up and spoke out on behalf of loved ones who were serving or had served. I came away from the weekend thinking that these two events pointed to something important: the difficulty and absolute necessity of writing of war, especially war of extraordinarily long duration, from a personal perspective. Ackerman’s power to engage these issues is on full display in Places and Names. What follows here considers what it means to write a memoir, to write a memoir about war, and to write a memoir about a war of long duration. I put Ackerman’s Places and Names in conversation with his novels, and even some of his journalism, to highlight the persistence of his key themes across his writing and better understand how they play out when he tells his own story, while still paying close attention to the distinctive and interesting ways he writes a memoir.
Memoirs have a few characteristics worth pointing out. First, they are, of necessity, always written from a retrospective point of view. They are written after the action they describe has occurred; its impacts may reverberate, but the action itself is closed. Even so, memoirs plunge their story into the moment-by-moment action of the memoirist’s experience. The immediacy and intimacy characteristic of the form exists alongside, and even sometimes in tension with, the after-the-fact reality of the narrative. These issues of duration and immediacy and intimacy and retrospection take on particular meaning in the face of writing about the individual experience of fighting in a protracted war. In addition to these forces, Ackerman writes at a time when the split between the military and civilians is deep and wide. The American military is remarkably well-respected in an age of generally high distrust of institutions, but many, even most, Americans understand it very little. Ackerman writes about wars that only a very restricted number of Americans experience or experienced firsthand. In 2014, Ackerman was featured with a few other veterans who are writers and writers who are veterans in Vanity Fair, where he’s quoted, “It might have been better to be part of the Lost Generation than the lost part of a generation.” In Places and Names, Ackerman does not merely make use of these complicated dynamics that are part of the very nature of memoir; he draws on themes and ways of conveying information that are present in his prior writing.
Ackerman: “It might have been better to be part of the Lost Generation than the lost part of a generation.”
Ackerman’s distinctive presentation of his concerns in Places and Names is forged in his journalism, and his novels: Green on Blue (2015), Dark at the Crossing (2017), and Waiting for Eden (2018). Phil Klay in Redeployment and Maximilian Uriarte in The White Donkey and in “Terminal Lance” capture how Marines talk—their diction and cadence, and how circumstances and tradition shape those—in ways Ackerman doesn’t strive to imitate. Klay and Uriarte get inside how individuals in a hierarchical bureaucracy communicate to get inside the experiences of becoming and then being a Marine. They illustrate the strong, often fractious and contentious, bonds between them and how those bonds can strain relationships with people outside the military.
Ackerman does this too, but in very different ways.
Ackerman brings a sharp awareness of the power of perspective, of the point of view of the storyteller and how that fundamentally shapes the story, to his writing. The storyteller typically controls the narrative, but Ackerman is adept at both holding onto that control and wresting it away. Places and Names is always Ackerman’s story, but it’s remarkable for the number of other people whose stories shape Ackerman’s own. The push and pull between the government’s account of Ackerman’s actions and Ackerman’s own telling of those actions that ends the book is representative of this dynamic. In this way, Ackerman brings his experiences as a novel writer to his memoir without devoting lots of time in his memoir to how he became a novelist. Waiting for Eden is an up-close, intimate look at a marriage in the aftermath of near-fatal injury. The thoughts and feelings of Mary and Eden are precisely noted and marked and accounted for as the story unfolds before Eden’s first deployment and in the reverberations from his second. The novel slowly reveals, though, a different kind of intimacy and perspective on the marriage. Not only were Mary and the narrator lovers, but the narrator himself is dead and waiting for Eden just as Mary also waits.
Ackerman’s arena is how your war is also someone else’s war and someone else’s war is your war.
Ackerman writes of war generally and individual battles in particular, but what distinguishes his writing is his expansive timeframe for writing war. Ackerman’s realm is the time before war or after war or while a war is going on but is no longer your war. Although writing about Fallujah was one of the first glimpses we in the public got of Ackerman’s work in Places and Names, it’s the case that his novels and journalism established him as a writer who writes about war from lots of different moments in time, at least some of which aren’t obviously about war. Dark at the Crossing sets its scene in Turkey but looks backwards, from the characters’ perspectives, to the wars in Syria and Iraq. Dark at the Crossing also looks forward as Haris Abadi tries to get into Syria to fight again. The novel can look to the past and to the future because war goes on even in its present. Ackerman’s arena is how your war is also someone else’s war and someone else’s war is your war. His domain is the line that separates people across a divide, how battle-lines both join warriors together in a common experience and the sharp separation of one group of people from another. Green on Blue not only shows a brother, Aziz, fighting for his brother, Ali, but the complicated, cross-cutting ties defining that fighting.
Who fights, what they are fighting for, and what side someone fights on isn’t just the stuff of his novels. In Time, Ackerman called for the reinstatement of the draft on the theory that doing so would “move issues of war and peace from the periphery of our national discourse to the center.”
By writing about individual battles, by writing about his own experience, but writing about how his experience is made by the experience of others, Places and Names puts war at the center. Ackerman describes war not by providing his own definition of experience of it, but by staging a conversation he had. Ackerman and his companion are talking about Austin Tice and why he returned to Syria after leaving the Marine Corps. Defining war means piling voice on top of voice on top of other voice:
[I]n the end he settles on ‘to be close to it.’
It’s the same it that many of us need to be close to.
This isn’t a cause, although it can be. This isn’t a particular war, but it’s often that too. If I were to describe it, I’d say it’s an experience so large that you shrink to insignificance in its presence. And that’s how you get lost in it.[1]
Telling how someone gets lost in it, telling the story of someone’s life and the story of that life as it is shaped by war involves, for Ackerman, the purposeful manipulation of narrative time. Green on Blue unfolds more or less chronologically as Aziz moves from being a son to acting as a provider for his older brother to serving as a soldier. Ackerman is absolutely capable of precisely unfolding minute by minute action in both his fiction and his memoir. Even so, he does not inevitably or invariably write narratives that move forward in time in a direct and straightforward way. A typical memoir might start with a scene of a young person, proceed to Officer Candidate School then through Basic School to specialty training and to their first job in the fleet. But Ackerman’s doesn’t. He’s most interested in concentrated moments of time, in cataloguing their chronology and setting them next to each other so they show different edges, facets, and sides of themselves.
Elliot Ackerman, sixth from left in the second row, with his team in Afghanistan in 2008. (Tufts Now)
A signature scene of Places and Names involves Ackerman’s time with Abu Hassar. Abu Hassar was an al Qaeda fighter who had no English and Ackerman doesn’t speak his language, so when their translator, Abed, leaves they improvise. Ackerman draws the Euphrates, Abu Hassar draws the border between Iraq and Syria, and then they are off and running. “Our hands now chase each other’s around the map, mimicking the way we’d once chased each other around this country...On it goes. Only the dates and place names matter. These are a common language to us, one not even Abed can translate.”[2] Ackerman, of course, controls the scene as its writer, but the scene is also remarkably balanced. Abu Hassar tells his own experience as he writes on the map. Ackerman does the same when he writes on the map. The action of writing on the map is twinned, and so is the action that the writing represents, at least to some extent. He goes on, “Had I understood Arabic or had Abu Hassar understood English, I don’t think we would have spoken...Soon we’ve filled most of the map.”[3] Ackerman also marks the limits of that mutual identification: “Between us one thing is missing: we have many places that overlap, nearly all of them, but we don’t have a single date that does.”[4]
In their previous experiences, Abu Hasser and Ackerman share places and names, and they share that information with each other on the map, but they were never at the same place at the same time. Not only is this a reality of whether they directly fought one another or not, it also provides an important way to think about how Ackerman handles thorny issues in writing the personal experience of protracted war: underscoring what’s shared while drawing lines around what isn’t. Ackerman opens the narrative up to his own experience, and Abu Hasser opens up his own experiences to the narrative, but though we read about those experiences we do not share them. They are not ours, just as Abu Hasser and Ackerman chase each other around a map and the land it represents without being in the same place at the same time.
Ackerman can be intensely precise about what he did in war. We’ve already seen that with his gloss of his own citation. By setting his scenes off the battlefield, by both showing the moment-by-moment of war as well as by showing its runup, aftermath and fallout, and by using language to describe experiences that torque speech Ackerman writes of his own distinctive and highly personal war, but in a way that is vividly broad and encompassing.
Katherine Voyles holds a Ph.D. in English and lectures at the University of Washington. She writes on issues of national defense in culture and the cultures of national defense.
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Header Image: A village in Bamyan province, Afghanistan (Zahra Khodadadi/UN Environment).
Notes:
[1] Elliot Ackerman, Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 75.
[2] Ackerman, Places and Names, 27.
[3] Ackerman, Places and Names, 27.
[4] Ackerman, Places and Names, 27.