This Veterans Day I am pleased to highlight Dead Reckoning Collective, a small press owned and operated by veterans that I believe is publishing insightful writing worth your attention. We intend to stock their books broadly, but if feels especially appropriate to to tell you about these books on Veterans Day. We'll have Dead Reckoning's books on display this month on our main level.
I began the book, Double Knot, by Mac Caltrider, this week myself, partly in anticipation of featuring these books. Mac's book is a great introduction to the collection and some of the goals expressed by the press, basically how veterans can understand themselves and also how the public can understand them. I found myself underlining and writing in the margins of just about every line, starting with the last of seven essays, which I knew from my friend Adam Wilburn made connections to the veterans' organization, Patrol Base Abbate, and their book club, of which he and Mac are both a part. I have had this particular book on my nightstand for weeks, and in some ways, I approached it after all this time, really ready to listen.
I know many of our customers are veterans, so many of the experiences themselves may be familiar in these books. For non-veterans, like myself, the experience of military service may be deeply unfamiliar. What I would highlight, as Mac does, is that the no matter how vivid the experiences themselves are, there remains the work of deciding what it means. This is the work of any author, no matter how intrinsically vivid the external world is in their lived experience. Writing is an inside job. Mac brings practice from working as a journalist (Coffee or Die Magazine), and describes looking for "good writing buried beneath 97,712 words of junk." I doubt it was junk, but I think looking for what really communicates what we mean, rather than "glorified skirmishes and banalities of military life" is an ethic that permeates this collection.
Beyond this awareness of the job of the writer in making meaning, I would also highlight what we know versus what we think we know. Mac quotes Sebastian Junger saying that any "'book about war that doesn't end by talking about mothers, it's not a real war book. It is just another combat book.'" This reminded me of Caroline Alexander's comparison of Homer's Iliad versus so many other military-focused works of Homer's time. Homer's warriors don't just live valorously, they are the particular child of a particular mother.
For me, I remember my students when I used to teach history. Afghanistan was no part of my experience, and it was not part of the experience of anyone I loved. But for my teenage students, they considered military service as a possible job. They had boyfriends and girlfriends that were marines and soldiers. I wondered what difference in outlook that created.
The interaction between the "public" and veterans that Dead Reckoning describes in their About page--and I'm glad they do--is between two groups that may not have existed so separately in living, if distant, memory. Many Americans of my age know the stories of their grandfathers and grandmothers. I remember hearing NPR's description of all of the vocabulary that came back from "the war," as it was universally called and understood where I lived in Virginia. People working in offices in the 1950s would "take flak" from their boss or an upset client. Even the terror of the Vietnam draft has some unity of public-military experience. (A friend of mine once wrote about how public monuments in the U.S. often tried to unify the various experiences of Vietnam in public art.)
I don't valorize these times and memories. And, I value the questioning by people like Howard Zinn, whose informed skepticism was sharpened by the shame he felt as a airman in late-war missions into France the he felt were unneeded and cruel. For my own grandfather it was decades until he would talk about his memories even, and then, some memories he only told to me. And, he never would consider visiting Europe the whole rest of his life. Rather, I am aware that, even if military service is a distant idea for many civilians, the wars themselves are still ours.
I was thinking of the famous epitaph of the Persian War:
Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
I am working from the sonorous, English rearrangement of these lines, not the Greek, but after reading and meditating this week on war, I was thinking how salient to me the word, "their," is to me in that epitaph, something I only heard as strange after reading Mac's work. If the infantry are themselves Spartans, then they are "our" laws, in a literal sense. But, the pain of the lines, their sense of loneliness across time, comes exactly from the fact that the speaker is out on the plains of Thermopylae, "obedient" to a distant plan, and perhaps a polity that has grown distant from its orders, and indeed their impact on the humans beings. They become they.
This is not a military history collection, though there are great military histories that I would recommend. These are not combat stories. I've mentioned Mac's writing, which was my way into this collection, and his are essays carefully distilled. There are also poems, in the tradition of meaning that the World War I poets created so memorably, such as Poppies, by Amy Sexauer, fact & memory by Keith Dow and Tyler Carroll, and Revision of a Man by Matt Smythe. There are works like Odysseus and the Oar, by Adam Magers, which look through the lens of psychology and psychotherapy. I think what I liked most about these books is that I realized in deferring to start to read them that I had no idea whatsoever what they were going to say.
Well wishes to you and all the people you love on Veterans Day,
Raymond
