Three Details

by Eddie Dzialo

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During the time I was in the Marines, units deployed for seven months, then they trained for seven months in preparation for going back. When I returned to the United States in October of 2008, it was a statistical certainty that I would be back in the Middle East by May of 2009—and I was. Before my second deployment, I was assigned a new platoon. A platoon usually consists of 40 Marines, give or take, and when I took command of it, I had less than 20. People had been sent off to specific schools for training, others had been moved to other units, and the rest had started the process of being discharged because their contractual obligations had been met.

Every few weeks, new Marines would check into my platoon. Shaved heads, rigid, nervous. They’d stand in front of my desk as I went over their files, figuring out where they were from and how well they had performed at the School of Infantry. Most of them were young. They’d just graduated from high school, or they’d left college to join up. I would try to draw out three details about them during our initial conversation. They were married.  They had kids.  They had slept in a van when they were homeless. This way, they were not just machine gunners or riflemen, they were kids who carried pictures of their children around with them in the same shirt pocket every day.

Once, when a new Marine was checking in, I looked through his file and noticed that he was 27 (I was only 24). Because he was several years older than most Marines of his rank, I asked him why he joined at an unusually late age. Without hesitation, he said, “Because I was sick of bagging fucking groceries, sir.” Afterwards, when I would see him during a field exercise, I would think about his answer, and I was proud of him for his conviction.

It’s been nine years since the day I checked that Marine into my platoon, and his response is no less powerful now than it was then. For as complicated as war can be, it’s the tiny moments that become so important.

Before leaving for Afghanistan, I was transferred to another platoon. When we deployed, I wouldn’t be in charge of the person who had quit his job as a grocery bagger to risk his life overseas. And on July 11, 2009, he was killed. He’d been driving a vehicle, and an IED detonated underneath him. His lieutenant, a close friend of mine, had been thrown from the vehicle by the blast. Another Marine lost both his legs and bled out in the helicopter while being transported to a medical facility. Of the three, the lieutenant was the only one to survive.

When I think back on it, I think of all the things that had to happen for that person to be in that vehicle on that day. Four feet to the left, and the vehicle wouldn’t have rolled over the IED. Had they chosen a different route, would things have been different? Would they have been worse? I don’t know, and there will never be anyone to tell me.    

Every Word a Choice

by Eddie Dzialo

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When I got out of the Marines, I couldn’t make decisions. Even making a sandwich was too difficult. I’d become overwhelmed with the choice of meat or bread. I was conditioned to map out the consequences of each action and to fear the repercussions. Frozen with an inability to choose, I spent the better part of a year locked in my studio apartment.

When I was deployed, I was always deciding. In the summer of 2009, I was in southern Afghanistan, in charge of a platoon of Marines and forty-something Afghan National Border Patrolmen. We lived in a small outpost surrounded by mesh containers filled with sand and rocks, designed to keep out shrapnel, mortar rounds, bullets, and cars weighted down with explosives being driven by suicidal zealots. I spent most of my time studying maps, trying not to let anyone see how scared I was. Though our unit had taken casualties, as the platoon commander, I was more worried about the consequences of my decisions and the impact they’d have on other people than I was about facing my own death. During a patrol, if I picked the wrong route at the wrong time, someone’s kid, father, or brother could walk over an Improvised Explosive Device or enter into an ambush, unknowingly. Keeping other people alive required an unknown ratio of skill and luck, and I still avoid thinking about which one I had more of.   

Each day was a challenge. On our first patrol, as we walked through the streets, people shot mortars and rockets at us before opening up with machine guns. Afghan soldiers threw their weapons in the streets and hid in a ditch. Later that night, as we moved through a wheat field, we got caught in a coordinated ambush and shot our way out. Though part of me feels like I don’t deserve it, I was given a medal for what occurred after we were attacked. When I look at the framed medal that hangs on the wall at my parent’s house in Cape Cod, I think: Skill or luck?

On another day, I was ordered to call in an air strike on a person who had supposedly killed a Marine the previous week. An intelligence report said he was standing on a bridge, alone. My hand shook as I sat on top of a Light Armored Vehicle, tracing out the blast radiuses of various ordinances, ensuring that they wouldn’t land too close to our position, using nothing more than a marker and a laminated map. I focused on numbers and grid coordinates rather than that I was about to kill someone. As the person on the ground, if I radioed the helicopter pilot and said, “Cleared Hot,” then I was legally responsible for everything his fired rocket did and who it did it to.

Ok, this next part has never left me: Right before I was going to say, “Cleared Hot,” I cancelled the whole thing by saying “Abort” on the radio three distinct times. Though there might have been an obvious reason at the time, now I can’t remember why I did that. But as the pilot flew over the intended target, never firing a round, he called back and said that there had been a child on the bridge.

It took writing to get me out of my studio apartment and to teach me how to make decisions again. Every sentence is a decision. You don’t need an idea to write a story, a novel, even a blog post; you need hundreds of ideas. And with each new idea comes a choice. I can wonder what this draft would look like had I made other choices, agonize over each word omitted, but I am able to choose again. One word at a time, I am able to accept my choices.

How to Write War: Learning from Tim O’Brien

by Eddie Dzialo

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Though it seems like a different life, I used to be an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. I deployed to Iraq in 2008, Afghanistan in 2009, and I usually don’t elaborate further. I don’t avoid talking about my service to protect myself from painful memories. Some of the proudest moments of my life happened during those years and the people that I deployed with know a side of me that no one else can. When I avoid the subject of my deployments, I do so because I know I will become the focus of the story. And I’m not the point. I’ve read too many war books, written by people who aggrandize their heroics, their condemnation or support for the political ideologies that fuel combat. I didn’t want to become one of those people. Shortly after getting out of the Marines, I stopped reading books about war altogether.

When I entered the Mountainview MFA program, I wrestled with how to write about my own experiences in a way that would overcome the trappings of war narratives that I so detested. As I struggled, my mentor recommended I read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, to show me how O’Brien navigated the difficulties of writing about combat. I agreed to read it only to prove my mentor wrong, to explain why I was against such books. It would be my excuse to walk away from writing about my experience. But my mentor was right. Halfway through the first story, O’Brien had already posed and answered the questions I hadn’t even known to ask.

I understand what O’Brien was risking by writing those stories: making the book about himself.  In writing war, you are never what’s most important. Any fear that Tim O’Brien might have written this book for his own edification leaves with the story “On the Rainy River.” Tim O’Brien, the story’s protagonist, is present, but as a frightened teenager who’s been swept up in events that he was powerless to stop. It’s self-deprecating, discussing fear with a brutal integrity that does not allow ‘heroics’ to intrude on the story’s honesty. “...I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything.”  These earnest emotions allow O’Brien to downplay his role within the stories and allow them to become more powerful than himself.

 “How to Tell a True War Story” gave me the words to understand my discomfort with war narratives by explaining what a war story is, what it isn’t, and what it can achieve.

What it isn’t: “A true war story is never moral...if a story is moral, do not believe it.” By not attaching lessons to his war stories, O’Brien is making a conscious effort not to bend them towards a purpose. He doesn’t give the atrocities any value. A real war story has an “...absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

What it is: “In any war story...it is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” Though the book is a work of fiction, The Things They Carried blurs the line between fiction and reality. The men named in the dedication are characters in the stories, and the opening sentence of “How to Tell a True War Story” is “This is true.” The reader cannot distinguish fact from fiction, just as O’Brien struggles to resolve his memories of war. “When a guy dies, you look away...pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot.”

What it can achieve: The most emotional scene in “How to Tell a True War Story” occurs when one of the characters tortures a baby water buffalo. The more the baby struggles, the more pain the character inflicts upon it. “It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose.” As disturbing as this story is, the reader is left wondering if it really happened, if the author spliced an event that he witnessed into his fiction. To O’Brien, veracity is relative. “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

I still approach books about war with a healthy amount of skepticism, but by reading The Things They Carried, I witnessed how Tim O’Brien embraced his past and discussed it with honestly and humility. It’s a book that was selflessly written for other people, and I think that each time I reread it.