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Artifacts

Days before graduating on March 1, 1978, from recruit training at Parris Island, South Carolina, my platoon-mates and I visited the Beaufort Museum. Then as now, the museum was tucked in the second floor of the Arsenal, a building completed in 1798 following a federal mandate to create a militia. We recruits, most of us no older than nineteen, had expected something far more glamorous as an end of training reward than a trip to the museum, but the trip was more than a reward. It was our debut, a test of our ability as women to represent the United States Marine Corps. Dressed in black spit-shined oxfords and green wool serge uniforms, we clutched our black leather handbags to our sides and did our best to smooth wrinkles from our skirts while we clambered up the Arsenal’s rickety stairway and into the museum. Our reception committee was composed of an elderly woman who disinterestedly waved us into the room. Nonchalance was the last thing on my mind.

Mourning gowns fashioned in black lace and jet beads fascinated, portraits of handlebar mustachioed Beaufortonians in Confederate gray astounded, the scrimshaw collection mystified – swords, guns, furniture, art – all these things aroused my curiosity. The museum’s holdings were more casually displayed in 1978 than they are today, but I didn’t care about the shabby chic state of the collection. I couldn’t believe my luck! The experience of actually being in the South, a region that had fascinated me since I first encountered Gone With the Wind during grade school, was overwhelming. I wouldn’t have enlisted so eagerly if recruit training had been conducted elsewhere; San Diego for instance, where men living west of the Mississippi were trained.

The year GWTW was published, 1936, my mother was born. This might explain her fascination with the film, which we saw for her umpteenth and my first time at the Lory Theater. I was nine years old when I saw GWTW at the Lory, a one-screen, sticky-floored, grimy-seated theater in the one-horse Southern Illinois cowtown where I grew up. Within moments of exiting the Lory, I was insisting on a trip to the library to check out the book.

Mom demurred, “It’s too much for you.”

The book is a daunting read for anyone – 1037 pages to mull before reaching “I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then…” – but not so daunting for nine-year old me: a scrawny mouse-haired thing already exiled from the real world behind inch-thick spectacles. I had read every page of GWTW within a week, started over, and read every page once more. Cleopatra is the only woman I have ever encountered in literature who is as strong, curious, bold, and as tragically undefeated by love as Scarlett O’Hara.

I wanted to be like them!

Ten years after seeing the movie and reading GWTW, I became a United States Marine. Maybe because as a girl I had modeled myself after the biographical Cleopatra and the fictional Scarlett, I managed to excel in my duties as the Marine Corp’s first enlisted woman fighter jet dogfight controller. Maybe because as a woman I still loved Scarlett’s story so well, I made the South my home following my 1998 retirement from the Corps. One thing is certain, reading changed my life for the better – a classic reason to read and to write.

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Today’s military writing is evolved from a long tradition. The Iliad, the epic revelation of war’s devastation upon both civilian and warrior, stands out as the first example of military experience translated into literature. In arguably the most poignant metaphorical moment in the history of writing, wild, tormented youth – Achilles – is approached by humble, wise, old age – Priam – and the two reconcile their differences in a record breaking moment of peacemaking. Imagine youth meeting old age over the body of middle age to settle the score between waste of time and waste of life! Centuries separate then from now, but writers still attempt to answer the question posed by Homer in The Iliad: What hold has higher law in human affairs?

The Iliad is important not only as literature or as historical, spiritual, and cultural record. Homer’s epic also holds a key to understanding the warrior’s psychological dilemma. Identified by Dr. Jonathan Shay in his groundbreaking book on the subject, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Achilles’ actions in response to the death of his brother-in-arms are the first literary characterization of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD).

PTSD was known as Soldier’s Heart during the civil war. Who better epitomizes the condition than the character Ashley Wilkes in GWTW? Following WWI, Hemingway captured the PTSD-afflicted soldier in Krebs, protagonist of “Soldier’s Home”; T.S. Eliot captured the devastation by war of a generation in his epic poem, The Wasteland; Joseph Heller’s Yossarian in Catch-22 captured the imagination of the 1960s peace movement; and Tim O’Brien spoke for the infantryman in Vietnam through The Things They Carried. Sometimes a writer helps an entire culture or nation assimilate a shared experience, as Margaret Mitchell did with the Civil War in GWTW. Sometimes a writer fictionalizes personal experience, while trying to make sense of events that happened at ticker tape pace. The result is often amazing, artful, and entertaining, as is the case with Pat Conroy’s autobiographical novel, The Great Santini.

Military memoir, like the story of GWTW influencing my life, uses individual experience to build bridges of understanding and compassion. Since 2005, military people have been gathering twice a year to write memoir in a classroom at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort. A sign above the classroom whiteboard reads, “Blackbird Zone.” The sign is a museum piece, as is the SR-71 Blackbird, a spy plane decommissioned several years ago. The writers’ works are artifacts as well. Each of their memoirs is a carefully crafted reminiscence, a completed piece of a larger personal history, the telling of a particularly eventful moment, a personal, cultural, and historical record and a work of art.

A Korean War veteran begins his war memoir with, “I was watching the news on television that day in October 2000, when there was a report that the day before, the 12^th, there had been an attack on one of our destroyers, USS Cole, in the Port Of Aden in Yemen -17 sailors killed and 39 injured by the action of two Muslim suicide bombers in a small boat.” An account of his battle experience with the Navy during the Korean War follows, but what is most amazing in this memoir is the writer’s strategy of using a souvenir found in Aden, Arabia – a fez – to remind readers of the Navy’s often overlooked contribution to winning land battles.

One marine has written about her experience during the first days of the Iraq War beginning with saying goodbye to her husband at the airport, moving on to being lost in a sandstorm with her convoy while evading an Iraqi tank column, and ending with turning to faith to make it through the ordeal. Another marine has confronted through writing the conflict and personal toll of being a mother and a warrior. For her, that conflict reached crisis during the September 11 attacks, which she heard about on the radio while stuck in traffic between her duty station in Virginia and her destination, the Pentagon. A moving account by a marine about her tour of duty as a worker in a military mortuary in Iraq takes the reader directly into the aftermath of battle:

Here were bodies of men whom their loved ones would cry over, would want to hold and cherish and love. The mothers and wives of these Fallen Angels were present in some way to me, in addition to the men themselves, the souls of the dead and their survivors looking down and observing us. They couldn’t act or touch or talk, but I could.

The list of voices emerging from the MCAS Beaufort workshop goes on. From capturing the sounds of rounds fired down range, to humming a song in desperate times, to remembering words spoken by someone lost, words brought to life from memory at just the right moment, Beaufort’s memoirists are discovering that writing, like any art form, is not only hard and valuable work, but also one of the healing arts. In a country at war, everyone has a war story to tell and a wound to heal – the story each of us is running from or running down, the brutal truth of loving and losing, the story only one person can tell. Your story, like my story – an artifact stowed away in memory beside scrimshaw dolphins and mourning gowns edged in grandmother’s lace – is just waiting to be told.

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