CWS1 Saturday, September 10, 2005

Two weeks ago, my fear of teaching scurried into the Swamp of All Fears along with the gator in my driveway. Two days after I saw that gator, New Orleans was destroyed. Those two events are linked together for me in the same way the sign “Anything Helps,” held by the homeless Vet from Da Nang, is linked to the falling towers of September 11, 2001. Linked to those towers is my experience of Operation Desert Storm.

I was a gunnery sergeant on active duty in the Marine Corps on January 16, 1991, and around 7 p.m. that day, the day Desert Storm began, the ringing telephone greeted me as I arrived home from my job controlling fighter jet dogfights in the cave-like darkness of the control center at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort. I answered the phone.

“Have you seen it? Of course you’ve seen it,” my neighbor and best friend said through the receiver.

“No,” I said. “What? What are you talking about?”

“The War started,” she said. “It’s on CNN—turn it on.”

“Okay…I gotta go—I’ll call you back.”

The TV screen flickered to life. The fireworks display over Baghdad was stunning. But what stunned me in that moment was the idea that for me, an active duty marine just coming home from watch, I learned the war had begun through my neighbor and CNN.

I wanted to be there on the road to Baghdad serving alongside my fellow Marines.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the phone rang as I was doing homework, one month into my second semester as an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

“Turn on the TV,” my husband Pete shouted through the receiver. “New York is being attacked!”

“Oh my god….”

As I watched CNN, watched the same scene over and over, I knew War would come before the dust settled. My mind raced. I wanted to be there, wherever, serving alongside my fellow Marines. But I knew that was impossible. I had been retired from the Corps for three years. I had a sixty percent disability rating. I was enrolled in college. I had a life.

I sat on the ottoman in front of the TV and cried.

Last week, I sent money for Hurricane Katrina Relief to the Red Cross; the interview I held with Richard Peabody, who is coming to Beaufort for a poetry reading and to talk to the War Veterans’ Writing Workshop, was published in The Lowcountry Weekly; I sent off three submissions to literary journals; I taught my twenty composition students the elements of the essay; and I taught the writers in the War Veterans’ Writing Workshop the elements of story.

The workshop that began with a list of twelve names has begun with five dedicated writers. Two are war veterans, one is the wife of a war veteran, one is a former recruiter, and one is a criminal investigator working aboard MCAS Beaufort. More writers might join us next week. There is room enough and time enough for all.

We talked about their first pieces of writing on Thursday. One war veteran, an enlisted man, wrote about the challenge of climbing what seemed to him the tallest tree in his state when he was seven years old. The other war veteran, a woman, wrote about a place called Enchanted Rock where she made the decision to attend Annapolis to become a military officer. The recruiter wrote about a day in his life, trying to make recruitment numbers, the push and pull of his opposing worlds: Family, Work, Self. The war veteran’s wife wrote about trying to regain the joy she felt as a child, and of finding that joy impossible to find this time of year. The detective wrote a staccato narrative about a day in his life, his journey to a murder scene, the investigation, and of trying to make sense of one human being’s acts of aggression against another.

Richard Peabody’s poetry reading, scheduled for September 22, has been transformed into a Hurricane Katrina Relief fundraiser for Long Beach, Mississippi, the sister-city adopted by the city of Beaufort in the wake of our nation’s most recent disaster. Hurricane Katrina destroyed Long Beach. I have told my twenty composition students they must attend Richard’s reading at the USCB Performing Arts Center, and they must write a response to his reading in their writer’s notebooks. I will encourage the writers in the War Veterans’ Writing Workshop to attend.

Anything helps as life goes on for each of us, our journeys unfolding like clattering oars on a rowboat caught in the outgoing tide, each of us attempting to make meaning from the experience of witnessing through media broadcasts the people of the Gulf Coast clinging to the shards of their lives.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, “It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.” I can no longer serve alongside those who defend and sometimes rescue this nation; I give what I can.

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