How to Tell a War Story? ~ MAKE MONEY BLOG$

Jason Deckman

Several years ago, I was living in a small town in southeast Virginia. I had ended up there by accident. Mostly, my head was so messed up from some things that had happened that I couldn’t really think straight. Or write. I worked as a waitress. Sometimes, I wrote, but it was hard. Abstractions were difficult.

Every once in a while, though, I would write something. I wrote a few stories for the local newspaper. I hadn’t really written much for newspapers before that. I vaguely remembered something about a pyramid from the one journalism class that I took in college, but I could never really understand why any writer would want to reduce their writing to stringing together a bunch of facts, when you could write features, and be creative, and play with words.

One day, I got assigned to cover a fundraiser. The fundraiser was for wounded veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Prior to that, my exposure to veterans was pretty slim. I grew up in Berkeley, California. There, if you were a veteran, you were probably passionately against the war. Or you moved somewhere else to get away from the hippies, and the communism, and all the peace signs in the windows.

At the fundraiser, I met a young man who had accidentally driven a Humvee over an IED in Iraq.

He was really a great kid. I interviewed him, and we hit it off. He had been burned over most of his body when the IED had detonated and he was trapped in the vehicle. He’d endured countless surgeries. When I met him, he had what turned out to be a breast implant embedded under the skin covering his skull. It was stretching the skin so that skin could get graphed onto other scarred parts of his body. I joked that when he was done with the implant, he could donate it to a stripper who had only one breast implant and was in need. He laughed.

After I met him, I never forgot him. He was one of those game-changer sorts of people you meet who implant an idea in your head, and even though maybe you never see them again, they change your life forever. I started thinking I wanted to interview veterans. I was interested in trauma, and war, and PTSD, and what it’s like to survive extreme circumstances, and how people who witness extraordinary things see the world.

You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. — ‘How to Tell a True War Story‘ by Charles Baxter

Back then, I didn’t really have the means to do the project. My head was too messed up. But the idea was there. It would be several years before I would start turning the idea into a reality.

Eventually, I got a job that enabled me to stop waitressing. I had time to think again, and I worked hard at my new job as an editor, and I paid off my debts, and I did a lot of acupuncture, and I started doing yoga. So I got better. Eventually, I got comfortable. That’s when I realized it was time to push myself, because comfortable, for me, is lazy, and I don’t want to be lazy, because I want to do something. Something that matters. I’ve always been like this. I’m not sure why.

I had this idea that I would interview veterans. Because I had this editing job, I could afford to do this project on my own. I would interview veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I would post their stories online. I would not say I’m an expert on war, but I’m a really good interviewer. I did not think I was particularly qualified to do this project, but the alternative was sit around and watch TV. Sometimes I would say, “What else am I going to do? Buy another pair of shoes?” I had enough shoes already.

I decided I would call it The War Project. I asked an artist/illustrator/designer friend of mine, Chris Bishop, to create the site. Basically, it would exist on a blog platform. I would interview each veteran, record the interview, transcribe the interview, edit the interview, and each interview would be an entry on the blog. There would also be a photo, taken by me, of the veteran. I wasn’t really sure what the site should look like, and I figured since Chris is a guy, he’d probably have a better idea than me. I was pretty much like: Have at it. He created what the site looks like all by himself. It looks great. I take no credit for that. Except maybe for hiring Chris.

I can’t remember how I found the first guy to interview, but I think I was just googling various terms. That led me to Fred Minnick. Fred is a former Army public affairs photojournalist who was deployed to Iraq. He even wrote a book about his experiences: Camera Boy: An Army Journalist’s War in Iraq. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and since I had a steady paycheck coming in, and I’d never been to Kentucky, I flew to Louisville.

I interviewed Fred at his home outside the city. On the drive there, I could see how beautiful Kentucky is. All those rolling green hills. In Fred’s living room, he told me about the RPG that almost killed him, and then we walked around his suburban neighborhood, and I took photographs of him. I’m not the greatest photographer in the world, and to say I’m “self-taught” would be a stretch, since I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I wanted to take a photograph of each one of the veterans. It’s another way of telling the story, I suppose.

At first, you know, I wanted to take pictures of car bombs, because that was how the war was being fought. I guess it’s like when you’re a solider, you want to fight. When you’re in that situation, you want to do it. That was my way of adding to the fight.
Then I got there, and I was like, ‘How in the world could I ever want to photograph this, this devastation, these pools of blood?’ — Fred Minnick

I’d also found another veteran to interview while I was there. That was George Zubaty. He was an Army sergeant. George was really different from Fred. In the lobby of the hotel where I was staying, we sat at a small table, and George, who is very calm, cool, and collected, talked about combat: dead bodies, killing, the messiness of war. George had a certain kind of mind where, it seemed, he was able to deal with that sort of thing. I took his photograph in the lobby of the same hotel. In the photo, he is sitting on a sofa, and there is a silver phone sitting next to him, and it looks like he is waiting for the phone to ring.

If someone is physically shooting at me, even if I think they’re gonna shoot at me, if it’s a credible threat, it just does not bother me. The idea of shooting that person and the actually pull the trigger on somebody in that situation doesn’t bother me at all. — George Zubaty

Then I got an email from a former Army sergeant named Carlos Farias. He had written a post on his Myspace page years ago about a really horrific firefight that he had been in in Afghanistan in which his friend had died. He wanted to know if I wanted to publish what he had written. In an email, he said:

I wrote [this] days after the event. … The day was hell. … I documented it to help me get over the situation, a venting process if you will. It did help some but even at that for weeks I could not sleep fearing that either one of the members of my team or myself would die in the coming missions. — Carlos Farias

I said, Sure, let’s do it. There were a lot of comments on his post. Here’s one:

I’m one of his bestfriends and I showed him this website after randomly finding it one night on the internet. It’s been two years since he’s been back stateside with us, but the healing process takes exponentially longer than that. Glad to see he posted this to get it off his chest.

Next, I interviewed Hart Viges, who was a mortarman in Iraq. Hart said he was a “dittohead” when he went to war, but now he’s an anti-war protester. Someone told him he looks like Jesus, so sometimes he walks around Austin, Texas, wearing a white robe like Jesus and carrying a sign that says, “JESUS AGAINST WAR.”

I go for a walk, about four or five hours, all around Austin. Walk past City Hall, walk past the Capitol. Of course, you know, get the, every once in a while, asshole.
My favorite one is, ‘Only if you served would you know.’
What do you say?
’82nd Airborne division, 1-325 HHC Battalion Mortars, As Samawah, Fallujah, Baghdad.’
They go, ‘Uhh,’ and walk off. They don’t really have anything to say after that. — Hart Viges

Around that time, I started getting word that things at my job were looking iffy. If certain things happened with the company, I wouldn’t be downsized, but if they went another way, maybe I would get downsized. This made me nervous. I stopped doing new interviews for The War Project because I felt like I had to spend all my time sitting around worrying about whether or not I would get downsized from what I referred to as my “day job,” because by then all I really wanted to do was The War Project. Eventually, I got downsized. Then I was so busy being downsized that I felt like I didn’t have time to work on the project.

Being downsized is really embarrassing, but not working on The War Project was my greatest embarrassment. I felt like I had failed. The one thing I was doing that was meaningful, I wasn’t doing.

Four months later, I got my job situation back together. At first, workingfour part-time jobs was hard. I had to learn how to do them all, and figure out how to juggle them all, and it was kind of overwhelming. But, eventually, I got the hang of it. That took maybe a month.

Finally, I got back to work on The War Project. Last week, I interviewed Staff Sgt. Jason Deckman. He’s a combat engineer and has been deployed five times. I didn’t realize until we started talking that he’s about to be deployed again. This fall, he will go to Afghanistan. He’s already been deployed to Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Iraq twice. During the interview, we talked about — well, I’ll let him tell you:

I’m scared that something will happen this time, and my luck’s going to run out. Being in the Army 16 years, I know that the way to cope with that fear is to train my ass off, do that PT, train my soldiers so that even if something bad happens to me, at least I know that they’ll still be able to do the mission. While I’m afraid that my luck’s going to run out, I’m going to try and do everything to make sure I stay lucky.
The progression of my deployments, it’s almost like you would chart out a movie or a book. Start out and it’s easy, and it progressively gets more difficult. The adventure builds to that climax.
Am I building to my climax in Afghanistan? I don’t know. Sometimes it feels that way. Who knows what the future will bring. — Jason Deckman

That made me realize part of why he was telling me his story. So it would always be there. At least that’s what I think. I guess you’d have to ask Deckman to know for sure.

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