Captain Spang Writes Her War Story

By Jerri Bell

Before her deployment to Afghanistan, Captain Jessica Spang of Fishkill had self-published a little chapbook of blank verse about the Marine Corps.
She titled it Explosions, and preceded it with a foreword in which she modestly thanked her battle buddies and her Great-aunt Ivy for convincing her to commit the poems she performed at open mics and slams to the printed page so they might reach a wider reading public. That public had expanded only enough to include her mother and a skinny civilian journalist, a second-wave feminist who had written a well-received book about military women. On the blog of the Military Writers Guild, the journalist gently deprecated the poems’ sentimentality and praised the author for attempting to raise consciousness about being a woman in a man’s world, quoting (as everyone does) Eleanor Roosevelt’s description of Marines’ clean bodies, filthy minds, high morale, and low morals.
Later that year, at a war writers’ social following a reading at the White Horse Tavern in Manhattan, Captain Spang sat next to the poetry editor of Swords and Symbols, the new “Quarterly Journal of Deconstruction and Destruction.” Leaning into her so closely that his garlicky breath stirred the hair at her temple, he hinted that there was more than Jessica knew in her poems. Little puffs and hisses of air tickled her ear with every plosive and fricative when, showing lupine yellow teeth, he whispered that her esoteric vocabulary revealed that she had the soul of a warrior-poet. He suggested, constructively of course, that her poems would gain incomparably in meaning if only she molded them into sestinas and villanelles—sonnets being far too common.
A week later he returned the file she’d e-mailed him, now festooned with comments and suggestions in Track Changes. She felt flattered, gratified, and understood.
She met the editor for drinks and dinner at a noisy bistro on the seedy side of Tompkins Square Park, then went back to his studio in Bensonhurst and fucked his brains out among the litter of discarded black dress socks and empty wine boxes surrounding his futon. By morning, she’d realized that he had a fetish about making it with a Marine—gender of said Marine completely optional—and that he had no more realistic idea of who she was than the infantry officer at her current reserve drill unit who referred to her as a “sandwich maker” and a “walking mattress.” Besides, she knew that nobody read anything in Swords and Symbols but contributors, and they only read their own contributions so they could see their words in print. She walked out without waking the editor up, deleted the version of her file that he’d annotated, and never returned his calls.

            Then she got deployment orders, and she forgot all about writing poetry.

***

            The war was ten years old. Jessica, now a reservist, was pushing thirty. She’d cashed in her GI Bill to get her MFA at an elite university in a major northeastern city. The writing program hosted an annual conference featuring speed-dating with the editors of two dozen respected literary journals. While a black-clad editor solemnly thumbed through the opening chapter of her draft memoir, she overheard one of her classmates say, “Jessica Spang over there deployed to Afghanistan, and she might write fiction. If you want a story from a woman veteran, you should ask her.”
At the reception that afternoon, the man her classmate had been speaking to introduced himself over sour pinot grigio and sweaty cubes of Colby cheese as the senior editor of The Fayetteville Review. Leering at her over his black-rimmed glasses (birth control devices, Jessica thought involuntarily) and stroking his tidy hipster beard with lascivious intent, he urged her to submit her war story. Immediately she envisioned using The Fayetteville Review as a stepping-stone to a real writing career, one in which editors at nationally acclaimed magazines that published fiction would take notice and accept her next submission—or at least send a form rejection instead of ignoring her altogether.
“A good hero’s journey, Miss Spang; a dash of trauma, of course, but nothing too depressing, or suggesting a lack of support for the troops. We Gucci?”
Jessica managed not to roll her eyes. “I read you Lima Charlie.”
“Good, good! A trauma story with a redemptive ending would be just amazeballs,” the editor continued. “A regular hero’s journey. I’ll leave the details to you. With your experience in the Korengal Valley, ha ha—” (Captain Spang had spent most of her deployment with Public Affairs inside the wire at Camp Leatherneck) “—you know just what our readers are looking for. Can you have it done in time for our Veterans Day special issue? Yes? Good. Rula Ghani has promised us a poem, you know, with a picture of herself giving an orphaned Hazara baby his morning bath….Oh, we’d like your author headshot, of course. Or better—a candid of you in uniform. Out in the desert, with your rifle.
“We want the veterans’ issue to be a ‘True War Story’ issue, à la Tim O’Brien: all contributions written by real combat veterans, or at least by veterans who deployed to the sandbox. You women weren’t really in combat over there, were you?
“Oh, mortar strikes at Camp Leatherneck! That’s totally lit! Give us a good mortar strike story, then, Captain Spang, with a Bronze Star and a ramp service for a fallen hero and a homecoming scene, if you can manage it, since Veterans Day is so close to Christmas. And wouldn’t it be just wack if we could get David Abrams to write us a Purple Heart coming back to the old home out in Montana on Christmas Eve? With snow coming down to set the mood….”

***

Jessica wrote her first draft on her two-week drill, then took a week’s vacation to revise her story. The white papers she wrote for the think tank where she worked might have suffered otherwise.
She had to take a solicited piece seriously.
She had neither to apply for a residency nor mad money for a hotel. But her Great-aunt Ivy, who lived in a quiet retirement community on Florida’s Gulf Coast, welcomed a visit and promised to defend the privacy of Jessica’s mornings with her life, if need be. (Jessica knew from reading Writer’s Digest religiously that Mihaly Czikszentmihaly’s state of “flow” was best achieved early in the morning, before checking Facebook or Twitter or looking at cat pictures on Instagram or even eating breakfast.)
She shut herself up in the second bedroom of Great-aunt Ivy’s trailer with her rough draft and a fresh Rite-in-the-Rain tactical notebook, and prepared to kill her darlings.
At first she had trouble getting started. She knew so much about Afghanistan that she hardly knew where to begin revising. A kaleidoscope of fragmented impressions and half-formed memories sprawled across the page, and she wondered if she’d developed a raging case of PTSD five years after deployment. 
The more she thought about it, the less she understood how a war story—or any story, for that matter—was written. Why did stories have to begin in media res, and what was the middle of a war in a place like Afghanistan that had been at war for thirty years before bin Laden and 9/11 anyway? How did stories ever end? The war in Afghanistan never seemed to end—it just went on and on.
Her anxiety triggered, she opted for stealth mode on the second morning. She slipped out through the bedroom window to go for a cleansing run on the beach, leaving her great-aunt standing guard in the kitchen. She’d been ashamed to admit that she had writer’s block.
Some of the other joggers on the beach wore old Army PT gear and one—almost certainly a major—even wore a reflective belt, but she didn’t even nod for fear of frightening off her Muse. She knew that Muses were fractious and contrary, and she felt like she was trying to assign it to stir shit at the burn pit.
“If you wanted to stay inside the wire, why didn’t you say so?” she grumbled to her Muse. But, like a pissed-off lance corporal, it continued to sulk.
Up on the boardwalk she came to an empty bench, where she sat down and stared out to sea. The light reflecting off the wave tops glared off the cover of a battered magazine beside her—the midsummer fiction issue of a nationally acclaimed magazine. She pounced on it.
In grad school they’d discussed “finding your own voice,” freshness and originality, the imperative of multiple revisions, and the importance of the first sentence. The editor of Swords and Symbols had also pontificated on those themes ad nauseum over his Asian Fusion Baked Arugula during their ill-fated dinner. She decided just to glance casually at a few beginnings.
The first story in the issue was written by one of the most famous women of a previous generation of writers. It began, “John Gridley had published his first novel in the years before the Depression.” Jessica turned the page impatiently. Even she knew that historical fiction was out of fashion.
“You cycle through your apps….” No. Writing an entire story in the second person singular point of view was a beginner’s mistake.
“A rigger in coveralls and leather gloves is detaching the compressor from a hydraulic fracturing pump…”
She was a Marine, not a social justice writer, though she secretly disapproved of fracking and hoped that the fictional rigger met a gruesome end in an industrial accident described in detail using all five of the writer’s senses.
“Forty-six years ago, my brother Virgil said he was going down to the underpass to burn his draft card, walked out the door, and disappeared.”
That was more like a war story.
But best of all she liked “A small child stood on tiptoe on the flat roof, peering down over the crenellated edge at the agitated bystanders on the street below.” Jessica could imagine building a story from that beginning.
But she’d promised to write a war story. In true war stories the soldiers came first, never the women—and certainly not the children.
One truth became obvious from even a quick scan of the stories: you had to begin in the middle, and hope that your reader would figure out what you were writing about. But where was the middle of her true war story, and how could a reader figure out what she was writing about if she didn’t know herself?
Jessica scratched a sand flea bite on her ankle, and then decided to move out smartly even if she didn’t know where she was going. That approach had got her through the nighttime land navigation problem at The Basic School. The Marine Corps had taught her that it was better to make a wrong decision than no decision at all. She rolled the magazine to hide its front cover in case its owner came looking for it and jogged off toward Ivy’s trailer.
Her great-aunt, drinking coffee in the kitchen, raised an eyebrow when she came through the door. “I heard you crawling out that window, sweetheart. I thought you might need some time alone at the beach with your Muse. Have you figured out your plot?”
Jessica kissed her great-aunt’s wrinkled cheek gently. “Stories are character-driven now. Nobody cares about plot.”
“Well, that should make things easier,” Ivy said.
But Jessica knew that the opposite was true.
For a day she analyzed the magazine, covering the pages with rectangular and triangular operational symbols that resembled plans for an amphibious landing in tricolor. Then she opened her Rite-in-the-Rain tactical notebook to a fresh page and wrote, “A shot rang out. Sergeant Smith stared at the flat roof of the mud house above him, where a teenager holding an AK-47 stood on tiptoe on the flat roof, peering down over the crenellated edge at the agitated soldiers on the street below.”
But when she started to write the next sentence, a premonition of doom crept up the back of her neck and into her sock bun. She opened the magazine. Just as she’d feared, the final story in the issue began: “A shot rang out—”. The story’s place in the issue showed what the editor thought of that first sentence, and her contempt for it was increased when she read the author’s name: Jody. Jody Bloggins. Poor bastard.
She sat down and stared at the page she’d defiled with her first ridiculous sentence.
But then a strange thing happened. That sentence became the first sentence of her story. A second sentence escaped, flowed from her brain through her fingers to the page, and took on a life of its own. She’d found Czikszentmihaly’s “flow.” She couldn’t think of any other way that the story could begin.
She began to hate both her Muse and Czikszentmihaly.

***

On the third day, Jessica confided to her great-aunt that she was struggling with the revisions on her short story. “The deadline’s coming up so fast!” she complained, as if deployment approached and she was delinquent on her dental readiness.
“How do these editors expect you to turn in creative work on a deadline?” Ivy asked. “I’m sure you can’t just dash off a story as easily as you can bake a cake.”
“Cake-baking is an art form, too,” Jessica said. “At least, when you make great-grandma’s dark chocolate cake with double fudge frosting.”
Ivy chuckled at the hint. “Mama’s secret was using the highest quality ingredients—” she paused and put a fingertip to her lips. “Suppose,” she continued slowly, “you revised to make sure you had the highest quality ingredients in your story. Like your characters. Isn’t character the thing these days?”
“What do you mean, Aunt Ivy?”
“I met so many interesting characters when I was an Army nurse in Korea during the war,” Ivy said. “Including your Uncle Walter. He was one of my patients when we met.”
“Aunt Ivy! I didn’t even know were a veteran!” Jessica said.
“Nice girls didn’t join the Army in 1949,” Ivy said. “All those soldiers. And no one would want to remember some of the things we saw and had to do. Some of the things we smelled. Gangrene from frostbite. And night soil—what every farmer on the Korean Peninsula used for fertilizer.” She lowered her voice to a dramatic whisper. “Human shit.”
Jessica nodded. “We had burn pits and a poo pond at Camp Leatherneck. Tell me more about Korea?”
“It was so cold that first winter that the ink in my pen froze. I wrote letters home in pencil. And my journal. I haven’t thought of that in years!”
In the hallway of the trailer, Jessica watched Ivy root through a shelf in the linen closet until she found a shoebox, its lid humped up, the corners of thin airmail envelopes poking out from beneath, held shut with a rubber band so old and fragile that it crumbled at Jessica’s touch.
“That can wait until after dinner,” Ivy said, retrieving the box from Jessica’s hands. She wiped away a tear with the tip of her pinkie finger. Jessica pretended not to notice. “Let’s go bake that cake.”

***     

After dinner and the M*A*S*H movie on Netflix, during which Jessica and Ivy drank wine and thoroughly trashed the character of the adulterous Margaret Houlihan, Jessica carried the journal off to bed with her. She smiled at the looping, round handwriting with little circles dotting the i’s. Her aunt had covered each side of the page and poured on and on without a paragraph, or proper punctuation—like Jessica’s own journal from Afghanistan, and like war itself.
In June 1950, Ivy had volunteered to transfer from the hospital in Yokohama to the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. She’d traveled by sea to Pusan, then to Miryang, where she’d helped improvise operating tables and equipment after guerrillas attacked a supply truck. The entries became shorter and more terse after the Marines landed at Inchon and the hospital began to follow the Army north: Taegu, Taejon, Suwon, Kumchon, Haeju. Finally, late in November, Kunuri.
November 26, 1950: Sergeant Walter Adkins, shrapnel wounds in left lung, hypothermia, & frostbite (loss of two fingers on left hand, loss of tips of ears). Idiot. Refuses to rest, insists on helping the orderlies….
The 8076th had spent a week of November in the mountains at Kunuri, near the Chinese border, the coldest week the Army had encountered in Korea. Temperatures fell to thirty below zero; thousands of wounded flooded the mobile hospital—more than six hundred on a single day. Some froze to death in the poorly-heated hospital tents.
With Chinese troops advancing, the order came to retreat to Pyongyang. Uncle Walt remained behind with a doctor and a handful of orderlies to evacuate the last forty wounded patients by air; Ivy went south with the other twelve nurses in the ambulance convoy, which escaped ambush and death at a roadblock only because the colonel in charge of the convoy chose to take the right fork in the road instead of the left. Neither Walt nor Ivy expected to see each other again.
This gave Jessica a chronology, and kept her focused when she started to grow rhapsodic and lyrical. The next day she changed the geography around Marjah as if she were creating a notional country for a military exercise. This made so many revisions and transpositions necessary that she had to put in headphones and jam to Beyoncé while she wrote.
Finally, disgusted with every man in her story, she revised Walt and Ivy into a pair of deployed lesbian lovers with a tale of women’s agency that met the Bechdel test. Even Betty Friedan would have approved, said Ivy, who was secretly a fan of The Feminine Mystique despite her collection of ruffled aprons and skill at baking cakes.
That afternoon, Jessica found the perfect deployment photograph to accompany the article. Tendrils of wavy hair had escaped her bun under the colorful headscarf given to her by a woman official from some province in the north during a courtesy call. She’d taken off her armor and her uniform blouse for the meeting with the group of Afghan schoolgirls in the walled compound of a village elder’s home that served as the girls’ school. Her damp khaki t-shirt clung alluringly to her curves and made her appear feminine even in her uniform and dusty boots. An enormous pair of Oakleys obscured most of her face and reflected a distorted version of the half dozen tiny schoolgirls in gray caftans and white hijab who reached politely toward the handful of crayons Jessica offered. The service revolver strapped to her thigh added a touch of badass. She decided that the photo gave her the ferocity of the warrior queen Boadicea, the sex appeal of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, and the maternal tenderness of a Raphaelite Madonna. She bent to her revisions with a renewed will.
Great-aunt Ivy read the final product, which put Saving Private Ryan to shame in its depiction of selfless heroism and courage, with tears in her eyes. She sighed over the elegance and ferocity of Jessica’s words. “You’ve written a beautiful story, sweetheart,” she said.
Modestly, Jessica agreed.
She ran the spell-check and then sent her story to the bespectacled hipster editor via Submittable. She kissed Great-aunt Ivy goodbye and hopped a flight back to the Northeast.
By the time she got home, the Fayetteville Review’s Submittable account had acknowledged receipt of her story with an electronic form letter. (She’d secretly hoped for more enthusiasm.) Life thereafter became a desert waste of suspense broken by oases of Submittable status changes, from “Received” to “In Progress” to “Accepted.” Time then stopped altogether while she waited for the next issue of The Fayetteville Review to appear.
Finally a battered manila envelope bearing the journal’s mailing label arrived. She ripped it open with her multitool. Inside, printed on glossy 6 x 9 paper, was “Her Letter Home.”
At first, in that serif-font text on those high-rag-count pages, her story seemed to be alien, not her own, something caged that she had simply set free into a world bound to be hostile. But as she read it for the third time, she heard her own voice speaking off the page. The back of her neck prickled. Her skin felt raw, as if she’d been scrubbed down with a wire brush in a cold shower.
Then she analyzed the poems, read Rula Ghani’s hopes for the children of Afghanistan, and looked at the portraits of the authors—a comforting experience. Ghani was beautiful, but the interviewer’s prose read like a bizarre graft of feminist rhetoric onto Dari verb forms.
Most of all, the poems comforted her: rhyming couplets that broke down after a stanza or two. Their peculiar mixture of military slang and allusions to post-traumatic stress seemed forced and clunky to the author of Expressions. Half the contributions in that issue seemed to be slapdash efforts by people who knew how to write, and the other half patriotic pablum by people who didn’t. By comparison, Jessica decided, “Her Letter Home” and her photo held their own.
Publication of the issue was such a big event for her that she felt puzzled that few of her friends and family seemed to know or care. Her university library and her local indie bookstore even displayed the issue prominently at her request, but she received none of the little congratulatory social media posts and tweets that she and other emerging writers left for their favorite authors. Finally she bought a dozen copies of the issue and left them in the campus Veterans Center.
When The Fayetteville Review made the issue available on line and Jessica posted a link to her Facebook page, dozens of her friends, relatives, and classmates left her “Likes,” but only three classmates seemed to have bothered to make time between final assignments, holiday blog posts, book recommendations, and links to book-themed wrapping paper to click on the link and read the story. Suddenly shy, she logged on only once a day to acknowledge each comment. She drank an entire bottle of champagne alone when she got her hundredth “Like.”
Jessica arrived an hour before the first class in her MFA program after the winter break. Her instructor stopped her in the hallway. “We’ll have a visiting writer in our class today, Jess—the famous veteran novelist whose first book won all those literary prizes and was shortlisted for the National Book Award right after he came home from Desert Storm.”
That famous veteran novelist! Jessica’s heart skipped a beat. She’d left a copy of her issue of The Fayetteville Review in the classroom. He might be reading “Her Letter Home” that very minute, waiting for class to start!
Jessica decided to drop by the Veterans Center. Several copies of The Fayetteville Review still lay on the round table in front of ratty sofas probably scavenged from a dumpster around the end of the Vietnam War. A former infantry lance corporal had picked up a copy and was deep in its pages. Three other young men, business majors who usually nodded hello and went back to the Economist or Wall Street Journal, or who ignored her altogether, leaned over his shoulder to see something he pointed at.
Their smiles were wide. Glowing, she plopped down into a seat across from them.
The former lance corporal held up the journal, open to the first page of her story with her photo on the facing left-hand page.
“This is awesome!” he said.
She laughed. “Wow. A compliment from you guys? Did Hell freeze over?”
They all laughed. Then the former lance corporal said, “Would you sign a copy for each of us?”
“Of course!” Jessica said, reaching for a pen. “I’d be honored.”
He gestured at her photo. “Right here in the corner,” he said. “I’ve got a perfect frame made out of bottle tops from local craft beer breweries.”
Jessica’s throat started to close, and her eyes stung. She blinked.
“It’s not every wook who fills out her BDUs like that,” one of the others said earnestly. “Pinups on calendars are usually civilian models in mixed-up uniform parts that don’t really fit them.”
“Are you doing anything tonight after class?” the third asked.
“Hey, I was supposed to get to ask her out first,” the former Marine infantryman protested. “Could be my only shot ever at making it with an officer.”
Jessica laughed. What else could she do?
She punched the former lance corporal on the shoulder, hip-checked the guy beside him, and took the journal. “We can all go out for a drink after class to celebrate, but I’m not making it with any of you douchebag grunts. Not tonight, not ever.”         
Not one of them had read her story.

***

A little late to class, she slipped into a seat in the back of the room. Her heart beat uncomfortably. She’d recovered from her humiliation in the Veterans Center lounge; she hadn’t really expected business students to read a story like “Her Letter Home.” But the famous veteran novelist could be her most important critic.
She recognized his pasty-white, ugly face from the jacket photo of his most acclaimed novel. A copy of her issue of The Fayetteville Review lay on the table in front of him. His hand lay between the open pages.
“This story is a perfect example of ‘round’ fictional characters,” he said. “Both of the women—the protagonist and her apparent nemesis—are complex and contradictory.”
Jessica’s heart leapt, but she tried to play it cool. An author was supposed to sit quietly in workshop class without offering explanations or comments while the instructor and classmates discussed her story.
“When characters are this finely drawn,” the famous veteran novelist continued, “readers can overlook the lack of factual accuracy and realism.” He picked up the journal and waved it. “After all, this is fiction.”
Jessica’s mouth opened and closed, like the mouth of a goldfish that had escaped its tank and landed on the carpet.
A classmate frowned. “The facts are wrong? What’s not realistic?”
“For one thing,” said the famous veteran novelist, “women never deploy forward to dangerous areas like Marjah. They’re restricted to support roles in units that don’t engage in direct combat with the enemy.”
Thinking of the Female Engagement Team members who’d deployed out to combat outposts in Helmand Province—including hot spots like Marjah—Jessica ground her teeth.
“Furthermore,” the famous veteran novelist continued, “the protagonist’s actions in the climactic scene aren’t typical. Military females try hard, but have trouble finding a leadership style. They can’t lead like men. They end up being either mother hens and coddling their troops, or—excuse the phrase—they try too hard and become stone-cold bitches.”
Jessica’s nostrils flared. Her face grew hot. Her classmates all looked intently at the tabletop.
The instructor interrupted the famous veteran novelist. “That’s Jessica’s story.” He gestured in Jessica’s direction. 
The famous veteran novelist dropped his gaze to the journal, and then to Jessica’s chest. He jerked his hand out of the journal, which closed with a little pfft, and fixed his eyes firmly on hers in the way men have when they’re trying not to look at a woman’s tits.
“You wrote that?” The skin of his face and neck darkened. He dropped his gaze for a moment. He put his knotty hand on top of the journal, then met Jessica’s eyes again.
“Well, you’ve got great characters. That’s great, of course. But the plot is a mess. Totally unrealistic.”
Her war story—Great-aunt Ivy’s war story!—so casually dismissed. She blinked back tears of frustration.
“See!” he said. “I knew a woman couldn’t take a little criticism, even constructive criticism. You’re all such snowflakes. Why are you even in an MFA workshop?”
White-hot rage from the region of her solar plexus evaporated the tears. She stood to leave.
He said with sham penitence, “I’m sorry. Are you really angry with me?”
Jessica faced the famous veteran author, her body locked at attention. “I’ve heard the same shit from better men than you.”
“I don’t believe you were ever a Marine. Or even in the Air Force.”
“Five years active duty, three Reserve. Your belief is irrelevant. That photo is me.”
He looked at the photo, then at Jessica. “Could be anyone under those sunglasses.”
She picked up her backpack and turned, feeling his eyes on her back—probably ogling her ass, she thought. When she reached the door, the famous veteran novelist said, “Miss Spang?”
She stopped and looked back.
“You were butthurt because I didn’t like your story, and now you’re even angrier because I do like your photograph. Don’t you think that—?”
Jessica stalked back to him and brandished a drill instructor-worthy knife-hand in his face.
“With all due respect for your literary accomplishments,” she said, “women have served on the front lines and in combat for years. Soon we’ll be serving in all specialties in the armed forces, whether you want us to or not. We’ll be properly trained, properly armored, and paid combat pay for the jobs we’ve been doing for years.
“And we’ll break into your hallowed war literature canon. My first story’s already published. There will be others. I won’t be the only woman veteran writing and publishing war stories. Military women are nothing—nothing,” Jessica’s voice rose, “if we’re not persistent.”
She paused. Staring a thousand miles beyond the bulldog wrinkles of his forehead, refusing to blink, setting her feet solidly on an imaginary set of yellow footprints, she compartmentalized her complex and contradictory emotions—especially her fear that her aspirations exceeded her talent and drive. She inhaled deeply. Exhaled the last fuck she had to give. “You’ll see.”

****

Jerri Bell, a Navy retiree, is the Managing Editor for the Veterans Writing Project’s literary journal O-Dark-Thirty. She and former Marine Tracy Crow are the authors of It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (2017). Her book on the first African American women to serve in the US armed forces is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press