{"id":10422,"date":"2017-11-09T22:50:31","date_gmt":"2017-11-09T22:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=10422"},"modified":"2017-11-10T23:04:31","modified_gmt":"2017-11-10T23:04:31","slug":"veterans-turned-poets-can-help-bridge-divides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/veterans-turned-poets-can-help-bridge-divides\/","title":{"rendered":"Veterans turned poets can help bridge divides"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Dubinsky<\/a>, Virginia Tech<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Although Veterans Day is a national holiday, often filled with parades and celebrations, it brings with it ambiguity. <\/p>\n

Howard Zinn, a World War II veteran, once wrote<\/a>, \u201cI do not want the recognition of my service to be used as a glorification of war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes the cost of the service and sacrifice can temper any desire to celebrate. Just consider the fact that even on the original Armistice Day, almost 2,700 Allied and German soldiers died in combat<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ambiguity is also the result of the growing gulf between those who have served and those who haven\u2019t. At any given time, only .04 percent of the U.S. population is serving on active duty<\/a>. In The Economist, a columnist<\/a> recently explained, \u201cThe gulf between America\u2019s armed forces and its civilians has never been greater. In 1990, 40 percent of young Americans had a military veteran for a parent; in 2016, only 16 percent did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes the ambiguity lies within the veteran community, and sometimes within individual veterans. Veterans\u2019 experiences are not uniform. Some have seen combat; many have not. The story of each veteran\u2019s service is unique.<\/p>\n

As WWII vet Frank Brookhauser once said<\/a>, \u201cThere was nothing right in one story. There is no such thing as one story if there are two people.\u201d <\/p>\n

Today, there are approximately 20.17 million veterans<\/a> \u2013 7 percent of the U.S. population. That\u2019s more than 20 million stories, along with the stories of their loved ones. Sometimes poetry is the most effective way to capture both the ambiguity and the story.<\/p>\n

Bridging divisions<\/h2>\n

One poet who is aware of these divides is Yusef Komunyakaa<\/a>, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970 and earned a Bronze Star. He is now a professor at New York University. Either with his own poetry such as \u201cFacing It\u201d<\/a> or by encouraging us to read other veterans\u2019 poems, Komunyakaa explains that poetry has dual roles \u2013 to delight and to instruct, a concept traced back to Aristotle and Horace\u2019s \u201cArs Poetica<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cA Letter to the Editor<\/a>,\u201d Komunyakaa makes the case for such encounters with veterans\u2019 poems, saying, \u201cWe need our young men and women, soldiers and civilians, to read good literature, to come across a voice like Yehuda Amichai\u2019s in \u2018What Did I Learn in the War.\u2019\u201d Amichai<\/a> is considered by many to be Israel\u2019s greatest poet<\/a>. His poem describes the soldier\u2019s experience:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cTo march in a row and be alone in the middle,<\/p>\n

To dig into pillows, featherbeds, the body of a beloved woman,<\/p>\n

And to yell \u2018Mama,\u2019 when she cannot hear,<\/p>\n

And to yell \u2018God,\u2019 when I don\u2019t believe in Him\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Komunyakaa and Amichai emphasize the need to encounter and learn from stories of those who served. Even though much about those stories is unremarkable or routine, some is not. Debs Myers, a WWII vet, describes his fellow soldiers in \u201cThe GI<\/a>\u201d: <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cHe learned how to sleep in the mud, tie a knot, kill a man. He learned the ache of loneliness, the ache of exhaustion, the kinship of misery. From the beginning he wanted to go home\u2026 He learned\u2026 that every man is alike and that each man is different, [but] if he was on the line it didn\u2019t make much difference.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Myers\u2019 soldiers longed for home. Veterans are home, and even if people read the stories about what is like to be \u201cover there,\u201d they may not always understand what it is like to be over here. Brian Turner, an Iraq combat vet, describes such thoughts in a \u201cAshbah,\u201d a poem in \u201cHere, Bullet<\/a>.\u201d He is home, but he can\u2019t help but think about:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe ghosts of American soldiers<\/p>\n

Wander the streets of Balad by night,<\/p>\n

Unsure of their way home, exhausted.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

His poem helps us see that not just the ghosts are \u201cunsure of their way home.\u201d So, too, are those who survived and returned home, at least in the physical sense.<\/p>\n

By being mindful, we might understand that on Veterans Day it is not simply enough to offer a free meal or host a parade. Honoring those who served means making an effort to connect with those who have served.<\/p>\n

Eisenhower transformed Veterans Day from one that focused on WWI (it had been Armistice Day) to a celebration<\/a> of those who served in all wars. Congress added the Moment of Silence Act<\/a> in 2016, which asks for two minutes of silence \u201cin honor of the service and sacrifice of veterans throughout the history of the nation.\u201d <\/p>\n

For the millions who have served \u2013 those who have not come home, those who have and those who have but who are caught in that space between here and there \u2013 celebration and silence are valued and appreciated. But are they sufficient to helping bridge the gap? <\/p>\n

\"TheService is integral to who veterans are, but it is transformational in ways that are not always easy to describe or celebrate. Listening to veterans\u2019 stories and reading poems that attempt to capture the ambiguity and complexities of veterans\u2019 experiences may offer another path to honor that service and sacrifice.<\/p>\n

James Dubinsky<\/a>, Associate Professor of English, Virginia Tech<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Dubinsky, Virginia Tech Although Veterans Day is a national holiday, often filled with parades and celebrations, it brings with it ambiguity. Howard Zinn, a World War II veteran, once wrote, \u201cI do not want the recognition of my service to be used as a glorification of war.\u201d Sometimes the cost of the service and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":10423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[3474,2033,2013,2336,3475,3476,97],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10422"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10424,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10422\/revisions\/10424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}