On Veterans’ Day 2014, several students, faculty, and staff will share stories about their military service. It’s the first of a planned series of annual events called “Stories from the Barracks to the Front”.
Western freshman Ashlie Wilt, reads some of the essay she’ll present Tuesday. "Off to boot camp I go. For me, it wasn't that difficult, other than waking up every night to iron shirts and pants, taking ten-minute showers compared to my twenty-to-thirty-minute showers prior to this. And living with 87 other females for ten weeks..."
Wilt has spent seven years in the Navy, first on active duty and now in the Reserves. She’s one of six veterans reading their stories they’ve written about their military service. Wilt majors in child psychology, and she laughs while admitting that’s a big break from her Navy service as a military police officer. For Wilt, the reading event is a chance to show that veterans are just like anyone else on campus.
Margaret von Steinen at Western’s Haenicke Institute for Global Education helped organize the Veterans’ Day reading event. She says it will include poems as well as stories: "They're often about the fun things that they encountered. They reveal where they went and how, and even in the midst of the ugliness of war, that they can keep their sense of humor, their common touch, their understanding of the human condition."(P) Perhaps inevitably, however, the experience of combat - and its cost – is there too.
WMU senior Chris Hickey spent 20 years in the Marine Corps before starting his college career. Hickey saw combat in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. His story reflects on what seemed, at the time, to be just an everyday event at the Marine base at Twenty-Nine Palms, California.
"The particular thing I wrote about was this image of these 400 young marines marching down the street in January of 2003. And the way I remember it is only through the prism of what happened afterwards, because about 40 of those young men are dead now."
They died in the combat that followed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hickey says writing about those marching marines today isn’t easy. "Because I found myself actually crying a little bit after I had written it. And it's just because it's like you're releasing that moment in time that you had never shared with anybody else, and trying to find a way to describe this in both factual terms and emotional terms what it actually means."
Hickey is a history major and historians try to reconstruct what actually happened in the past. But he says a strict focus on chronology often misses the point with the stories that combat veterans tell. He says they’re really about how those events turned the veteran telling the story into the person they are now, not the literal truth of what’s said.
U.S. Navy veteran Brandon Brown has also seen combat, as a medical corpsman with Marine units in Afghanistan. He says people who haven’t been in combat can’t really understand the experience. He says many veterans don’t even try to make them understand. But Brown says it is important that everyone to hear these stories because everyone has benefited from the sacrifices made by those on the front line.
"Even after serving, you know, I look at my buddies who are going over there for a second time, you know, a third time, I'm just in awe of their sacrifice. And I hope that when people come and they listen to these stories, it kind of gives them an up close and personal view of what goes through our heads over there, good and bad."
Brown and other veterans will read their stories about military service on Tuesday, November 11, in Western’s Lee Honors College. The Veterans’ Day event starts at noon. It’s sponsored by the Honors College, the Haenicke Institute, and the Department of English as well as Western’s Office of Military and Veteran Affairs.
