Many poems and stories have been featured on the Paper Poppy Press Veteran Writing Showcase. This week, we talk about you. Your story is unique, worth writing, remembering, and finding new meaning in. It is also worth telling. Other soldiers may read it and feel a little less alone in their experiences, and civilians will come away with a new understanding of military life and a deeper appreciation for the lives of those who serve.
The goal of this writing exercise is to write a short personal essay. The story is about a tiny sliver of your military and veteran experience. A true story about one event or situation and the meaning it held for you.
Sometimes, when you try to write your own story, you find nothing but a blank page staring back. Today, we will use a prompt, a question, to get you started.
Prompt
Write about a situation when you had to make a decision and felt torn about which course of action you should choose.
How do you get started? Sit down at a computer, or pull out a pen and paper. Then take a deep breath and remember.
Some people sit down to write, and words flow freely and easily onto the page. Others need to approach their writing a little more systematically. I offer you a framework to get started. The questions or suggestions aren’t an exhaustive list of possibilities; they are a jumping-off point.
You can use the five W’s of reporting to give you one possible framework: who, what, where, when, and why.
Who: Were you alone in your decision, or were others involved? Who was around you as the story unfolded, and what was their significance?
What: What happened? What are the facts of the situation? What were your feelings or observations? What were the consequences you considered for yourself or those close to you, depending on your decision?
Where: Where did this take place? Describe the environment in rich detail. Describe the colors, sounds, smells, or any other sensory experiences that made an impression on you. Is your exact location important to the story?
When: When did this experience happen in your life? Is your age important? Did it happen early in your career? Midcareer? Is the historical day, date, or time important to the story?
Why: Why was the decision difficult? Were there conflicting feelings of responsibility or loyalty? Was there a question in your mind about right and wrong? Was there a moral dilemma?
You can answer these questions one at a time to help you remember events and situations more fully and to give you a deeper understanding of their meaning. When you’re finished, take what you have written and organize it into a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Don’t be worried if it takes you a few tries to get it the way you want it.
Finally, share with the reader the significance of your choice and its impact, past or present, on your life.
If you have read this far and still feel stuck, write your story as a letter to someone you know and feel close to. Help them understand the choices and challenges you faced and how they changed your life.
Finally, I offer you an example from my own writing. My personal essay, “Sandstorm,” was written in response to a prompt given during a session of the Veterans Writing Workshop and was published in the Veterans Writing Workshop Anthology 2024.
Sandstorm
I hated sandstorms. During my entire nine months in Afghanistan, I lived in a cycle of tension teasing the areas in my brain where dread has a hold but without conscious thought of why. A sandstorm would hit, and the wind would scream with the voices of dead or dying soldiers I had cared for. If I wasn’t in the OR, I’d stoop and crawl toward the hospital against the wind’s vertical force as I choked on grit driven through the fiber of my balaclava, just to have the distraction of giving an anesthetic would give me. The storm would blow on across the valley and I would take a deep breath, hold it and then repeat the process until my heart stopped racing and my jaw relaxed. But the relaxation never lasted more than a few hours, and the dread would build again.
The day I caught her caressing the vial of morphine I had seen the sandstorm off in the distance where two peaks met that created our valley.
The storm turned the hospital corridor into a sepia twilight, and Captain Reilly’s form came through as a grainy image until I got very close. I was preoccupied with my terror of the howl and didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. Captain Reilly at the narcotics locker fit into the standard operating procedure of my mind. Narcotics were our weapon against the siege of suffering, and OR nurses brought anesthetists drugs all the time when the pace of surgery kept us at our place at the head of the table. It wasn’t until I was close enough to reach out and touch her arm that I saw the way she rolled the vial with a lover’s touch between her fingers as she pushed the needle into the stopper. I could have stopped what happened next. Instead, I stood frozen, half believing that if the gritty haze would clear, the events would make sense again. I would grab a lockbox of narcotics; she would get what she needed, and we’d exchange a few words of gallows humor and be on our way. Instead, she pulled a tourniquet tight on her forearm.
I reached for her arm and shouted to be heard over the storm.
“Captain.” I searched her face begging for a sign that I was mistaken.
She looked at me, nodded, and emptied the syringes blessed relief into her vein.
“The drugs were already here,” she smiled, “it’s not like I’m sampling the local opium.”
“General Order Number 1. It doesn’t matter where the drugs came from.”
“You don’t have to tell.”
“I’m two years from retirement.”
“And I’m on my fourth strike. No more rehab for me. I’m out and probably some time at Leavenworth.”
As I eased Captain Reilly into a camp chair, her shoulders sagged, and her eyes lost their focus.
What if scenarios flashed across my mind searching for an algorithm that would make sense.
I could walk away. It wasn’t like I violated General Order Number 1. No one even had to know. I could toss the vial in the sharps container. No one would even think it was strange to see Captain Reilly dozing in the camp chair. We had been back-to-back mass casualties. OR personnel often knocked out for ten or fifteen minutes between surgeries.
What would the backlash against me be if I reported? Captain Reilly was a well-liked member of the OR family. I was on an individual assignment deployed into the CSH as a replacement anesthetist.
But what if the Head Nurse of the OR walked past at that moment or one of my anesthesia colleagues? I was fairly certain that punishment for my complicity with Captain Reilly’s violation would be severe.
My wife had tucked many of her own dreams away to be pulled out after my retirement. I would make the big bucks doing locum tenens anesthesia, be available to my family, and help her run her business. The Army was our retirement plan.
My daughter and grandsons were proud to be part of a military family and sucked it up through every deployment, believing they were part of the country’s elite. In their minds I was already a war hero. What if I came back as a criminal in disgrace?
Would I choose to protect a fellow soldier over the security of my family?
One final Scenario tipped the scale. What if I came to the narcotic locker one day and found Captain Reilly cold and blue, beyond all hope of resuscitation?
I found the chief nurse of the OR, who informed the MPs. I heard she was escorted from the hospital and sent home to a dishonorable discharge.
A few years and another deployment later I heard she found work at a small rural hospital where she was found with a needle still in her arm, dead from a fentanyl overdose.
At first, I was consumed with guilt. Any other reaction on my part could have changed her outcome. The truth came to me over the course of many years. This was addiction. It was always going to be cold and blue with a needle in her arm.