Soldiers' stories help civilians connect

 Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News

Aug. 29, 2013

Christine Dumaine Leche's college students often showed up to English class dirty, with the dazed faces of zombies. They were soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, and they did something many of her Texas-based students were loath to commit to — they showed up to class.

“I think of the difference between them and some coddled students,” said Leche, who now teaches at Austin Community College. “They were so appreciative to have teachers there.”

Leche spent a year teaching in Afghanistan for the University of Maryland, which has offered college classes in the field for American soldiers since the Vietnam War. Halfway through the experience she had a light bulb moment when one student said, “I wish people knew what it's really like to be a soldier.”

Thus was born “Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from Afghanistan,” a book of essays by soldiers and their loved ones who aim to walk us through the experience from recruitment to horror to honor.

“It struck me that I could help these students to be heard, give them a chance to connect with the public in a visceral way about what goes on: the good and bad, the funny and sad,” Leche said. “For a lot of Americans, the military is an abstraction. Soldiers realize that.”

In other words, we may honor our soldiers, but do we truly understand them and their experiences?

Sgt. First Class Michael Bramlett writes of “The Great Voice,” the public address system that emits a monotone phrase: “The aerial gunnery range is now hot.”

“Do any of us really know what the hell this means?” Bramlett says in an essay titled “B-Hut Blues.” He knows loud booms will follow while he looks up with reverence at the 3-by-5-foot American flag on the wall near photos of his wife and children. Yet his national pride is mixed with sorrow. He soon learns a mortar hit a couple of B-huts away. He tries to sleep, but cannot.

“It's beautiful and terrible to wear that uniform,” said Leche, who when her husband's job took them to Germany in the 1990s first volunteered to teach in war-torn Bosnia and knew she had found her calling. “They gain a life — the military is a life — but they risk losing their lives.”

They also face the losses involved with not being there, like in Sgt. Christopher Williams' piece “My Great Sadness,” which tells of discovering over the phone that his wife had died in her sleep so many miles away.

Perhaps most powerful is Specialist Andrew Stock of Austin's piece, “The Hate,” a poetic meditation on the moment when a soldier must pull the trigger. “The tragedy of war is the realization that it would be all too easy to exterminate everything,” Stock writes.

An anonymous soldier illustrates this in “They Were Just Kids” with the moment waving children refuse to get out of the way of the Humvee she is in. The driver doesn't dare stop for fear it's a Taliban trap. “We roll through,” the soldier writes. “Not even a glance back.”

Leche terms it the “humble ambiguity of being human yourself but having to forget that the enemy is human in order to kill them. Some soldiers say they want to kill all those (enemies), but what they really mean is I don't want to be killed by (them).”

Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer.