For Bin Laden to be killed in a US solo operation, so secret that only a handful of US officials knew about it and kept the operation under wraps for over a week is the work of a political mastermind. While the entire world was focused on President Obama’s birth certificate and what underwear Kate Middleton was going to wear on her wedding night, the US was setting conditions for the action of the decade.
Bin Laden’s death is symbolic. I don’t believe it will change the shape of the War on Terror. Nor do I believe that with Bin Laden’s death, Al Qaeda will cease to be the threat that it remains. I don’t believe that his death is cause for the jubilation or joy we’ve seen in the streets because really, I don’t think it will have the impact the media seems to think it will.
I hope I am wrong. I hope that this will turn into a transformative event that will reshape the world, that it will galvanize the Arab Spring movement and help reshape the Middle East. I hope that this will be the turning point in our decades long war in Afghanistan and that victory will be declared and peace brought to that nation which has suffered terribly under the ideology Bin Laden espouses.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that will be the case. I think that by tomorrow, the news will shift back to the royal wedding and the price of tea in China and whatever other vacuous nonsense takes up our time. Because collectively, we have the attention span that can be measured in nanoseconds and the government and the corporations need us to not pay attention.
In this case, it was a good thing. Bin Laden’s death is good and it is great that it didn’t leak out prior. But the victory is purely symbolic for a nation that largely has forgotten that we’ve been in Afghanistan for a decade.
Now back to your regularly scheduled entertainment.
Mourning Doesn’t Get Easier
May 5, 2011
SO TWO DAYS AGO, I received word that a good friend of mine died last year in Iraq. The news hit me square in the heart and I was instantly just wrecked. I emailed back and forth with a mutual friend because he was the one who told me. I’m not sure who took it worse. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.
I hate this. I hate looking at a newspaper article and seeing my buddy in the picture, holding his weapon with a big grin on his face. I hate knowing that he’s not out there, hanging out with his kids. And I fucking hate that I didn’t know he’d died.
I don’t think anyone is really good at mourning. I’m not. As many times as someone close to me has died in this war, it’s not something that you just toss off and get better at. There is no training that teaches you the right way to deal with the horrible news that someone you care about has died in a crappy place far from home.
My soldiers were on the range with me and I can only imagine what they saw. Their commander, taking a knee, tears streaming down her face, her eyes raw from rubbing them with her gloves on. The rest of the day, I walked around with eyes so red and swollen, I looked like I had hives or pink eye.
I’m still kind of numb from the news. But just like downrange, you have to put it away so you can get back after it. I had to put it away and blink back tears so I could qualify on my weapon. I had to put away the emotion and get back to work because I’ve got a hundred and forty soldiers counting on me to do just that.
Doesn’t mean I didn’t close the door for a minute and put my head down and bawl my eyes out. It still hurts. I just can’t keep crying over it because I’m afraid sometimes that I’ll never stop. And oh God, but I can't tell my husband. Not about this. Not until he's home. This one...this one will destroy him.
Thanks to everyone who dropped a note. I appreciate the support. Sometimes, just a note makes a big difference.
Anxiety, Thy Name is Publishing
May 20, 2011
I DON’T DO WELL with anxiety. I don’t handle it particularly well on a good day and I really don’t do well when I have to sit and wait.
For anyone new to publishing, waiting better be your strong point.
I’m a doer. When the shit and the fan make babies, I have to have something to do. I cannot sit. I cannot wait. I must have action or distraction or whatever. Call it what you want but please do not tell me to sit in a chair and wait.
This lack of patience has been a big problem for me, oh, my entire life. It’s gotten me in trouble in the military because, well, in the absence of orders I will make decisions (and when you’re a young sergeant supporting the division headquarters and you decide to crash your switch because it will bring the communications link back up but you didn’t tell anyone first these things tend to not go well).
That is partially the reason for this blog post right now. I need something to do with my shaking hands while I’m waiting for the phone to ring or the inbox to chime. I’m waiting for something to happen and I’m forced to sit.
Sitting is not my strong point.
I Don’t Believe in Censorship But...
May 21, 2011
I’M NOT A FAN of censorship. I believe it should be up to the people to decide what to read and what not to read, not left to corporations to filter to the people. I didn’t buy into the whole idea that Harry Potter is promoting witchcraft for our kids. I thought it was great that the Harry Potter books revived reading among kids during the rise of the gamer generation. But ultimately, parents are the ones who should be making the decision about what their kids should or shouldn’t read.
But at my daughters’ book fair, yesterday, I found something that disturbed me. My daughter is in elementary school. And I fully recognize that what is fine for a fifth grader may not be age okay for a first grader. But when I saw a book called America’s Next Top Model, I was kind of upset.
I stand by my initial statement that parents should be the ones deciding what their kids should read. I’m not going to advocate that the book should be pulled or wrapped in plastic or require parental approval before students can buy it.
But I am going to question why a book that is clearly a young adult novel belongs in an elementary school book fair to begin with. If kids are reading, great. Last time I checked, young adult books were targeted at teenagers and older tweens. This book was in an elementary school and with titles like Skin Deep and Eye Candy, I’m kind of thinking that we’re pushing a young adult novel on an audience that’s a little too young to be able to read between the lines.
I called the school and spoke with the assistant principal. All I asked was why we have books that are probably too old for the audience in the book fair. She was very nice and said she would look at it. The bottom line is that it’s the end of the school year and the end of the book fair. I asked the question in what I hope was a nice enough way to actually garner a “Hey let’s check this out.” I don’t think there is anything wrong with the books for older kids but there’s a reason there is a young adult market and a middle grade market and a children’s market.
All I ask is that we keep things a little more age appropriate. I think that’s reasonable.
Why I Don’t Outsource...Much
May 21, 2011
I CHANGED MY WEBSITE today. Again. For those of you who’ve been following my adventures in publishing, the Army and everything, you’ve seen multiple iterations of the blog format and theme. Information has gone from everything and the kitchen sink to the basics.
Why, you may ask, why don’t I just pay someone to do it and be done with it? Why spend the time (in today’s changes’ case, half a Saturday) fiddling with my design and coding and uploading when I could have been doing something else, like revising a manuscript?
Very simple, actually.
I have stubbornness issues. More like control issues but that’s really splitting hairs. The short version is that I’m not in love with designs for very long and if I paid someone to do it for me, not only would I end up driving them insane, I would also end up owing a fortune. And the not so short answer is that I like being able to do things for myself. Again with the stubbornness issues, right?
You’d think my control issues wo
uld extend to cover my entire life. Not so much, actually. I have a cleaning lady, who is an absolute goddess in my world. I freely admit to being better at Battle Drill 6 than cleaning my house. For those of you that don’t know, Battle Drill 6 is enter a building and clear a room. And I suck at it. So when I say I’m better at that than cleaning...well you get the idea. The problem with housework is that it requires constant management. I swear, I’m home with the kids for ten minutes and the house is destroyed. My snazzy new website, however, will last until I decide to tinker with it again. See the difference?
So there are things in this life that I am terrible at. I pay people to do those things for me. If I could hire someone to cook dinner for me and my family for the rest of my life, I would do it. Because I’m a terrible cook. But I’m a food Nazi when it comes to what my kids eat. Go figure.
But there are other things in my life that represent a challenge. A “can I do it for myself” gauntlet thrown down. The fastest way to get me to do things is tell me I can’t.
Mom, I am sorry for that. Truly, I am. Websites fall into that category. So do challenges from my brigade commander, who thinks my troops can’t get a tropo link installed. Watch us. Give my Vipers about forty-eight hours’ notice and they can move mountains.
And in the meantime, check out my new website.
Memorial Day 2011
May 30, 2011
WHEN I WAS IN Iraq, the true meaning of Memorial Day finally hit me. It shouldn’t have taken me thirteen years in service to get it, but for whatever reason, it did. Since that Memorial Day, when the chow hall of FOB Marez was decorated with American flags and the names of the fallen, Memorial Day has been a sobering reminder of the men and women who have gone before us.
When I was in eleventh grade, my band took a trip to Washington DC. I was a junior in high school who thought she knew way more than the adults around her (shocking, I know, but bear with me). I was a typical bitchy teenager who chafed around adults left and right. One of our stops was at the Washington Mall. It’s a huge place, full of monuments and memorials. I remember the news when they’d finally decided on a design for the Vietnam Wall. I grew up in the post-Vietnam world, when people still talked about it on the news but I didn’t understand. Not really.
I didn’t understand how people could spit on our soldiers. I couldn’t fathom how people who didn’t fight could have called our soldiers baby-killers. When Somalia and the Battle of Mogadishu broke on the news, I remember mumbling something to the effect of “Go get ’em, boys.” I remember my mom asked how I could say that when I didn’t believe we should have been there in the first place. It was something that stuck with me. At that point in my life, a freshman in high school, I didn’t yet realize that my parents had been hippies, my father marching in the Civil Rights movement.
I knew on some level that our soldiers were special but I never saw myself as one. I’d briefly entertained the notion of becoming a fighter pilot (thank you, Top Gun and Iron Eagle) but that idea quickly fell out of favor when I realized how hard it was to get into the Air Force Academy. But in my junior year in high school, on that field trip to Washington DC, something happened. Maybe it was the spark that landed me where I am today. I don’t know.
But I remember walking up to the Vietnam Wall. I remember my throat clenching tight, my eyes burning. I was sixteen. I didn’t have a clue why I felt this way. My father didn’t have any brothers who died there. My mom only had sisters. I knew no one on that wall but the tears burned until they spilled down my cheeks. I couldn’t explain it then and I can’t explain it now. What was it about the names on that wall, the sadness that clutched the air around it that made a cocky high school junior break down and cry?
Fast forward six years. It’s 2000 and I’m now a staff sergeant in the Army. I’m at Fort Gordon for what was then known as BNCOC (pronounced be-noc): Basic Non Commissioned Officer Course. My platoon was tasked to be escorts for the Moving Wall, a traveling mockup of the Vietnam Wall that moved around the country, bringing the memorial to those who could never travel to DC to see the real thing. I remember escorting a little lady to her son’s name. I didn’t cry that time, but the emotion was just as strong. I listened as she talked about her son, about what he’d wanted to be when he grew up. And at the end, all I could do was thank her for her family’s sacrifice.
The words felt hollow. Empty. How could something so trivial mean anything to this woman who’d lost a child to a war the nation still argued over, let alone accepted?
I don’t know how much these moment changed my point of view but I remember standing in the chow hall in Mosul, doing my best not to bawl like a baby in front of my husband and his soldiers. I couldn’t explain it. All I know is that memorializing the fallen, a group that now holds the names of close friends and former soldiers, is hard. There are no words that can explain the tightness in my chest or the tears that fall automatically whenever I walk up to the 1st Cav Memorial.
I don’t know that Memorial Day will always have this impact on me. But I think memorials always will. For now, I avoid them because I don’t like to unlock the box where I keep all that relentless emotion locked away. I’ve spent this Memorial Day avoiding the memorials. Maybe it’s because I’ve recently lost a good friend that I’ve avoided it. Maybe it’s because the fear that maybe I’ll become one of those Gold Star families because my husband is back at war for a fourth time. I don’t know. I hope it doesn’t make me a bad soldier or a selfish person. The memorials will be there but for now, I won’t be.
And maybe someday, I’ll be able to attend one without feeling like I can’t breathe. In the meantime, I’ll write about it, then tuck it back away to get back on with life. Because I think it was Voltaire who said in Candide that we must tend our gardens. My garden is my soldiers, my kids, and my books.
#YASaves? Yeah, It Really Does
June 6, 2011
YESTERDAY, THE TWITTERVERSE BLEW up with the hashtag #YASaves started by Maureen Johnson in protest to a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Darkness Too Visible” by Meghan Cox Gurdon. I won’t recap the entire article as I believe everyone should read it for themselves and make their own judgments. Kind of like the books the author judged and did not read.
So here’s one more blog about the power of books, and in this case, YA books. When I was growing up, I was the kid who always had her nose in a book. This has not changed. I read whenever I get the chance. And the power of YA novels means that kids get to start thinking about the broader world that they live in. I grew up in a tiny (and I do mean tiny) town. When I was in seventh grade, I read my first romance novel, courtesy of my grandmother’s Danielle Steel collection. I read Message From Nam and it made me start thinking about the war that shaped my parent’s generation. I read Anne McCaffrey and tons of science fiction, some that was probably pretty violent and depraved (I don’t remember the book, but I remember a woman being raped repeatedly until her captor’s voice aroused her). Was that a better choice for a seventh grade me than Jackie Morse Kessler’s Rage? Um, no.
YA authors bear a responsibility and I don’t think you will find a single one who is not cognizant of the fact that other people’s children are reading their books. As someone who has written a YA novel that deals with sexual abuse in a military family, I was extremely worried about the reception this book would get, not from kids, who I hope would see that life in the military home is not all American flags and hero parades, but from their parents.
The author in the Wall Street Journal piece longs for the literature section of forty years ago, at a time when The Outsiders had not been written and all of the dirty little secrets from sexual abuse, rape, drugs, and all the other horrors in today’s society were behind closed doors. She longs for a time when GLBT teens remained in the closet and were bullied and harassed and driven to cutting or worse self-destructive behaviors because they felt like they were alone in the world. She longs for a time when we didn’t know about the child abuse happening next
door.
What the author fails to realize is that these books serve a purpose. To negate the entire genre as too dark is to pretend that the world we live in is actually a utopia where everyone treats each other with dignity and respect. Where I wouldn’t have to have The Talk about touching and privates with my four and six year old. I may resent the fact that I have to have that talk but not having it doesn’t mean my kids won’t still be put in that situation. If I talk to them about it, if they read a book that explains the difference between boy parts and girl parts then maybe, when another little kid on the bus says if you want to be my friend, you have to let me touch you down there, they’ll know that it’s not okay. And maybe, they’ll tell someone. And maybe, the little kid who said it will have an adult watching out for her and someone will stop the adult that first said it to her.
The YA section of the book store is a reflection of the world we live in. Even the Hunger Games, which I did not find too violent at all, is a reflection of the soulless society we live in where we will sell out our best friend for the chance to be on TV. The author of that article can bemoan that fact all day long, but it does not negate the truth of our world.
As a former teenager, I’m grateful the young adult section of the bookstore is exploding. Kids are reading. Thank heaven, kids are reading. Maybe they’ll find a book that keeps them from pulling the trigger or swallowing a bottle of pills because the pain is too much. Anyone who had a utopian teenage life, I’m glad for you. But don’t look at the world through the lens of your own experience and think that speaks for everyone’s experience.
As a parent, I believe are some YA novels that are too old for my kids. I wrote a piece just a couple weeks ago about finding a YA novel in the elementary school book fair. I’m not happy about it because it’s too old for the majority of elementary school kids. But is it good for teens and older middle schoolers? Guess what? That’s their parents’ job to decide, not mine. The book still deserves to be out there. Just because I don’t read it doesn’t mean someone won’t enjoy it.
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