My experience of war

"Let me read you this poem I wrote in high school about war," I said to Karl, after digging through old journals to find it.

Karl raised an eyebrow, "based on your extensive experience of war?"

This is the problem with me writing about Karl: I am making it up. I have no experience of war. I have exactly the same experience of war now as I did in high school.

I was still laying in bed this morning when Karl started a monologue about an interpreter they called Jack. Karl was wearing a neck gaiter because it was cold and it made him think of interpreters who hide their faces so their families won't be killed. Jack wouldn't leave Iraq because he was saving up money to get his family out of Iraq... but someone kidnapped his family and he spent all his savings to save them.

I could try to dramatize Jack's story, add in details about his savings and his tears, but I can't. Not only am I awful at fiction* but I don't want to put myself in Jack's place. I don't want to think about risking my life to give my kids a better life, only to find out that everything I worked for had to go to keep them alive in the place I was trying to save them from.

I don't want to know what it's like to be a soldier brandishing a gun or to be a mother facing a gun with her children, trying to keep them quiet while our house is ransacked. I like living in a nice American suburb with two children who go to school and have enough food.

I do not know what it is like to wait in line for men with guns from another country to give me an allowance of rice. I do not know what it is like to be a man with a gun giving rice to a woman who may or may not want to kill me. I  know what it is like to be on government assistance to buy my own rice from the grocery store in suburban America with no guns in sight.

Anything I write is the garble at the end of a game of telephone. My experiences of war are not experiences of war. My stories about strykers and IEDs and interpreters and explosions are not my stories. I like my running water, my wifi, my safe commute to take my kids to school, that my kids get to go to school, that my daughter gets to go to school. That is not to say this place is safe. I know from the stories I tell that no place is safe... but I like to pretend we are safe. I can pretend we are safe because I have no experience of war.










*true story! If I didn't have an interesting life, I would probably spend my days describing my dogs' snores.