What We Carry (TinyLetter Archive)

 Dear Ones,

The week before the break, we start reading "The Things They Carried." I give the students a journal assignment:

What 5 things would you take with you if you knew you'd be gone for a year, unable to see or speak to your family? You can approach this as if you were a soldier going away to war, or you can approach it as if you're going on a service trip like the Peace Corps in a remote area. Assume your basic needs are met.

The students mostly take this seriously. Some of them bring more weapons: a crossbow for hunting. Some think practically: a camping filtration system to turn unclean water drinkable in a pinch. Most have something sentimental: family pictures, a necklace from mother. And still others are concerned with boredom: decks of cards, a basketball, a yoyo, music player. Journals or paper and envelopes are considered imperative, and many also want to document with cameras. Fights erupt about whether it's smarter to bring a pen or pencil. In each class, some student asks me what I would bring.

I thought this through in advance: a notebook to write poems or letters or use as a journal. A book of poems, probably Craig's. Definitely a camera, though I'm not sure which one. It'd have to be digital but something not too advanced with batteries that die quickly. I'm torn at this point between one of my grandfather's pocket knives or an iPod. But the battery would go quickly, so maybe not music. Actually, I'd bring photos (tucked into my notebook?). Or perhaps I'd bring a travel guitar and teach myself when I had time. And last, surprisingly, I decide to bring my Grandfather's heart-shield Bible. Not for any reason having to do with Jesus, but because if I were actually somewhere dangerous, I would like to have this object to protect me and also to remind me of my grandfather and how he carried it 70 years earlier flying in the second World War.

Someone says, Oh come on, Miss A. Like you would ever be a soldier? And I bristle at the comment, as much as I try not to. I feel my own insecurities about my health and weakness rise up, but I try to suppress them. So I respond that No, I most likely would not be a soldier, but I have thought seriously about becoming a conflict photographer. And more than one student says, Ooohh yeah, I could see you doing that. But I also wonder at my annoyance. Is it bad to be a person whom others think could not willingly kill or participate in war? Follow orders? Should I take it as a compliment?

Just a few weeks prior, I ask my aunt about a friend of mine from high school. He was the strongest person I knew and one of the first boys I ever remember being completely baffled by. I wanted to figure him out, this strange, quiet, football-playing, choir boy who slept on the floor every night to practice and turned his closet into a camo shrine. Three years ago he was detained at the airport in our hometown with blocks of C-4. My aunt tells me that he is now remarried, living back in our hometown with their young child. I realize that this is a different kid, so I ask if he ever sees his first. No, she says, his ex-wife has full custody. They found he had a lot more explosives at their home; when she found out, she was done. It's strange to think of what could happen to a person in war that would lead them to steal explosives and begin making plans for them. Somehow he got an honorable discharge, but it seems like it was mostly for the army to save face--to call what he did an accident. I wonder what it is he brought back with him from Afghanistan and what pieces of himself he left behind. Surely sleeping on the floor and running barefoot on snow didn't prepare him for: what exactly? I guess only soldiers can really know.

Yours,

The Unsoldier