Conference rooms are more or less all the same. Tables, chairs, whiteboards, and overhead projectors lay in wait for the impending PowerPoint lectures, budget reviews, and quarterly assessments that make up most meetings. The conference room I found myself in at the beginning of my first Coming Home Dialogue was not that much different. Room 406 in the Antonin Scalia Law School building on the campus of George Mason University had a large white table in the center of the room. Fifteen name placards neatly identified seats for each of the participants and projected a sense of formality. The familiar smell of coffee and bagels floated in the air. As people filtered in on that sunny April morning, they took their seats, made cursory introductions, and fidgeted through their bags while nervously waiting for my cofacilitator and me to dive into what would be one of the most personally and professionally transformative adventures of my life.
The Coming Home Dialogues, as described on its website, offer:
Military veterans the opportunity to explore the moral, psychological, and spiritual impacts of war on the warrior, especially as he or she returns home. The project coordinates dialogues among veterans, academics, and civilians in a variety of roles, using sources in philosophy, history, poetry, and literature to spur discussion.
Initially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the program has spent the last three years creating a place for veterans to safely tell their stories, listen to others, and create a shared respect between civilian and military audiences. What I have seen among a variety of audiences across the country is that all of us—civilian, active-duty and retired military, combat and noncombat veterans—have relationships with combat and trauma. However, we so often create and hold to false assumptions that these different relationships are the obstacles to the critical conversations that must exist between military and civilian audiences. The literature and conversational approach used in this program show how the poems, short stories, and essays bridge those gaps in experience and give people an opportunity to create common ground. That common ground is where the conversations start, and we need to support, financially and logistically, these dialogues to keep them alive.
One of my most effective exercises during these sessions has participants read a poem out loud and then write about their personal relationship to combat using the poem as a guide. The intent is to represent a particular emotion by means of symbols that objectify that emotion and are associated with it (an objective correlative). In other words, I ask them to focus on details rather than the ideas behind the details when they write. We have all heard it: show, don’t tell. In this case, I use Brian Turner’s poem, “What Every Soldier Should Know,” an exploration of the complicated relationship between combat soldiers in Iraq and the local population. He opens the poem with a simple, sardonic piece of advice:
If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon,
it could be for a wedding, or it could be for you.
His shifting use of first, second, and third person pronouns as the poem goes on creates complementary and contradictory things to “know.” Some of his most powerful couplets incorporate the local language and allude to the Department of Defenses’ sometimes confusing use of cultural awareness training:
Sabah el khair is effective.
It means Good morning.
Inshallah means Allah be willing.
Listen well when it is spoken.…
Men wearing vests rigged with explosives
walk up, raise their arms and say Inshallah.
In the end, the piece transcends the narrow lens of a combat veteran’s war-time experience and connects with a much broader audience through Turner’s use of specific details that express the emotional confusion of combat. He does not tell soldiers anything they need to know about war but rather simply writes what he knows.
The exercise itself is quite easy to follow. It is a paint-by-numbers approach that explicitly states that no one will be able to write a good poem in the fifteen minutes we take to complete it. I get laughs and people let down their guard. Because of the poem’s efficacy and because I give participants the permission to safely try their hand at being creative, I inevitably get powerful glimpses into those personal and diverse objective correlatives. However, there is always a moment near the end of the exercise when I get a sense of dread about what is going to happen when I ask people to share. There is no guarantee that asking a room full of hardened combat veterans that includes career Navy SEALs, Marines, retired flag officers, and military chaplains to be openly vulnerable with a handful of civilian college professors will end well. But the process and the amazingly equalizing experience of reading that poem and then writing their own pieces somehow gives the participants the permission to be vulnerable, honest, and open to the idea that they are not that much different from each other. The awkwardness of the creative stages, and forcing them to think in terms of experiences and not assumptions about those experiences allows authenticity and honesty to surface.
The first time I did this exercise, I could not shake the feeling that I had seen something like this before. At some point during that first Coming Home Dialogues session, that bland and average conference room in Virginia transformed into something else, somewhere else. I did not think too much about it at that time and I was just happy the exercise worked as a catalyst for creating powerful dialogues. I was willing to let that be enough. However, as I was driving home after this most recent session at the U.S. Air Force Academy, it came to me. Driving north on Interstate 25 to the Denver Airport, I passed the Colorado Renaissance Festival and smelled the distinctive scent of a campfire. Without warning, I immediately found myself in an armored vehicle driving on Route Tampa in North-Central Iraq en route to an IED call. I do not suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but certain smells still evoke powerful memories. This time, as usual, I quickly came back to the reality of my rental car but was left with the remnant memory of that deployment and the many nights we would sit around campfires rehashing the events of the day.
In the darkness, everything was on the table and every team member—from the most senior to the most junior—was open to judgment and expected to be accountable for their actions. In a sense, it was our very own peer-review process that transcended the traditional hierarchy of military rank. If certain issues were too tough to handle, the crackle of the fire would fill the silence as necessary. When tempers flared, the flames provided safe separation. Everyone felt safe in those moments, back on the base, surrounded by the closest and most trusted people in their lives. Interestingly, when I returned to the region in 2008 and then again to Iraq in 2009, I found teams from different units, different services, and different countries all doing the same thing—sitting around a fire, talking.
As I thought about it more, I came to realize that around those fires, rank and position did not matter. Similarly, inauthentic politeness and niceties did not exist. Everyone sitting in those worn-out, sand-covered folding lawn chairs knew that he owed nothing but his most honest self and that he would get the same from every other person within the fire’s glow. Professionally, those few hours yielded some of the most effective unit leadership, after-action briefs, and organic management of good order and discipline. These were the moments when we would comfort each other, scold each other, and serve each other in ways we did not even know were necessary. Those nights temporarily burned away the memories, the horror, the sadness of any particular day and gave us the chance to remember why we were there. If we could not get past the anger and frustration to remember why, it at least pushed away the realities of the day for just a moment and let us imagine that we were back home, around a more comfortable and welcoming fire in a land that did not hate us so much.
One of the biggest hurdles we face today is fostering respectful and beneficial conversations about the topics of moral and spiritual injury. How does the veteran express to a civilian audience the emotional confusion and complicated relationship with the unmatched excitement and equally horrific trauma of war? How does that conversation start without platitudes and parades? How does it continue to be authentic and transformative when both sides feel uncomfortable and uncertain about what’s appropriate or disrespectful?
I am often struck by the phenomenon that powerful poetry and literature do not need to be explained or demystified by some expert in a college classroom when we give ourselves permission to experience it. The Coming Home Dialogues taps into that. Just as great art does not need an expert to explain its objective correlative, soldiers do not need to be, nor should they be, the experts in explaining the varied relationships with war. During every Coming Home Dialogues session I have facilitated, when I let the audience see themselves within the literature, when I created a space for them to speak openly about that relationship, and when I successfully gave the military and civilian participants the opportunity to listen to each other with respect, they inevitably were brave enough to be vulnerable and learn from all of their stories.
These sessions have just scratched the surface of finding an effective framework for bridging the gap between the military and civilian populations that make up a society at war for almost two decades. But it is not a framework we invented. Going as far back as The Iliad, Homer painted pictures of soldiers using fires and their associated rituals in emotionally cathartic ways similar to the ones I experienced during my deployments. When Achilles finally decides to reenter the war against the Trojans, he strikes Hector down and ends the Trojans’ greatest hope of holding off the Greeks. Achilles struggles to reconcile the glory of killing Hector with the rage and sorrow he still feels over the loss of his best friend Patroclus:
Farewell, Patroclus, even there in the House of Death!
Look—all that I promised once I am performing now:
I’ve dragged Hector here for the dogs to rip him raw—
and here in front of your flaming pyre, I’ll cut the throats
of a dozen sons of Troy in all their shining glory,
venting my rage on them for your destruction!
The brutality of human sacrifice coupled with the celebratory elements of war intermingle in this and many scenes like it, and often it is around a fire where we see that confluence of conflicting emotions come to rest.
Today we find ourselves replacing campfires with conference rooms. As we move forward, we must embrace our shared right and responsibility to enter into these conversations. The Coming Home Dialogues facilitate that acceptance and are worth continuing.