Silence Was My Father’s Fortress. I Shared It for a Time Until Poetry Set Me Free.

I grew up on Air Force bases overseas, bouncing from one country to another. While most mothers were marking heights on kitchen door frames, mine was packing cupboards and taping boxes for yet another move. My father was a pilot, his plane an F-4 Phantom with a shark’s mouth painted on its nose. As it screamed overhead, I would ride my banana-seated bike on the gravel trail paralleling the runway, racing, imagining what it must be like to score the blue with white contrails and leave proof of my passage.

I wanted to be just like my father. But pilots had perfect eyesight, and I wore thick glasses. If I couldn’t fly the planes, I figured, I would jump out of them instead. I joined the 82nd Airborne Division and became a paratrooper. After the school circuit (basic, airborne, ranger), I joined my unit just as Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. My mother later told me that when I went off to war, it was only the second time she’d seen my father cry.

When I came back from Iraq, I carried with me the images of landscapes littered with ruined bodies. To deal with the stew of emotions roiling inside, I emulated my father, who never spoke about his experiences in Vietnam. Stoicism was his fortress. It became mine, too.

Silence had served as a tolerable stopgap when action ruled my world. But once I left the Army, I had too much free time to think. I’d seen reports about the high rate of veteran suicides—22 per day. I hadn’t considered taking my own life, but I often got angry at simple things, exploding in violent outbursts. A friend of mine, Nancy Powell, suggested I try filling the darkness inside me with something different than silence. She suggested I write a poem. Poetry, she said, would allow me to explore the painful subjects I’d been avoiding and ask questions without needing to come up with answers.

When I started writing about my war experiences, I focused on tiny moments of little consequence—soldiers breaking down weapons and cleaning latrines, stuffing pictures of girlfriends in the webbing of Kevlar helmets, trading MREs with Bedouins for rides on their camels.

I wrote about the quiet camaraderie of paratroopers huddled together with rifles on their laps. I wrote about the desert’s rock-strewn plains, as foreign to us as the dark side of the moon. I wrote about a shrieking blare one night that sent us scrambling for our protective masks, only for the nuclear-biological-chemical team to discover a goat had peed on the air-sampler alarm.

One poem led to another, which led to another. From those mundane moments I inched toward memories freighted with remorse. I wrote about the husks of bodies in back-splintered bunkers and wounded soldiers crying in medevac helicopters. I wrote about ripping patches from the sleeves of dead men and carrying them home as trophies. I wrote about the children we searched at gunpoint, the resignation in their eyes, the certitude that we would execute them.

I rummaged through the fear, guilt, and shame I’d bottled up inside and found the exploration cathartic. Writing each poem was like picking away a scab. It hurt, yes, but each time I ripped it off, the scab shrunk, the pain diminished, and the skin beneath grew healthier.

For years, I shoved my scribbled work into drawers. Sometimes, I’d revisit poems, read through them again, and do some editing. I was scared to let them out in the world. It had been hard enough to write about my experiences; letting others see them seemed impossible. If people glimpsed my inner thoughts and knew what violence I was capable of, surely they would think me a monster.

Nancy had other ideas. “Come with me to an open mic,” she said. She figured if I heard other people reading their work, I might be encouraged to do the same.

“OK,” I told her. “But I’m just coming to listen.”

The open mic was wedged into one corner of a coffee shop, competing with orders being called out and the general hubbub of a dozen different conversations. The readings were a hodgepodge of homilies, rants, and silly cat poems. But whenever someone revealed a painful portion of their personal geography—rapes, addictions, disease, dementia—the crowd’s support was overwhelming. The universal response was one of empathy.

I kept going and, after several months, worked up the courage to share one of my war poems. My voice quavered as I read my work, the page trembling in my hands. A skewer of raw emotion stabbed through me and I nearly broke down crying, shocking myself more than anyone else. I’d roared my anger in public before, but never wept.

I’d always imagined people reacting to my poems with shocked expressions that would slowly turn to disgust or contempt. But my dread had been unfounded. No one recoiled in horror. When I finished, the audience thundered their applause.

Later that night, a few people offered thanks and shared stories of sons and daughters in similar situations. The relief I felt in knowing I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t viewed as some alien abomination, was immeasurable.

Trauma invades everyone’s lives, soldiers and civilians alike. These people, I learned, had their own troubled backstories, their own apprehensions. Each was also seeking acceptance from the group. One by one, as we spoke into the mic, we faced up to our damaged histories and liberated ourselves from their dominion.

Far too long I’d fretted over my past, allowing it to rule my present. But no more. I began to submit my poems to journals and found acceptance on a wider scale.

In 2013, FutureCycle Press published a collection of my war poems titled Half a Man. For the cover picture, they used a picture of me in Iraq, young, grim-faced, and holding an AK-47. I wish I could go back in time and tell that kid that nothing troublesome ever gets better by ignoring it. “Do your job,” I’d say. “And when your job is over, don’t bury your story. Write it down and share it with the world. Own your history so it won’t own you.”

“Alternate History” by Bill Glose

Originally published in The Sun, December 2016

When we rolled into Iraq,
newspapers predicted more
than half of us would die.

Eyes masked by tinted goggles,
we feigned indifference with shrugs,
joking and slugging shoulders

embroidered with AIRBORNE tabs,
those narrow strips proclaiming
our shared religion.

Looking back
on my younger self, so full of bravado
and jingoistic pride, I ponder

the multiverse theory of existence.
On another plane, perhaps predictions
were correct, my corpse rolled

into an unmarked grave then covered
by a dune’s shifting sand. But then,
another world would provide

yet another version of me—one that
never went to war, never bargained
with God to swing his hammer

on someone else, never unleashed
the black dog within his heart
and set its gnashing teeth to work.

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This War Horse reflection was written by Bill Glose, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Abbie Bennett wrote the headlines.

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