Preface To the War Series

“At the war’s end, I, too, promised myself that I had done with talking about it.  I had talked and lived war for six years, and I was longing to pay attention to something – anything – else.  But that is like wishing I were someone else.  The war is now the story of our lives, and there’s no subtracting it.”
page 70 of GLaPPPS

About a week ago, I finished a wonderful novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and Tuesday I finished The Postmistress.   Both books were accidental reads for me.  The first, I selected at Barnes and Noble because it had a cover that made me pick it up (and it was half price), and the second was one my mother gave me during my last visit to NC.  I had no idea that both would have World War II as the unifying storyline with woman protagonists.  Reading these two books about a topic that’s already been written about for decades, but which were penned with fresh voices and original perspectives (not unlike Sarah’s Key which I also immensely enjoyed a couple years ago), reminded me that my story can be “new,” too, if I mentally and emotionally commit to writing in my genuine voice.  What these individual stories offer within the context of a larger one is the distilling down of a tangled mess of events and emotions that one could never make sense of otherwise.  My hope is to do the same with my story.

When I originally began this writing journey, I did not have any desire to discuss my time in the Marine Corps, the wars, veterans, etc.  I wanted to write about my world travels and sporting adventures.  But these war stories, past and present, seem to keep finding me, and even though I’ve posted snippets about my time in the Marine Corps, or journal excerpts from my deployments to Iraq, I’ve recognized that I need to get more focused again. I’ll probably still blog about a variety of subjects, but for the most part, I’ll try to focus on the deployment theme.  So, tomorrow I plan to start my “war series” which will kick off with my journal entries from the few days before I left for my first deployment to Iraq. 

Come with me on my quest if you’d like ;)