Basic training for chronicling a war beyond words

The Marine contingent was supposed to be there for only a few minutes, a quick in-and-out to guard trucks resupplying a 10-story hospital in Ramadi. But one of the deliverymen was delayed in Baghdad, 30 miles away, so the Marines had to wait, each tick of the clock giving insurgents more time to salt the escape route with bombs.

More than an hour passed and Cpl. Veronika Tuskowski felt her nerves stretching in the sweltering June dusk. “Anything longer than 10 minutes is dangerous,” she said. When the caravan finally began rolling through empty alleys festooned with anti-American graffiti, the very walls a cover for death, the fear threatened to overwhelm Tuskowski’s Marine training as she crouched in the back of an open-topped Humvee.

“We were just huddled down, just waiting for the explosions,” said Tuskowski, 22, a Marine combat reporter from Orlando, Fla. “I was really jittery. I was praying to myself, worried about my family back home -- I’m an only child. I almost wanted to close my eyes and cover my ears .... I was wondering: ‘Is this my time?’ ”

No bombs went off. But Tuskowski carried away an indelible memory of fear and anticipation and the mortal comprehension that she easily could have died.

Tuskowski says she wants to write about all that, to add her voice to a history that is still unfolding. A rare joint operation by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pentagon could give her a chance.

Over the last nine months, two dozen established writers have conducted NEA-organized writing workshops at Camp Pendleton and 10 other military bases -- the next is scheduled for this week at Fort Bragg -- to prod returning vets and their stateside spouses to write about their experiences in fiction, nonfiction or poems. The NEA hopes to anthologize the best of the work submitted by the end of March in a book to be published next year.

All the submitted works -- more than 800 pieces so far -- will be archived at the Library of Congress. Though some question how much you can teach about writing in the span of a few hours, Dana Gioia, head of the NEA, believes there will be “a kind of freshness and authenticity about this writing that might be hard to duplicate down the road.”

The NEA estimates that more than 1,000 people have attended the workshops, although enrollment has been inconsistent. A September seminar by bestselling author Tom Clancy drew about 140 people at the naval station in Norfolk, Va.

But only 35 people attended a recent session at Camp Pendleton, led by memoirist and novelist Tobias Wolff and former Fresno State military historian Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative writer who has won fans among Bush administration officials for his view that the United States’ military confrontations with Islamic fundamentalism is a showdown between consensual democracy and repressive theocracy.

Roughly a third of the attendees were Camp Pendleton public affairs staffers encouraged to attend by their commander. Only five or so had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Reactions were mixed.

“I thought it would be a lot more hands-on,” said Sgt. Ryan Smith, a public affairs officer with the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot. “I’m just Joe Schmo Schmuckatelli with one day of college -- the history thing just really isn’t it. It just doesn’t really apply to what we do.”

But Cpl. Jennifer Valliere, 22, said she found Hanson’s talk “interesting,” and that it made her see her own four months as an Iraq combat broadcast correspondent in a different light. “It’s really kind of inspired me to start jotting things down.”

Recording fresh details

“Operation Homecoming” began in a bar. Gioia, a California poet and former food-marketing executive, was having a drink nearly two years ago with fellow poet Marilyn Nelson when the talk turned to people like Tuskowski and creating art out of war.

It has happened over more than 2,000 years of human history, from Thucydides’ stories of ancient Greek wars to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” from Tim O’Brien’s memoir-stories of Vietnam to Anthony Swofford’s “Jarhead,” one Marine’s take on the first Gulf War. But those works came several years after the wars themselves, after the writers had time to reflect on what they had seen.

Sitting there sipping drinks, the two poets agreed that someone should find a way to capture the experiences of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq while they were still fresh, before time eroded the details. Gioia crystallized the idea further with his staff in Washington, secured a contribution from the Boeing Co. to underwrite the $452,000 project, and launched Operation Homecoming.

Technology, though, might have already outpaced the NEA. Soldiers have been blogging from Iraq throughout the engagement, and short films on the war and its aftermath have already made it onto the Internet and into film festivals. The documentary “Gunner Palace,” a soldier’s view of Iraq, opened this month and several analytical books have been published.

Memoirs too are in the works, including “The Last Truth I’ll Ever Tell” by John Crawford, who joined the National Guard for the college benefits, not envisioning combat in Iraq.

And “War Letters” editor Andrew Carroll of Project Legacy, which preserves wartime correspondence, is finishing a collection of Iraq-related mail before he edits the NEA’s planned Operation Homecoming anthology.

Samuel Hynes, a retired Princeton University professor, World War II memoirist and author of “The Soldiers’ Tale,” about personal war accounts, applauds the desire to help returning veterans record their experiences but questions the design.

“You’re not going to turn them into writers in one day -- that’s ridiculous,” Hynes said. “It makes it sound like a propaganda move or a publicity move rather than a serious effort to help these people write.”

McKay Jenkins, a University of Delaware professor who has written about the experiences of military units, said his workshop at New York’s Fort Drum was designed to open soldiers’ eyes. “I was encouraging people who aren’t writers, who have had a remarkable experience, to see their own experiences as a writer would,” Jenkins said. “There wasn’t enough time to go into detail on writing technique.”

Hanson sees the project as a means of gathering raw material for future historians, creating a paper trail that has been absent from earlier wars.

“The U.S. Army had an official history team that interviewed people after World War II and that made a big difference -- we know so much more about World War II than we do about World War I for that reason,” Hanson said, adding that projects by Ken Burns and Stephen Ambrose were built around the reflections of people years after the events because “people fresh out of battle” hadn’t written down their experiences.

That the project is government-run doesn’t bother Hanson. “This is government-sponsored, but it’s not supervised,” he said. “They’re not sitting down and saying things like, ‘How many bullets did you shoot?’ like they did in World War II. [It’s more like,] ‘Here’s what you can do -- go for it. We’ll try to aid and encourage you. We don’t know what you’ll get back, but at least if it’s archived and gone through, then it’s going to be a rich resource.’ ”

Some, though, are uneasy with the government acting as its own historian. “The NEA will be in a bit of a bind if they get a really killer piece of writing about something like Abu Ghraib, or telling more truth about controversial things,” said author McKay Jenkins, who supports the program and led one of the first workshops at Fort Drum. “The NEA are presidentially approved people. That’s where the tension lies. There is a point where patriotism and nationalism and honest writing can come into serious conflict.”

Already the NEA has posted excerpts on its website that churn emotions with imagery of flags and families back home, the dead of Sept. 11 and “kids on the ground that we would be supporting” with Air Force jet attacks on Afghani fighters. Still, Gioia insists that the project is not government propaganda.

“I’m confident that at every stage of the game we’ve made it clear that this is an arts program,” Gioia said. “We recruited faculty from the full political spectrum. We haven’t told our faculty what to teach, and we aren’t telling the students what to write. We’re putting together an independent panel of editors, and they’re simply being asked to choose the best writing. No one involved directly with the program has a political agenda.”

‘The ugly side of things’

At 33, Cpl. Paul Leicht is a decade older than most of the other Marines at the Camp Pendleton workshop. He joined in July 2002 after ditching a well-paying job as a Chicago paralegal, figuring it was time to “put up or shut up” on his long-held belief that he had a duty to serve his country.

“I was working downtown, I was single, and I just wasn’t happy with what I was doing,” says Leicht, sitting on sun-worn wooden bleachers overlooking a muddy running track between the Paige Fieldhouse and the Marine Memorial Chapel. “I always admired people who had seen combat ... maybe because I was naive. I just thought that it was such a harrowing experience, a life-changing event, that it was like a rite of passage. I felt like I had to do it. My grandfather was in World War II, saw a lot of combat. Growing up, I always wanted to talk to him about his experiences fighting the Germans, and he never wanted to talk about it.”

So Leicht signed up, got married in April 2003 after training for his assignment as a public affairs photojournalist, and got his orders to ship out to Iraq, excited that he’d be able to move among units, chronicling pilots one day, grunts patrolling neighborhoods the next. “I wanted to see the ugly side of things,” said Leicht, a compact man with Marine stubble thinning at the top.

He went in confident he’d come out. After spending his first few days with an Army medical evacuation unit, that confidence wavered. Witnessing death up close has a way of doing that.

“Sometimes we just feel like, ‘I’m not going to get killed -- it’s going to be the other guy.’ You feel like you’re invincible,” Leicht said. “Then it is the other guy, and you say to yourself, ‘Holy ... , when’s it going to be my time?’ ”

Leicht flew on helicopters picking up badly wounded soldiers, where he sat among the injured men and women on the flights back to the base hospital. “They were on the verge of dying and all bloody and crying to me for help, and here I am with a camera and I just feel really stupid,” he said. “One time, I was holding a guy’s hand for 45 minutes flying to Baghdad at night, hearing the bullets ping off the hull. It was pretty dark, and there were fires everywhere.”

The soldier died in surgery.

“I came back from my time with the Army medevac unit and people would ask, ‘Hey, how’d it go?’ ” Leicht recalled, shaking his head as a bewildered smile creases his face. “How do I tell them what I just saw? How do I tell them what it was like to be in that helicopter? So I just said, ‘Well, uh, good.’ To this day, I’m trying to process it.”

In the moment comes a flashback to earlier conversations when Leicht was the one asking the questions and his grandfather was shrugging off the answers. “Only now do I know why he didn’t want to talk about what he went through,” he said.

Rather than talk, Leicht hopes to write, as much for himself as for any concept of a historical record. The experience was personal and as transforming as he had hoped, but not in any way he expected. Or in any way he can explain yet beyond the notion that life is not to be taken for granted.

It will take more time, alone, with his thoughts and his memories and something with which to write it all down, a tool to divine comprehension from the incomprehensible. “The writing itself is the process through which you figure out what what you saw meant,” Leicht said. “You figure out how you’re changed because of it.”

Contact Scott Martelle at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.