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Noted author, decorated Marine examines the complicated ways we are at war with ourselves and other countriesFree Access

Will be featured keynote speaker at upcoming Festival of Book here



Elliot Ackerman will be the keynote speaker for this year’s Harbor Springs Festival of the Book. He will be in conversation with guest host Benjamin Busch on Friday, September 27. His new book, Places and Names, is a nonfiction account of the complexities of ongoing war. As a decorated marine and now, writer and journalist, Ackerman’s insights make for a fascinating read. (Photo by Huger Foote/Courtesy photo)

Elliot Ackerman will be the keynote speaker for this year’s Harbor Springs Festival of the Book. He will be in conversation with guest host Benjamin Busch on Friday, September 27. His new book, Places and Names, is a nonfiction account of the complexities of ongoing war. As a decorated marine and now, writer and journalist, Ackerman’s insights make for a fascinating read. (Photo by Huger Foote/Courtesy photo)

Editor’s Note: The fourth annual Harbor Springs Festival of the Book is set to take place throughout Harbor Springs Friday-Sunday, Sept. 27-29. In anticipation of that special event, Harbor Light feature writer/ editor Emily Meier is speaking with a number of the authors that will be a part of the Festival. Here she speaks with Elliot Ackerman, who will be the keynote speaker on Friday evening, Sept. 27. For more information on the Festival including schedule and tickets, go to www.hsfotb.org

Author, Elliot Ackerman, will be the keynote speaker for this year’s Harbor Springs Festival of the Book. Ackerman is the author of several novels including, Dark at the Crossing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Esquire to name a few. He is a former Marine who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. His latest book, Places and Names is a memoir that moves back and forth between his experiences serving as a Marine Special Operator and a journalist covering the ongoing wars. His unique perspective makes this book a must-read.

 

I didn’t know what to expect before speaking to Ackerman on the telephone for our interview. It was a pleasure to find him to be both serious and funny, intelligent and accessible. His writing is the same, which brings a different kind of depth to his stories, allowing people to enter into them without fear of being lectured or told what to think as he explores the complicated ways we are at war with ourselves and other countries.

EM: There is a moment in the book during your sit down with Abu Hassar, a fellow veteran of the Iraq war (though he fought on the other side), that I am sure most interviewers bring up because it hits on the title of your book (Places and Names). When Abed, your friend and translator, takes a break a silence falls in the lack of a shared language. That is until Abu and you begin to draw out a map of the places you both fought with the dates. This shared language of combat connects you both in a very interesting way. It’s a common ground even though you both subscribe to very different ideologies. In some ways, you share more with him than your friends back home who have never been to war. What a strange realization that is. Can you speak to that a bit? And can you speak to the way this moment informed the title of your book?

EA: There’s an idea that when you get to the end of war, toward the end of the experience, that notions of ideology and right or wrong kind of blur away. You’re stripped down to the barest essentials of what that experience was. I think, for Abu Hassar and I, it was a recognition of a commonality that we had; we had both been defined by our wars. And because we’d been similarly defined, there was ultimately this curiosity we had with one another, as if to get to know the other person would fill in this last part of understanding the experience. Every war is different. But every war is also the same in that they follow a certain emotional trajectory. After I had that experience with Abu Hassar, it reminded me of that famous Hemingway quote from A Farewell to Arms, which also echoes in the name of the book. The Hemingway quote I’m thinking of is this: “I had seen nothing sacred and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” I think that moment with Abu Hassar, when Abed stands up and leaves the two of us and we feel as though we can’t communicate, and we start sharing the names and places on the map, it’s this silent acknowledgement that we actually do share a language. And it’s a language that even if Abed had been there translating, he could not have translated. It was the language of places, names, and dates.

EM: It’s a very powerful moment and rendered on the page beautifully. Did you have that Hemingway quote in mind when you were writing it?

EA: Bob Dylan has this great quote from when an interviewer asked him how he came up with so many of his great lyrics and how long songs like Blowing in the Wind took to write. Dylan responded by saying that ‘If you’d have listened to as much Woody Guthrie as I have in my life, those lyrics just write themselves.’ I’ve been thinking about, and reading about, war since I was a kid. So it’s my equivalent of years listening to Guthrie. It’s not that I had that specific quote in mind. But I’ve read A Farewell to Arms several times. And I know that idea, which Hemingway was not the only one to express.

EM: When you are in the military, and specifically in combat, you have a heightened sense of purpose. For many, a civilian job doesn’t provide that same feeling of purpose. You channeled some of this into writing about war and these experiences. But how did you find that transition period? How did you come home to civilian life and make that adjustment?

EA: First of all, there is that sense or need to repurpose yourself. I write about it specifically in that passage in the book, “the crystal meth of purpose”. Guys I know, the ones who have come back and done well, they’re the ones who have repurposed themselves. And the ones I’ve seen who’ve really struggled, a lot of that struggle comes because they haven’t been able to find that second sense of purpose. So for me, yes, it was writing. But then, being a writer isn’t always easy. You struggle to find your topic, you struggle to find publishers and outlets who want to work with you. I found meaning in that struggle. But that struggle was oftentimes frightening.

The second part of it is there is often this sensibility we have- –and maybe it’s only heightened because there’s this massive civil-military divide that exists in this country– which is that if you’re a Marine, or a Marine Special Operator like I was, that you are of a certain archetype. The military has people with wide-ranging interests. I’ll frequently be asked when I’m on a book tour, ‘Tell us how you ended up becoming a writer having been in the military?’ Behind that question is the assumption that it’s odd that a military man would become a writer. I don’t take any offense to that. I think it’s well-meaning. But people who actually knew me when I was younger, say, ‘We think it’s odd that you ended up in the military because you were always this artistic young kid.’ I bring this up because we all have a multitude of aspects to our personality. I think that for people who’ve been in the military, or anyone who has had a very intense experience and has to do something else, when you repurpose yourself and have to tap into another part of your identity that can be very challenging.

EM: Yes, especially when maybe you don’t have an easily recognizable skill or passion. I can see that making the repurposing more of a struggle.

EA: Yes. And I think when you become a writer there’s a somewhat recognizable identity to what a writer is. The military gives you a very clear sense of identity. You wear that identity every day with your medals on your chest and your dress uniform. When you get out and you don’t have that identity anymore, and you have to create a new identity, that can be a challenge. Especially if you are going into a field where your identity is not easily given to you in the same way.

EM: You’ve written novels. And you have written many articles for various publications. But how did you make that jump into writing this book, which is nonfiction and memoir?

EA: I’d been writing all of these articles. And my longtime girlfriend, soon to be wife, who is also a writer pulled me aside and said, ‘You know you’re writing a book?’ I hadn’t seen that it was a book. But she recognized the narrative arc behind them before I did. It was sort of a memoir in essays. And that allowed me to start thinking about them in different ways, expanding some, filling in a lot of blanks, and building the connective tissue that made it a book.

EM: Writing articles and essays is one thing. But writing a sustained nonfiction narrative like this is still different. What were some of the challenges of writing this book?

EA: I was probably two thirds through the writing of it when I realized it was a book. I was just kind of instinctively writing pieces and found they were then fitting into this arc. And then I recognized where I needed to put in the connective tissue. The part of the book I’m most proud of, the last chapter, wasn’t in the book when I handed it into my editor. He was pleased with it but felt that I was holding something back by not dealing with the specifics of being awarded a medal. He said he understood if I didn’t want to write about it but felt it would be a better book if I figured out a way to write about it. I thought about it a long time. I had that summary of action that I’d been handed. And I realized that it was perhaps the key for me to be able to write about that stuff. And it has wound up being the part of the book that I am really proud of, a part that I hadn’t originally put in there.

EM: It’s very well done. That chapter does a lot of different things. It shows the complicated aspects of being at war. At the same time it humanizes war in a way that makes it more accessible for so many of us for whom war has become such an abstract idea. As we fight these wars on foreign grounds and they have gone on for years and years, the general public has become almost immune to them. It is in this chapter, in this Summary of Action, where you’ve filled in the personal and even humorous details between the factual lines. It gives the reader a very real sense of the complexity of what goes on in combat. One aspect of this chapter that stood out for me is the way in which humor plays a role in some of the most intense moments- -the nicknaming of the buildings after the Olsen twins, and the way the guys in the tank were listening to Britney Spears as they were amidst active fire. Were there other examples of how humor became part of the day-to-day? Can you speak to how humor became important amidst such intensity?

EA: We had a saying that ‘our job is too serious to take it seriously all the time’. If you do, you’ll lose your mind. You have to be able to release the anxiety that exists in these moments. It’s like the example of a kid in trouble who is smirking. I remember doing this as a kid. My son does this when he gets into trouble. He’ll stand in front of me with a smile on his face. But he’s scared and he’ll tell me he isn’t meaning to smile. It’s the anxiety. He’s smiling to release it. You see a lot of these moments; war is filled with contradiction. So it’s rife for these moments–like guys listening to Britney Spears in a tank amidst active fire.

EM: Do you think the people who can have a sense of humor in those kinds of moments, or about themselves, do better when they come back from war?

EA: I think we all need a sense of humor, now. I don’t say that with any partisan agenda to the left or right. I think this whole country needs to get its sense of humor back. But I think it does help. Humor allows you to process and see the absurdity in otherwise very tragic events. And that allows you to live with them.

EM: In that same Summary of Action chapter, you tell the story of the Marine who came to you saying he couldn’t do it anymore and how he kept thinking of his daughter. You make the decision to send him home and include the bit about his brother-in-law, who is serving alongside him, who tells you that he will never speak to him again now that he has left. Did you have strong feelings about him leaving too? How did you feel about the situation?

EA: Going in, the training that you do, you learn about combat fatigue and that there are people who aren’t going to do well in certain situations. You understand intellectually that’s nothing you should take personally. So as a platoon leader, in that moment, when the guys were really mad at him, I took it personally. On the one hand, I felt like maybe I should get the whole platoon together and have a talk with them and say, ‘Hey, you are not entitled to those emotions. He’s a casualty like anybody else.’ Maybe, if I was a bigger man, I would’ve found that the right thing to do. But I, myself, felt a sense of betrayal, that sense of ‘Hey we’ve been together for a long time and you leaving means we’re a person short. I know you’re scared. But we’re all scared.’ And that existed for me too; those conflicting emotions. In that moment, for better or for worse, I decided as the commander of the unit that while I was entitled to insist upon and demand obedience with order and discipline, there were things that these guys had earned the right to and were entitled to. And one of those things was their own emotions. I felt like I didn’t have the right to sit them down and tell them how they were supposed to feel about this. And I still don’t know if I handled it the right way. But it was a more complex decision than I had anticipated.

EM: We haven’t had a war, since WWII or maybe Vietnam, where there was a real beginning, middle, and end to it. Now we have wars that go on for years. We have people that come and go on deployment after deployment, some even spend an entire career at war. How did you choose an end to your active duty participation in it? And how did you deal with what I can only assume would be the complicated emotions in leaving behind friends and comrades who were continuing to fight?

EA: I think everybody who has left these wars has had to declare a separate peace. What I mean by that is that you have to basically say that the war is over, for me. And whenever you come back, there will be a group of guys who are going on their next deployment. They will ask you if you’re going. And saying, ‘no, I’m not’ is a very complicated decision and one that is fraught with guilt. This is one other layer of complexity that is specific to our wars, which is whenever we’ve left them, it’s been a personal choice. I write about this specifically in “What’s Buried in the Devil’s Mountain” chapter. I frequently have spoken with friends where we’ll say, ‘God I wish this was WWII’. Or, even, Vietnam where relatively quickly it was over and the embassy was evacuated in Saigon and you knew it was done. But this hasn’t been that way. So everyone has had to make their own separate peace, and know this thing is still going on, and that you’ve elected to no longer participate.

EM: What do you think the average American/ the general public gets wrong about war, it’s repercussions, and how it’s conducted today?

EA: I think our country exists right now in a position of great moral hazard with regard to how we have have elected to prosecute our wars. And what I mean by that is every war that America has fought has been fought under a specific paradigm from the Civil War–with the first-ever draft and income tax, that were designed to sustain the Civil War—into the second World War with national mobilization and the bond drives, into Vietnam with the draft. They are all characterized by a certain paradigm. These current wars have been fought with an all-volunteer military and deficit spending, no war tax. And because of that they have, by design, been set up in such a way that the American people are anesthetized to them. It makes it very easy for us to wage war. And then we wonder how we’ve been in Afghanistan for 18 years. It was designed that way. I say, we’re operating in a position of moral hazard because it’s easy for us to go to war. So when you ask about what the American people get wrong about war, it’s that we, counter-intuitively don’t think of ourselves as a militarized society when, in fact, we are a highly militarized society.

The easiest way, I think, for us to demilitarize would be to implement some sort of draft or war tax. When you say to people, ‘Let’s have a draft,’ that sounds like militarization but this is how you demilitarize. Because, with that at stake, people start paying attention and won’t permit these wars to go on. What ended Vietnam? The protest movement, the draft ended Vietnam.

EM: It’s crazy that in a time when we have 24-hour news, and things like Twitter connecting us to every news update, that we are actually more removed from what’s going on in so many ways.

EA: Especially in the world outside our borders.

EM: Yes, and even as we are updated about what’s going on in the world with constant news cycles, we have this huge disconnect.

EA: I believe it’s because news isn’t news. It’s not designed to inform. It’s designed to sustain our eyeballs, keep them on the tv screen. And the way that it does that is by keeping us indignant and rageful regardless of right or left. We’re watching politics now as a massive reality television show. It’s like at the end of the season, 2020, who will be president? And nothing else matters.

EM: And in order to keep the eyeballs glued to the screen you have to insight fear, panic, or a state of emergency. But everyone is becoming immune to it. We’ve all started to become immune to this low-grade sense of emergency so that doesn’t get our attention anymore.

EA: Yes, how many times in an hour do you see “Breaking News”.

EM: Breaking News used to mean we’re under attack or the president had been shot.

EA: And now it’s every hour there are eight breaking news alerts. It’s a business model. And news now is run to keep eyeballs on the screen. Most of it is designed to keep us rageful, indignant, pick your own emotion.

EM: I’d say especially fearful.

EA: Fearful, yes. That one especially.

EM: You recently wrote an Op-Ed for The Washington Post. I really enjoyed reading it. Especially because, like your book, it exists, in a way, above party lines.

EA: I like to read writing that doesn’t tell me what I’m supposed to think. I like when a writer gives me a little bit of room to make my own decisions.

EM: It goes back to the idea that your reader is smart enough to hear you. You allow room for your reader, the space to listen, because you don’t lecture. And these are such important stories to hear.

EA: And there are no easy answers to any of this. And those people that say that there are, I would contend, are selling something.

EM: In the Op-Ed piece, you write about both sides, Afghanistan and the United States, needing to keep promises in order to eventually have peace. Do you think it’s possible that both sides could honor their promises?

EA: I mean, it feels like it’s so impossible and so hard. And that’s with cause. But then you look at a place like the Balkans. I’m old enough to remember when that war was going on and there were so many people saying, ‘Those people have been killing each other for hundreds of years, they’ll never get along’. And I’ve been to the Balkans. When I lived in Turkey, I’d go on vacation in Croatia and other places. And it’s beautiful and those countries have rebuilt. So you just don’t know. You just don’t know. So do I think it’s possible? Sure. I mean, anything is possible. There are plenty of cases where people with deep antipathies have defied the odds and created peaceful societies. And it would be really nice if that was the case in Afghanistan. Having fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan there are some things that really struck me. When I was in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, and you’d sit with a local sheikh, the conversations were always about how we’ve got to figure this out, we’ve got to get this country back to peace. People still remember peace.

But in Afghanistan, in 2010 and 2011, when I was there, the life expectancy was 65 years old. Do the math there. Soviets invaded in 1979. So Afghans who are dying right now were maybe in their late teens/early twenties when the Soviets invaded. Any Afghan who is 40-50 years old, they have no memory of peace.

So when you say to them, ‘let’s get back to peace’, they don’t know what that is. Peace to them is a sheer act of imagination. And that’s a very different challenge to face.

So then look at us. The United States has been at war for 18 years. My kids don’t remember what it is to not be living in a time of war. That’s here in our country. A whole generation of people don’t remember a time when you didn’t have to be searched or take off your shoes at the airport.

EM: It’s also scary to think that people who do still have a memory of times before that are losing hope. Not to harp on the 24-hour news, but it does seem to create a sense of hopelessness and fear.

EA: Sure. There’s always this presumption that everything is progress and that there is no regression. But in some areas of our society, it feels like regression. And, if you look at history, regression is as strong of a force as progression. That doesn’t mean don’t be optimistic. But recognize there are ramifications for our actions. Particularly, in the United States as we look at how intensely we are breaking along out various partisan lines and becoming so divisive against one another.

EM: That’s, to me, one of the saddest parts of what’s going on today. We don’t seem to be able to really hear one another. So many people view differing opinions as threats instead of just a different opinion.

EA: Have you seen the Big Lebowski? There’s a scene where Walter and the Dude are in a car together talking about stuff and Walter says, “Am I wrong, Dude? Am I wrong?” And the Dude replies, “No Walter, you’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.” I wish we could just say that to one another and move on.

EM: Yes, and still be friends. That’s better than trying to destroy each other for differing opinions. But switching gears here, what are you reading?

EA: This summer I kind of went on a bit of a classical kick. I read the Memoirs of Hadrian  and I, Claudius.

EM: When you are writing, do you avoid reading certain things?

EA: I read very widely and with extremely little planning or direction. I read everything even when I’m writing. Do you know Shelby Foote, the historian who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative? It’s one of the world’s great reading challenges. It’s three volumes and 1000 pages per volume. His son, Huger Foote, is a friend of mine and a very fine photographer. We’ve done a couple magazine pieces together; I wrote and he did the photos. He manages his father’s estate and told me they released his dad’s books on Audible. The guy who read this for Audible should get the Congressional Medal of Honor.

I’ve always wanted to be able to say I’ve read this whole thing. And I knew I’d never be able to plow through three volumes at 1000 pages each. So it was my New Year’s resolution to listen to it. Anytime I’m exercising or on the subway, I’ve been listening to Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. I’ve done about 140 of 152 hours. You live it. I’ve been living the Civil War. It’s pretty amazing. A true epic. There’s something Homeric about it.

Elliot Ackerman’s keynote talk will take place on Friday, September 27 at 7:30 p.m. at the Harbor Springs Performing Arts Center. Ackerman will be in conversation with guest host Benjamin Busch. This is a ticketed event and tickets can be purchased at www.HSFOTB.org or by calling 231-838-2725. For more information email: info@HSFOTB.org

The Harbor Springs Festival of the Book is an independent, 501c3 non-profit organization overseen by a board of directors. For more information, visit www.hsfotb.org.