Art La Flamme

Back in July, I tuned up and posted a blog entry (here) that recounted the tale of what my soldiers did in support of the rescue of Jessica Lynch and the recovery of the remains of those killed in the attack on the 507th.

I wrote it and published it because one requirement of my class was to blog. The long and the short of it is that our CG (Commanding General) thinks that we need to learn to do more to interact with our citizens (or, at least, that’s how I interpret it), to do more to tell our tales.

As I saw it, Jessica Lynch and her rescue was a very tangible topic familiar to most folks.

I had talked about it before. In the aftermath of the ground war, I’d talked about it a bunch — I’d given a whole bunch of briefs, just never to the public and never outside the protection of the Army.

I’d written about it, too. I first wrote about it when my second deployment was coming to an end — I was putting together a small handwritten book of short stories for my father, about what I had seen and been a part of, and this was one of those stories. But that writing didn’t really see the light of day. Other than a couple of immediate family members, it’s just sat and collected dust, probably waiting for my kids to be old enough to understand what it says.

Two years ago, three years after the events and two years after I’d written my little book, I cleaned up this story and posted it to the web (here). If that seems like a long time, well, it might be. I was slow to decide how to tell it, and slower to decide that I was willing to just barf it out there for the world to see.

This time around, though, it seemed the right topic for the assignment at hand. It felt good to go back and re-tool it, to give it some love and some attention and to republish it. It met the course requirement, too, which was a bonus.

But when the school-related aspect of it was done, I decided to turn it up to 11. And honestly, I have no idea why I decided to do this. I flipped through the on-post magazine, FYI, and found the email address for the editor. I dashed off a note and the URL, and waited to hear back from them. Would they be interested in running the article? Yes (minus the F Bomb). Would they be interested in the two photos I happen to have with me? Yes. Would then honor my Creative Commons license? Yes.

Three for three — pretty good. Just like that, I was set to be published.

Pretty soon thereafter, I got an email from the post Public Affairs Office. A reporter from Augusta wanted to interview me, about an article related to my piece. Was I game? Yes. Yes, because it seemed to me to be in keeping with what I thought out CG was trying to teach us.

An interview, and a wait. And today, and article.

To be honest, I think the article in the paper today is something of a non-story. I think I certainly offered far more details in the magazine article and the blog. To each their own, I suppose. It’s not that I didn’t give her enough material, either.

I told her about the soldiers I was fortunate enough to lead. I talked about my role a the token figurehead, and the absolutely conviction of the soldiers to do all that they could to support the efforts of our soldiers and of our units. I just happened to be in change, but they did such amazing things, it still stings to thing about it.

I told her that there was gobs and gobs of stories like this one, stories that could be told by so many soldiers about so many things. I was trying to tie it all back into what I saw as the intent of the CG, to show and illustrate for her that there’s more out there if she or others are just willing to ask, and are willing to wait for when a Soldier or Airman or Marine or Sailor is willing to tell it.

And I tried my best to stress that this is just one of what must be countless stories of soldier innovation, of soldiers finding a way to do more than ever expected or intended, all to support the mission. That hardware they gave us, it was certainly never intended to be used in this way, but these soldiers were smart enough, insightful enough, daring enough to put aside the textbook answer in order to find a better way. And that is just humbling.

So, yeah. I’m in the paper. It was published today, here. An interesting footnote to my time spent in Augusta.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Army, Blogging, Iraq. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.