![The Memory War
Wrote this story for GOOD a few years back with my Uncle Doug (RIP) in mind.
On the eve of her discharge from the U.S. Navy, Annette Yover stood beneath a black sky watching fireworks explode in blooms of green and purple, yellow and red. It was July 4th, 2005, and the Navy was holding its annual Independence Day celebration at Carney Park, an American military recreation center in Naples, Italy. Yover had been stationed there for the last 18 months. A mortician at the nearby U.S. Naval Hospital, she was looking forward to a night of celebration with her friend. They spread out a blanket among crowds of other soldiers, and sat down to enjoy the show. But Yover soon noticed something was wrong. As columns of fireworks spiraled into the air, each explosion more amplified than the last, her heart rate quickened and the blood drained from her face. The repetitive booms reminded her of the mortar fire she heard while forward-deployed in Kuwait, collecting human remains from the battlefront in Iraq. The smell of sulfur triggered memories of long hours spent in the Naval mortuary, mending wounds on the bodies of dead soldiers. Her chest muscles tightened, and tears welled up in her eyes. At first her crying was subdued, escaping from her mouth in short bursts. But it quickly gave way to heaving sobs, the type that take hold of the body and forcefully wring it out. “I noticed other people looking at me,” Yover says now. “But I was the only one reacting. It was overwhelming, that sense of panic, that feeling of, ‘I need to get out of here.’”
READ MORE
[Photo: Zoriah Miller]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4rilfXpsb1qzjp43o1_1280.jpg)
Wrote this story for GOOD a few years back with my Uncle Doug (RIP) in mind.
On the eve of her discharge from the U.S. Navy, Annette Yover stood beneath a black sky watching fireworks explode in blooms of green and purple, yellow and red. It was July 4th, 2005, and the Navy was holding its annual Independence Day celebration at Carney Park, an American military recreation center in Naples, Italy. Yover had been stationed there for the last 18 months. A mortician at the nearby U.S. Naval Hospital, she was looking forward to a night of celebration with her friend. They spread out a blanket among crowds of other soldiers, and sat down to enjoy the show.
But Yover soon noticed something was wrong. As columns of fireworks spiraled into the air, each explosion more amplified than the last, her heart rate quickened and the blood drained from her face. The repetitive booms reminded her of the mortar fire she heard while forward-deployed in Kuwait, collecting human remains from the battlefront in Iraq. The smell of sulfur triggered memories of long hours spent in the Naval mortuary, mending wounds on the bodies of dead soldiers. Her chest muscles tightened, and tears welled up in her eyes. At first her crying was subdued, escaping from her mouth in short bursts. But it quickly gave way to heaving sobs, the type that take hold of the body and forcefully wring it out.
“I noticed other people looking at me,” Yover says now. “But I was the only one reacting. It was overwhelming, that sense of panic, that feeling of, ‘I need to get out of here.’”
[Photo: Zoriah Miller]
Source: GOOD
Paul Fussell is dead. He left behind works on war that will outlast us all by many generations. Below are a few of his thoughts about his role as a writer on the subject of war, informed by his own brutal experiences as a foot soldier in Europe in World War Two, and then, by returning home and sensing how the experiences of the war settled into the public consciousness. They form the opening paragraph, fittingly, of “Wartime.”
This book is about the psychological and emotional culture of Americans and Britons during the Second World War. It is about the rationalizations and euphemisms people needed to deal with an unacceptable actuality from 1939 to 1945. And it is about the abnormally intense frustration of desire in wartime and some of the means by which desire was satisfied. The damage the war visited upon bodies and buildings, planes and tanks and ships, is obvious. Less obvious is the damage it did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and irony, not to mention privacy and wit. For the past fifty years the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales.
Source: cjchivers
![You can see the appeal of fiction, especially when reality can be so brutal: “Beware! This man murdered my son. He sold him poison drugs and now my son is dead!”
[via @groteskito]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4j47u9Bok1qzjp43o1_1280.jpg)
You can see the appeal of fiction, especially when reality can be so brutal: “Beware! This man murdered my son. He sold him poison drugs and now my son is dead!”
[via @groteskito]
Source: instagr.am
![Wilkinsburg saw a rash of shootings back in April; then North Braddock followed suit earlier this month. Now something’s going on in Clairton, with four people shot last night on Park Avenue (worlds away from this Park Avenue). It would be simplistic to say there is one unifying undercurrent here, but each of these places — Wilkinsburg, North Braddock, Clairton — are distressed communities that survive despite the existence of legitimate economies.
In the case of Clairton, however, cocaine has long been one of the town’s most stable and, of course, illegitimate economic engines (outside of US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, that is). In December of 2010, a federal roundup of cocaine dealers that stretched from Texas and Georgia to the Mon Valley sent 11 from Clairton to jail, making a dent in the drug trafficking problem that has plagued the town for nearly two decades. According to the Post-Gazette’s Rich Lord:
Crack reached Clairton in the early 1990s, around the same time Chief Hoffman joined what was then a fledgling city police force that took over for the state troopers that had patrolled there for years. The chief remembers driving into one since-demolished housing complex, being surrounded by dealers asking him what he needed, and thinking, “Aren’t you guy supposed to be running from me?”
One theory for the current violence in Clairton is that new blood is battling over the vacancies left in the cocaine trade by those who were incarcerated in the federal roundup. The closing quote from Lord’s January 2012 story sums up the frustration surrounding Clairton’s current reality:
“There’s a drug war going on, definitely,” [Sgt. Giles] said. It’s a war in which cash-strapped Clairton is, once again, outgunned. “You’ve got these Colombian cartels making trillions of dollars moving cocaine into the country,” he said. “We’re at the bottom of that chain.”
[Photo: Bill Wade/Post-Gazette]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4h3u1nvLC1qzjp43o1_500.jpg)
Wilkinsburg saw a rash of shootings back in April; then North Braddock followed suit earlier this month. Now something’s going on in Clairton, with four people shot last night on Park Avenue (worlds away from this Park Avenue). It would be simplistic to say there is one unifying undercurrent here, but each of these places — Wilkinsburg, North Braddock, Clairton — are distressed communities that survive despite the existence of legitimate economies.
In the case of Clairton, however, cocaine has long been one of the town’s most stable and, of course, illegitimate economic engines (outside of US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, that is). In December of 2010, a federal roundup of cocaine dealers that stretched from Texas and Georgia to the Mon Valley sent 11 from Clairton to jail, making a dent in the drug trafficking problem that has plagued the town for nearly two decades. According to the Post-Gazette’s Rich Lord:
Crack reached Clairton in the early 1990s, around the same time Chief Hoffman joined what was then a fledgling city police force that took over for the state troopers that had patrolled there for years. The chief remembers driving into one since-demolished housing complex, being surrounded by dealers asking him what he needed, and thinking, “Aren’t you guy supposed to be running from me?”
One theory for the current violence in Clairton is that new blood is battling over the vacancies left in the cocaine trade by those who were incarcerated in the federal roundup. The closing quote from Lord’s January 2012 story sums up the frustration surrounding Clairton’s current reality:
“There’s a drug war going on, definitely,” [Sgt. Giles] said. It’s a war in which cash-strapped Clairton is, once again, outgunned. “You’ve got these Colombian cartels making trillions of dollars moving cocaine into the country,” he said. “We’re at the bottom of that chain.”
[Photo: Bill Wade/Post-Gazette]
Source: post-gazette.com
“I was very ill at ease with people in social situations, and I realized that if I photographed I wouldn’t have to chat.” -Martine Franck
Photo © Martine Franck/Magnum Photos
Source: magnumphotos.com
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
Source: amazon.com
On learning that Yauch had passed away, I walked around Brooklyn assuming every woman, egg man, child, and pet to be thinking the same thing: I wondered which track their brains were playing.
Source: theparisreview.org
