Instructor Christine Dumaine Leche has released a book titled "Outside the Wire" that contains essays about 38 other American soldiers.
Instructor Christine Dumaine Leche taught soldiers on an air base in Afghanistan how to convert their experiences and feelings into prose. She held classes after a long day in the war zone and has now released a book titled "Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from Afghanistan." One of her students included Sgt. 1st Class Billy Wallace. The book has been edited by Leche and contains essays about Wallace and 37 other American soldiers.
Leche and Wallace speak to NPR about their experiences.
On teaching and attending a writing class in the middle of a war zone
Leche: "Most of my students were on patrol during the day, and they would come to class just ready to go. They looked forward to being outside of that military world, so this was their time. We had terrific discussions about literature. I would have them read, for example, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and they realized that they were living all the elements of fiction - only this was reality; only they had a lot at stake in the moment."
Wallace: "[The mental shift] was pretty easy because, you know, once we walked into the door, it was like all the fears and the worries and the stuff that we had gone through that day just kind of evaporated for a little bit. And once we got in there, it was like, wow, this is kind of like a burden, you know, lifted off our shoulders."
On the value of writing about wartime experiences
Wallace: "I kind of got a little bit of therapy out of it, to be honest, because part of the writing that is in this book about my Iraq deployment ... was a moment that changed my life forever and, you know, changed a lot of things about my life. And it just - I put it aside and wouldn't talk about it. Didn't talk to anybody, which is what soldiers do. You keep it bottled up inside, which could actually make more of the problems worse. So it was more therapeutic. It allowed me to understand how I could start coping with it and how I could put it into words to where other people could understand it."
" I would have them read, for example, Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' and they realized that they were living all the elements of fiction - only this was reality ..."
On what the class talked about
Leche: "We talked constantly about how to put experience into words, to re-create that experience on the page. That's an important way of communicating what does happen down range ... in a war zone. But the student soldiers would attend class after 18 hours of guard duty. They would be exhausted, but nevertheless they were ready to open that backpack and pull out their English text. ... After cleaning human remains from medevac helicopters; or after washing bodies in the morgue; after having been raped by a fellow soldier in the camp a week earlier; after watching their wives give birth via Skype; and even after working as a nurse with a surgeon who might be trying to save the lives of two young [Afghan] boys. So everyone in that room brought different experiences with them to camp. But we had that great commonality of being present in this space together, and of taking that raw experience and writing it as story, as narrative to convey the instant and to take that back to people who might not otherwise know what it's like for a soldier when he's deployed to a combat area."
On how the essays have helped after returning home from war
Wallace: "My wife didn't know a whole lot about the attack in Karbala [Iraq], but she knew I was wounded. But after writing it, you know, it allowed me to better, I guess you could say, articulate it to her; to where I could kind of dummy-proof it down for her a little bit to where she doesn't have to know everything but at least it gave me an opportunity to kind of talk to her about it so that she felt that she was part of the loop too."