When Writing Goes to War

As a child, I used my father’s diary and photos for school projects — sharing them with anyone who was interested.  While studying those personal thoughts in my father’s own handwriting, I wondered what compelled him to keep a diary during a war. He seemed so young and keeping a diary seemed so out of character for a soldier. After several years of reading my father’s diary, looking at his photos from the war and using his primary source materials in my teaching lessons, I developed When Writing Goes to War as a focus for a faculty research fellowship and then it further evolved into a themed first-year writing class at Wake Forest University. In much the same way, reading my father’s diary transformed the way I thought about him and the war. I was hoping that reading letters and personal writings from soldiers would open my students' eyes and hearts to better understand the effects of war and how life changes forever for the soldier and their families. 

After the Breaking the Silence oral history project developed friendships with the Vietnam Veterans who had been visiting my students for several years, I continued to research how soldiers use writing as a lifeline. In generational years, my students are far removed from the Vietnam War. But in life experiences, they are the same age as many of the men who were drafted into service during the Vietnam War. As they tried to put themselves in the place of each soldier, they learned how every aspect of war changes lives, which is an important lesson. As a culture, we are over-exposed and somewhat immune to the violence and trauma of war. The students were only five or six years older than I was when I found my father’s diary. In class, my students talked about letters, diaries and personal writings and their significance both during and after a war. Letters become a space that both haunts and heals, particularly in the midst of loss, chaos and confusion

The class and the veterans' visits were featured in various campus outlets and media sources: The Winton-Salem Journal, The Wake Forest News, FOX 8 - The Buckley Report, The ZSR Library, Focus on the Forest and The Office of Civic and Community Engagement at WFU. This particular topic, "When Writing Goes to War: Narrative Constructs and Rhetorical Strategies in Autobiographical Writings of African American Vietnam Soldiers," was also the focus of my Faculty Research Fellowship at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. My other publications related to this topic are: “The First Saddest Day of My Life: A Vietnam War Story,” “The Double Consciousness and Disability Dilemma: Trauma and the African American Veteran,” “African American Masculinity Performance in the Diaries of Vietnam Soldiers,” “’Sing a Song Heroic’: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Mythic and Poetic Tribute to Black Soldiers,” and “Something He Couldn’t Write About: Telling My Daddy’s Story of Vietnam.”