The Spelling Bee and D-a-d-d-y

Speller No. 9 is studying word lists right up to the last minute

I acquired a bit of local news this past Saturday in the only way permissible as long as I'm engaged in this project. I didn't need to read it in the newspaper or find it on the Web or see it on TV.

I lived through it.

There I was seated and yawning on a Saturday morning, in an auditorium full of parents and family members. We were steeling ourselves for the city-wide spelling bee.

I now know something that I didn't before.  I know who won that spelling bee. More importantly, I am coming to terms with the contradictory fact that I like spelling bees except when I don't like spelling bees.

CARPENTERS OF LANGUAGE
What I like about spelling bees is that we have a rare opportunity to witness a word under construction. The pronouncer at the podium says the word and the student speller hovers over the microphone, mentally preparing to make for us a thing of beauty.  The lips part, the mouth opens...

p-a-d-d-o-c-k

In those seconds, human breath creates acoustical waves that are no mere noise. The speller peforms a feat only our species is capable of. From organized sounds emerge symbols representative of our language. These symbols adhere to one another in such a way as to allow us to communicate without being physically present. That is why you can read this sentence made of up these words and know what I am communicating. Yet where am I at the moment you read it? Far, far away... in distance and in time.

As much as the word-nerd in me likes hearing words spelled, there is a certain situation that leads to my not enjoying the spelling bee. It is when our seventh grade son is up on stage, hammering and sawing and putting together a word letter by letter. An all expenses-paid trip to the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. this June awaits the winner. The suspense kills me.

c-a-r-t-o-g-r-a-p-h-y

If at any pont he says a wrong letter, it's in the air and in microseconds it enters the judges' ears and registers in their brains, and now it can't be taken back. His word house collapses, a fact that will be soberly registered by one of the four judges sitting at the table who reaches toward a bell.

Ding!

And this is what eventually happens. In the wake of the misspelling, our son, following directions, walks off the stage and goes to the "comfort room." Waiting there are cookies, bottles of water, and his mom who gives him a hug and whisper in his ear that it doesn't matter; we're proud of him.

A WORD NOT HEARD
So our son didn't win. He didn't totally lose either. The city-wide event began with 21 students, fifth grade through eighth. They each had won a spellilng bee at their respective schools, public and private. They were the best spellers their institution had to offer.

Less than an hour later there were 16 empty chairs on stage. Our son was one of the remaining five spellers still in contention.

To ease the tension I felt, I thought of the weeks he'd spent in preparation. He took his study lists of words and read each word out loud multiple times to impress it like a physical thing into his mind.

The word might have been a stone and his brain damp mud.

He would say the characters in sequence over and over:

c-o-m-m-e-n-s-u-r-a-t-e...c-o-m-m-e-n-s-u-r-a-t-e...
c-o-m-m-e-n-s-u-r-a-t-e...c-o-m-m-e-n-s-u-r-a-t-e...

Then we quizzed him on the words. It was during this process I realized that there are words that I know the meaning of and use from time to time in my writing, and perhaps--on a good day with a strong spelling wind a my back--I can even spell them correctly, BUT I've never heard anyone deploy them in a sentence. This means, lacking an audible model, I am uncertain of how to pronounce the word.

It turned out there were many words like this on the spelling bee list that troubled me in this way.

Is wainscot pronounced "wayne's cot" or "wayne-scoat"?

VOCABULARY DEPRIVATION
It's been said that Shakespeare must have known around 60,000 different words although I've heard that an actual word count of his plays and sonnets yields a figure far lower (17,500).

The English language's No. 1 wordsmith...Will

In any event, Elizabethans had the opportunity to be "ear-witnesses" to Shakespeare's command of the English language which by all accounts was prodigious. Presumably, if theater-goers were listening closely and often enough, they would come to know how to pronounce the most unfamiliar words themselves.

Using a word in everyday speech is key to keeping it alive and relevant to ourselves. Words that are never spoken, remain stuck inside books. They are like pressed flowers that await the day the book is opened. Then the word tumbles out. Brittle, faded. Not as useful and "alive" as one might wish.

But even if we know a lot of words, there may be constraining factors in our using them.

Speller No. 9 bides his time...

One doesn't want to use words others don't understand. And it might not be a good idea to sound too literary or as if we are "putting on airs" and bearing down with some kind of class distinction.

Our spoken vocabulary is further impoverished by the cultural influence of the vocabulary we receive from electronic media. The movies and television do not draw upon an extensive vocabulary. It's a simple if not simplistic word pallette.

And what can one say about texting? This medium turns fertile fields for vocabulary into parched patches of tiny screen views where only a few weedy shoots are allowed to sprout.

Shout wher ur wen u a min  Thx

This could be a reason why one study published in a journal contends that a teen in 1950 had a vocabulary of 25,000 words and that today's teen has one of 10,000.

TIME FOR A NEOLOGISM?
I face a problem that's not going to go away. With so few of us speaking actual smart, non-ordinary spelling bee-type words, even when I'm in a language-appreciative crowd, it's hard for me to use certain wordswithout risking mispronouncing them. I could sound foolish to some rare soul out there who has total mastery of the word.

I think we need a word for these words that out of auditory ignornance I tend to fumble as soon as they come out of my mouth. I wish to call each of them a...

DARE TO SAY IT...
Thanks heavens for pronouncing dictionaries which can be found on-line. Before that I had to turn to a physical dictionary, leaf to the proper word entry, and then try to decipher the esoteric pronunciation and accent marks.

It's much better to hear a real, albeit disembodied voice saying the word and then allow myself to imitate it. Which leads me to my partial personal list of "vergewords" that I'm still working on.

duenna
phillippic
Baedeker
bromeliad
jeremiad
pitchblende
coloratura
bravura
incunabula
apparatchik
pampas
cacao
ecru
recidivist
megalopolis
tritium
potash
isinglass
peloton

If you hear me saying one of these words and mangling the pronunciation, please give me credit for trying. And then after my cookie in the comfort room, you may kindly, so kindly correct me! - V.W.


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On Not Being a "Blog of Note"

Are the folks at Blogger watching VWP? Not likely!

When I began this blog it was a logical way of keeping track of the mental and emotional ups and downs of my project of avoiding the news. I went into it mostly ignorant of the larger world of blogging.

At the same time I was excited by the opportunity to write in perhaps a new way in a medium that allowed me to combine pictures and words. As I saw it, I would be publishing my own digital magazine articles reflecting my life and my sensibilities.

Because this "blog-zine" is solipsistic at heart, i.e., about me, I initially never expected very many people to come to it, much less read it. Hugh Hefner has Playboy, Oprah has O, and I have VWP. Come on. There's no comparison! I do not have what one might call a "competitive lifestyle" that will attract avid, loyal readers.

But early on there was a surprise.

Blogger allows one to peer behind the scenes using the almost magical "Stats" tab. I could see how often people were coming to my site hour by hour. At first traffic was slow, but I never found myself staring at an insultingly flat line.

This is where I was tempted to become grandiose. My favorite writers seem to prove over and over that if you write well enough you can make almost anything interesting. And if it's interesting, people will find it and read it. That became my goal. I would write so well that I would magnetically attract more people.

I spent hours polishing my prose. Upwards of eight hours per post. And I began dreaming of becoming a Blogger "Blog of Note". If I achieved such an honor, perhaps my pageviews would spike in an Everest-like fashion.

At that point somebody needed to slap me. I was out of my mind.

WELCOME TO REALITY, VAN WINKLE
The growth in the blog phenomenon is stunning. According to the people who have the electronic means to achieve a rough count, in  2001 there were 2 million blogs. By 2005 we were up to 50 million. In 2009, according to BlogPulse, there were126 million blogs.

Take all the bloggers in the world...
try to fit them into the UK. Ugh!

This is more than three times the entire population of the United Kingdom.

Since the Van Winkle Project has placed me more squarely on the Web than ever before, I've become aware of just how widespread blogging is. There are blogs for everyone, including companies and corporations. When I tell people about my blog, they usually mention they started one, too. If I go to their blog and click on their "About Me", I often find that they're being modest: they've started multiple blogs to reflect different interests and audiences they want to address. 

So out of this rising number of blogs that has become an ocean of language and imagery, each week the wise, innovative, and very nice folks at Blogger (no, I'm not sucking up) choose a handful to join their "Blogs of Note" and  they post the links on Blogger In Draft.

If as a blogger you seek pageviews, becoming a "Blog of Note" is the equivalent of winning the lottery or lining up five cherries on the slot machine. When it happens, your pageviews and followers will jump as if a 9.0 earthquake has rocked the sensitive needle on the graph.

As I continued to fantasize about the Van Winkle Project becoming a "Blog of Note" (because no one had yet slapped me) I saw cause for hope. My Blogger data showed where my pageviews were coming from. What was this? Slovenia? India? Singapore? Columbia? New Zealand? Wow! Van Winkle had gone global!

Blogger's helpful visual about where people who have visited this blog are located.

The wheels began to spin in my mind. If I became a B.O.N., I could put it on my curriculum vita (this is the name the university world gives a "resume"). I could tell my friends! In the midst of his own newsless project, Van Winkle would have fabricated his own news!

                      

THE TANTALUS FACTOR
After a while I began to realize how out of reach the entire fantasy was. Blogs that are truly "of note" get as many pageviews in a day as I've accumulated in six months. Why movie critic Roger Ebert had 104 million pageviews in 2010! How many per day is that? Never mind; you do the math...

This is when I thought of Tantalus. He was the son of Zeus who was given special dining privileges and could eat nectar with the gods.

But one day he offended the gods (the accounts vary as to why). Because of this, Tantalus was perpetually punished in a most devious fashion.

He was placed in a locale where every time he tried to bend down and drink from a pool of water it receded. If he reached up to a tree to pick fruit, the wind blew the luscious, juicy orbs beyond his grasp.

He would always be close but never quite able to satisfy his basic desires.

From the tragedy of Tantalus we get the verb "to tantalize." It's a verb that applies to me. Every time I think of being a "Blog of Note" I am tantalized. It's a crazy way to live.

HOW NOT TO BE A "BLOG OF NOTE"
Rather than live a life of being constant, unfulfilled craving, I've decided I do not wish to attract mass followers by becoming a Blogger "Blog of Note." Should you blog from time to time and feel inclined to follow in Van Winkle's nearly invisible footsteps, here are four sound tips on how to achieve this kind of ideal non-recognition.

1 - Simply exist.
That's right. As soon as you create your blog you virtually guarantee that no one of significance, including Blogger, will get around to visiting you. There are way too many blogs out there.

2 - Have a laissez-faire attitude about graphic images.
Every time I upload an image to a post, Blogger gives me a message that some images are copyrighted blah, blah and I should take this into account. For that reason I prefer using my own photos, but frankly that's not always possible. If I violate anyone's intellectual property rights, I will cheerfully remove the image when they request. But this is the Web. Images are strewn like confetti in a wide city street. Who can resist picked up a few pieces? So my blog is not "pure." Can I still be a "Blog of Note"? Does Miss America have to be a virgin?

3 - Write posts that are more than a few hundred words in length.
This is a great way to guarantee that even if someone lands on your blog they won't read it. When they see that it will take more than a few seconds to find out what's there, they're on to the next website. I've decided because I'm a writer, what I have to do is write. I'm not going to write more than is necessary, but I'm not going to ration my words or truncate my thoughts any more than a composer would try to alter a twenty-minute sonata for piano forte to conform to the length and format of a cell phone ring tone.

4 - Start a year-long project.
Come on., Van Winkle. This has been done! No one likely cares about a year-long project unless one's life hangs in the balance. If a person wants to attract notice, he or she is better off blogging about popular niche subjects: music, movies, food, travel, crafts, hobbies, politics, pets, and pole dancing.

AT OCEAN'S EDGE...
At the Van Winkle Project I blog because I gotta blog. Each time I post I think of it as being like building a sand castle at the beach.

As I look up and down the beach I notice nearly everyone is building their own castles. But this is not about them or the rare visitor who strolls along and compares our sand castles and says one is "of note" and, by implication, the others are not. In the great scheme of things the incoming tide of time rolls over each person's castle and he or she must build/post a new one as soon as the tide goes out again.

So why do this? Because those ephemeral castles are are a result of one's best thoughts and creativity. Within the sandy digital walls I erect, I place the essence of my hands, breath and heartbeat and I communicate, "I'm alive. I was here." - V.W.





Get yours at Toysplash.com
and start digging...

  
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Review of My Typewriter (or Keys on Ice)

Today the two-tone blue Smith-Corona portable sits on a high shelf. I've owned it since I left for college, a young man with stories filling his head.

About thirty years ago something came between us and it changed our relationship.

It was like a comet colliding with Planet Earth. Wham! The world shook. A puff of dust obscured reality. Then the dust settled. I'm talking about the arrival of a new technology. We shook our heads in wonder. Then we began using this enticing thing that had come into our midst and offered so many advantages.

This was in the 1980s. The computer age had arrived. My typewriter, essentially, died right where it stood...

When the Mode Becomes the Muse...
As everyone knows, the computer easily won the allegiance of 99% of writers, including Van Winkle. How could it not? It offers an easy way to correct everything from misspellings to an infelicitous phrasing.

Let me take a second to type out the computer's chief competitive advantage for everyone to see:

A computer = Free do-over

But I think there's a way in which my old hunk-of-steel typewriter remains the forgotten king of the technology heap. It's true. The typewriter is the original all-in-one device.

The typewriter is also the printer.

The practical implication is that a typewriter has always required a high degree of commitment to whatever one is writing. Think a thought and communicate it to your fingertips and it will appear a second later on a piece of paper in black ink.

Think, hit, print.

It's going to require a lot of erasing or some stern swipes of Wite-Out to take the words back.

For this reason, tentativeness and hesitation and endless backspacing, highlighting, deleting, and paragraph moving have no place in the typing-writing process.

Instead, it's like standing in a corner at a party and spotting an attractive person.

Without rehearsing over and over in the mind a pickup line and the proper je ne sais pas quoi inflection, you get your fingers in the right position, walk up to that person, and you smile. And then you lean forward and start "typing" what you have to say and every word had better count...

Hello. You look like someone interesting.

I'd like to get to know you if you'll let me...

Exploding Typewriter
It must be recognized that typewriters are not without their drawbacks. In fact, I know of some writers who have had major problems.

In The Writing Life Annie Dillard tells of the time she was upstairs in her house and she heard a rumbling from below. She found the source of the ruckus downstairs in her study where her typewriter was glowing and smoking. Before her eyes it grew worse:

I saw at once that the typewriter was erupting. The old green Smith-Corona typewriter on the table was exploding with fire and ash. Showers of sparks shot out of its caldera—the dark hollow in in which the keys lie. Smoke and cinders poured out, noises exploded and spattered, black dense smoke rose up and a wild, deep fire lighted the whole thing. It shot sparks.

This all too absurd fantasy ends the next day when Dillard cleans the typewriter and announces, "I have had no trouble since." Then she adds an amusing note of frisson in the final sentence of the chapter:

Of course, now I know it can happen.

Getting Hammered
In 2002 Judy Blunt published a memoir entitled Breaking Free. In it she told of her depressing life as a young wife on a Wyoming ranch, which led to her fleeing said ranch. The book caused some controversy.

The problem was a scene in the first chapter of the book in which Ms. Blunt dramatized how her father-in-law, angry because she was late bringing lunch to the table, came into her room where she had her typewriter. He took the machine outside into the yard and beat on it with a sledgehammer.

Please don't destroy this typewriter from the 1930s.
It's gorgeous and I bought it as a collectible!

When the book appeared, the father-in-law, highly irate and perhaps feeling a bit litigious, said this event never happened.

A red-faced Ms. Blunt had to admit that she had exaggerated the facts to heighten the conflict.

In truth the incident involved the old man pulling the plug on her electric typewriter and shouting at her. No sledgehammers were involved.

I'm glad the author made a public correction in an interview. Because, you see, I was having trouble understanding why anyone out West would try to kill a typewriter with any kind of hammer.

The man was a rancher! He should have run over the typewriter with a tractor or a pickup truck until it resembled shiny roadkill.

Or he should have taken it down to the river and thrown it in into the deepest whirlpool.

Jack Kerouac's typewriter

As I see it, typewriters deserve respect. Even when you're killing them. You're not executing some knave but veritable royalty.
Just think of Jack Kerouac typing On the Road on a 120-foot long "scroll" of paper he continuously fed through his typewriter.

Such a BIG and WORTHY machine should die a notable death.

With a bang, not a clang!

Typing Posture
In the days of yesteryear I drafted all my fiction by hand on either notebook paper or within the pages of ruled notebooks. After that I turned to the two-tone blue Smith-Corona typewriter to produce the final product. I wrote a collection of short stories and a novel with that typewriter, both of which were published, but I didn't connect this success to the typewriter. The computer came along and whisked me away for the remainder of my writing life.

Still, I remember well how those early works required the hard labor of typing multiple drafts until I got the words right. When I add it up, I realize several thousand pages rolled through the typewriter just to produce the sum total of two books. The work was so physical that my back began to hurt.

So I learned to type standing up.

This was about the same time Elton John became famous for kicking over piano benches and acrobatically banging the ivories from an upright position. Crocodile Rock! Bennie and the Jets! The crowd went wild. In my empty apartment the only sound was the keys clacking and my occasional sighing. But my back? It felt a whole lot better.

Rating
The Smith-Corona has remained in my life, albeit at the margins. After I began teaching at a university I placed it on a table in my office on campus. When our son was a toddler I took him to the office and, fascinated by the chrome return bar and those tantalizing keys, he urged me to shove a piece of a paper into the slot, roll the platen, and have me help his little fingers poke at the keys and print a few words.

It is magical.

Most of the time when I stop using things, I get rid of them. They get traded in like my cars or they go to a garage sale or Goodwill or end up in the trash can. Not my typewriter.

Both the typewriter and I know. My computers are convenient, lightweight, and quick, but I'll never save a computer and enshrine it on a shelf. The computers are casual, colorful affairs, the typewriter is someone I've loved. Its key pressure and clacking sounds and dinging return bell and its twenty-pound weight are aspects I know intimately.

Just look at you, Smith-Corona. You traveled from Anchorage, Alaska to go to college with me in New Haven, Connecticut. You got me through a nearly 100-page senior economics paper. Whew! In your greatest feat, you churned out pages that were mailed to New York City and eventually they came back to me in published form. And those are just the highlights. That's reason enough to rate you four stars **** - V.W.



Van Winkle and a Mess of Metaphors

Pietro Longhi's "The Confession" (1755). The Venetian artist
painted the wealthy and poor of his day queuing to unburden
themselves. Here at the Van Winkle Project we must do likewise...

The most significant thing that's happened to me of late can be seen on the right-hand margin of this blog.

A few days ago the counter that shows "Time Remaining Before I Awake" fell below two hundred.

This may not sound momentous, but as difficult as it has been  for me to get through the first 165 days of this project, I find myself claiming comfort wherever I can.

Hurray! I'm getting closer to the halfway point.

You see, I'm not exactly enjoying this regimen of keeping my eyes and ears away from television, newspapers, and a major chunk of the Internet or ordering my family to remain silent at the dinner table about whatever might be going on in any part of the world, large or small.

One reason for my discomfiture, which I've confessed at various points along the way, is that I tend to fail. Or to use the phrasing of old-timey alcoholics, I must confess that on occasion I have fallen off the wagon.

A SERIES OF UNINTENDED FAILURES
It's time to analyze what's been going wrong of late and develop a plan to do better with the remainder of my time "asleep."

It seems like there are three ways someone in my position can easily mess up. Conveniently, there's a metaphor for each.

1 - I'm a Cracked Egg

That would be Van Winkle (me) with the dent on the right...

It's hard to blame myself for those times when I happen to be in the presence of someone who reveals something about the news or developments in culture. I'm struck by their information like a fragile egg that's received a hammer tap. I'm not completely shattered, but my universally uninformed status has been cracked. A couple of quick examples:

- Someone in church mentions "the sad thing that happened in Tuscon" and asks us to "pray for the victims of the shooting."

- I see a person the week of the Super Bowl wearing a foam chunk of cheese on her head walking into the grocery store. The day after the game I overhear someone saying, "It was a tough day for us Pittsburgh fans." Hmm...do you think the Packers played the Steelers in Super Bowl XLV and won? Duh...

2 - I'm a Hungry Hibernatin' Bear

Van Winkle is a like a blissful sleeping bear until he stretches,
gets up and begins to groggily prowl...

The real Rip Van Winkle was a world-class sleeper. In his twenty-year uninterrupted sleep he outdid any bear hibernating throughout the winter. Bears are known to stir in their dens and briefly arise and then go back to sleep.

Somedays I'm more like one of those bears than I'm like Rip. Without completely realizing what I'm doing I flip open a newspaper or glance at a news magazine cover. It's not like I fill my belly with news. I just crunch upon stray words as if they were dried berries. Examples:

   - Republicans, House, Budget Cuts, Obama Reaches Out to Business

   - Egypt, Riots, Dictators Fall, Libya, Vow to Fight to Last Drop of Blood

3- I'm a Straw Attached to a Vacuum

Sometimes I long to suck up the news
without regard to consequences...

When I have misbehaved and actually betrayed the spirit of the Van Winkle Project it been by giving into temptation and starting to read an entire article including the following:

- A review of the Coen brothers latest film, a remake of True Grit. I found it irresistible. The Coen brothers have made some of my favorite movies (see The Big Lebowski and the Whole Brevity Thing), yet they've never shot anything but their own original scripts. What's up with this? Why True Grit, which with John Wayne in the 1968 lead role is already an Academy Award-winning classic and so who needs a remake?

- An article on the lawmakers meeting in our state capitol this year and suddenly dealing with a multi-billion dollar deficit whereas the last time around they still had been able to balance the budget using leftover money from flush times. My excuse for reading this? Well, as an educator I could be affected because if they start hacking at student loan money...

ACTION PLAN
I learned something from my breakdowns and failures. Even having little chips off the news in the form of headline words or a picture here and there or an overhead remark is enough to assemble the larger picture. The mind can fill in the missing pieces.

I suppose this is why so much of the news is habitually boiled down to soundbites or crawls at the bottom of the television screen. It may not do justice to a complex, larger experience or issue, but it conveniently conveys just enough that people are happy to settle for it.

Recently my wife warned me: "If you start to hear more about certain things, then you might as well stop the whole project." That frankly frightened me. I've invested too much into my not knowing to have it all turn out to be a meaningless exercise.

So I've resolved to take the following steps.

• Never take the newspaper out of the its plastic sleeve.
• Make sure the copy of Newsweek is always lying cover-side down.
• Keep my road vision high enough when I'm stopped at stop lights that I can't see bumperstickers.
• Think about other things besides news, sports, entertainment, and weather.
• Take lots of cold showers.

All right, that last bullet point is a joke, but if this project is to set me up for a windfall of missed information in something less than 165 days from now, I do need to remain where I've vowed to metaphorically be. Outside in the cold. - V.W.

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Chance Meeting - Two Veterans

When I created this blog I vowed that there would be no political or religious opinions expressed herein. The reason for this is that I feel such material tends to divide people from one another wherever they are in the world.

Instead, I'd rather write about everyday wonder and memories and what strikes me as humorous. These are things that humans can mutually love and appreciate and they might bring us closer.

But I suppose it's possible something historical and harsh can bring us together as well. If nothing else, I hope in the wake of what I'm about to share we can stand shoulder to shoulder and affirm that the pain some military veterans still suffer is worthy of concern and grief. 

What follows then, in true Van Winkle style, isn't likely in the news headlines that I've forbidden myself to consult. Instead, it amounts to a wholly accidental, face-to-face discovery. I sat down to eat dinner and I ended up hearing the tale of Margaritte and Tyrone (names changed to respect their privacy), a husband and wife who were caught up in a horrific war.

There was no agenda as they told me their stories. It was an outpouring, as if they felt, "I have to finally tell someone what happened over there."

He fell in love with her hands...

AN INNOCENT QUESTION
So I am at a writing festival this past Thursday-Saturday and it is on the campus of a college which happens to be a few miles away from a major U.S. Air Force base.

At dinner on Friday night I see a neatly dressed twenty-something couple sitting by themselves at one of the tables in the Theater Building. I get my shrimp cocktail, sit down beside them, and we introduce ourselves.

Margaritte works in the human resources department. Her husband Tyrone, who is wearing a sport coat and tie, has just begun his first week at a new job with a technology based organization.

Margaritte and Tyrone have not come to attend the writing festival. What happened is that Margaritte got an email earlier in the day from the festival organizers saying there was extra food and the university staff and spouses were invited to join us at the dinner at no charge.

So she told Tyrone about it and there they are--a free delicious meal is before them; it's a smart thing to do.

I finger a shrimp and begin to ask the first of my get-to-know-you questions.

":How did you two meet?"

"In the Army."

"Oh, really. What did you do?"

"I was a dental assistant and x-ray technician," Tyrone says.

"I was trained in heavy weapons and chemical weapons detection," Margaritte says.

"We met," Tyrone says. "when I took x-rays of her hand."

"Yeh, I slipped in the shower and I thought I broke my hand. It hurt!." Margaritte laughs. "Then I get it x-rayed and Mr. Suave here tells me I have beautiful hands."

I tell them that's a nice story. Then I do it.

It's like stepping on a mine. Except at first it doesn't go off. If anything maybe there's just a little "click." The "click" is in their eyes when I ask, "Did you ever go to Iraq or Afghanistan?"

They're thinking. Should we tell this stranger or not?

INVASION
Margaritte: I moved up to the Kuwaiti border 48 hours before the deadline we gave Saddam expired. I was inside a tank. The deadline came and went and we rolled in. It took us a week and a half and then I was in Baghdad.

VW: Did you think you would find weapons of mass destruction?

Margaritte: No. But we tried! We found stuff. All of it was ours.

VW: What do you mean ours?

Tyrone: The U.S. gave Saddam weapons in the '80s when he was fighting a war with Iran.

Margaritte: We knew he had it. We gave it to him.

VW: If it wasn't about WMD, why did you think we were invading the country? Was it for the oil? Or bad intelligence?

Margaritte: We wanted to have a government in there that would be friendly to us and do what we told it do. That's all. It was regime change.

EARLY DAYS OF THE WAR
Margaritte: At first they wouldn't let us shoot unless we were shot at. We couldn't believe it. It was crazy!

Tyrone: Saddam had his Republican Guards, but most of the Iraqi army was just a bunch of men who they found and stuck guns in their hands. A million of them. All of these people are suddenly out of work. And we're surrounded by them.

"We were told to do things we had no training for..."

Margaritte: The Army told us we had to go on patrol. We were told to do things we had no training for. They should have called in the scouts, but they'd tell me to go clear a house. I have no idea how to clear a house. I refused.

Tyrone: I'm a dental assistant. They put me on street patrol. There was looting going on and we just watched it. They told us to report it. So we'd get on the radio and tell them where the looters were and where they had moved to next.

Margaritte: One of the myths was that women weren't in combat. I was walking around with a rifle in my hand. Before that I was manning the 50-caliber machine gun on a tank. I was in a fire fight. After three hours I couldn't hear anything. I could only see the tracers and RPGs going by. It all appeared in slow motion. We'd move to a new position, they'd find us and start shooting again. After 24 hours I couldn't do it anymore.

Tyrone: There was no "insurgency." It was all various tribes fighting us and each other. They started sending women suicide bombers to check points because they knew Americans wouldn't pat them down the same as men. After one week when 9 Americans got blown up that way the higher ups changed the plan. Now we could shoot and ask questions later.



"It was totally misreported..."

 Margaritte (still thinking about the women's role in the Army issue): That Jessica Lynch thing. It was totally misreported. She was injured all right, but she ended up in an Iraqi hospital. The Iraqis tried to give her back to us twice. But we wanted to stage a rescue to look good for the folks back home.

Tyrone: And they didn't report, too, that the Iraqis after they killed everyone else in that convoy, they beheaded the bodies and buried the heads in the sand. They thought it would keep them from going to heaven. I know. Because I was involved in identifications. You know, dental records.

IT GETS REALLY BAD
Tyrone: We met some special forces from Macedonia. I said you're from Macedonia? What are you doing here? And they told us. We don't follow the Geneva Convention. That's why you want us here.

Margaritte: Abu Ghraib that was all misreported. You can look today. None of the military personnel they identified as the perpetrators are in jail. You look at those photos and you know these people didn't do this torture because they were just sitting around and felt bored.

Tyrone: Yes. Look at the photos. It's all done according to the textbook. The torturers were trained. Then they left and the reservists were fall guys.

Margaritte: That's why I got out. I couldn't take any more of the Geneva violations. The stuff we were willing to do.

Tyrone: You want to know about the Surge? The Surge isn't what stopped the bombings and the violence. Adding those troops wasn't enough to make that kind of difference. What happened was that they turned loose the special forces and they went out in  assassination teams. At Fallujah they surrounded the city and they let out the women, the very young, and very old. They made the males age 9 to 60 stay inside. Then they killed them. All of them.

VW: If the media failed to cover this, why didn't soldiers speak out about some of these things. Or at least tell their families? They had access to the Internet and...

Tyrone: The Army controlled what you sent on the Internet or said on the phone.

Margaritte: If you were standing in line to use the phone and someone ahead of you said something they shouldn't, they'd suddenly say the phones were down. In the whole country! Once I sitting around while some officers were talking and I had a notebook. I was doodling in it. An officer came over and took it away from me. Even after I showed him I hadn't written anything.

GOING HOME
After the couple got out of the Army it was clear that Margaritte suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, something the Army has been reluctant to acknowledge is a legitimate combat caused disorder. She is now part of a class-action lawsuit (Sabo v. United States) to receive benefits and care for this injury. She admits, "No one thinks you have it. You look normal on the outside. But you're not normal on the inside."

When Margaritte enrolled in college one of the first classes she took was history. She dreaded the possibility that the class might reach the Iraq War as it moved forward in time. It did. When she spoke out about a few things she experienced she was told by two 18-year-olds, "You were never there!" Another student took another line of attack and called her a "baby killer."

Hearing that I understood why the couple was so reluctant to speak in the first place. But I couldn't help thinking they deserved to be heard. Maybe they weren't eyewitnesses to everything they claimed, but they actually had their boots on the desert ground while the rest of us were sitting at home in comfort. They put their lives in harm's way every day.

I'm sad to see them end up this way. Conflicted about what they did. Feeling used and abandoned by the people in power.

I hope they are successful in what they're trying to do nowadays. Move on, raise their son, and forget about those bad years of their lives except whenever the nightmares still overtake them in the dark. - V.W.

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