The Curious Draw of the Battlefield

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Once a year the streets of Philadelphia overflow with Marines, both active duty and veterans, celebrating the Marine Corps’ birthday on Nov. 10th. And it was in the “City of Brotherly Love” that I met a fellow Marine infantry veteran, Patrick Maxwell, last fall. We didn’t speak with each other much, but he knew my wars were over. What I didn’t know was that his weren’t.

Patrick didn’t share his plans with me then, but it wasn’t long before he contacted me from a village near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. He’d just come back from patrol with the Kurdish peshmerga forces. Patrick, honorably discharged in 2011, had returned to fight alongside the Kurds against the self-proclaimed Islamic State just weeks after our conversation. Not as a Marine, but as a civilian volunteer.

The full story of Patrick’s journey is told here. But his story began long before he traveled to Iraq to fight a second time.

In 2006, Patrick deployed to Iraq’s deadliest province, Anbar, in the south. But he never fired his weapon and I could understand his disappointment. I had spent the first months of my deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan anxious and saddened because I hadn’t pulled my trigger – the very thing Marines are trained to do. So I knew what he meant when he said he “felt robbed.” And so I understood why he went to fight alongside the peshmerga.

Even though I carry the weight of the lives I’ve stolen, some of them innocent, I was jealous of him and it upsets me that I don’t fully understand why. A part of me wanted to fight beside him. The other half despises the very thought. My desire for war is something I believe I will always struggle with even though my longing for peace is much stronger.

The first time I killed someone I was not under fire. A scrawny man with a Kalashnikov lurked toward our position in Falluja, Iraq. I watched as he fell to the ground with one slow, steady press of my rifle’s trigger. At first, all I felt was recoil. But I kept looking back. I couldn’t believe I had killed a man. And I did so with a smile. Because he could have killed one of us.

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For an Iraqi Expatriate, ‘American Sniper’ Both Draws and Repels

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Like many others, I was intrigued by the attention the film “American Sniper” was getting. I knew I was treading murky waters, but I decided to follow the herd and see the movie. Unlike most people in the crowd, I had a very personal stake in the film. “American Sniper” takes place in Iraq, my homeland, which I left shortly after the American-led invasion that Chris Kyle took part in. So the film, powerful and sad, left me with mixed thoughts and reminiscences.

Falluja — where much of the movie takes place — was, for American troops, a city of demons and horror. But before the 2003 invasion, during the years of the embargo against Iraq, Falluja was known as little more than a transit hub frequented by travelers heading to the western border with Jordan – as well as for its tasty kebab. Three days before the invasion, a group of five teenagers from Baghdad, my son among them, drove there after midnight for a late meal. It was the norm. Nobody was hurt.

When I was back in Baghdad in 2010, I found that my skills on the very roads where I had learned to drive were no longer viable because of traffic jams caused by checkpoints and blast walls. I had to be transported around by a cast of fearful drivers. One driver, Sa’ad, told me quietly one day, “I cannot serve you tomorrow.” When I asked why, he replied that he had to go to Hilla — about 70 miles south of Baghdad — to bring the children of his dead brother to their grandmother’s home. His eyes were teary.

In 2006, his brother, he and a cousin were in a car that broke down near an American base. While the three were leaning under the car’s hood, trying to fix the engine, someone – perhaps an American sniper – shot and killed the brother and cousin. Shielded from the sniper’s sight by the car, Sa’ad was spared.

“His head was on the radiator, and I was too scared to do anything,” Sa’ad said, sobbing. After the killing of her husband, Sa’ad’s sister-in-law moved with her children to her parents’ house in Hilla.

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For Many Veterans, ‘American Sniper,’ Right or Wrong, Starts an Important Conversation

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This week, the trial of the man accused of killing Chris Kyle opens in a Texas courtroom, even as the Clint Eastwood film based on Mr. Kyle’s life, “American Sniper,” is playing in a theater three miles away. Much as Mr. Kyle’s death shocked the nation, the film has generated fierce debate nationally over the meaning of his life and his death, and the Iraq war itself. To some, Mr. Kyle represents all that was right with the American-led invasion, to others, all that was wrong. Yet to many veterans, his story offers a chance to discuss and debate a remarkable array of complex and personal questions: the mix of motivations that lead people to sign up in the military, the riot of emotions troops feel when they kill or witness death, the struggle to reengage with civilian society upon coming home. A number of people have sent At War essays about how they viewed the film, including the piece below by a former Marine. What do you think? Send us your thoughts: atwar@nytimes.com.

We arrived at the mall and made our way to the massive IMAX theater where we found all but the first few rows completely full. “At least it’ll be immersive,” my wife said with a look of optimism as we took our seats. “Oh great,” I thought to myself, “an immersive experience of the Iraq war, this ought to be good for me.”

While reading “American Sniper” last year, I saw in Chris Kyle a man who had made himself vulnerable in his struggle to become human again while recounting the events that led him to become America’s most deadly sniper. Now with the movie, I thought that perhaps its six Oscar nominations were an effort by the Academy to say, “This subject is important and we should be taking it seriously.” But it also occurred to me that the nominations were just a figurative pat on their own backs for “serving those who served.”

Douglas W. Jackson in Iraq in 2007, where he served as a rifleman in the Marines. Courtesy of Douglas W. Jackson

I was reminded of “The Hurt Locker,” which had the movie industry convinced that they’d nailed it. “It seemed so realistic,” I can remember some people telling me. Give me a break. And then there was “Zero Dark Thirty” (also based on a Navy SEAL memoir). It, too, received wide critical acclaim with several Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Perhaps for some audiences it was an entertaining, climactic moment seeing Osama Bin Laden killed on screen. But I couldn’t help but think of a much more pressing narrative: the nation’s involvement in Afghanistan. I mean, why not show any one of the countless Army units living in the mountains for 12 months at a time, being attacked daily and barely making it out alive?

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Which Movies and Television Shows Get Veterans Right? Or Wrong?

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Chris Marvin at a panel discussion last month at the National Geographic Society in Washington. Mr. Marvin's organization, Got Your 6, fights stereotypes of military veterans in movies and on television. Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

Whenever movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come up when I’m interviewing veterans, talk inevitably turns to “The Hurt Locker.” Almost everyone who has deployed tells me they found the portrayals of life on an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team in Iraq laughably over the top: Since when do bomb techs ride out into the desert solo in full sniper gear?

But then they bring up “the cereal scene” — where Staff Sgt. William James returns from war and finds himself shopping for groceries. In the cereal aisle, he stares silently at the hundreds of choices, seemingly disconnected and lost in thought, overwhelmed perhaps by the banality of the abundance surrounding him. Without looking, he throws a cereal box into the cart and walks off. A few scenes later, he is back in Iraq, seemingly more at ease.

We published this article today about the push to portray veterans in a more thoughtful, realistic light onscreen. We focused on a retired Army captain, Chris Marvin, the founder of Got Your 6, who is leading the charge. He offered his hits (“American Sniper,” “Lone Survivor,” “The Mindy Project”) and duds (“Brothers,” “Forrest Gump,” “CSI: NY”).

If you’re a veteran, tell us in the comments section what other onscreen portrayals of veterans do you think either captured what it is like to be a veteran after 9/11, or made you cringe?

Tracking the Weapons Used to Fight Ukraine’s War

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It is the central question of the continuing civil war in Ukraine: to what degree is Russia supplying the weapons that are helping antigovernment forces sustain their secessionist movement? That question became even more relevant this week with the news that NATO’s military commander now supports providing defensive weapons to the Ukraine government.

A recent report on the weapons and military vehicles used in the Ukraine conflict provides evidence for both sides of the argument.

Released late last year by the research company Armament Research Services, or ARES, the report cites several examples of cross-border matériel support to separatists and rebels fighting the government in Kiev. Certain items the researchers came across gave their team pause, as these weapons had been introduced into service only after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union or had never been documented outside the countries that developed them.

Nic R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of ARES, was able to positively identify 20 weapons systems in Ukraine that had never previously been exported from their country of origin. Nineteen of those came from Russia, and one was from Poland. He calls these “flag items” because they can be clearly tied to outside nations.

From Russia, ARES identified exotic killing tools like the VSS suppressed marksman rifle, heavy armor like the T-72B3 main battle tank, and newer thermobaric rocket launchers like the MRO-A that have not been seen outside the Federation’s borders.

The lone Polish flag item was the PPZR Grom man-portable air defense missile system, which ARES spotted in a YouTube video released by the Ukrainian military. The missile was manufactured in 2007, according to markings painted on its exterior.

But the report also draws conclusions that counter the widely accepted narrative that the insurgents depend on Russian matériel.

By analyzing photographs of captured ordnance, ARES also determined that existing stockpiles of weapons were the single biggest source of military goods used by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

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A Young Private, Killed in World War II, Still Leaps Off the Page

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Private Richard Halvey in an undated photo. Courtesy of Kiley Bense
Voices

Pvt. Richard Halvey scribbled his last letter home in the passenger seat of an Army radio vehicle rumbling somewhere through North Africa in February 1943. He wrote on the desk built into the front of the car while his friend Ryan drove, passing across chocolate bars and sticks of gum. He complained about his warts (“I even have an idea they are bringing friends”). He asked after his driver’s license and his brother, Bob. He spoke of regret that he had to shave his mustache without taking a photo first (“Beards aren’t permitted in this company and mustache was starting to strain coffee etc so rather than have it dry cleaned I decided to dispense with it”). The last letter addressed to my grandmother, Patricia, his sister, was just a quick note about a $30 money order, later carefully pressed flat; his mistake in dating the top delicately corrected in Pat’s spindly hand.

He was 23 when he succumbed to his wounds in a Tunisian hospital. The war department sent a Purple Heart to Philadelphia and, later, his body to Virginia.

Death visits on the mundane a heightened gravity, making the trivial beautiful and the everyday weighty. Had Private Halvey lived, had his letter not been followed by a terse telegram reporting his death “of wounds received in action in defense of his country,” that letter might be softly rotting in an airless attic now, or forgotten in an estate sale trunk. He might have grandchildren, kids with blue eyes and long limbs and the borrowed grace of a once and future basketball star. Instead, the letters are stuck together in a scrapbook made by my grandmother, a tribute to her beloved brother. There would be no girl and no wedding band, no sons, no forwarding address.

I first read my great-uncle’s letters in high school, an audience he could never have imagined. Growing up, I’d heard stories and seen a picture of him, posed with a rifle over the mantel. But it wasn’t until I opened the faded green scrapbook that I became fixated on his short life. It was not that he was exceptional, but rather that he was so ordinary: a normal, kind-hearted young man who had marched into a storm set in motion before he was born, at nearly the same age that I am now. On Veterans Day, especially, I think of my grandfathers, both in the Navy and lucky enough to survive the war, and then of Dick Halvey, grinning on his parents’ porch, hand raised in a salute, and I open the scrapbook again. It contains his letters home, his obituaries, condolence cards, high school grades, a map of Arlington.

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In an Amputee Clinic, Putting on a Happy Face

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Adele Levine at work with a patient. K. Dunlavey

Last year, my co-worker Emma called to let me know she was driving away from Walter Reed for the very last time. She had just resigned. She thought she would feel sadness or have pangs of remorse. But instead she had just felt relieved. It was over.

Emma and I worked together as physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and then later its reincarnation, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, for nine years.

When we were first hired in 2005, Walter Reed was so busy with incoming casualties there was a rumor that they would erect M*A*S*H tents on the front lawn of the hospital to handle the overflow. That never happened. Instead, when the wards tasked with treating the wounded filled up, the new incoming soldiers (mostly men) went to Ward 67 – the gynecology unit.

In the amputee section, where Emma and I worked, we could tell you exactly how things were going for our ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the troop surges happened in 2007 and 2009, there were so many new amputees coming in that, in one week, I saw three of my co-workers cry. But the wounded kept coming. And somehow, by 2011, we were treating an average of 150 multi-limb amputees a day.

Emma confessed on the phone that she hadn’t felt right for months and had gone to her doctor. She said that after the doctor left the room, she read her chart. She knew she wasn’t super healthy, but it was altogether different to read in black and white that she didn’t exercise, drank frequently and had a stressful job.

I was only half listening, because I had the phone balanced between my shoulder and ear as I tried to pry the cap off a bottle of beer. Walter Reed hadn’t been that healthy for me, either.

You would think that in the amputee clinic you would get used to seeing amputations, but there was always something new. In the beginning, below knee amputations and below elbow amputations were the norm. But as the wars progressed and the bombs and terrain got deadlier, we saw amputations above the knee and above the elbow. And later amputations at the groin. Those progressed to include partial pelvic amputations.

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‘Basetrack Live,’ the Story of a Marine’s Deployment, and His Return Home

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Tyler La Marr, a former Marine Corps sergeant, left, plays the role of Cpl. A. J. Czubai, right, in "Basetrack Live" at BAM Harvey Theater. Teresa Fazio
Voices

No millennial worth his iPhone remembers life before social media. While previous generations’ warfighters wrote letters or phoned home over spotty connections, Marines today can post on Instagram photos of themselves sitting atop cans of ammunition. In 2010, the photojournalist Teru Kuwayama and his collaborators embedded in Afghanistan to start a Facebook page for the First Battalion, Eighth Marines to communicate with loved ones. Far from resulting in just another live-stream of minutiae, their Basetrack project became a way for deployed troops to maintain relationships with their families. The resulting trove of photos and videos provide ample fodder for “Basetrack Live” — the onstage story of one corporal’s deployment and homecoming, and the effects on his family.

For both the battalion and a nation’s artists, self-reflection occurred stunningly quickly through the use of social media. Anne Hamburger, executive producer of En Garde Arts, the company behind “Basetrack Live,” said she felt it was important to document the human side of going to war, without sensationalizing the experience.

“The issues are so complex” when an ordinary person deploys, Ms. Hamburger said. Her biggest challenge for the production, which is showing at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and will be going on a national tour, was paring down the “incredible wealth of material,” she said.

Ms. Hamburger reached out through Facebook, gathering more than 100 respondents and conducting three dozen interviews to cull images and video for the project. Every word in “Basetrack Live” is taken from interviews with Marines or members of their families.

This citizen journalism captures the truth of troops’ feelings during deployment, including graffiti about pornography, and profane, funny rules for standing watch and cleaning toilets. The images chosen for the production reflect the Marines’ brotherhood, including an impressive assortment of tattoos. Because of the authentic, emotion-rich material, the Marines are painted neither as heroes nor victims.

The plot delves into the relationship between Cpl. A. J. Czubai and his wife, Melissa. Corporal Czubai is played by Tyler La Marr, a former Marine Corps sergeant and the founder of the Society of Artistic Veterans. Mr. La Marr is quick to point out that his experiences as a signals intelligence analyst in Iraq were distinctly different from Corporal Czubai’s infantry deployments to Afghanistan.

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Marines Remember Falluja, 10 Years Later

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Marines of the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment responded to enemy contact in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004. Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan
Voices

On Nov. 6, 2004, NATO forces launched an assault on Falluja, a city north of Baghdad that had become a magnet for Sunni insurgent forces. Thomas Brennan, then a 19-year-old Marine Corps lance corporal, was one of the infantrymen with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment who would participate in the attack. The battalion suffered numerous casualties in the battle, one of the bloodiest for American forces since Vietnam. Now a journalism student, Mr. Brennan recalls the battle with the help of some of the Marines and sailors he fought beside.

Grains of sand floated through motionless air as beams of light crept through sandbagged windows. Young men sat mesmerized by the words echoing from walls scarred by years of war.

Through cigarette smoke and desert confetti, Doug Bahrns, who was then a Marine second Lieutenant, exuded confidence and trepidation as he explained over two hours the details of our mission and what should happen when — not if — we were wounded. He paused often, gazing into the darkness above our heads. He knew he wouldn’t bring us all home.

Now a major assigned to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Major Bahrns recalled recently the weight he felt leading Marines “into such a large-scale fight where it was inevitable someone was going to get killed.”

“Nov. 10, 2004, is one of the most significant days of my life, changing not only my life, but other’s lives,” Major Bahrns said. “It put into perspective life, death and the brotherhood within military service. That was the first day, alongside my fellow Marines, that I truly felt I’d cemented my place among them.”

Ten years ago, roughly 13,500 American, British and Iraqi forces attacked Falluja, Iraq, where roughly 4,000 insurgents fought from trenches, tunnels and houses, using improvised explosive devices, rifles, rockets and machine guns. During the 46-day battle, roughly 2,000 insurgents were killed and 1,500 captured. By Dec. 23, 107 members of coalition forces had died and 613 were wounded. Alongside Lieutenant Bahrns, in Alpha Company, First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, 17 died and 102 were wounded. It was the heaviest urban combat since the 1968 Battle of Hue City during the Vietnam War.

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Helping Homeless Veterans Locally, and Thinking Bigger

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Joseph Gotesman, right, and other VetConnect workers made rounds in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx in May. Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Under the tracks of a northbound 5 train, Joseph Gotesman pulled a sandwich from a plastic bag and approached a man sitting near a jumble of boxes. His query was crisp and succinct: “Excuse me, sir. Are you a veteran?”

Mr. Gotesman, 22, leads VetConnect, a Bronx-based organization devised to combat homelessness among veterans. Since it started work in January, the small group has made contact with dozens of veterans living on the streets in and around the Bronx. VetConnect has helped five veterans get permanent housing, including one who needed it to get much-needed surgery, and has worked with others to find employment.

Such small numbers might seem paltry in a city where the ratio of homeless people to people who have homes is the third highest in the nation, but a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services says that every little bit helps.

“Many of our partners started out as small, neighborhood-focused organizations. We value every effort, however small, to reach out to a homeless man or woman and connect them to services,” Chris Miller, the spokesman. “It makes a difference.”

The strength of VetConnect, said Mr. Gotesman, is its grass-roots nature. “We’re local,” he said. “You can’t get more local than community members reaching out to their own. And as we grow, it will be community members reaching out to their own as well. You won’t see me at a VetConnect excursion in an L.A. or a Boston community excursion.”

And that is exactly where the organization is heading. In the last few months, VetConnect has begun the process of putting together teams in other states where homelessness among veterans is high, such as California and Texas. In September, VetConnect was awarded a $5,000 grant from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, which will assist the organization in, among other things, expanding, conducting research and distributing materials.

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Lessons for a Grandfather, Unexpectedly Deployed to Afghanistan

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Lt. Col. James Gleason Bishop, right, interviewing the project manager of a non-government organization in Kabul in July. Navy LT. Peter Buttigieg

“You know you won a free round-trip ticket to Afghanistan?” a perpetually busy chief master sergeant asked me one warm winter evening. We were at the gym at Robins Air Force Base in Houston County, Ga., after a day spent serving on a panel of public affairs chiefs.

“You’re kidding,” I said. Weights clanked behind us. “I saw my name on a deployment list, but there was a question mark beside it.” All afternoon, my hopes had hung on that question mark.

“No question sir. You made the list. You’re going to ISAF headquarters in Kabul,” he said, referring to the United States-led international force in Afghanistan. He beamed like he was handing me a winning lotto ticket. It was January 2013. I was scheduled to deploy in 15 months.

To him, deployment amounted to the opportunity of a lifetime. At that moment, it seemed to me like some surreal theft. I’d miss another New England summer, every birthday in my immediate family and my 33rd wedding anniversary. As a 30-year Air Force Reserve veteran, I’d spent months away from home, but never deployed to a war zone. So I was a decade overdue. But while the Air Force Reserve asks for volunteers to go overseas, I had assumed they don’t involuntarily deploy 53-year-old grandfathers.

They do.

When I called my wife, Debby, that evening to tell her the news, she said, “Aren’t you a little old for that?”

I felt old. I took a walk around the gorgeous Georgia base, grateful to be away from the frigid New England winter, feeling alternately numb and angry to be “non-vol’d.” The crepe myrtles bloomed and the sun warmed my arms as the notion crept up my spine: I’m going to Afghanistan.

In the evening, after opening the Gideon Bible to the 23rd Psalm and glancing at the familiar words – “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want …” – I slept in fits until about 3 a.m., then not at all. In the dark, short, violent movies kept looping in my head. Somebody would burn another Quran and 40,000 protesters – 1 percent of Kabul’s population – would storm the gate. An Afghan would come to work and start shooting, like what happened when a colleague was killed at Kabul International Airport. Looping, like bad songs that won’t stop.

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An Iraq Veteran’s Experience With Chemical Weapons

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Play Video|13:15

Chemical Secrets of the Iraq War

Chemical Secrets of the Iraq War

The United States went to war in Iraq expecting to destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, it found only remnants of chemical arms built in close collaboration with the West.

Video by Mac William Bishop and C.J. Chivers on October 15, 2014. Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
Voices

We found chemical weapons my first week in Iraq.

At Contingency Operating Base Speicher, I was a lieutenant working in the operations department for an explosive ordnance disposal battalion. We were responsible for the entire northern sector of the country, about 50,000 square kilometers (or roughly 19,300 square miles) of ground touching the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian borders.

The information came to me in an otherwise benign email, alongside the dozens of field reports that hit my inbox every hour. After just a couple of days as the new guy on the team, the reports showing the aftermath of vehicles and soldiers torn apart by explosives started feeling routine. I’d been expecting them.

But this one showed something I didn’t see coming: M110 shells, which are American-designed 155-millimeter artillery projectiles. These had tested positive for sulfur mustard, a blister agent.

“Chem rounds.”

I looked away from my screen, and not 10 feet away from me was Chuck, an Army E.O.D. technician who’d already served tours in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He was the kind of noncommissioned officer every lieutenant hopes for: a smart, talented young soldier who trained you up and made you better. I was already relying on Chuck for everything.

Here, I turned to him in disbelief.

I told him that the team had found chem M110’s and that the shells had tested positive for mustard.

He was unimpressed.

I persisted. As far as I knew, we’d just made the first “WMD find” of the war.

But it turned out there was a lot I didn’t know.

He cut right to the chase.

Chuck turned to me and peered over the eyeglasses low on his nose. He looked at me for a while without blinking.

“LT, let me let you in on something,” he said. “We find three or four of those things a week up north here. Everybody knows about them. And nobody cares.”

I was stunned. “You got to be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

As good noncommissioned officers do, Chuck got me up to speed quickly but also didn’t hesitate to give me swift reality checks when needed. This was one of those times.

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Helping Veterans Find Their Place, This Time on Campus

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As bow-tied waiters cleared plates and emptied coffee cups inside a plush meeting room at the Yale Club in Midtown Manhattan earlier this month, about 30 veterans from nearby community colleges listened to representatives from Yale, Dartmouth, Wesleyan and Vassar describe their veterans programs and answer questions about academics, financial aid and housing.

Rob Cuthbert, an enlisted Army veteran and member of the fiduciary board of the Yale Veterans Association who helped to organize the event, said the session was an attempt to address a phenomenon he referred to as an “exigent crisis”: the small numbers of veterans attending elite four-year colleges and universities.

“Numbers from the Department of Labor suggest that there are at least 1.4 million veterans without bachelor’s degrees,” Mr. Cuthbert said in a phone interview. “A bachelor’s degree is a key tool for socioeconomic mobility in today’s economy. Enlisted veterans should not doubt that there are clear pathways to Ivy League and peer schools.”

According to school administrators, there was one undergraduate veteran attending Princeton during the 2013-14 academic year, out of 5,244 undergraduates. Harvard had four among its roughly 6,700 undergraduates. Brown had 11 out of 6,182. Dartmouth, whose former president, James Wright, is an enlisted Marine Corps veteran who encourages veterans to continue their education during his visits to military hospitals, had 18 of 4,276.

Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs also shows that less than one half of one percent of the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill money paid since 2009 has gone to individuals attending Ivy League schools. Of that relatively small amount, an even smaller portion went to enlisted veterans attending undergraduate programs at those colleges. The remainder went to dependents of service members, officers or enlisted veterans attending graduate programs.

In response to those numbers, organizations like the Posse Foundation have turned their attention to bringing more veterans to the nation’s colleges. The foundation was started in 1989 to help underrepresented students to enter top-tier schools. Two years ago, Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar College, began working with the group to apply their model — which focuses on helping exceptional community college students gain admission to elite four-year colleges — to veterans.

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A Sister, and Brother, in Arms

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Voices

Just before Sept. 11, 2001, my teenage brother Mike, fresh from Air Force training, pressed something small into my palm: two pin-backings stubbed on a curled shape in dusky silver. Jump wings.

“If you keep them safe, I’ll always be safe,” he said.

My brothers and I had always tried to protect each other. Chris, the younger, was calm, but Mike was rambunctious. When I was 4 and they were toddlers, I would sneak into their room past midnight to ensure they still occupied their dual cribs. I would poke a finger through the crib slats, slide up their eyelids, and check their breathing as they slept. Safe in their company, I would curl up on the floor for a minute, then pad back to my pink-swathed bed. But by elementary school, our parents had divorced, and anger ran through our thin walls.

When I was 14, our stepfather and Mike, 12, got in a fight over pajamas. Too cowardly to burst in, I stayed in bed and turned up my Walkman. Mike sobbed himself to sleep with a nosebleed that soaked his mattress. He had misbehaved, but my crime felt worse — I had let him thrash alone. As the years passed, conflicts with our stepfather prompted police cruiser lights on our street. When I finished high school, Mike’s card to me read, “…Stay another year? Please?” I should have ensured my brothers grew up strong. Instead I fled.

At 18, I paid for college with a Marine Corps R.O.T.C. scholarship; the military’s rules seemed enlightened next to the ones back home. Mike later barreled into the same Boston unit as an Air Force cadet. He tagged along on field exercises with us upperclassmen, easily completing grueling hikes and rappelling down university buildings. My senior year, the Twin Towers fell, and I knew at some point I would deploy. The following June, Mike and Chris pinned gold lieutenant bars on my shoulders.

Teresa Fazio receiving her Marine Corps commission in 2002, with her two brothers, Chris on the left and Mike on the right.   Courtesy of Teresa Fazio

Two years later, on an Iraqi base, I nervously strapped myself into an androgynous Kevlar jacket. Tromping around our gravel-strewn compound, I doled out candy and phone cards while waiting for mortars to fall. We plodded through our days, trusting in grace that wherever we stepped was safe. Late at night, when the desert heat lifted, I taught my Marines martial arts. As we punched foam mats and dragged each other through the sand, I wondered how my fist would feel against my stepfather’s face, how much pressure my forearm required to choke his carotid artery. But I could not predict the techniques my sparring partners threw; I could only try to counter them. And my rage did not help me lead.

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Writing as a Soldier and a Civilian

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It is 12 a.m. in the land of the midnight sun. Seventy-two hours until deployment. I should be at home with my wife, Jen, and 6-month-old son or unpacking the house we bought recently. Instead, I’m on my bike riding home from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. A rowdy group rides down another trail that merges with mine, cycling in a pack in front of me. They laugh, pull beers from messenger bags, see me and offer me one. The exchange is tour-worthy. An anonymous rider pulls out a cold Olympia and reaches toward me. His eyes remain on the trail ahead, as do mine. I extend a blind left hand, close the gap, find the front of the can. For a moment we are connected by cheap beer. Then he lets go and it is all mine. I toast the rowdies and ride ahead.

Voices

***

On Jan. 13, my wife’s water broke, just as I put the final touches on my application to the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. While I drove, frenzied, across town for a post office, she held out through rising contractions. Finnegan Shichiro Komatsu made his entry that night, and a month later a letter came in the mail. I was in, accepted into the creative nonfiction program.

Matt Komatsu and his son, Finn.  Megan Marlene Photography

The university program is low residency: a correspondence course for all but two weeks every summer. During the residency, students from all over the globe — and from three genres (fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry) — converged on the Anchorage campus. For two weeks, it was 12 hours a day of writing: poetry, fiction, readings, lectures, manuscript workshops. Immersed in an unfamiliar world, windows to new material opened hourly.

Because the program required so little time on campus, I did not have to quit my job to pursue the degree. The course work for my first semester was online. When it was time for the residency, I took leave, shed my uniform, pulled on some civvies and rode my bike to class.

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