I'm rinsing my muddy boots at the washrack in about 1990 with an M88 Armored Recovery Vehicle in the background

What Did You Expect?

Hey! Here’s a picture of me, back in the day. Below it you’ll hear modern-day me reading a creative nonfiction story I put together with the help of the good people of Wrath-Bearing Tree and So Say We All (Veteran Writers’ Division), about the kinds of things that were going on at the time this picture was taken….

Baskets and piles of peaches, golden and orange. Image goes with story in Wrath Bearing Tree titled, Move OUt

Move Out

I drum the steering wheel of the rental car with the flats of my palms. It’s the opening riff of a song by Yaz. It takes three notes, four—that blossoming into a fanfare of electronic horns, and I’m a teenager in the 80s driving these same roads in Ingrid’s crap Toyota, bellowing along. “Don’t make …

Cover of inaugural issue of Hallaren Lit Mag, We Contain Multitudes. A watercolor image of a female service member in a blue uniform with a background of wildflowers. Very Gibson Girl!

Mem-war

I’m sitting in the CONEX, just a fancy shipping container really, that serves as our office at the
port in Antwerp. It’s January and the skies are as drab as the thousands upon thousands of vehicles
parked on hundreds and hundreds of acres of concrete pads at the edge of the docks, all straight lines
and rectangles and canvas, some camouflaged for the desert and some not yet painted, waiting their
turns to roll or be lifted onto the ships that hesitate only long enough to be loaded before they scud
away to the Gulf. Slouching, riding lower under the weight of their burdens, toward Bethlehem.