\nEvery so often you see something – some small fact – that nails shut a belief that you’ve held for a while and turns it into something solid you can truly take a stand on.<\/p>\n
I have claimed for some time – along with many others – that the cultural gap between the media class and our military class was too large, and that the media persist in their devaluing of the military because of this gap.<\/p>\n
Via local journalism blog LA Observed, I was brought to a series of tweets by New Yorker staff writer Dan Baum, describing his firing from his staff consulting writer gig there – but also describing how he’d been hired.<\/p>\n
Still, the New Yorker is the New Yorker, and my next question to John was, “What can I do next?”<\/p>\n
As any writer knows, editors almost never suggest stories. Generating story ideas is the real work; researching and<\/p>\n
Writing them is the easy part. In one of our conversations, though, John let drop a real jewel:<\/p>\n
“We have this sense that we should be paying more attention to the military,” he said. (This was now early 2003,<\/p>\n
as the country was getting ready for war in Iraq. “Thing is, nobody here cares about the military, and nobody here<\/p>\n
knows anything about the military.” Well, I certainly didn’t know anything about the military but I did find it<\/p>\n
interesting, so I piped up, “I can do that!” I wasn’t worried about my lack of experience or knowledge in the field<\/p>\n
of arms. Tom Wolfe is right, I think, when admonishes young writers to ignore the old advice about “writing what<\/p>\n
you know,” and instead write about what you don’t know. If you have to learn about something from scratch, he<\/p>\n
argues, you don’t bring any lazy preconceptions. John said I was welcome to give it a try. “Think about trying a<\/p>\n
process story,” he said, using a term I’d never heard. “It’s a New Yorker standard,” he went on. “You simply<\/p>\n
deconstruct a process for the reader. John McPhee was the master. It makes for a simple structure.”<\/p>\n
By that time the improvised explosive device was the weapon of choice in Iraq, and limb loss was the signature<\/p>\n
Wound of the Iraq war. So I followed one soldier from the moment he left his job at Wal-Mart in rural Wisconsin<\/p>\n
To join the Army to the day he returned to speak to his high school without his leg. John Bennet gave me another<\/p>\n
Great piece of New Yorker advice: “This is the New Yorker, so you can use any narrative structure you like,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Just know that when I get it, I’m going to take it apart and make it all chronological.” Telling a story in strict<\/p>\n
chronological order turned out to be a fabulous discipline. It made the story easy to write, and may be why New<\/p>\n
Yorker stories are so easy to read. Of course, the magazine does run everything through the deflavorizer, following<\/p>\n
Samuel Johnson’s immortal advice: “Read what you have written, and when you come across a passage you think<\/p>\n
Is particularly fine, strike it out.”<\/p>\n
My wounded-soldier story ran as “The Casualty” and can be found here:<\/a> <\/p>\n
Next I pitched a story about what killing does to soldiers, psychologically, and how the Army is ill-equipped to deal<\/p>\n
With the damage that killing does. That proposal can be read here:<\/a><\/p>\n