my story

 During the four years my son Mauro was on active duty, I never slept. I lay awake at night imagining Iraq. In my head, bombs exploded, bullets flew by, injured soldiers moaned and called for their loved ones. When Mauro returned, safe and relatively sound, I was profoundly grateful and felt the need to give back. My son had just entered a graduate program. Perhaps, I thought, I could help other veterans ease back into civilian life, particularly those who had suffered injuries or didn’t have a family support system. 

At the time, there were almost no veterans’ services at Georgetown University, where I was a professor. I began meeting with campus administrators to lobby for student veterans and became Faculty Adviser of  The Georgetown University Student Veterans Association. Since there was no administrative apparatus in place for guiding military applicants, the association officers and I spent hours counseling veterans wishing to continue their schooling. Those were long, grueling, and satisfying days, during which I got to spend hours and hours with veterans. Best of all, I got to hear their stories.  

Rather than put an end to my imaginings, the veterans’ stories nourished them. They helped me to visualize places and people I had never seen and to grasp situations about which I had never thought. Eventually, I started writing down the stories. Strictly speaking, all of these stories are both true and untrue. They are all based on actual events, but they are also products of my own obsessive imaginings. Writing them has helped me to bring closure to the difficult period of my son’s deployment. It has also helped me to grasp more clearly the consequences of war—not only for the combatants, but also for their loved ones.