On his first day in Iraq, Maurice Decaul realized that despite being a member of the U.S. Marine Corps — an organization that, in his own words, “relentlessly trains for war” — he only had an intellectual understanding of war. That feeling was displaced quickly as artillery fire sounded around him. And in the eerie silence between booms that all but confirmed loss of life, Decaul says that he became a writer.
His transformation from soldier to poet and playwright didn’t happen overnight in a foreign land. Years later, in a veterans’ writing workshop, he recorded memories of that day — an attempt to understand what happened and how he felt about it. Finding words to express his emotions made Decaul realize that the experience completely numbed him. “But writing helped me excavate the why of why I went numb,” he explains, going on to say that the process got him “back to being in a place where I could feel again.” See Decaul share this story of resurrection and recite his poem “And The War Was In Its Infancy Then” at the recent Got Your 6 Storyteller event, a campaign that honors and celebrates the talents, skills and leadership of our veterans, in the video above.
In this exclusive interview with NationSwell, Decaul discusses what inspires his service as a veteran and his work as a poet.
What does it mean to be a veteran?
Beyond the technical definition, for me it means being of service to other veterans, especially younger people. A few months ago, I was speaking with a friend who is a veteran of the Army, and we are both writers and we both served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. I mentioned to him, for me, because I have been fortunate over the years to be offered great opportunities to write and to create, I now see it as my duty to help those coming after by sharing what I know and contacts and being a mentor.
What inspired you to serve your country?
My family and I are emigrants and one of my earliest memories is seeing a Marine Embassy Guard. After relocating to the United States, I found myself reading a lot about Marines. I remember hearing about the battle of Khafji. I remember hearing about those Recon Marines on a roof calling fire onto occupying troops and the audacity of that…I was hooked, I wanted to be like them.
What 3 words describe your experience in the service?
I served in the Marine Corps and our core values are honor, courage and respect. For me, those words drove the way I tried to behave in and out of uniform. At the core of those words is the notion of integrity — doing what is right, not what is expedient or self-serving. Drill instructors ensure that recruits fortunate enough to graduate and become Marines leave training knowing the importance of our core values and integrity. This is key to maintaining discipline and esprit, and I’ve kept these values in the civilian world.
What is the quality you most admire in a comrade?
Enthusiasm for the work we are doing.
Who are your heroes in real life?
The people who I admire are those who are able to take an idea and go beyond having the idea to making something out of it. I guess, I’m thinking broadly about risk takers. People who aren’t afraid to challenge institutions, thought patterns and naysayers. Entrepreneurial people who are courageous enough to try.
Who was the most inspirational person you encountered while serving?
I served with a Marine named Sgt. Ali while in Iraq in 2003. He was my roommate over there and beyond his general excellence, he knew how to lead. He led by example, understood fairness and is one of the most honorable and courageous Marines I ever knew. I know there were times when he must’ve felt fear, but he was resolute in the face of it. I respected him. I still respect him. I felt honored to serve with him. I would still follow him.
If you could change one thing about your service, what would it be?
I wouldn’t. It’s made me the person I am.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
There isn’t one specific thing, but I know I would’ve regretted not joining the Marines. I’m glad I did, and I am glad I got to serve with great people like Sgt. Ali and many others.
Who is your favorite writer?
I have several writers that I go back to: Yusef Komunyakaa, Yehuda Amichai, Jack Gilbert, Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. None of them are more important to me than the others. They inform my work, my thinking. Also, I’ve been fortunate to have exceptional writing teachers such as Edward Hirsch, Sharon Olds, Yusef Komunyakaa, Timothy Donnelly and Anne Carson. I love them all, deeply.
What is your favorite topic to write about?
I write about the people forced to make difficult and/or impossible decisions. Sometimes these people are participants in conflict, sometimes not. But I am interested in the ambiguity, the space between right and wrong.
What is your favorite poem?
Jack Gilbert’s “Married” is one of them.
How does your military service impact your writing?
Well, the wars are often the theme, but I am curious about how people in extremis make decisions and how the consequences of those decisions shape their lives.
What is your motto?
There is no right answer
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Homepage photo Courtesy of Got Your 6.
Tag: Poetry
Does the Pen Have the Might to Help At-Risk Teens?
We all have stories to tell, but for these students, telling it may be the key to their success.
Spoken in rhyme, Get Lit presents teen with opportunity to express their frustration, joy and thoughts on life through poetry. By entering the lyrical world, these students are able to verbalize and escape the trials of everyday life and envision a different future.
It all began back in 2006 when teacher and literary coach Dian Luby Lane started the program in a South Central Los Angeles high school. Coming from a low-income community herself, Lane wanted to show her students that there is a hope for a better future. So she introduced them to the world that saved her: books and poetry.
Since then, Get Lit has expanded to other schools and communities in order to show at-risk teens that there is hope. Through curriculums taught at high schools and in communities, Get Lit uses poetry to instill confidence and show the value of self-expression. Students who participate learn not only to read poetry, but also to write and perform it, reports Good.
The curriculum includes classical, spoken word and canonical poems from Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound to Langston Hughes.
Get Lit is more than just a class, though. It’s also a traveling troupe of performers known as the Get Lit Players, which performs famous compositions, as well as originals. During their travels last November, the Get Lit Players found themselves on The Queen Latifah Show where a video of their performance went viral.
One member of the troupe is 18-year-old Kyland Turner, a senior with aspirations to work in television and movies.
“[Get Lit] came to my school and someone did a poem about a father son relationship and it spoke to me and my struggles so I decided to get involved,” Turner tells The Queen Latifah Show. “Since joining Get Lit I have turned my grades around and now I’m looking and applying to colleges, something I never thought I would have a chance at doing two years ago. They saved me in so many ways; I owe my life to Get Lit.”
Currently, Get Lit has a pilot program in Washington, D.C., and it’s also working in coordination with After School All-Stars, a program offering after-school programs to almost 90,000 students. The organization is currently holding a fundraising campaign with the hope of further expansion.
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What Happens When You Give a Soldier a Pen Instead of a Gun?
For seven years, members of a Philadelphia-based nonprofit have been traveling the country turning the stereotype of veterans not speaking about their military service on its head.
Warrior Writers hosts regular workshops for veterans in Chicago; Ithaca, N.Y.; New York City and Boston; as well as visiting workshops in other cities to help soldiers (regardless of age) express their feelings and experiences through poetry and prose.
This year Warrior Writers is teaming up with Combat Paper, a nonprofit teaching vets how to turn their old uniforms into artful paper (read our story about the organization here), to offer three writing and paper-making workshops in New Jersey. These efforts were made possible by a $135,000 grant from Impact 100 Garden State.
After the veterans and active-duty service personnel polish their writing at the workshop in Morristown, N.J., they will be presenting their work during the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival at the NJ Performing Arts Center in Newark on October 25.
One participant in the Morristown workshop is Sarah Mess of Branchburg, N.J. Mess served in the Army in Somalia and wrote a piece in the voice of male soldiers who didn’t think she belonged. “She thinks too highly of herself,” Mess reads in a video for Daily Record. “Let’s knock this girl back down to her stupid, dumb girl position. Come on, boys, sic her. Get her. Beat her. Kick her. Don’t let her up. But she’s bleeding. Good for her. That’s what she gets. She should have never joined the Army.”
“I’m able to express and tap into things here that maybe I didn’t even know were still stirring, like I did today,” Mess tells Lorraine Ash of Daily Record. “I’m able to bring those things to the surface and share them in safe spaces with people who’ve experienced similar things. The draw is that it’s veterans working with veterans. The draw is that we don’t call it therapy. When you start calling things therapy, it creates an aversion to wanting to participate because of the stigma. This works because it’s just community.”
Eli Wright, who works for Combat Paper NJ and served as a medic in the Army, tells Ash that while explorations of painful topics like Mess’s piece are welcome, “We’re not all here because we are broken by the military and trying to heal. We have a lot of veterans involved in these projects who are not combat veterans. A lot served during peacetime, but they’re still artists and they still have plenty of things to say. It’s not all about war trauma.”
Clearly, it’s about art.
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Can Writing Poetry Help Set Incarcerated Youth on the Right Track?
“You don’t understand what it’s like.”
“You never listen to me.”
Most teenagers make these over-the-top complaints to adults at some point during those angst-filled years. But for some troubled teens, these emotional statements aren’t hyperbolic. And those are just the kids that Richard Gold wanted to help.
When Gold left Microsoft 18 years ago, he started the Pongo Teen Writing Project, a Seattle non-profit that connects with troubled teenagers who are in jail, homeless, in the foster care system, or being treated for mental illness, and teaches them to write poetry to express themselves. Since 1992, Pongo has served 7,000 teenagers, providing them with volunteer writing mentors and publishing their work in anthologies.
Gold told Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour, “What so many of us struggle with is the unarticulated emotion in our lives, and when poetry serves that, it’s doing something essential for the person and for society.”
Through one of Pongo’s programs, writing mentors visit juvenile inmates individually for an hour, asking questions about their lives and emotions to guide them toward writing poetry about their experiences. The mentors transcribe what the inmates express, collaborate on revisions, then give the teenagers a chance to read their work aloud to the group.
Pongo volunteers do similar work at the New Horizons homeless youth center Seattle, helping homeless teens write poems, and hosting poetry reading events.
The workers in the juvenile justice system attest to the difference Pongo makes in the lives of the teens it works with. Warden Lynn Valdez at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, once an incarcerated gang member himself, said that after the teens write their poems, “the reward is, I think that they have actually released something that they have repressed inside.” King County Juvenile Court Judge Barbara Mack said that the young people she sees in her court “have never really learned how to express themselves. And Pongo gives them the opportunity to do that in a way that’s not threatening.”
It’s clear that poetry can be a powerful tool to make teenagers feel valued as they try to move past their rocky adolescences and become productive adults.
MORE: Poetry Program Offers Hope to Detroit Schoolchildren
Can Writing Poetry Make Better Doctors?
With teaching gigs at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, you would’t think Dr. Rafael Campo would have time for much else. But he’s also a poet with six published volumes to his credit, and he’s on a mission to combine his two passions. Campo believes teaching medical students to study and write poetry can imbue their work with more compassion, balancing the emphasis he feels medical schools place on teaching students to distance themselves from their patients. Campo runs a writing workshop every week for students and residents. “Sometimes facts become all-consuming in our work as docs and we may risk losing sight of some of the truths of the experience of illness, particularly from the perspective of our patients,” Campo said in a recent workshop attended by Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour. Campo described a typical moment of loss that he witnesses in his practice: “The family is sitting by the bedside. The patient hasn’t survived the arrhythmia. Don’t we still have a role as healers there?” Poet or not, it’s hard to argue with that.
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Kanye West Probably Won’t Answer This Young Woman’s Letter, But You Can
Girls Write Now provides mentorship and college prep to aspiring writers in New York City. The nonprofit specializes in helping young women who especially need a boost—almost 70 percent of the girls it serves live below the poverty line, and 20 percent are immigrants. Girls Write Now matches girls with professional writers who help them put together a portfolio, and publish their work. Girls Write Now is seeking donations to support its expanded mission–it now makes therapists available to all participants, and as Dani Green’s moving poem demonstrates, they can use them. “Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I write a letter to rapper Kanye West,” Green explains. She speaks movingly about wanting to climb out of the poverty that has gripped her family. She wants to escape “this place where dead dreams lurk in the footprints of everyone you’re close to.” With the help of Girls Write Now, she’ll have a more promising future.
Poetry Program Offers Hope to Detroit Schoolchildren
Poet Terry Blackhawk founded the InsideOut Literary Arts Project as a way to help public schoolchildren and teenagers in the struggling city of Detroit express themselves and assure them that their voices matter. InsideOut brings volunteer teacher-poets into 27 Detroit public schools and serves 5000 kids each year through writing workshops during classes and after school. At the end of the year, InsideOut gives each student a published book featuring their work. InsideOut also hosts regular poetry readings by students, some of whom continue to write poetry after graduation.