Why do all war stories seem so realistic? Is it our lack of experience with war? What about war is so untouchable that even works of fiction seem true? Maybe it just says something about the excellence of the fiction piece. While reading Fire And Forget, more often than not, I would finish a short story thinking about the character I had just read about. Wondering how they were doing now. Wondering if they ever told their military spouse they cheated, or wondering if they ever fully re-emerged themselves back into civilian life, or if they even can.
Fire And Forget had this almost magical way of making me feel like I was reading someone’s diary. And yet, every time I finished a story, and breathed a sigh of relief because it was just fiction, a little part of me would think, this isn’t fiction for everyone. For many people the horrible things depicted in these short stories are things they go through on a daily basis. Things they can’t stop reliving, even as a veteran. It makes you step back and think. For every story that shocked me, for every story that saddened me, and for every story that just made me think, I reminded myself that this is someone’s reality. Though this author wrote it as a piece of fiction, there is someone out there living this supposedly fictional story. Maybe not everyone is out there killing the kindest chicken, but there are millions of veterans living a reality we like to think of as fiction.
Fire And Forget shows the harsh reality that as civilians, we like to avoid the issues of veterans and soldiers. Though the title “Fire And Forget” could refer to the soldiers firing weapons, or killing people and not thinking about it, I always thought it was talking about us, the civilians. I figured it was referring to the fact that we sent nearly 1.5 million troops, only to ignore the war, since it didn’t really pertain to us. Growing up, I can count on one, maybe two hands, the number of times people referenced the Iraq War. Because we sent them away, only to forget. We sent troops away to what we pretended was a fictional land, as troops lived a non-fictional life.
More than anything, reading the short stories from Fire And Forget has just reminded me how much I despise war, fictional or not.
