By Andrew Alan Klebahn  

Department of English, University of Texas at San Antonio  

My journey to becoming a writer began just before Christmas in 2008 in Mosul, Iraq. During a special mail call, my platoon received a bag of mail from a group of students asking, “What is life as a soldier like?” I didn’t want to describe the ineffable tsunami of fear. Responding to the letters, I said, life for me in Iraq is about liberation from tyranny, in the words of Edmund Burk, “for evil to prevail, good men need but to do nothing.” 

Furthermore, the life of a soldier is far more interesting than the lugubrious motivations for escaping abysmal poverty. My grandmother was a colorful storyteller with her way with words that cordon fear and inspire bravery. My favorite childhood memories are of my grandmother feeding me home-cooked Mexican food and sharing stories with her photo album books. The first photo is an old monochromatic family photo of a young couple adorned with fur coats holding an opulently dressed baby. “This photo was taken just before [we] moved to Texas without papers,” she says. Her parents and herself were undocumented. The next page is my grandfather when he was a young man dressed in uniform, she tells me, “He earned his citizenship by serving in World War II as an artillery soldier.” War must put enormous stress on the human heart because he returned home with a heart condition, just like I did when I returned from the Iraq war. My grandmother’s storytelling is the progenitor of our family legacy. Every story of tragedy and triumph inspired me to become a patriot and scholar. The most powerful story shared with me was of her young adult experience with local police and Border Patrol officer who stopped her while she was walking to work to de-shell pecans. “Times were different back then, the era of Operation Wetback” she explained. I didn’t understand why a police officer called me a “wetback”, but my grandmother explained our people were labeled as “desperate criminals” according to the 1964 doctrine Operation Wetback. 

Writing to students became my therapy because I didn’t think about the lugubrious reality of war. I wrote to students about my favorite book, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The great American dream of a boy who rose above from abysmal poverty was very relatable. However, one fatal flaw about Gatsby sends a resonating personal message to me—earn a college degree or end up like the main protagonist who suffers from imposter syndrome. Enlisting in the U.S. Army during a time of war was the most noble experience of my life that earned me an early retirement with honorable discharge for service-connected injuries. Now, my second greatest achievement is graduating with a bachelor’s degree and becoming a graduate student on the precipice of earning a Ph.D. Fear of death is more than a malaise of ineffable emotion. My love of writing is the progenitor of earning my Ph.D. so that I may cordon my fear of living an unfulfilled life and becoming fungible. Christmas 2008 in Iraq is perhaps my defining moment of becoming a writer by challenging myself to anthropomorphize my life into words on paper and posthumously honoring my family.