Ghosts of War by Ryan Smithson

Ryan Smithson was just a teenager when terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  After graduating from high school, he joined the Army Reserve.  At age nineteen, he was sent to Iraq.  His book, Ghosts of War (Harper Collins 2009), chronicles that year in Iraq.

Like most people here, I learn about what happens in Iraq through the news media–television, newspapers, and magazines.  Smithson gives a glimpse of what the war is like from a different perspective–that of the soldiers living through it every day.  The war in Iraq looks pretty different through those eyes.  I am glad I had the opportunity to read and learn from his story.  I want to thank my student, Jeremy, who donated a copy of the book for my classroom because it is not the kind of story I would have picked up on my own.

For my students who are still wondering why we read and write so much, I want to share with them from Smithson’s story.  Once he is back home, he struggles to readjust to the life he had before.  His family wants to know what it was like, but how can he find the words to describe it?  It is literature that gives him the answer.  First he describes how reading helped him during his time in Iraq:  “Every book was alive as I read it, lying in my sleeping bag.  I wasn’t in the godforsaken Middle East fighting a war.  I was in my own country:  a country of the mind…High school defines literature with terminology…But experience defines literature as more than words on paper.  Not just escape, but more important, words that have the power to heal” (Smithson 295).  That’s what I hope my students learn to take away from the reading they do.

While taking a college composition class (that’s a writing class), Smithson first writes about one of his experiences in Iraq.  With his teacher’s encouragement, he shares it with his classmates ate the end of the semester.  It is difficult to read, but doing so changes both his classmates and himself.  I love how he describes the power of story:  “It’s funny, but all I did besides sit in a dump truck during the ambush was write a story about it.  It’s funny, but the story is what matters.  The story is what changes, at least for a moment, the way these people feel.  And what an empowering sensation it is to share it” (Smithson 300).

 

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