Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor's Guide to Writing about Trauma by David Chrisinger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor's Guide to Writing about Trauma by David Chrisinger Collin Halloran (bio) stories are what save us: a survivor's guide to writing about trauma David Chrisinger John Hopkins University Press https://www.davidchrisinger.com/book/stories-are-what-save-us-a-survivors-guide-to-writing-about-trauma/ 240 pages; Print, $19.95 The US seems to have a collective amnesia surrounding the following two facts: 1. War is state violence. 2. In the United States, we, the people, are the state. It is our votes that elect the decision makers who guide foreign and military policy. It is our tax dollars that pay for every bullet fired. War in this country is our—the people's—violence. But whether it is apathy, ignorance, overexposure, or collective delusion, the disconnect between the civilian population (including political leadership) and the military has never been more pronounced than here at what could be the end of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Of course, I say "could be" because without a formal declaration of war, there can be no formal end. And with a declared enemy as abstract as "terror" it is likely this war will prove itself to know no bounds, geographic or temporal. It is the lack of temporal bounds that have led to the moniker "forever war(s)," a designation that has seen more pushback now that the US has formally withdrawn from Afghanistan, where this war began. It is exactly this boundlessness that the literature of the GWOT must attempt to address, and it is this civilian-military divide that it must bridge. But such a reconciliation cannot take place. At least not yet. The truth is that no one book can cure this collective amnesia. In fact, no one book should. But if there's a book to start with, it's David Chrisinger's Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor's Guide to Writing about Trauma. Part memoir, part teaching guide, part writing craft book—what Brian Turner calls a "braided tutorial"—Stories Are What Save Us provides an ideal example of what such a reconciliation can look like. [End Page 30] One reason the military-civilian divide cannot yet be bridged is that even more than collective amnesia, what we're seeing in this country is collective trauma. In "Notes on Trauma and Community," Kai Erikson reframes the definition of trauma to mean not the blow that creates an injury (think blunt-force trauma) but rather the injury that results (the broken bone and all that will follow from it). In this way, "it is the damage done that defines and gives shape to the initial event." Thus, we cannot know the traumatic impact done by the GWOT until stories of impact are told, and therefore we cannot yet truly understand the wars themselves. It is the necessity of process. Of historical recovery. Trauma researcher Dori Laub suggests that it will take "a new generation of 'innocent children' removed enough from the experience, to be in a position to ask questions" to build understanding. If it takes these "innocent eyes" to see past the collective delusion, we're not there yet. The current youngest generation of adults has grown up with the GWOT as normal; they have never known peace. It will take their children to move past the attitude of "that's simply how it is/was." This is an aspect of trauma healing that Chrisinger explores in the memoir sections of Stories Are What Save Us as he weaves in his personal tale of a quest for the truth of his grandfather's military service. "None of us knew the details of what he experienced, except for witnessing the mental and emotional damage these things left in their wake." It takes the distance Chrisinger has, two generations removed from the events of his grandfather's war, to ask the questions that will lead to an understanding of his family's trauma. Healing the civilian-military divide is also a question of collecting more than two decades' worth of experience. It is the vital necessity of relational witness, a witnessing that is carried out...