"I was afraid of not being able to come home for any reason. And then every time I did something I didn’t know if it was gonna be the last time.”

This quote hit me like a ton of bricks. He was twenty-four years old when he got deployed overseas. I could not imagine what it would be like to have such a fear of death and a fear of never seeing my loved ones again. I can’t imagine the anticipation he must felt in the time frame when he was told he was being deployed until he actually arrived in the Middle East. This is a point I might go back to on the next interview.

 

“I feel I did a service. ‘Cause when I initially signed up it was in ’99 and the world was a totally different place. So, I never expected any of this to happen.”

I keep listening to this particular quote of the interview over and over again. I think a lot of us (me included) forget what life was like eleven years ago. We were a country with no war. We were a country with citizens that walked around feeling almost invincible, or indestructible. The only footage from disgruntled countries with roadside bombing, etc. was on the world news or CNN. Most of the country was oblivious to what would happen to our country two years later. I confirmed my fact that my husband had no idea that he would ever go to war. I think most military recruits felt that way.

It’s such a different time now, and has been since 9/11. The recruits coming in at least have an idea of what they are in for, but the recruits in the late 90s probably assumed that they would never have to battle the front lines in a foreign place. Especially, since the Desert Storm war of the early 90s. Before that it had been years since the United States were involved in a serious war. You could almost see the innocence in his eyes as he spoke of his lack of expectations for his time in service. It was almost as if he was speaking as his nineteen year old self, “So, I never expected any of this to happen.”

This is one of the main reasons I have been torturing myself to learn video-editing and bought new software! I feel the facial expressions, along with the audio is very captivating. It also creates a closer connection to the interviewee and the audience.

“I just remember how patriotic everyone was and everyone was all about America. And so, ya know we were a very visual force ‘cause we were made to be. So, we would be there with ya know a Hum-V with a big machine gun on top of it and there would be four or five of us surrounding it and ya know people would always come up to us, and talk to us. I just remember New Year’s Eve especially, we were there, and everyone was stopping and bringing all sorts of food and booze.” (Picture a big smile while saying the word booze!)

This was an almost nostalgic portion of our interview. I remember the day. We all do. If you were born, you remember where you were when the terrorist attacks on 9/11 occurred. You remember who you were with or what you were doing at the exact moment that the second plane hit, or the terror that you felt when the next plane and the next plane hit. But, another thing I remember about that time was the patriotism of our country. You could not go anywhere without seeing an American flag. There were flags on houses, business, bicycles, and even cars. I cannot imagine how magnified that patriotism must had been in New York City.

I’m thinking about asking him what the contrast was between the patriotism of 9/11 compared to 2005 when he came home from overseas. Was there a celebration? Were people as kind? Was there a parade? I’m thinking there was a big difference in how people felt about those two different time periods.

The end of that clip struck me as well. He talks about various “strangers” so to speak giving them food and booze all the time, especially New Year’s Eve. His face lit up when he said the word booze, but I think he was just had a genuine good feeling about how people reacted to him and the others. New Year’s Eve? I never thought about that. If we was deployed to Ground Zero on September 13, 2001 and was still there on December 31st, just think of all the holidays he missed. He missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s?

He was just twenty-one years old when he was called to go to Ground Zero. It would’ve been his first New Year’s Eve to legally go out and celebrate the coming of a new year. Instead, he was in the streets of New York protecting and preserving what was left after the horrific events. When he was deployed overseas, he was there for over a year, so that means he missed every holiday for the whole year. On my next interview I might want to dig deeper into this aspect of detachment, if there was any. He missed out on so many different events that I believe we, as Americans, take for granted. I want to know if that had any effect on him. Did he feel like he was frozen in time?

My oral history project is based on a soldier’s tale throughout various experiences in the United States Army. Although my interviewee is my husband, I did not know him during his experiences in the army where he was deployed. I am always curious to find out more about his experiences and how he felt during a time where our country went from being so united (after 9/11) to being so divided (when protesters and soldiers questioned our purpose in the war).

In the first interview I asked Specialist Gillis various surface level questions that ended up turning into twenty two minutes of footage! I was more intrigued to hear about his experiences at Ground Zero, which I was unaware of until just recently. I’m learning that soldiers are like steel traps and that it’s very hard to get information out of them.

There was one question that he refused to answer about his time in Sinai. He got a little upset and just saying, “next question, next question.” I have a feeling that if I was Katie Couric I would be able to pry through that steel trap,  but I have to live with him for the rest of my life! The question that sparked him to totally shut down stemmed from his explanation of his time at the observation posts. They guarded the road that went from Africa into the Middle East, and had to do perform vehicle stops and he said, “If they stopped.” When I asked him what the procedure was if they didn’t stop, he immediately shut down.

I am still not clear on which direction I want to go with this piece, but I would gladly appreciate feedback! I feel more connected to his time at Ground Zero, but I know there’s much more to pull from with his time overseas. He was in the Middle East for a longer period of time, and there are photos and video footage I can add to the interview footage as well. I am hoping to create a cohesive oral history project so that my son will see that not only is his Daddy a hero in his eyes, but he is an American Hero. A Veteran.

 Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman grabbed my attention immediately when she began to tell the story of her mother taking her to the library every two weeks. Hoffman explains how she almost lived vicariously through the characters she read about in the different books she read. I too did this as a child. I moved around a lot in elementary school, and it was difficult to make friends at times. I also spent most days after school, as well as summers at my Gram’s house which was about twenty minutes from where I lived at any given time. So, I would grab a good book and escape into various stories and my personal favorites were anything written by Judy Blume and The Baby-Sitters Club series. I even went as far as making up a mock baby-sitting service and had a phone with my logo taped to it! I would take fake phone calls for baby-sitting jobs and go off to babysit my Cabbage Patch Dolls.

I was also connected to Hoffman’s Polish heritage. My family is Polish and I’m not that familiar with many traditional Polish practices, etc. Hoffman’s account of when she read Sienkiewicz and that it was almost expected of the Polish children to read this particular author. She describes Sienkiewicz as the “laureate of Polish nationalism” and how she mostly read his pieces for the hints of sexual innuendo. I chuckled to myself as I read this, because as a young child I remember reading Judy Blume’s Are you there God, it’s me Margaret.  There was a reference in this particular book about a young girl who became a “woman” in the story and how she felt and what she experienced. I would frequently read this book so I would know what to do when I came into the world of “womanhood” so to speak.

Although Hoffman’s account was many years before my own experience with literature, I felt as if we were one in the same. Even though many years can separate two people, it amazed me how closely related our experiences truly were.  The technologies of writing have become so far advanced in so many different ways, but literature up until recently has remained the same. Now the question is, “To Kindle or not to Kindle?” If I “do” Kindle, will a young woman many years down the line be able to relate, or will the Kindle or other e-readers become obsolete?

Valerie Kinloch author of Harlem on the Minds  recalls the struggles of her personal literacy, as well as the literacy of her students and family. She discusses a school trip she took with some of her students to Harlem, and eventually (seven years later) became a resident of Harlem. Kinloch discusses her “struggle to define literacy” before she immersed herself in the culture of Harlem, as well as her “limited approach to literacy, even in the light of multiple literary experiences that were right in front of me.”

Kinloch’s narrative about her journey to grasping a full understanding of the culture and its residents and their literacy of Harlem is mind-blowing. Her accounts paint a clear picture in my mind the struggles that her students overcame in light of their education and surroundings. She brings up the issue of gentrification and the internal struggle she experienced as an employee of Columbia University and a teacher/mentor to the students from Harlem. Harlem’s community was fighting gentrification, yet Columbia University was attempting to “expand into Harlem, thus participating in its gentrification process.

Kinloch’s personal connection to the story, as well as direct quotes from the students she worked with created a cohesive piece that was relatable and creditable.

Tweeting definitely made me more aware of my surroundings, but I don’t think that it made me anymore connected to those surroundings. Although Twitter allowed me to instanteously record my thoughts, it was distracting once my tweet was posted. I was drawn to classmate's tweets about their Twitterive, as well as what Whitney Cummings or Jimmy Kimmel was thinking.  The end result of my Twitterive ended up being a connection into a human’s emotions, rather than a physical place. I did Tweet about physical aspects of places around me, but none of those tweets “jumped” out at me like the ones I chose for my final product.

The actual act of tweeting and responding to other classmate’s tweets is what ignited the flame for my Twitterive. It was a classmate’s response to one of my tweets that sent me in the direction of an emotional place, rather than a physical place in nature or my environment. So, in the end it aided me in the writing process and which direction I chose to go with it. It was almost as if we were actively work shopping each other’s work actively during the construction phase of our writing, which deemed to be a successful component in the writing process.

Twitter acted as a way to expedite my thoughts in the process of writing my Twitterive. The instant gratification of having my ideas already on a site facilitated my writing process. It was significantly easier to cut and paste my tweets, which acted as my notes, to a Word document, rather than trying to organize and re-arrange hand written notes. For a technology junkie like me, the tweeting process directly affected my writing.

I am not much for pencil and paper note-taking or writing for that matter. There is nothing more appealing to me than to be able to click away on a laptop or shoot a message from the keyboard of my Blackberry. For me it sends the true or real thought I am thinking at that moment. I was never concerned with spelling or if I was making any sense because it is a fast, raw note. I think too much when I write with a pen or pencil.

Using Weebly to convey my Twitterive seriously impacted my final product. I knew that everyone, including my followers of my mommy blog, would be reading my Twitterive. This was partly due to the curious nature of my readers. They frequently saw the hash tag #twitterive and wondered what it was all about. I was also more concerned about the audience of my professor and other classmates and how they would portray me, because I took many literary risks (at least in my eyes I did). Weebly also impacted the layout of my piece. It was more like a blog post with no indentations throughout the paragraphs.

As a whole I feel my final product was affected by both Weebly and Twitter in different ways. In the long run, I think that it has impacted my final product all for the better. Technology is the key to my personal success with writing. It is what drives me to continue writing and sharing it with others.