I have been preoccupied with war lately. Front of mind: the on-again, off-again senseless hostilities with Iran, and the interminable deadly stalemate in Ukraine. (VOTE, people, VOTE: it’s the least you can do!) Other conflicts continuing in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Myanmar, Somalia, and the DRC, may not make the daily headlines but hover on the edge of consciousness.

My War

I’ve always been interested in World War II. Although I was born four years after the conflict ended, it was the defining event of my early life in England. That war engulfed so many countries, involved the displacement of millions and the complete restructuring of the global order, as well as enormous loss of life and the wholesale destruction of cities. Individual stories of courage and resilience are still emerging that fascinate me more than the macro-history of battles won and lost. The motive for writing my first novel (first written, fourth published) Daughters of Riga, was just such a story about a Dutch diplomat in Kaunus, Lithuania, who helped save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg, director of Schindler’s List, said, “If I had known Jan Zwartendijk’s story before, I would have filmed that.”

However, Daughters of Riga is not a Holocaust story, or even really a war story. It follows two young girls who meet in Riga, Latvia, in 1939 through to their reunion in 2003. How the experience of war shaped their lives in the years that followed is a central theme of the book.

The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice

Laura Kalpakian’s recent release Undesirable isn’t a typical war story either. In 2023, Laura discovered a trove of documents that told of her father’s three year fight to get her brother Doug’s “undesirable” discharge reclassified as “honorable.” At nineteen, Doug enlisted in the Army and was sent to Vietnam. Eighteen months’ later in August 1970, he was shipped home—a drug addict, ill with tropical diseases, malnourished, and clutching the sandal of dead Viet-Cong. In order to avoid court martial for going AWOL, he had accepted the undesirable classification which denied him any veterans’ benefits.

Reviewer Paula Becker says Laura’s memoir “reminds a new generation that wars fought far away still exact bitter collateral damage from everyone they touch back home.”

Legacies of War

I have also written about a homecoming from war. My short story The German Spoons was published in the Whatcom Reads 2024 anthology Legacies. You can read it here. You will see it lives on the cusp of fiction and memoir. I’m not sure there is a named category for this. I can only vouch for the existence of the spoons. The rest is hearsay, speculation, or—what I think I do best—fiction.