What’s in a play, write? A lot more than I thought before participating in the Returning Soldiers Speak Letters Project. I had endured numerous stage productions in the past, mostly reluctantly (and don’t get me started on musicals!), but never before had I written one word with the goal of writing a play. I’m a U.S. Navy veteran, and this project was like my period of service-I had no idea what I was getting into until I was in, and then it was too late to get out until the project ran its course.
I had written before, and am part of the Returning Soldiers Speak Anthology. I have had letters published in Time, and local newspapers from Santa Monica’s now-defunct Outlook, to the Newhall Signal. And I write regularly in my journal, so writing wasn’t new, but the goal of the writing was.
The project was to read a selected batch of letters, written by an actual military service member, and the time periods ranged from the Civil War up to Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, to create a short play based on those letters, as so many movie productions have stated, these events are based on real life characters and events, something I’ve never done before. I learned that it is good to challenge ourselves by trying something we’ve never tried before, unless of course, we’re talking about hemlock.
This experience took me into the personal life of an Army colonel, via letters he wrote to his wife, while he was deployed in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia after the First Gulf War combat was over. It was an interesting experience for me. He was involved in ammunition handling, and my experience in that area was handling the ship’s 5-inch shells and powder canisters during unloading in preparation for going into drydock, and again in loading up after the drydock period was over.
In addition, as part of the A/S (Anti-Submarine) Division, we handled torpedoes and ASROCs as well, though my ordnance handling was on a much more limited scale than the colonel whose letters I was selected to read.
My task was to glean from those letters aspects that could be used to write a fictionalized piece on the experience, and in such a way that there would be no identification of the person I had been selected to write about. To say it was challenging would be understating the case.
At times, I felt like Bob Seger’s song, ‘Against the Wind,’ in having to decide ‘what to leave in, what to leave out.’ At times I felt that I was very much running against the wind, like a sailboat on a bad tack. This process was difficult for me, and involved multiple re-writes, and re-writes of re-writes, then more re-writes after the “final” draft was submitted. That’s a lot of work for me, all right.
My Navy service records are dotted with Article 15s, known in the Navy as ‘Captains Mast’, so I have demonstrated that I don’t always work well with others, and this project required me to work with others, in receiving and offering, feedback on the writing at the different stages.
I learned a great deal more about what goes into a play. It is, like military service, a team evolution, requiring the playwright, producer/director, actors and stagehands to bring to life on stage the words that start from a blank page, and to convey that message to the audience.
One of the biggest benefits for me was the collaboration, and hearing the works of some of the other writers as they progressed along their journeys. It wasn’t always easy, but the reward was being able to see the words, both of myself and the other writers, and to appreciate what the actors and directors bring to the stage. The playwright is the author of the words, the director and actors’ author the performance on stage.
This project pulled me into the world somewhat more than I normally would have been involved. It also brought up some feelings that were unexpected during the process.
For instance, it made me realize how much closer we are all connected with war than we realize, or at least for me and my family history it did. My grandfather on my father’s side, Omar Klemm, served in World War 1, and died at 47, years before I was born, due to lingering after-effects from a gas attack during that War. My dad served in the Army, though I don’t have specifics he was at prime military age as the Korean War began.
In particular, Lester Probst’s piece, “My Korean Soldier,” spoke to me, in that I believe my father, Ken E. Klemm, Sr., was involved in that conflict, based on snippets of conversations among family friends when I was a teenager, before I had wisdom enough to seek further information. I’ve seen the Korean War memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and was struck by how much one of the statues looked like my father, and this came up too while I was watching the play unfold on the stage.
All of these connections came back to me in the course of this project, but particularly when I was fortunate enough to be able to get to see the first dress rehearsal for the play, via a Zoom connection that was set up. Seeing the actors saying the lines, and bringing the characters to life, really opened my eyes.
As the writer of “Eulogy for Gerald,” I was very impressed with how the actors brought the words, and the characters to life. I’m not going to lie, it was nice to hear the words I had written mostly still being retained, but I was impressed with the process of how some of the dialogue changed via input from the actors and director/producers. Sometimes the peanut gallery can be useful, but only if the writer can put the ego aside and take in the information instead of butting heads.
This was a project of learning, and growing, for me both as a writer and a human being trying to navigate the ever-murkier waters of the modern world. Would I do it all over again? You mean you want me to re-enlist? Hmm. Let’s talk re-enlistment bonus.
