Guest Blog: The Disconnect

(This blog is from my good friend and up-and-coming poet, Colin Halloran. Please join the conversation and tell him what you think.)

I have worked as a secondary English teacher in urban districts, and as a substitute teacher in well-off suburban districts, and in both settings my military background has been invaluable in gaining the respect of the students and control of the classroom.  However, in both settings I am consistently faced with the same question: “Did you kill anyone?”  (Sometimes they just assume that the answer is yes and jump straight to an enthusiastic “How many?!”)   No matter what the background of the students, regardless of the age, grade, or class, those are the first words out of at least one student’s mouth when they learn that I served in Afghanistan.

I don’t want to sound like an off-the-deep-end mother and blame it on video games, or the media blitz, but the reality of the situation is that those are a part of it.  For so many people here on the home front, the war is simply a numbers game:  troops deployed, casualties, troops being pulled out, pounds of coffee donated. For those of us who have been a part of it, there are names, faces and stories behind each of those numbers. 

For many kids in this country, the concept of war is perceived through the lens of Call of Duty, where the kill number is more important than making sure that the guy next to you doesn’t bleed out or lose consciousness on the chopper back to base.  Where you can use cheat codes or just start over.  Where if you don’t properly cover your sector the only casualty is the pride of some college kid in Tuscaloosa.

But it’s not just video games and the media that cause me to be asked about my confirmed kills on a near daily basis.  The problem is that the students don’t know any other questions to ask. Unless they have a relative who also served, they don’t realize the sensitive nature of the question.  No kills is weak and shameful to them, the higher the number, the cooler you are. They don’t understand that the higher the number, the heavier the personal toll, the more vivid the nightmares.  They don’t realize that I was more focused on making sure my guys made it out of there safely, whatever the cost, than on picking off the “bad guys”.  But back here, the actual reality seems to be less important, simply because it isn’t as widely known.

There are great programs out there that work to get veterans into classrooms as teachers or guest speakers, but it seems to me that we just aren’t doing enough to teach these kids about a situation that is very much a part of the world they are growing up in.

Tomorrow I will have an eleven-year-old ask me about my kill count, and once more I will explain about respect, and sensitivity. I will explain that there’s much more to the conflict than that; that I think more about the number of hospital beds I’ve sat next to and the number of funerals that I’ve attended.  I’ll explain that I’m used to hearing that question, that I don’t mind explaining these things to him, but someone else, and there are going to be more and more of us in coming years, might not be able to talk or think about it as easily.

I think that doing more to educate our children about the realities of war is essential to helping secure the future of our country. These are our future doctors, counselors, policy makers and soldiers.  With the number of veterans of the Global War on Terror (or whatever we eventually call it in the text books) constantly on the rise, students need to be given more than just a social studies lesson on the subject.  I think every student should have the opportunity to talk to a veteran, to read firsthand accounts, to hear about tomorrow’s history today from the people who are a part of it.

Colin Halloran currently attends The Fairfield University Master of Fine Arts in Poetry Program where he serves on the editorial board for the literary journal, Mason’s Road. His poetry has been featured in The New York Times and other places.  

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