Muse of Fire

I have one more recommendation for a film for Memorial Day. This one’s a little different from yesterday’s list. And it’s related to last year’s Memorial Day post.

That was about Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of US Troops and their Families (Random House, 2006). As the title suggests, Homecoming is a collection of writings by those we’ve sent into harm’s way since 2001. It’s the outcome of a project by the NEA to help soldiers and their families use writing to process their experiences at war.

And the film is Muse of Fire; a documentary about that project. A few of the writers who took part in the project and the head of the NEA talk about the purpose, and a few of the participants talk about their experiences and their writing.

There’s not a lot of action, but there is a great deal of emotion.

I won’t go into a lot of the details, but there’s one story I’ll carry with me for a long time.

An Army specialist recounts the experience of being part of a transfer of a body from an Iraqi ambulance to a US one. What astounds and undoes him is when the body bag emerges from the Iraqi vehicle: “It’s the size of a pillow.”

His mind simply cannot connect with the anomaly of expecting a body, assuming it would be an adult, but then having a baby emerge, with the one-size-fits-all bag being folded over several times to accommodate the infant.

He feels like vomiting. After a while he spends the entire night writing, the literary equivalent of detoxifying. He assures us he didn’t send that output to anyone because it was too raw. But if he hadn’t been able to write—if he hadn’t had the NEA training—he thinks he’d have gone insane.

Another specialist talks about connecting with an old Iraqi, a man whose son has just been killed in a “roadside incident”. The specialist, who’d lost an infant daughter, thinks he can appreciate on some level the old man’s anguish, and he tries to comfort him. The Iraqi keeps repeating something and the specialist asks the translator what he’s saying.

“Just shoot me now.”

The film runs less than an hour and it’s on DVD. I found it at the King County Library, so you might check out your local branch or find it on Netflix. It’s more gripping than entertaining, but I highly recommend it.