A poem inspired by Jess's experience.
Shade it Black
Across the gunfire, beneath a truck,
flashes light up my collection.
The explosion has done its job,
Oh God how it has done its job!
I must do mine.
How dare they say we are trained,
there is no training to prepare you for this...
Same boots, same belt,
It could be me, it could be me.
I wish it was me.
His pain over, mine just begun.
I freeze.
Feeling inept I lay there motionless, what do I do?
I do nothing, nothing.
A nearby shell shocks me. I start clawing out
at the burnt meat, grabbing all I can see....all I can smell.
Quickly, quickly, get this over with.
No fear. Pure anger.
Body bag partly full I drag myself out.
The Unit greet the old me. She doesn’t exist.
She was left behind in the cold shadow of the truck.
Congratulations on a successful mission
Got there before the enemy. Job well done.
I ignore the high five............
The light falls upon the open bag.
They are also quiet.
A half-finished jigsaw
the marine lays on the table,
We stare at the spaces the bomb has left behind.
I shade these in black on the paperwork.
The inventory begins.
His pockets full of life,
‘Rules of engagement’ neatly folded,
scrunched up trash that didn’t become litter,
a picture of smiles from his high school football team,
a half-full bottle of Blue Star ointment
and
from his bloodied breast pocket slips a sonogram of a foetus.
The silence now louder.
Alex Bell
Monday, September 10, 2012
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Here is Jess' Convocation Speech!
This isn't shown in the video, but Jess received a long standing ovation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLv6TosSQeQ
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Jess Delivers Convocation Speech at Miami University!
The 4,000 person audience was fully attentive during Jess' 15 minute speech, and many cried. Afterward, people said it was the best Miami convocation ever. Here is a bried segment of her speech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvOm76cjKhM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvOm76cjKhM
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Video from Miami University Student
Here is a video made by a student at Miami University.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e29B6q8oiRk&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e29B6q8oiRk&feature=plcp
Sunday, July 15, 2012
From Chris Hedges
Chris has an artticle in the July/August issue of Boston Review. it's titled, War is Betrayal. Here is an excerpt:
Jessica Goodell came to understand that torment only too well, as she relates in her 2011 memoir Shade it Black: Death and After in Iraq. Goodell wasn’t poor. She grew up in a middle-class home near Chautauqua Lake in upstate New York. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother worked at home. But her “universe fractured” when she was sixteen and her parents divorced. She could barely continue “the motions of everyday existence.” She was accepted at Ithaca College her senior year, but just before graduation a uniformed Marine came to her high school. He told her he had come to find “tough men.”
“What about tough women?” she asked.
By that afternoon she was in the Marine recruiting office. She told the recruiter she wanted to be part of a tank crew but was informed that women were prohibited from operating tanks. She saw a picture of a Marine standing next to a vehicle with a huge hydraulic arm and two smaller forklift arms. She signed up to be a heavy equipment mechanic, although she knew nothing about it.
Three years later, while stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in the desert town of Twentynine Palms, California, she volunteered to serve in the Marine Corps’ first official Mortuary Affairs unit, at Al Taqaddum Airbase in Iraq. Her job, for eight months, was to “process” dead Marines—collect and catalog their bodies and personal effects. She put the remains in body bags and placed the bags in metal boxes. Before being shipped to Dover Air Force Base, the boxes were stored, often for days, in a refrigerated unit known as a “reefer.”
Her unit processed six suicides. The suicide notes, she told me in an interview, almost always cited hazing. Marines who were overweight or unable to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and physical abuse. They were called “fat nasties” and “shit bags.” They were assigned to other Marines as slaves. Many were forced to run until they vomited or to bear-crawl—walk on all fours—the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by sets of monkey fuckers—bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching like a baseball catcher, and then standing up again—and other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed.
Goodell’s unit was sent to collect the bodies of the Marines who killed themselves. They usually blew their faces off with assault rifles in port-a-johns or in the corners of abandoned bunkers or buildings. She and the other members of the Mortuary Affairs unit would have to scrape the flesh and brain tissue from the walls.
Goodell fell into depression when she returned home. She abused drugs and alcohol. And she watched the slow descent of her comrades as they too tried to blunt the pain with narcotics and self-destructive behavior. She details many of her experiences in Shade It Black, a term that refers to the missing body parts of dead Marines, which she colored black on diagrams of the corpses.
In a poignant passage, she talks about what it was like for her and a fellow Marine named Miguel to come home and see all those yellow ribbons:
Stateside “support” not only reflects the myths of war, but it also forces Goodell and her comrades to suppress their own experiences:
Those who return to speak this truth, like Goodell or Millard, are our contemporary prophets. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. The words these prophets speak are painful.
Jessica Goodell came to understand that torment only too well, as she relates in her 2011 memoir Shade it Black: Death and After in Iraq. Goodell wasn’t poor. She grew up in a middle-class home near Chautauqua Lake in upstate New York. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother worked at home. But her “universe fractured” when she was sixteen and her parents divorced. She could barely continue “the motions of everyday existence.” She was accepted at Ithaca College her senior year, but just before graduation a uniformed Marine came to her high school. He told her he had come to find “tough men.”
“What about tough women?” she asked.
By that afternoon she was in the Marine recruiting office. She told the recruiter she wanted to be part of a tank crew but was informed that women were prohibited from operating tanks. She saw a picture of a Marine standing next to a vehicle with a huge hydraulic arm and two smaller forklift arms. She signed up to be a heavy equipment mechanic, although she knew nothing about it.
Three years later, while stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in the desert town of Twentynine Palms, California, she volunteered to serve in the Marine Corps’ first official Mortuary Affairs unit, at Al Taqaddum Airbase in Iraq. Her job, for eight months, was to “process” dead Marines—collect and catalog their bodies and personal effects. She put the remains in body bags and placed the bags in metal boxes. Before being shipped to Dover Air Force Base, the boxes were stored, often for days, in a refrigerated unit known as a “reefer.”
Her unit processed six suicides. The suicide notes, she told me in an interview, almost always cited hazing. Marines who were overweight or unable to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and physical abuse. They were called “fat nasties” and “shit bags.” They were assigned to other Marines as slaves. Many were forced to run until they vomited or to bear-crawl—walk on all fours—the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by sets of monkey fuckers—bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching like a baseball catcher, and then standing up again—and other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed.
Goodell’s unit was sent to collect the bodies of the Marines who killed themselves. They usually blew their faces off with assault rifles in port-a-johns or in the corners of abandoned bunkers or buildings. She and the other members of the Mortuary Affairs unit would have to scrape the flesh and brain tissue from the walls.
Goodell fell into depression when she returned home. She abused drugs and alcohol. And she watched the slow descent of her comrades as they too tried to blunt the pain with narcotics and self-destructive behavior. She details many of her experiences in Shade It Black, a term that refers to the missing body parts of dead Marines, which she colored black on diagrams of the corpses.
In a poignant passage, she talks about what it was like for her and a fellow Marine named Miguel to come home and see all those yellow ribbons:
We’d frequently pass vehicles displaying the yellow ribbon ‘support-our-troops decal,’ but we never once mentioned it. We probably passed a hundred or more decals—two hundred if you count the multiple decals decorating the cars of the more patriotic motorists—and yet neither of us even once said, ‘Look, more support from the citizenry. Let’s give the ‘thumbs up’ as we pass.’ . . . I knew that these people on their way to work or home or dinner had no idea what it was they were supporting. They did not have a clue as to what war was like, what it made people see, and what it made them do to each other. I felt as though I didn’t deserve their support, or anyone’s, for what I had done. . . . No one should ever support the people who do such things.
Stateside “support” not only reflects the myths of war, but it also forces Goodell and her comrades to suppress their own experiences:
Here we were, leaving the ribbons behind us as we sped up on our way to Hell, probably, where we would pay for the sins these magnetic decals endorsed. There was an irony of sorts shaping the dynamic between our ribbon decal supporters and us. They were uninformed but good people, the kind whose respect we would welcome—if it were based upon something true. It was when we were around them that we had to hide the actual truth most consciously.
Those who return to speak this truth, like Goodell or Millard, are our contemporary prophets. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. The words these prophets speak are painful.
Friday, June 15, 2012
From an English Reader
Moving and beautifully written
By
We don't read the narrator as a woman for the first few chapters. She is a marine, without gender, until slowly the prejudice shades her in too. This is one of the best books on war I have read, and because it unpacks a woman's place amongst the body bags and latrines it is deeply provocative about what must happen to make soldiers. What is so good, is the writing too. There is much here to learn about humanity and it is all beautifully told.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Shade It Black at MU!
(Un)Shading: A Miami University Dialogue on the World Stage
We invite Miami’s newest students, members of the Class of 2015, to enter a composition contest based on the book selected for this year’s Summer Reading Program, Jess Goodell’s Shade It Black. All other Miami students, faculty, and staff are welcome to post their essays as well.In Shade It Black, Goodell tells us about her firsthand experiences in the Iraq War and its continued influence on her life back home. We invite you to submit a composition (in written, digital, or other forms) that describe how you or someone close to you has been impacted by an event of global significance.
We hope that these compositions will help Miami University highlight ways the people and places of our world have grown increasingly interconnected and the ways we all have a stake in the world stage. While not everyone will have direct involvement with such an event, one of the goals of liberal learning at Miami is to explore ways our daily lives affect and are affected by world events.
You can participate in this exploration in the following ways:
- Submit a 350- to 500-word Shade It Black composition by following the process described on the Shade It Black Contest Webpage.
- Read, listen to, and view what Miami students and others in the Miami community have shared by going to the Shade It Black Contest Webpage.
- Join the discussion at the 2012 Shade It Black Facebook Page.
$100 Prizes for New Students
To welcome the Class of 2016, we are offering 16 prizes of $100 apiece for the best “Shade It Black” compositions by incoming first-year students. Students at all Miami campuses are eligible for prizes. The contest opens June 2, 2012. Deadline for prize eligibility: Midnight, October 2, 2012.Winners will be featured on the website of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence. Prizes are gift certificates to the University Bookstore. This contest is sponsored by Miami’s Howe Center for Writing Excellence and the Office of Liberal Education.
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