It Happens
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Excerpt
The firing had started, that I knew. It was the enemy, but I didn’t know where they were or where they had come from. Nobody did. It was nuts. Those sharp whizzes, like electric fireflies sailing past your head, careening into your ears. Zip zip zip. They were fucking shooting at us, but from where?
“Three o’clock! Three o’clock! Contact, three o’clock!” some NCO yelled, and we were all on the ground looking for cover.
Chalmers said, “Returning fire.”
Someone else said, “Reloading.”
And I still hadn’t fired a shot. All I could think about was basic training: What happens next? What the fuck is supposed to happen next? Right, shoot your fucking rifle. So I shot my rifle. I fired in the direction everyone else was firing in. Then I started to see silhouettes, just like at the range, except these were Hajji terrorist fucks, or something like that. They were there, their little eyes and their little heads and the fucking zip zip zip.
“Move! Move!” LT was yelling.
Guys were getting up, so I moved too. We were going toward the gunfire, another fucked-up cliché. (“Normal people run away from gunfire,” the recruiter had said. “U.S. Army soldiers run toward gunfire.”)
Anthony Walker
Anthony Walker served in the U.S. Army from 2004 to 2012, deploying to Afghanistan and Yemen. He is originally from Southern California and lives in Manila, Philippines. He is at work on a story collection and a novel. “It Happens” is his first published story. He can be found at mymi.gg/anthony.
Will Allison on “It Happens”
In our Q&A, Anthony Walker observed that, “Most contemporary war literature is war made legible for people who don’t know anything about war.”
I’ll be the first to admit I’m one of those people; everything I “know” about war comes from literature, TV, film, and the news. Furthermore, I consider myself very fortunate not to have experienced war. But this also means I lack any firsthand knowledge that would help me to identify “true” war literature when I see it.
So when “It Happens” crossed my desk, I was in no position to say if its depiction of war was any truer than any other war story I’ve ever read. But the story’s emotional truth was, to me, undeniable. The protagonist’s suffering (both during and after war) is right there on every page—visceral and shocking, honest and heartbreaking. And I believe it’s that sort of emotional truth that readers most respond to in any work of fiction, regardless of their familiarity with the milieu.
At the time Mr. Walker wrote “It Happens,” he was a literary-world outsider with no formal training in fiction writing and no literary community. That’s why it gives me special pleasure to welcome him to the One Story family and to share his first published story with you. Here’s hoping there are many more to come.
Q&A by Will Allison
- WA: What initially inspired you to write “It Happens”?
- AW: Writers always say they are compelled to write what they write, and it sounds pretentious, but that’s the only way I can describe it. It was like an itch I needed to scratch. And that feeling—when a story starts pouring out of you from accumulated experience, and you just start writing without really thinking much about it—is probably one of the greatest, most satisfying experiences, in my opinion, that a person can have.
- WA: What was the most challenging part of writing this story?
- AW: It was the same challenge as with any story: saying something true. The reason it’s hard to say something true is because you feel what is true, but you can’t really say it. It’s kind of stuck inside you, and you want to bring it out, but it’s very hard to do. I don’t think I’ve ever written a story that truly conveys the totality of what I feel about the subject of that particular story. Only pieces, fragments, come out. But if enough of them do, you can end up with something you and others might like.
- WA: And what was the most satisfying part?
- AW: The most satisfying part of writing “It Happens” was inhabiting the viewpoint of somebody who is almost me but a much better version of me.
- WA: How and when did you first take up fiction writing?
- AW: In 2016 I was living at my mom’s house, jobless, suffering from PTSD, and going to counseling at a VA center. My counselor asked me to do some writing as part of my therapy, so I did. Then I spent about three months writing flash fiction. Then I stopped. I spontaneously started writing again about two years ago because I found myself mumbling things that turned out to be longer than what I could keep in my working memory.
- WA: “It Happens” is told in a series of vignettes that move back and forth in time. Why did you choose that structure as opposed to a more conventional, chronological narrative?
- AW: The vignettes just came to me much like the mumblings. I would write one down and then realize (very quickly) that it was time to stop. I did this for about three days, and then I arranged everything into a structure that made sense. So I guess I didn’t choose the structure so much as follow it. The first time I shared it with someone, I was certain they were going to say, “This is not a story.” When they said the opposite, I gained confidence. It was like the epigraph to Lord Jim, from the poet Novalis: “It is certain my conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul believes in it.”
- WA: You’ve described your fiction as exploring the “new absurd.” What exactly do you mean?
- AW: What I call the new absurd is an approach to literary absurdism that rejects classical absurdism’s claim that there is no meaning in the universe and contends that it has become the opposite: we are drowning in “meanings”; the problem is that none of them make any sense. For example, in another story of mine, a detachment of soldiers is deployed to an outpost in Afghanistan that exists only because somebody higher up in the chain of command had to mention the deployment in a PowerPoint presentation. So, ultimately, the new absurd is absurdity as only the twenty-first century can render it. And once you realize that much around us, much of what we see in the world today, is in fact demonstrably absurd, you start to see it everywhere.
- WA: I know you’ve read and studied a lot of fiction that deals with military life and war. What’s your general impression of contemporary war fiction?
- AW: I’ve read most of the fiction that has come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention all the classics, and the vast majority of it is disappointing. The highly praised stuff especially is not true, in my opinion. And I don’t mean factual; I mean true as literature is meant to be. Most contemporary war literature is war made legible for people who don’t know anything about war. It’s full of tropes and clichés, scenes ripped from Vietnam lore, depictions of PTSD that are clearly what the authors think PTSD is but is really not. And some of it is just bad writing that gets a pass because people think it’s “important.” Trust me, no soldier has ever been full of regret and rumination about their deployment on the plane ride home. That stuff doesn’t happen until much later. It’s that kind of thing: a lot of it is just not true to life.
- WA: How long did it take you to complete “It Happens”?
- AW: Accounting for deliberate time away from the story between readings, it took about two weeks to finish.
- WA: What are you working on now?
- AW: I’m working on a book of short stories and a novel. The book of short stories is more or less finished, while the novel is organized as a collection of four novellas, and the first novella is complete. The stories explore complicity and the new absurd, and one is about a journalist who becomes a giraffe. The novel is about a five-person “cell” on a planet called Negato-14 that becomes a microcosm of an authoritarian society. I’m currently seeking representation.
- WA: What is the best bit of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- AW: That’s an easy one. Someone once told me to write as long as I enjoy it. And I do enjoy it—immensely. It’s not something I put myself through to achieve something. It’s fun and interesting and exciting. So I will always keep that advice in mind. If it stops being fun, I’ll find something else to do.
