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Bill Denham
, October 11, 2015
Reading Exit Wounds by Jim Lommasson is not an easy thing to do.
Yet, once done, it compels the reader to share the experience.
It feels like a necessary experience for everyone in our culture��"young and old, rich and poor, liberal and conservative. No one should be excluded from hearing these voices of American veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Everyone should read Exit Wounds.
This is a book of war stories.
Lommasson’s gift to the veterans was his ability to listen with his heart, to thereby gain their trust so that they felt comfortable sharing their most intimate wartime experiences. And his invaluable gift to us, to all of us, those who have served and those who have not, has been his tireless commitment, over the years, to photographing these veterans and to recording their stories, to collecting their photographs and to bringing it all together into this beautiful, disturbing book.
The idea of listening to the stories of our current veterans grew out of Lommasson’s personal experience. His father had served in the Second World War and had never spoken of his experiences until he was 85 years old, when he began to share them with his son. “My father’s revelations gave me an idea about doing a soldiers' oral history of the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “I feel that soldiers need to tell their stories and we need to hear them. The soldiers that I have been interviewing and photographing have been generous with their stories and intimate feelings. They have taught me what it is to descend into hell and then try to find their way home. Many of the details of my father’s experience are lost with him, but as I chronicle the lives of today’s young soldiers, their story is his story. I hope they can find their way out of the fog. Sixty years is way too long to keep a secret.”
If I were to select a single word to describe my experience of reading the individual stories in Exit Wounds, it would be authenticity. Somehow Lommasson elicited honest, forthright statements from each of the 50 soldiers, regardless of their motive for enlisting. They spoke frequently of the horrors of war, what they witnessed, what they themselves had done��"like one young man who having mistakenly killed a child and the child’s father, killed the mother when he was unable to witness her agony. To imagine that from any angle��"the child’s, the father’s, the mother’s or the soldier’s��"is to imagine the confusion, the tragedy of war. The reality of these stories and of the young men and women who had had such experiences often would leave me in tears.
The book is not political. Nor is it ideological. It simply offers these true stories of 50 veteran’s experiences, most of whom signed up with no idea what the experience of war would be. It is a book born of love, the love of a son for his father, of curiosity and a desire that today’s warriors not have to hold their stories for sixty years. Certainly, Jim Lommasson accomplished this goal for these fifty soldiers.
We need to honor these individuals and Jim Lommasson by reading this book and passing it on. It should be required reading for every high school student, every college student, every military recruit, every teacher, minister, priest or nun, every entrepreneur or non-profit worker, every public official or legislator��"everyone without exception should read this book!
Bill Denham
Portland, Oregon
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