UFR Weekly Newsletter #12: What We’re Looking For
David Cotrone
The other day I was talking to someone I had just met. I said I write because it makes feeling alone okay and read because a book is a place where two lonely people can meet. He said he got that but didn’t really buy it. He said he writes because he likes to and he reads for the same reason. I said, exactly.
***
Support by Faith Gardner
Leah Hager Cohen talks with furniture, saying, “I do doubt. I do. To the extent that I’ve finally, in midlife, decided to make friends with my doubt. I even suspect it may be essential to the process. But that doesn’t make the doubt feel much better when I’m in its throes.”
Sennenhund by Myfanwy Collins
***
The thing about war is that there’s always misunderstanding. But it’s not always a matter of friends against enemies. There’s plenty of self-destruction. For Mark’s unit, a big project was to rebuild the Doura market, making it safer, cleaner. But there was miscommunication, and a few Americans demolished the whole space. The next day, Iraqis showed up looking to buy and sell goods. They couldn’t find what had been standing just one day before. They found a ruined piece of land.
Mark managed to move the market to another location, but the string of mistakes continued. Another miscommunication led to a team of workers tearing up train tracks they still needed. “That was a total goat fuck,” Mark says. And still another time they were ordered to build fences so soldiers wouldn’t run across a field. Mark didn’t understand why they had to spend hours putting them up. He figured they could have spent their time better, could have been doing something more constructive, even resting. He didn’t understand the reasons behind sectioning off a big patch of dirt. Later, when a unit was ambushed on the road, they were pinned between what they had built, stuck. The insurgents opened fire.
***
Sometimes people send notes asking what we’re looking for in submissions. I never really know what to say. Susannah doesn’t, either. But I think about Luis Alberto Urrea, how he says the secret to his success is that he keeps it funky. There’s funk and there’s funk. And that’s pretty much what we’re looking for here at UFR. We want you to bring the funk.
***
Another time they picked up a 45 year-old woman, Karen, who was wondering what life was like outside the Green Zone. She asked Mark’s unit what they did, if they went shopping, if they had a pool. She was drinking coffee, something Mark told his crew to never do. “We had to piss enough as it was,” he says. They were always drinking water to stay alive in the heat. “Caffeine dehydrates you,” he continues. “And it makes you go.” He laughs. “She was fucked.”
They got a call from command, ordered to go ward off some insurgents who were causing a commotion at a Palestinian school some twenty minutes away. When they got there the school was empty, and the insurgents opened fire from the roof. Rounds rattled off Mark’s Humvee. They shot back, heavy fire. “And there was Karen,” Mark says. “Pissing in the backseat.”
***
Be well,
David