The Question of Collective Memory

An interview with Jillian Danback-McGhan.

Hello! This is our third interview of this issue — last week we published our conversation with Alex Vernon. This week we’re speaking with Jillian Danback-McGhan, writer, Navy veteran, and author. Her debut collection of short fiction is titled Midwatch, focused on women service members confronting a world that treats their military service as spectacle.

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Thanks so much for taking the time, I loved Midwatch. How did you come to write it? What was your process?

Frustration, mainly.

I've always studied literature. I've loved literature and art since I was old enough to remember, likely because I’m the daughter of a visual artist. Around 2011 to 2013, while I was an English instructor at the Naval Academy, books about Iraq and Afghanistan hit the market and started to gain critical acclaim.I essentially had a front-row seat to the first wave of literature written in reaction to the War on Terror.

Despite the constant barrage of news from Iraq and Afghanistan at that time, having a chance to read how artists explored this conflict creatively offered new insights and empathy into those affected by warfare—both as practitioners in the military and from people who were essentially besieged and invaded. What I saw, though, was the conspicuous absence of women's perspectives. That's where the frustration piece comes in.

Yeah. You write, in the foreword the book, that women have fought in and written about every major war since the American Revolution, but this fact is frequently overlooked. I am curious how you think about that and who should be more widely read.

I think warfare and societally-imposed perceptions of womanhood are still antithetical. Also, I consider myself a feminist, and what gets complicated is that most feminist scholars and authors (perhaps rightfully) are against this idea of women contributing to war making. This places women in the military in this strange, liminal space when it comes to acceptance. Women are the fastest growing demographic within the veteran community, though, so I'm heartened that these perceptions may be changing.

Going back to women's presence in history, this is well documented. Deborah Sampson wrote a memoir about her involvement in the American Revolutionary War, to say nothing of women who actually occupied roles which today are considered part of the Armed Forces. One of the best books about women’s contributions to the military, from an American perspective, is Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow's book It Is My Country Too. Other works which have personally informed my writing are Cynthia Enloe’s 12 Feminist Lessons of War and. Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War. There are countless others to include. Individual memoirs, such as Kayla Williams’s or Lauren Kay Johnson’s or Teresa Fazio’s, stand out. Then there are the classics, like Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. I could go on and on.

What is truly astonishing is how the concerns these women write about—you know, they don’t repeat, but they certainly rhyme. Women in the military really do face this recursive battle for acceptance where gains can be rather slow and laden with societal friction.

Yeah. I feel like a few of your stories sort of deal with the idea of women using what's at a woman's disposal, their femininity, namely, to get ahead. Ashleigh in the first story is one of those..

Yeah. I mean, Ashleigh is a bit of an extreme character. [laughs] But I think there is benefit to playing into the good girl model archetype. From what I’ve observed, it makes women seem less threatening to their male counterparts. While that's not exclusively true to the military, however, it is certainly amplified.

Then there is the other end of the spectrum, where women in the military perform this idea of hyper-masculinity to fit in, to be considered one of the guys. It really does put women in a double bind where they feel compelled to play roles that they'd otherwise not want to play, or have to shift their personalities in ways they’d otherwise would prefer not to.

Yeah. I also liked the story about sort of the wives of the officers, which is probably a role that is maybe more traditionally associated with women and the military.

There’s this suffering spouse archetype which emerges when you see women portrayed as service members’ wives in fiction or in movies. And I wanted to turn that on its head. In a way, that was the whole point of this book, to give women that permission to act as they are and not as they should be or are seen to be. To what can happen when women subvert expectations.

I think there's also this underlying or outward rage happening. And I think that's true of women in a lot of contexts, but what feels particular to you about this rage in the setting of the military?

I think that rage gets sublimated a lot of times, as you alluded. And at some point there's going to be a release. It can be direct and violent, it could be underhanded or misdirected, or it can be channeled into something constructive. Most people like to pretend, I think, that we have a handle on our own emotions. What you see in real life, quite often that's not the case. I also think anger does get amplified in environments such as the military, where you have such a firmly established power structure. And when women are deprived of power within these structures, it can be quite infuriating. Much of this emerges in the book. In a way, Midwatch was a reaction to the power dynamicsI observed while in the Navy. Much like my characters, I could sit around and stew and stew in my own anger, or I could attempt to say something about it.

Yeah…it's an interesting context to play with in literature and media because it's so rules-based in a way.

Right. In a way, the military becomes a perfect microcosm, because it is a society contained within a society. You're looking at a power structure in isolation.

I wanted to ask about the tradition or the practice of storytelling while enlisted. I pulled this quote: "Midwatch is a time for storytelling. It's the watch between 10 at night and 2 in the morning, span of nothingness between the late evening and early morning. Topside lookouts like to tell tales to keep themselves awake. The more outrageous the better. It's a longstanding tradition. The job would be boring otherwise."

The Navy, I believe, does that better than most. It's probably the branch most enamored with tradition. Storytelling is everywhere on ships. If you're deployed with 300 people in a metal box for six months, you have to find ways to entertain yourself.

Back when I was teaching, I used to give my students an assignment where they had to research stories they heard about life at the Academy. It was interesting hearing the same rumors I heard as a Midshipman seven, eight years earlier about events which happened decades in the past. Yet these anecdotes continued to get passed on. Some stories don't actually ever go away – they're probably the one thing that will stick around when all of us are gone.

There's debate about whether collective memory actually exists. Susan Sontag said it's really collective instruction. But the storytelling tradition in the military is alive and well, and it undoubtedly contributes to some sense of a shared tradition.

You mentioned between 2011-2013, you saw a surge of war literature come out. Did you feel at that time like there was a consensus or a collective memory forming? And did you feel it was accurate or the full picture?

Literature written at this time brilliantly captured the sense of general confusion and this perceived loss of national innocence. After September 11th, there was a kind of “noble cause” mentality applied to military operations in Afghanistan. This was questioned, rightfully, and most notably about our operations in Iraq. I’m generalizing here, but the emotional truth these works capture is how quickly this just-cause mentality disappeared, and how the absurdities and ambiguities of war still can’t stop the human tendency toward meaning making. There is also an emphasis on the return home in this body of literature.

Was it a complete story? Well, the war went on for another seven years, so no. And anyone who said they could predict how things would end was probably lying.

Creatively, I think there is more opportunity to put this period into perspective. I’m trying to do so with a novel I’m currently working on. My concern is that the public isn't really interested in it. The danger, of course, is that while new conflicts pop up around the globe, most people would prefer to disregard the last 20 years of our history. We do so at our own peril.