I love Spokane, Washington’s rich book and literary culture. In addition to several great independent bookstores and libraries, this last weekend found Spokane hosting Eastern Washington University’s “Get Lit” literature festival. The four-day festival offered writing classes, lectures, book sales, and readings. On Sunday, I was especially interested in attending a panel discussion about military memoirs.
The conversation was facilitated by my friend David Millet, director of the EWU Veterans Resource Center. The event featured former Marine Kacy Tellessen and former Airman Andy Brown. Even after all my military-themed writing, I was still naive enough to go to the session expecting something simple and straightforward. In fact, it was extraordinary.
The event was held in Spokane’s beautiful, old Montvale Hotel Event Center. Built in the early 20th century, it’s three floors of old, dark-wood-accented walls with an auditorium and third-floor ballroom. The military memoir talk was up there, a curved wood panel sloping from the walls up to the ceiling and a row of round lightbulbs circling like a crown. As I sat down for the show, I could sense the history in the building and in that room.
Then, the men began to discuss their journeys through history. Kacy Tellessen had served in the Marines, with two tours as a machine gunner in Iraq. He spoke about and read from his memoir Freaks of a Feather: A Marine Grunt’s Memoir. Andy Brown discussed the experiences that led to his book Warnings Unheeded: Twin Tragedies at Fairchild Air Force Base.
Dave Millet led the discussion, starting with a general talk about the role of books in the lives of the servicemen. But the conversation quickly became difficult for both of the veterans-turned-authors.
Mr. Tellessen talked about taking fire. He spoke of his friend, Lance Cpl. Joshua C. Alonzo, who had expressed his brotherly respect for Tellessen right before departing on the patrol ended by the IED that killed him. Tellessen, a large, bearded man in a nice suit, folded his arms and sat stone-faced. I could feel his tension.
Andy Brown was a senior airman serving in the security police squadron at Fairchild Air Force Base outside of Spokane on June 20, 1994, when an armed monster engaged in a murderous rampage with his MAK-90 rifle. On bicycle patrol that day, Brown rushed toward the danger and killed the gunman to stop the attack. His reading focused on the blood left on his shoes from 8-year-old Christin F. McCarron, whom Brown was unable to save. The look in his eyes as he read is beyond my ability as a writer to describe. A part of him, maybe a large part, had somehow gone back there, to that terrible day in ’94.
“What does it mean to tell these stories?” asked Dave Millet.
“It’s my small gesture to keep these guys alive,” Tellessen said.
“To honor their memory,” said Brown, remembering those who were killed at Fairchild, those he couldn’t save. “To encourage people who are suffering [from PTSD] to seek some help.”
As a veteran and writer, I have participated in and witnessed several such presentations, but after the Biden administration’s betrayal of Afghanistan that laid waste to our hard-fought mission and still leaves my Afghan friends in deadly danger from the Taliban, something was different. I began to shake a little. Emotional control was a challenge. I forced myself to breathe deeply.
Both men talked about how writing, how sharing their service stories, helped them cope with the emotional fallout from their experiences. Dave Millet, Andy Brown, and Kacy Tellessen are extraordinary men who served with courage and honor, and yet only six people attended the event. My fellow veterans, many Americans may want to move on and forget our service, but that makes it all the more important for us to share our experiences. Otherwise, we haven’t learned a thing.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns. Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
