It is 12 a.m. in the land of the midnight sun. Seventy-two hours until deployment. I should be at home with my wife, Jen, and 6-month-old son or unpacking the house we bought recently. Instead, I’m on my bike riding home from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. A rowdy group rides down another trail that merges with mine, cycling in a pack in front of me. They laugh, pull beers from messenger bags, see me and offer me one. The exchange is tour-worthy. An anonymous rider pulls out a cold Olympia and reaches toward me. His eyes remain on the trail ahead, as do mine. I extend a blind left hand, close the gap, find the front of the can. For a moment we are connected by cheap beer. Then he lets go and it is all mine. I toast the rowdies and ride ahead.
![Voices](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141206084633im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs_v3/atwar/pog-voices.gif)
***
On Jan. 13, my wife’s water broke, just as I put the final touches on my application to the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. While I drove, frenzied, across town for a post office, she held out through rising contractions. Finnegan Shichiro Komatsu made his entry that night, and a month later a letter came in the mail. I was in, accepted into the creative nonfiction program.
![Matt Komatsu and his son, Finn.](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141206084633im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/09/10/us/atwar-komatsu/atwar-komatsu-blog480.jpg)
The university program is low residency: a correspondence course for all but two weeks every summer. During the residency, students from all over the globe — and from three genres (fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry) — converged on the Anchorage campus. For two weeks, it was 12 hours a day of writing: poetry, fiction, readings, lectures, manuscript workshops. Immersed in an unfamiliar world, windows to new material opened hourly.
Because the program required so little time on campus, I did not have to quit my job to pursue the degree. The course work for my first semester was online. When it was time for the residency, I took leave, shed my uniform, pulled on some civvies and rode my bike to class.
Among the better-known veteran writers of recent wars, Brian Turner, author of “Here, Bullet” and “My Life as a Foreign Country,” took his M.F.A. credentials to the battlefield and returned with devastating poetry. Phil Klay got his degree not long after leaving the Marines and wrote an acclaimed collection of stories titled “Redeployment.” And Ron Capps, author of “Seriously Not All Right: Five Wars in Ten Years,” got a master’s before serving with the Army and the State Department in various war-torn areas, including Afghanistan and Rwanda. He credits writing with saving his life.
Veterans who are writers are no different from civilian writers in that we bring the same baggage to the keyboard. Emotional trauma, the minefield of cliché and self-doubt are common to all writers. However, what sets us apart is that we veterans arrive with a litany of cultural tags, some of which are self-enforced, others undeserved, all entirely unhelpful: the other one percent, uneducated high school dropouts with no better options, mindless automatons.
I showed up for the residency, cautious after a semester of online classes. Nothing in my virtual interactions with classmates indicated a need to worry. But how much can you hope to learn about someone when your interface is limited to, say, trading online perspectives about Anne Lamott’s essay on terrible first drafts? I arrived, sweating from my hurried bike ride, and looked for the boogeyman.
Instead I found men and women genuinely interested in my writing, which occurs on the peripheries of war and military life. My classmates included pacifists, Occupy movement enthusiasts, stay-at-home fathers, touchy-feely poets and backcountry risk-takers. But labels fell away when we workshopped one another’s manuscripts.
We each submitted two manuscripts and for hours each day workshopped them, which was the core of the residency. Nobody got a pass. One of my manuscripts covered the Japanese tsunami of 2011 — during which my grandmother died — and my subsequent deployment to Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo. An emotional facade crumbled during the workshop and I broke down. My classmates smiled and told me that the essay was good but that the structure needed work. My other manuscript, a retelling of my experience during an attack on Bastion air base in Afghanistan, was “confusing” and filled with “military jargon” that isolated the reader, they told me. During the workshop I was no longer an airman or a veteran. I was a writer, just like everyone else.
I asked a fellow Air Force Academy alumnus, Brandon Lingle, about his M.F.A. experience. He joined Brian Turner’s M.F.A. program this year at Sierra Nevada College in Nevada, and is now deployed to Afghanistan. During his first residency, Brandon’s classmates wanted to know more about the veteran experience and understood that he was about to deploy, which, he said, “helped humanize the concept for those who had never been exposed to the military.”
If there is debate over whether M.F.A. programs produce good writers, none exists where connection is concerned. And that is precisely what I am after. Near the end of my first semester, a classmate asked the question in our online forum: “Why do you write?”
My response was two paragraphs. Both described what it was like to witness an airman receive a Silver Star, then drink with him and a man whose life he saved. The first paragraph described the ceremony, the heroics, everything you could absorb in a hurried read or on the Silver Star citation itself. The second paragraph characterized the struggles both men now face in negotiating simple day-to-day living.
You can get all of the former on your own, I wrote. I’m here to deliver the latter.
***
I balance an increasingly foamy beer while maneuvering my bike around and over frost heaves in the pavement. Caught in the moment under the shadow of an evergreen canopy, I find a smile on my face. An unlikely beer. A shot off the page that hits the reader just right. While the former was serendipitous and the latter desired, both are inextricably tied to the risk I took when I sent in my M.F.A. application. That decision positioned me right where I am. It will lead me ahead, converging and diverging with other paths as it may.
I finish the ride and park my bike next to garage boxes. I tiptoe into Finn’s room, kiss his sleeping form, then find Jen in the bedroom, where she is unpacking. “Do I have a story for you,” I say.
Matthew Komatsu is a full-time Alaska Air National Guardsman. He and his wife, Jen, recently had their first son, Finnegan. Matthew is one semester closer to a Master of Fine Arts in nonfiction writing from the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, the Defense Department or any branch of the United States government.