Nashville Gulf War veteran looks to ‘rattle the cage’ with his intense short stories

Odie Lindsey found Kurt Vonnegut in a box in the middle of the desert.

Stationed on the Iraq-Saudi Arabia border, in a place of peripheral terror where missile strikes ignited the sandy horizon and the concussion of the blasts could be felt for miles, Lindsey served as an Army armorist during the Gulf War.

It was here, on the desolate edge of a combat zone, that he happened upon one of the many care packages sent to those fighting overseas.

Inside, he was hoping to find Oreos or something else to eat. Instead, he unboxed satire and science fiction by one of the world's most famous fiction-writing war veterans.

Lindsey devoured it.

Vonnegut introduced Lindsey to literature. And a decade later — when Lindsey watched yet another generation of teenagers head to war following 9/11 — he chose fiction writing as a way to bring combat stories to consciousness.

But Lindsey didn't want to share his own experience. In fact, the "traditional war story" — combat and trauma and guys fighting each other and losing friends — bothered Lindsey. The narrative is important, but it often didn't speak to the span of the experience.

During his time overseas, Lindsey served with women. He fought beside those who identified as lesbian or gay.

He also knew mothers and children who carried combat losses with them years after the fighting subsided.

"We sculpt what we want to about people going to war, and I wanted to expand who gets a war story," says Lindsey.

The result is a dark and uncompromising collection of narratives — all amplified by the very distinct details of war from a man who, like Vonnegut, fought in a far-off land and returned home to write about it.

"So many people deserve representation," says Lindsey, who will discuss his collection of short stories, "We Come to Our Senses," on Oct. 15 at the upcoming Southern Festival of Books. "And, unless we reckon with different stories, we will keep recycling the old ones."

Lindsey's story

His grandfather served in WWII, his father in Vietnam. But Odie Lindsey never expected to go to war.

A teenager looking for a way to help fund a college education, he joined the Reserves and headed to the University of Tennessee.

But the day he completed Advanced Individual Training — just hours, in fact, after the graduation parade — everything changed.

Waiting for a bus at Fort Lee to take him back to Knoxville, he and his fellow platoon members turned on the TV. The lead story on CNN: Saddam Hussein's orders to invade Kuwait.

"We sat there," he says, "and we knew."

Months later, Lindsey's combat engineering unit was attached to the 82nd Airborne and deployed to the Iraqi border through Fort Bragg. 

A schism in humanity

They lived in tents, surrounded by nothing but sand and rocks. And they built roads, spraying the dusty land with diesel to keep it packed and drivable for the pending ground assault.

Lindsey spent 10 months deployed in the desert, from 1990-1991. When he returned home, he was different.

In war, he had to shut down the empathetic part of him, the humanity. He had to be ready to kill someone. He had to prepare to be killed.

But back home, nothing had changed.

Friends still complained about the football team's linebacker. They still went to movies. They still threw parties.

There was a weird disconnect.

For about a year, Lindsey felt feckless.

He was reckless with his body. He used drugs, drank a lot. He drove with nonchalant abandon. He fought depression. He withdrew from his college classes.

And for the better part of a decade, he didn't talk about his deployment.

"I couldn't wrap my head around this schism," he says. "Something went wrong and I didn't know what it was, so I didn't want to talk about it."

Another war, 'like a rerun'

But then came the September 11 attacks, and in 2003, the invasion of Iraq. Twelve years after he returned home, again nothing had changed.

"Watching another generation of people deploy to the same place hit me like a ton of bricks," Lindsey says. "It was like a rerun."

With that, Lindsey was ready to speak out, to capture stories he believed were being overlooked. So he started writing.

His pieces featured fictionalized characters living on the margins of society. He focused on what life was like when they returned from war, the aftereffect of terror that would radiate with them forever.

The stories were inspired by the bravery of real people like Shoshana Johnson, a Panamanian-born U.S. soldier who was the first African-American female prisoner of war. But they were creations of his own.

"There are certain stories we make palatable as a military story, and that sometimes bothers me," says Lindsey, who got his master's in Southern studies at Mississippi and completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

"I tried to capture stories from soldiers I didn't think would be told."

The abuse and sexual politics of war

"We Come to Our Senses" centers on the direct and tangential effects of combat and the deviant legacies of war — particularly in the South.

The stories are grim and rending.

In "Evie M.," a lesbian combat veteran-turned-office clerk faces her trauma and the neuroses that derail her suicide. In “Colleen,” a woman returns to her Mississippi hometown and confronts the superior who abused her at war.

The final story, "Hers," is about the sexual politics of a combat zone and the homecoming for female veterans who are unenthusiastically greeted as heroines. 

It all centers around Southern culture and its relationship to the military.

"I really wanted to be as mindful as I could about things," says Lindsey, who now teaches a class on literature and medicine for The Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University.

"But I wanted to domesticate the discomfort a little bit, to rattle the cage."

Just like a certain WWII veteran, an author Lindsey discovered in the desert decades ago, who recurringly wove the complexities of war into his work.

Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and jbliss@tennessean.com. You can also find her on Twitter @jlbliss.

Veterans' stories in music and literature at the Southern Festival of Books

The Southern Festival of Books takes place Friday (12-5 p.m.), Saturday (10 a.m.-6 p.m.) and Sunday (12-5 p.m.) at War Memorial Plaza and the Nashville Public Library.

It is free and open to the public. No advance registration or tickets are required. All seating for speaker presentations is on a first-come basis.

Author Odie Lindsey, a Gulf Warveteran and professor at Vanderbilt University, will join musician Mary Gauthier in a discussion about veterans' stories at the Festival.

When: 12-1 p.m., Oct. 15.

Where: Nashville Public Library (615 Church St., Nashville), Conference Room 1A

More info: humanitiestennessee.org