Military sexual trauma: important new book
Stories from the Front joins a lineage of books by and about veterans that Blue Ear Books is keenly interested in continuing to develop and make available to a wide reading public.
Today is the publication date of Stories from the Front: Pain, Betrayal, and Resilience on the MST Battlefield, by Blue Ear Books author Lisa Carrington Firmin, a retired United States Air Force colonel. Lisa insisted from the start on this specific publication date, because of its significance as the anniversary of the April 22, 2020 murder of the soldier Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood, Texas.
Hearty congratulations to Lisa! Her important book on military sexual trauma is now in a lineage of books by and about American military veterans and their lives that Blue Ear Books is keenly interested in continuing to develop and make available to a wide reading public. The opportunity to edit and publish Stories from the Front came to us via a web of friendships that I’ve come to cherish as an important vehicle for my own needed and ongoing education, and its publication helps set the stage for what I hope will be a robust and ongoing contribution that my Blue Ear Books colleagues and I will be in a position to continue making.
Order your copy of Stories from the Front for US$18.95 plus $3.95 US shipping via this link.
Read the book’s press release at this link.
Read Lisa’s March 18 Substack post:
One of my own mentors and role models, the great British foreign correspondent and travel writer Gavin Young, wrote in the introduction to his collection Worlds Apart that he “fell into journalism the way a drunken man falls into a pond.” That’s more or less how I fell into publishing books of veterans’ stories. Soon after I first launched Blue Ear Books, as a way of keeping my own books in print amid disruptive sea changes in the commercial and technological context of book publishing and other media industries, three different writer friends approached me asking, essentially, “How do you do that, and could you do it for me?” One of those was Jeb Wyman, who teaches writing at Seattle Central College. Several years and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears later, in 2017, Blue Ear Books published What They Signed Up For: True Stories by Ordinary Soldiers, Jeb’s oral history collection of eighteen personal accounts by combat veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Meanwhile, one fine day in Fort Worth in 2015, my friend and colleague James English of Texas Christian University introduced me over lunch to Major April E. Brown (USMCR, retired), TCU’s Director of Veterans Services. I happened to mention Jeb’s book then in progress, and next thing I knew I had been swept up in April’s purposeful intention that a similar book should be produced of the stories of students and others affiliated with TCU who were veterans. That project was an adventure in its own right, and the published result was Voices of America: Veterans and Military Families Tell Their Own Stories, co-edited by April and me with Kit Snyder and published in 2020 by TCU Press. One important thing to note is April’s insistence that Voices of America should include not only combat vets but the full gamut of military experience, including stateside and peacetime service and the spouses and children of military personnel.[1]
One unplanned but very welcome offshoot of Voices of America was Consequences: An Intelligence Officer’s War by David Grantham, published in 2020 by Blue Ear Books. Another will be a book-length memoir by Stesha Colby-Lynch, whose story is featured briefly in Voices of America and more fully in Stories from the Front. When Stesha asked me, sometime early in 2021, if I could speak to a friend of hers who also wanted to write a book, little did I know what it would lead to. Thanks, Stesha!
So, as you see, I fell into publishing veterans’ stories the way a drunken man falls into a pond. There’s much work yet to be done, and Blue Ear Books is committed to continuing to do it. Hardworking and assiduous though our little publishing platoon is, and however many books we might succeed in publishing and persuading some people to read, it will be only a few drops in a vast ocean of human experience. But that daunting truth has a helpful corollary: that it’s not necessary for any of us to know all of every story. What’s needed is for us to exercise our capacity for empathy, and to do what I believe April and I did well in Voices of America and Jeb and Lisa have done in exemplary fashion in What They Signed Up For and Stories from the Front: to listen, actively and without prejudice. It’s especially important for civilians like Jeb and me to be able and willing to do this. We at Blue Ear Books – April, Lisa, Jeb, David, Stesha and I, along with others – plan to continue doing our part in the important work of listening to military veterans. Our plans include an updated edition of What They Signed Up For as well as a new book by Jeb Wyman, on the ways that American culture has been changed by the impact on our society of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Another project we would like to try to follow through on would be a book compiling personal accounts by veterans who served throughout the full 20-year U.S. presence in Afghanistan, from 9/11 all the way to the bitter end in August 2021. In short, if you have a story to tell, we’d love to hear it.
As I write this, the shocking Russian invasion of Ukraine is not quite two months old, and its outcome remains uncertain. One thing we do know is that there will be many stories from it that will need to be told and – just as important – heard, read, and understood. Those stories will include the stories of American and other veterans – many of whom have been disappointed, to put it mildly, by the tragedy and non-result of two decades of U.S. presence in Afghanistan – who have rushed to the aid of what they see as a righteous cause.[2] I want to help tell some of those stories.
This message would not be complete if I failed to make reference to Svetlana Alexievich, the great Belarusian-Ukrainian journalist and oral historian who was deservedly honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. Never has the enduring importance of her work been more obvious. Her book on ordinary people’s experience of the collapse and aftermath of the Soviet Union, Secondhand Time, is an essential document, and not without relevance to Americans in this moment and the time to come. Her book Voices from Chernobyl speaks for itself, so to speak. Likewise Zinky Boys, her feat of listening to veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and their families.
I hope and expect that, in due course, Svetlana Alexievich will publish something on the current war in Ukraine. But one thing that makes mentioning and recommending her work appropriate here is that we mustn’t sit around and wait for her or any other famous person to do the work that we ourselves are in a position to do. There’s so very much work to be done, a shared mission to be executed.
Publisher, Blue Ear Books
Order your copy of Stories from the Front for US$18.95 plus $3.95 US shipping via this link.
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[1] The story of how Voices of America came about is told well by Lisa Martin in “Veterans Share Their Experiences in New Book,” TCU Magazine, Fall 2021, https://magazine.tcu.edu/fall-2021/voices-of-america-veterans-book/.
[2] See “Fleeing to the War Zone” by David Grantham, March 22, 2022,
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