The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-
Time Soldier
The war in Afghanistan creates an urgency for telling stories-between
soldiers, as they hand off missions to each other, and between soldiers and
civilians, trying to explain what is going on - while also denying a lot of the
context that is important for the telling of that story. The landscape is so
mountainous and isolating that one incident or anecdote might not fit into a
bigger picture beyond itself. A patrol may have no effect on the one that
comes next. The war has ground itself into such a stasis that it is hard to see
movement or plot. Yet we're there. We have to say something. We have to be
accountable, even though the circumstances complicate the ability to talk
about it while simultaneously creating a constant yearning to do so.
The Longer We Were There follows a part-time soldier's experience over
seven years in the Iowa Army National Guard. He enlists at seventeen into
the infantry, then bounces between college classes, army training, disaster
relief, civilian jobs, a deployment in Afghanistan-first on the Afghan-Pakistani
border, then into a remote valley in the Hindu Kush Mountains - and finally
comes home. His stories are about having one foot on each side of the
civilian-military divide, the difficulty of describing one side to those on the
other, and how, as a consequence of this difficulty, that divide gets replicated
within the self.
About the author...
Steven Moore earned a BA in English from the University of Iowa in 2010
and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Oregon State University in 2016. His
debut book The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-Time Soldier won
the 2018 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction. His nonfiction has appeared
in Kenyon Review online; The Georgia Review; Ninth Letter; Entropy; War,
Literature, and the Arts; North American Review; Southeast
Review; DIAGRAM; and is forthcoming in the anthology Why We Write: Craft
Essays on Writing War. He is a contributing editor at Moss: A Journal of the
Pacific Northwest and currently resides in Corvallis, Oregon.