War Memories in Six Words

"He Still Wants to Go Back." 

                  "Gonna Rip That Uniform off Him."

   The talent of quickly summing up one's present attitude is the stuff of serious attention in our daily lives from twitter post to text to #hashtag. Ok. But what happens when this form of writing becomes the stuff of art and history-making? Can it be informative or does it produce more of the same head-scratching vaguery that hashtag inside-jokes written by out-of-touch friends across the country might produce?

                     Upstart Smith Magazine's Six Word Memoirs showcases this talent, boasting categories like 'Moms' along with more serious subjects such as 'Divorce' and gasp... even 'War' and featuring the good ones like it's a competition. The site apparently even deals with some official veterans organizations to push it's specific brand of wartime memory making.

(From the URL): "Smith Magazine is honored to team up with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) to hear stories about coming home from war- in exactly six words...

                     It is clear from the site that the majority of folks posting to this category are the loved ones of people serving overseas who are looking for solidarity. When someone writes, "Best words. 'Mom I'll be home," they are asking for sympathy from the nebulous number of people who might stumble across the post somewhere on the site. In this case your tag line is not just for subscribed 'friends' to read but for an unknown audience. This is 'fishing' for compliments in the vast pool of well, anyone. 

                    But there is something eerie about simplifying the complexity of the human psyche down to a tag line when we're talking about war. When writing in this style, we shoot for profundity, for revelation, for that which needs no elaboration. Or at least, we can pretend to do those things without doing them at all. It's like a game of darts where you try to nail down your emotions, but run out of darts real fast. 

                     This is probably the problem tackled by my friends who've abandoned their facebooks and is the reason why I cringe when I browse Six Word Memoirs. I don't know any Iraq/ Afghanistan vets personally, but it's hard to say I get anything from reading, "your letters are keeping me sane," or "Should I re-enlist? Told him yes." 

                                                         So why even go there?

                      I'm starting to think that when discourses on war get tossed into the internet melting pot, the projects that interest us fit into the molds already carved out by our preferences for different media platforms. As it goes, you will probably not log on to Six Word Memoirs unless you dig writing hashtags. And you will probably not try to understand the emotional effect the war is having on you in six words unless you really dig hashtags, or maybe want to shape up your hashtag writing or interpreting capabilities.