The Inspiration for my Book: A Song, Chekhov’s Gun, and Heroes
By I.M. Aiken
The wisdom at our dining table involved “write what you know.” What does a kid know? My answer was: join the volunteer fire department, earn your EMT, work in the inner city on urban ambulances, sail the oceans on long voyages, work as a cook, teach skiing professionally, move to Alaska, spend years in “bush” Alaska working with remote and rural health organizations, then get roped into the post-9/11 world of military, secrets, clearances that resulted in a year in Iraq as a civilian member of a army unit. Then join a rural ambulance and rescue service.
The title of this novel is The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County. From the title one can infer that several story elements came from my experience. Experiences serve as filler. Stories come from intent. While writing, I carried these three images:
- A Song: Ralph McTell’s “The Streets of London”
- Chekhov’s Gun
- And the inner hauntings of a retired hero
“Streets of London” is a song that I have been singing and listening to since the 1980s. It is in a song book called Rise Up Singing. It is both a folky song and appears on my classical music station as an orchestral piece. One of the stanzas goes like this:
Have you seen the old man
Outside the Seaman’s Mission
Memory fading with
The medal ribbons that he wears
In our winter city
The rain cries a little pity
For one more forgotten hero
And a world that doesn’t care
Ralph McTell has an amazing YouTube video with striking black-and-white photos. I asked myself: what is it to be a hero, to have lived the hero’s life and then find yourself as “one more forgotten hero” living in a world that doesn’t care?
What does that feel like? In the U.S., once per year, a few restaurants offer veterans a free lunch on November 11th. Maybe once per year, some small towns ask veteran groups to march down main street. From inside that skin, what does that feel like? Who are those people marching with ill-fitting uniforms or funny hats? When you do go off to war, you tell yourself that you are doing this because we live in a democracy.
I am giving my time, my years, my body, my life, my soul to the citizens of this nation. I will have earned a special place in society through this sacrifice. And then you find yourself at baggage claim inside of Boston’s Logan Airport in full desert kit waiting for an army duffle bag with everyone else either looking at their shoes or staring at the baggage carousel wishing for their luggage to arrive. The silence hurts – as does insincere applause.
Four years ago, I stood in an airport lounge because I saw a flag draped casket being unloaded from the belly of a plane. I stood in respect and in a solemn salute to an American who gave their all.
I stood alone. That service member flew alone in the belly of a plane. Yet, we knew each other.
I need to share this feeling with others. It is a hard place to be. It is difficult to ask people to look. Now, we even have civic leaders calling wounded service members “losers”–It harms us all, civilian and uniform alike.
We can’t just spend 300 pages being all serious and stuff. I took Chekhov’s Gun out of my office safe to play with it. The casual statement of this literary rule is that if you see a gun in the first act, it better go bang before the end of the show. In a broader sense, the rule suggests that everything in a story belongs there and if you put it in the story, then you better need it. In most thrillers and crime novels, the crime is the dead body, and the gun goes bang. Therefore, I put both guns and dead bodies throughout the work. And a gun does go bang. And it goes bang for absolutely no good reason and does absolutely no harm. So there Chekhov! That’s just me playing. Why not have fun?
At 18, I had one set of thoughts of being a hero.
At 59.96 years old (I’ll turn 60 in two weeks), my thoughts of being a hero have changed.
I walk on one terrible knee and one bad knee. My ears ring in a silent room. And thankfully, the stroboscopic images of horror have faded with care, counseling, and training. Yet, I am not the frumpy, mildly overweight, gray-haired lady that I appear to be. I’ve climbed and worked 100 feet in the air on the rigging of two Tall Ships. I’ve been shot at and mortared. And unlike Chekhov and his prop gun, I can still put a tiny hole in a target from 100 meters with my little varmint rifle. When working on a federal research vessel off the coast of Alaska, I got dumped overboard in a fjord as a practice dummy. Inside my skin I believe that I am a very sharp and effective instrument. “Ready to go coach, put me in.”
And yet, that is not what people see, is it? That bought me another topic I wanted to explore in this novel. What if you are not the hero of your own story? Being forgotten and ignored is one deep pit into which emotions can fall. There is a deeper and darker pit into which we fall. Imagine having been a hero for an entire career, then you find out that people act with malice towards you and actively rob your sense of heroism, and identity.
Following 9/11, we bathed firefighters, cops and EMTs with applause and laurels. We saw a mild renewal of that spirit of appreciation during the COVID pandemic. On the streets of America, people have grown to despise cops, firefighters and by extension EMTs. We yell at nurses. We are outlawing common medical protocols. People are leaving the medical field due to these stressors. We, the cops, firefighters, soldiers, medics are your neighbors who decided at a young age to give ourselves to public service. And you have kicked me in the teeth. You have offered me hatred. You greet me with distrust and resentment. You yell at me without knowing me or my views.
After the noise, after the fires are out, after the battle, after the patients are tucked safely in bed, you must go home and live with yourself. It is then that the questions come. The easy questions are easy: “Did I do my best?” or “Did I stay true to myself and my oath?”
The hard questions never get answered.
“Was it worth it?”
“Did I do any good?”
On some dark nights awake between bed linens wet with my own sweat, I think: “No.”
And I am not the only one, am I?
—
I.M Aiken
The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County: A Trowbridge Vermont Story
A fascinating and darkly funny novel giving readers front-row access to the world of EMS and other first responders — and the stink, sweat, and sex that accompanies long days caring for others at their most vulnerable.
Following in the footsteps of their beloved Boston cop father, Alex Flynn trains as an EMT, and spends years chasing emergencies in an ambulance. But the person Alex becomes is a far cry from the hero they signed up to be.
Over four decades in public safety, Alex encounters a changing America, where veterans are left to rot on streets, women are welcome in dangerous fields but abusers still walk free, and service providers are subjected to intense public scrutiny while being denied the resources they need. After moving from bustling Boston to small town Vermont, Alex discovers an escalating feud between emergency operators and must decide which to protect: their community, or their legacy.
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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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