Veteran Abrams tells Havreites 'How to Tell a War Story'

"Fobbit" is a love child between "M*A*S*H" and "The Office." That's how author David Abrams best describes his debut novel.

Abrams spoke at Havre-Hill County Library, giving a presentation titled "How to Tell a War Story," Monday at 7 p.m. The bespectacled veteran with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing will be the first to admit his experience in the Middle East is not to be grouped in with that of renowned soldiers like Marcus Luttrell or the deceased Chris Kyle.

"Letters were my bullets, sentences my missiles. I worked under the buzz of fluorescent lights - I got paper cuts. That was my war," he said, reading the prepared presentation.

Abrams joined the U.S. Army as a journalist in 1988. He only needed six words to explain why: "Student loans; pregnant wife; job security."

When he wasn't doing his job - he later became a public affairs officer - he was writing short stories and getting them published in literary magazines like Salamander and The Missouri Review.

As far as how real his novel is, he put it this way: "There are a few moments where fiction passes truth along the sidewalk and waves to it."

Why not just write a real account like everyone else? someone asked.

Abrams wasn't ashamed to tell the truth. Aside from being primarily a fiction writer, his experience as a soldier was really boring. He was a fobbit, a term used to ridicule soldiers who never left the safety of the forward operating base during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He stared at a computer screen 14 hours a day.

He said he found more war truth in the fiction of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" than in the reality of his experience.

Abrams barely touched on the specifics of telling a war story, but someone in the audience asked him what the most important literary aspect of writing a good war story was. Abrams didn't miss a beat.

"Something that will make you feel the experience," he said.

"Fobbit" is about a group of Fobbits and their counterpart group of infantry soldiers. It has jokes and severed body parts.

"Jokes about body parts," Abrams said about the combat soldiers he knew, "was a way of distancing themselves from the war,"