Valerie Bonham

For the release of the title, E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure from The Museum of the American Military Family, director Circe Olson Woessner talked about the book with my co-writer-in-residence, Connie Kinsey and me.

(yeah, I keep sharing the cover photo — credit the non-profit ad budget of $0.00 <smiley face> )

Launch day has arrived for E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure, another anthology produced by the Museum of the American Military Family.

E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure joins two other books from the Museum. One, Schooling With Uncle Sam, is a first-person memoir collection of DoD schooling with the overseas American military. The other, On Freedom’s Frontier, gathered first-person recollections of American military service on the tank-defended, and land-mine-infested border between West and East Germany–the Iron Curtain. All three books were shepherded by Circe Olson Woessner, the Museum’s executive director.

To quote from the Museum’s press release,

“The motto, E Pluribus Unum, means ‘out of many, one.’ The museum’s latest project E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure — gives title and substance to a newly-released multi-faceted study exploring if the many do indeed become one,” Dr. Circe Olson Woessner, Executive Director of the Museum of the American Military Family (MAMF) explains. “E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE under Pressure curates, in one volume, stories from hundreds of military-connected individuals based on their service experience seen through the lenses of GRAICE (Gender; Religion; rAce; Identity; Culture; and Ethnicity.).”

In writing E Pluribus Unum, none of us writers knew how the others approached the writing prompts or how they explained the way military life affected their experiences of the GRAICEs. Each of us expanded on our experiences.

My essays are:

• Supply Train
• Boxes
• Tl;dr: One Hundred Years of War
• Translating Mil-speak to Civilianese
• The Military: It’s Another World
• Army of One
• Gender: Brains, Brawn, or Both?
• No Atheists in Foxholes v. Keep Your God Out Of My Foxhole
• Race, in One Person’s Military Experience
• Who Are Military People?
• E Pluribus Unum.

A group of similar essays were written by my co-writer-in-residence, Connie Kinsey, a Marine Corps brat. Scattered between the essays are the book’s illustrations, conceived and produced by “the son of a world traveling family,” Brandon Palma who founded 8thDayCreate.

To polish the book, Amy Hines Woody, an anthropologist and an Air Force retiree, wrote the introduction. Anthropological PhD candidates, K.T. Hanson and Chelsea E. Hunter, put under a sociological microscope raw survey data collected online by the Museum from self-selected respondents. They added fifty pages of survey analysis to the over two hundred pages of first-person experiences. The anonymity of the surveys provided the analysts with much candid information.

Despite pride shown by many of the contributors, E Pluribus Unum is not a hoo-rah rubber-stamp of military life. Likewise, the book is not an invective-laden tirade. It is an authentic look by people with something to say about their lives, either in uniform or close to uniformed personnel.

For those with an interest in what takes place behind the installation fence, I hope you enjoy the book.