Q&A
You are a panelist at a literary festival. The topic: Women Veteran Writers. Two dozen attendees sit in rickety folding chairs inside a sun-lit art gallery. The festival organizers are kind and accommodating, the audience engaged and considerate. The moderated discussion with the other panelists, a nonfiction writer and a poet, accelerates at jovial clip. Your pre-session jitters are a distant memory. The wonky on-stage speaker hisses static; to limit background noise when not speaking, panelists mute their microphones.
The moderator announces it is time for questions when a stooped gentleman, wearing a grizzled beard and Vietnam War Veteran hat, raises his hand. He thanks the panelists for our service. Then he asks whether any of us, during our time on Active Duty, were ever sexually assaulted.
To your right, the nonfiction writer, a former intelligence analyst, gasps. Her hazel eyes dart nervously from side to side. To your left, the poet, a former Army logistician who writes gentle verse, looks ready to charge into the audience swinging. By their crossed arms and firm set of their jaws, neither has any intention of replying.
You sit in the middle, blazer bedecked and straight backed under the crackling speaker.
This question should not surprise you. You’ve been asked to answer it before. Men, when they go to war, are asked if they’ve ever killed anyone; women are asked if they’ve ever been raped.
The moderator fidgets with her notecards and drops them onto the floor. You glance down at the talking points you prepared for this session. Knowing nothing in your notes adequately addresses this question, you mentally draft a new set of talking points. You can:
Deflect the situation. Revert to your Naval Officer persona, the woman hard wired to defuse loose munitions and even looser tempers. Who could resist such charm?
Tell the stooped gentleman his question is sensitive. Treat this as a teachable moment. The question is clumsy but well-intentioned. Perhaps the older gentleman is simply trying to understand?
Assert boldly how no man would ever dare. Curse as you say it. Flex your bicep for the audience. Doesn’t he realize how strong women are?
Tell him about the time when a Chief in the engineering department exposed himself to you on a tour of your ship’s main reduction gear. So tiny! you exclaimed. Just in case, you grabbed a nearby torque wrench and brandished it like a club. From then on, the Chief ran in the opposite direction whenever he encountered you in the passageways. Do you admit the perverse satisfaction this memory brings?
Scold him. Doesn’t he know the complex emotions this question raises?
Tell him about the instructor at the Academy who closed the door to his office and rubbed himself as he explained what you did wrong on your last exam. You ran out of the room and informed the department chair, who said you must have misinterpreted the instructor’s nervous tick—he is a decorated officer, after all. The decorated officer gets fired the next year after three other women come forward. In the meantime, your B in the class dropped to a D and you lose your grad school fellowship. What would have happened if you stayed silent?
Reply sarcastically, a condescending smile plastered across your face, How about we skip this question?
Tell him about the time you found your roommate on her hands and knees in the shower under streams of cold water, sobbing so hard she vomited into the drain. You dried her off and noticed how her upper arm welted purple from elbow to shoulder. She begged you not to tell anyone. Everyone loved him, the guy with the dimpled chin and slightly-too-long hair who always paid his friends’ bar tab. I’m serious, she said again, don’t tell anyone. And you don’t. Should you have broken her trust and said something anyway?
Wonder about the stooped gentleman’s motives. He could seek to empathize or to shame; to uplift or victimize; to argue you belong or to imply you don’t. Does discernment or cynicism make you to question his intent?
Tell him about the time you saw the guy with the dimpled chin in a parking lot, alone. He looked at his phone while you idled the car, your foot twitching on the brake pedal. You think about running him over, slamming on the accelerator while his eyes are glued to the phone. Eventually, he looked up and waved. Would you have run him over if he hadn’t?
Imitate the sound of your roommate crying, the hollow moan which has drifted through your dreams for the past twenty years. Pour a glass of water over the microphone to recreate the shower’s insistent hush. Ask, Is this what you expected to hear?
Tell the audience you are tired, so very tired of living inside these relentless questions. You never created these situations. Where is the engineering chief or the decorated officer? What questions are being asked of the department chair or the guy with the dimpled chin? Why are you left to provide the answers?
A squelch of static startles you. Someone in the audience coughs. The moderator collects her notecards from the floor. The silence has stretched for far too long.
You unmute your microphone.
“After being on the receiving end of several exasperating questions at recent writing events, I decided to dramatize one of the encounters. Anger can occasionally be a productive emotion.” —Jillian Danback-McGhan
Jillian Danback-McGhan is a Navy veteran and the author of the short story collection Midwatch (Split/Lip Press, 2024). Her work appears in Military Experience & the Arts, storySouth, Line of Advance, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and the anthologies Our Best War Stories (Middle West Press, 2020) and Proud to Be (Southeast Missouri Press, 2024). She lives in Annapolis, MD and Indian Harbour Beach, FL with her family.