Storytelling

Photo By Marcus Fichtl | A Rangeview High School student writes down her thoughts about a recent photo in the media, at Rangeview High School, Aurora, Colo., Oct. 17, 2014. Sgt. Marcus Fichtl, public affairs, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division was a guest lecturer at the high school and discussed how images affect perception.  

AURORA, CO, UNITED STATES

10.17.2014

Story by Sgt. Marcus Fichtl  

2nd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division

AURORA, Colorado - I should have worn dress uniform.

Seven in the morning, I was about to step into a high school for the first time since I stepped out of one 12 years ago. A good friend from college asked me to be a guest lecturer for the high school history classes she teaches at Rangeview High School in Aurora, Colorado – to talk to them about what I do. Or more accurately how images affect perception and how that perception affects history.

A perception for me that started with my image, which was at the time the baggy and utilitarian Army Combat Uniform rather than the trim and neat Army Service Uniform. I couldn’t help it, having recently returned from Kuwait and Qatar, it was still in storage.

I’m what the Army dryly calls a public affairs specialist and what the public describes with varying degrees of reverence and disdain: a combat correspondent, a propagandist, a journalist, a shill.

I just call myself a storyteller.

I asked all five classes. “Tell me what you think when you hear the word Soldier.” I received for the most part the standard responses, “hero,” “detached,” “molded,” “fighter,” the rhetorical consequence of a professional army, which isn’t as intertwined with society as it once was during the era of the draft.

I turned off the lights and turned on the projector. I began to deconstruct their view, I started with the standard militaristic photos, the mortars, the tanks, Soldiers firing their weapons at the range, explaining each one of my shots and the goal I had on affecting perceptions with each. I moved onto the more intimate photos, the memorials, the deployment ceremonies, the slice of life behind the scenes interactions between Soldiers. I spoke a little less on what my goal with each photo was, because I was about to tell them by asking them “what do you think when you hear the word Soldier now?”

“Human being.”

It’s a truth I completely believe in, and it’s the story I told them. But it’s also a biased truth to redefine their perception, one that’s different than what news media shows, one that’s different than what a movie shows.

I told them I don’t matter, my images don’t as well, it’s how you perceive them and the decisions you make from them. From here we moved to the heart of the lecture. I flashed onto the screen the crash of the Hindenburg and we discussed why we don’t travel in Zepplin’s. Steve McCurdy’s “The Afghan Girl,” the most published photo in National Geographic, how it affected the Soviet-Afghanistan war and how it might still have effects on the NATO led conflict there for the last 13 years.

We talked about Ansel Adams and how a simple “oh that’s pretty” the high schoolers responded with, echoed the response in the 1940s that vitalized the national parks service and transformed it into what it is today.

Ultimately I landed on a final photo, not a historic photo, but rather a photo of a group of people with their smart phones up taking a photo of an eclipse. I asked, “what do you think they will do with photo they are taking?”

“They’re probably putting it on Facebook, Twitter, the students responded.

“What do you do every day on Facebook and Twitter, what does everyone do every day on Facebook and Twitter?”

“Post photos?”

“No, we storytell.”

I should have worn my dress uniform.

• Date Taken: 10.17.2014
• Date Posted: 01.23.2015 06:38
• Story ID: 152536
• Location: AURORA, CO, US