Ossining Students Learn about Vets’ Struggles through Writing

Before meeting David Giangrande, a Fleet Marine Force Corpsman who served in Iraq, Ossining High School freshman Leslie Zhina was grateful for her family, her home and other positives in her life.

But learning about the veteran’s near-death experience when an old potato chip factory he and fellow Marines were staying in was bombed made her think more deeply about gratefulness.

“What inspired me about my veteran is that he was grateful for the little things,” she said, referring to how excited he was when his MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) came with a bag of M&M’s. “When I get M&M’s, I take them for granted. When he talked about them, he spoke about them as if they were a foreign object that he had never seen.”

Leslie was one of 24 OHS students who worked with four veterans who are part of the Veterans Writing Workshop. The workshop helps veterans and active-duty members of the military tell their stories by providing free professional-level workshops. The group also works with families of veterans.

The OHS students read the stories that the three men and one woman had written about an experience in the military. The teens then developed questions for veterans, met with them, and created their own stories based on the interaction. Some wrote fictional pieces, some wrote stories about their own experiences and others crafted poetry. They presented their finished works to veterans May 22.

“Each student was able to show their own voice and experience through their writing,” said OHS English teacher Katie Helly, who collaborated on the unit with social studies teacher Gregg Ninos and art teachers Harry Quiroga and Ron Whitehead.

In addition to Mr. Giangrande, the veterans who participated in the OHS project were Jeremy Warneke, who served in the U.S. Army National Guard in Iraq; Rod Carlson, a former U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam; and Sharon Bailey, a retired Army combat medic and Air Force flight medic.

In Mr. Giangrande’s story, he never got to eat the rare treat because a rocket hit the factory wall he was leaning on just as he was pouring some of the chocolates into his hand.

“Back then not only did we walk through hellfire and brimstone, we bedded down in it,” he wrote in one of his stories for the workshop.

Ms. Bailey talked to students about her story of being faced with an Olympic-size swimming pool during her training and not knowing how to swim. She had to jump in for one of the exercises and flailed around until she was pulled out. “I loved water. I just never learned how to swim,” she wrote.

Students who worked with her wrote about frightening experiences they faced. Eleventh-grader Laisha Brito chronicled how she broke through her fear of public speaking at the Puerto Rican/Hispanic Youth Leadership Institute earlier this year in Albany. Others in the group wrote about tackling a high-ropes course at camp and finally learning to ride a bike as a teenager.

After the students read their pieces to Ms. Bailey, said the students and their work are amazing. “The things that they got from my story are probably more powerful than what I wrote,” she said.

Mr. Giangrande said the writing of students who worked with him was “phenomenal.

“I’m absolutely moved. There’s certainly a lot of hope for the future because there are a lot of bright young minds here,” he said.