Types of Stories We Tell

Style of stories.

Bullets and Bandaids is looking for veteran-centric, poignant stories about what it is to be human.

It’s like handing a storyteller carte blanche to express their own developed voice.

Here’s an in-depth breakdown of exactly what we mean.

Given that we are a product of nature, and that nature is inherently reliant upon the competition (survival of the fittest/most adaptable) as well as dumb luck (natural selection), our goal is to shine a light on the different aspects of what it is to be human amidst this. Imagine that we, as a species, have created ecosystems of social and industrial origin that are consistently overlapping (think Venn Diagram with an opaque center). Banking industries, sewing circles in small towns, salmon farmers, families, poker, etc., all of these are ecosystems created by us, where we apply game theory to what we recognize as important. 

“Sure, I could be an intellectual giant, but my ____ will never love me.” The intellectual aspect might make that person massively important, where their stories and opinions could mean life or death to others. They would be winning that game (because they choose, consciously or not, to play it). 

“Sure, I could be an intellectual giant.” 

But they might (and often do) place more value upon those things at which they do not excel. 

“But my _____ will never love me.”

Both of those quoted statements have infinite story potential. They triumph or fail. They resign or die.

Because everyone, kicking and screaming, has necessarily become an interactive cog in these different social mechanisms, they bring perspectives that are entirely theirs, based on their past experiences with said shared social mechanisms. There are stories that can be created at any second, based off of anything in that person’s life

And what’s more, the story doesn’t even need to be told from their perspective, so long as they retain the spirit of the story. Some potential protagonist/focuses could be as follows:

-A _relative/friend/neighbor/cowrker_  who was _(verb)_ed by _(military personnel), because they thought _(idea)_, only to find out _(reinforcement or undermining of idea)_.

-A button a captain wore when they were crossing the ocean to save/take lives. 

-The breeze that glanced off the face of someone guarding prisoners in _______.

-A flea that’s hesitant to jump onto a service animal.

-The memory that blends that unexpectedly shows itself or fades away in regard to _service member/past experience.

-The stream that a veteran can’t stop staring at because he’s in shock from a roadside bomb.

We are here to bring back the childlike wonder we had before our adolescence. The way to get everyone engaged is to use the hyperbolic, personal nature of veterans’ experiences to show the inherent value potentially lying in wait with everyone and everything. Through the is interconnectedness, there can be found both support and responsibility, which brings about a more developed social cohesion that could potentially encompass all the ecosystems humankind has built. We only ask that our mission isn’t undermined by straying from our focus to incorporate the filter of veteran experiences, while maintaining both dignity and poignance.