THE STREETS WEREN’T VERY CROWDED. It was late fall, getting on to winter in DC. I was on my way home from a graduate writing workshop. Things had gone well in the class. The week before, I had circulated among my classmates and the instructor a snippet of what would become this book, and that night I had received mostly positive feedback with a few really insightful comments on how to improve the piece.
I was nearly finished with a dual concentration degree program—studying fiction and non-fiction writing. I had reached that point in any program where you can begin to see the end and wonder what comes next.
As I was navigating through Northwest DC, dodging taxis, pedestrians, and ninety-pound, Pilates-sculpted housewives from Potomac driving 4,000-pound SUVs, I wondered what I would do with my new education. I was using VA benefits—for the record, that part of my experience with the VA was pretty painless—and I have to admit I felt a little guilty about getting to go to school mostly for free on the taxpayers’ dime. I felt like I needed to be able to demonstrate the value of the investment the taxpayers had made in me.
At about the same time, a story came out in The Baltimore Sun that went viral among the veterans’ community. A young Iraq infantry veteran had been tossed out of a local community college because of an essay in which he wrote that war, particularly killing in a war, was a drug and that he was addicted to it. Charles Whittington had been encouraged to write about his experience by his English composition instructor. He turned in his essay, received an A, and it eventually wound up in the campus newspaper.
What Whittington wrote, especially in a post-Virginia Tech (and pre-Newtown) massacre world, scared the hell out of people. Students, faculty, administrators and staff apparently worried that there was some psycho vet addicted to killing running loose on campus. The administration demanded that Whittington undergo a psychological screening and barred him from campus until the results were in.
In my view, the college administration had failed the young veteran. But I also thought that the community of veterans and, more broadly, the community he lived in had failed him as well. I had just a few weeks earlier been given a copy of Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam. Shay is a psychiatrist, now retired from the VA hospital in Boston where he treated patients, many of whom were Vietnam veterans, for over thirty years. In his book, Shay compares the actions of Achilles and others in Homer’s Iliad to the situation of many of the veterans he has treated. He also writes about how the Greeks revered their returning warriors, in contrast to how America treated (and treats) its returning veterans.
I guess I had just read the part about how Greek warriors were required to speak in public in order to communalize their combat experience among the citizens who had sent them to war. Shay wrote:
Any blow in life will have longer-lasting and more serious consequences if there is no opportunity to communalize it. This means some form of social ceremony and informal telling of the story with feeling to socially-connected others who do not let the survivor go through it alone.
By the time I got home from class, I had the germ of an idea. I would try to give other veterans the skills and confidence they needed to tell their own stories as a way of communalizing their experience among the 99% of Americans who had sat out the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the process, I would pay back the taxpayers by giving away (thus communalizing) what I had learned in school on their dime. I spent some time over the holidays thinking about it, talked to a bunch of people, and in early 2011, I created the Veterans Writing Project.
I knew after reading about Charles Whittington’s experience in college that I wanted to work with student veterans returning from the wars. So I wrote a letter to each of the five big universities in Washington, DC—Georgetown, George Washington, American, Catholic, and Howard—in which I told them that they had a problem that they were likely unprepared to deal with, and how I could be of help to them. In retrospect, this was both foolish and a bit audacious. No one likes to be told they are doing their job poorly, especially by someone who has pretty much zero experience in the field. Not surprisingly, none of the universities bothered responding.
But a couple of months after I had written the letters, I received an email from the Veterans’ Services Office at George Washington University inviting me to a meeting. I met with the university’s veterans’ service staff, and bluffed my way into their agreeing to sponsor the VWP for one set of seminars on campus that summer. We called them the “Open Seminars” as they were open to any veteran, any service member, or any military or veteran’s family member.
Classes were to begin in four weeks. I had bupkis: no curriculum, no syllabus, no students. I decided the most important step at that point was to develop some sort of a curriculum; the rest would logically follow, I presumed. I convinced the director of my graduate program to give me a semester’s credit through an individual study program to create a curriculum for the seminars. I asked several of my instructors to help, and one was actually assigned to oversee the project.
I had a rough outline completed by the time the first seminar rolled around. The university and I jointly had corralled eight participants. For the next thirteen weeks I furiously wrote chapters in the curriculum: sending them by email up to my advisor, then presenting each chapter, as it was completed, to the participants—whose numbers waxed and waned throughout the summer—then editing and excising as sections succeeded or failed. By the end of the semester, I had a tested curriculum. I called it Writing War: A Guide to Telling Your Own Story.
I began recruiting others to help me. I made a specific decision that all of our instructors would meet three strict criteria: working writer, graduate of an MA or MFA program, combat veteran. I quickly found two other veterans who met these requirements: an Air National Guard Chief Master Sergeant, and a former Marine corporal. I recruited a Board of Directors that included a Vietnam veteran with thirty years of Washington DC political journalism and a couple of books behind him; a former president of the Society of American Military Psychiatrists, who was a veteran with seven or eight published books as well; an accountant who was also a Vietnam vet; a couple of political communications professionals who were military family members; and a Naval Academy graduate who had served under Admiral Zumwalt in Vietnam, and had helped raise the funds for the Navy Memorial in Washington.
In September, I entered the thesis phase of grad school. I turned in 150 pages of writing, about half of which were comprised of non-fiction essays that have since become chapters in this book; the other half was fiction, the opening of a novel that takes place in 1916 in The Sudan. I also had meetings with administrators from George Washington University. The university was making a significant investment in student veterans and was interested in continuing our relationship, even assigning sponsorship of the seminars to the director of the University Writing Program instead of the Veterans Services Office. The writing program director agreed to sponsor a set of seminars each semester and to work towards the creation of a permanent home for the VWP as part of a Center for Writing and the Military at GWU.
Our model evolved a bit. I wrote the curriculum so that it could be taught over a fourteen-week college semester and allow the participants to workshop their writing among their classmates—like many other writing programs. But it would also be possible to teach the seminars over a weekend, albeit without the workshopping. That’s the model we began to use at GWU and it became our standard. In time, we were running seminars outside the DC area in North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Kentucky.
Just about the time that the first semester test program was finishing up, I received an email from a senior official at the National Endowment for the Arts, who wrote that he had heard about the program I had developed at GWU and was interested to know if I would help them develop a program for working with wounded service members at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
I went to the NEA and discussed the project with some of their leaders. I agreed to help create a curriculum for the program called Operation Homecoming, which would take place in a newly created facility on the campus of Walter Reed called the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE). It is DoD’s premier research and treatment facility for PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. The instructors for Operation Homecoming would all come from the VWP.
In developing the NEA curriculum I did some in-depth research on therapeutic writing. The guru of this work is Dr. James Pennebaker, a researcher from the University of Texas. Pennebaker met with us as I was developing the curriculum and clarified for us some of his research. He also gave us some course corrections. I spoke with Dr. Jonathan Shay (Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America), a MacArthur grant recipient, to help choose scenes from The Iliad to use as prompts in the class. I also spoke to Dr. Robert Spolsky from Stanford, another MacArthur grant recipient, to hone the language we used in our script.
Since none of our instructors was a clinician, we worked alongside therapists who were in place to take over if any of the service members needed an intervention. At first it was a challenge working with others dealing with PTSD. So many of the (almost entirely) men who came through the program were survivors of much worse than anything I had ever gone through. But I could see that many of them had the same symptoms that I was (and still am) trying to control. For me, that one afternoon a week teaching at NICoE became the best day of the week.
Most teachers I know will tell you that they learn from their students as much as the students learn from them. If there was one thing I learned in the NICoE classes it was that the idea of a moral injury is real. Brett Litz, a psychologist working at the VA hospital in Boston, defines a moral injury as one that stems from “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”
Much of Shay’s work circles back to this idea as well, that things happen in war that are so antithetical to our core beliefs that survivors cannot reconcile actions seen, committed, or left undone with the person they had been and the beliefs they had held before the war.
I wrote about moral injury for TIME Magazine in September, 2011:
…it might help to think of morality in wartime as operating within both the laws of war and the rules of honor, integrity, and morality that are ingrained in each of us as a member of society and within our specific culture. If a soldier were to commit an atrocity, that would break both the legal and the moral or spiritual rules. International tribunals and courts-martial help to sort out the former, but what about the latter? And what about actions that don’t rise to the level of atrocities? Actions an individual soldier commits, or in some cases actions a soldier might not take, seem to be at the core of this phenomenon. Some of us have been taught that killing is never acceptable. Much of this type of thought springs from a theological fount, and many have sought status as a conscientious objector to avoid direct combat roles during wartime. But others, including those who might not share a strict interpretation of the sixth commandment, might feel an extreme sense of guilt at having killed in wartime. This is where we start to get into the realm of moral injury.
I’ve felt for years that my PTSD is as much, if not more, based on things left undone—lives I feel I might have saved—as anything I had seen or done. Because of my work at Walter Reed working with and speaking to so many other veterans suffering from PTSD, I’m convinced of the existence of moral injuries and our need for a better understanding and treatment of them. Our work in the VWP focuses on two outcomes. The first is to give veterans (and, of course, their family members) the tools to make sense of what has happened to them. Consider this quote from WWI British nurse and poet Vera Brittain in her book Testament of Youth:
Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.
Writing helps us make sense of what has happened to us. It gives us the skill to shape our stories. But what do we do with them then?
Our second goal is to help our participants bear witness. Consider this: from a Memorial Day speech given by Oliver Wendell Holmes:
The generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, we have seen with our own eyes, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.
We stress to our participants that, by selecting writing as a medium, they have chosen to write their story, or at least a story. And by doing so, they are bearing witness. Even if the only objective is to put the story away in a closet for the grandkids to read at some later date, it is bearing witness. Putting the story out into the public eye through publication is a way of further bearing witness, and this act alone adds the author to a long line of writers who have written about personal and societal trauma in war.
Bearing witness is an important way by which veterans can not only remain connected to service and other veterans, but can also continue to reach an audience and possibly develop new circles of friends. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, is a significant issue for returning veterans. Imagine serving in combat with a small group of men and women, and then watching that group dissolve on return to the U.S. The absence of proximity to comrades, the lack of a sense of mission, and the diminished level of adrenaline-producing activity can all be partially addressed by bearing witness.
Encouraging veterans to bear witness by publicly telling their stories gives them a mission. It can reinforce the idea that they remain a part of the war. It might give them a voice in exposing the shortcomings or folly of a certain policy. Or, in a post-war environment, it may offer them a chance to memorialize the effort, to provide clarity and understanding. Warriors are patriots. Leaving service, whether by choice or because of wounds or injuries, is traumatic in itself. Staying engaged or re-engaging can help to assuage feelings of guilt or abandonment.
This is difficult work. It challenges the participant to confront painful and disturbing memories. It is sometimes traumatic in itself to open these memories up and re-live them. But it is important to do so. Consider these few lines from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Remorse”:
Remembering how he saw those Germans run,
Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees:
Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was one
Livid with terror, clutching at his knees…
Our chaps were sticking ‘em like pigs… “Oh hell!”
He thought—“there’s things in war one dare not tell
Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads
Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds.”
Sassoon is clearly addressing the divide between the soldier in the field and those sitting safely at home. But he is also getting at something more, the idea of moral injury. The things that poor father sitting safe at home most needs to know are the things that keep the warrior up at night in remorse and guilt, fear and unforgetting. These are the things that non-combatants most need to understand through our bearing witness, and that warriors need to forgive themselves for by understanding them. These actions and the horrific memories, remorse and anxiety that follow, are part of the human cost of war.