Combat catharsis - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Combat catharsis

“The man on my right was killed and the man on my left was killed and I was alive in the middle of them,” said former Army Capt. Nate Self, describing his mission to help rescue a Navy SEAL in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan in 2002.

Leading a team of Rangers, his helicopter had been shot down. He describes fighting back the ambush from the mangled body of the twin-rotor Chinook, the brutal Taliban counterattack and the on-again, off-again airlift out of the battle.

“We had been fighting for over 12 hours. We had to wait for the sun to go down — it got very cold, the wind picked up,” he said, releasing a deep breath as if trying to warm himself against the memory. “We were all wet with sweat and melted snow and blood, and some of us started to suffer from a little bit of altitude exposure and sickness.”

Five of his Rangers would die on what he described as the longest day in his Army career.

The memories would haunt him like wraiths. After his third combat deployment, Self resigned, eventually locking himself into a room with a loaded pistol, fighting the urge to take his own life.

For a long time, he had kept the stories of war locked away. Healing came when those doors were opened. First in small groups in his church and later in writing exercises, he began to tell his story, eventually penning an entire book. And it has been in the very act of telling his story, he said, that he has begun to find healing.

The power of story

“I did not want to write at all. I used to sit down at the computer or with a piece of paper and just get mad. I couldn’t do it,” Self said in an online oral history project dubbed “Not Alone.”

The Web site’s core is a collection of podcasts of veterans and their families telling their story, as well as forums for wider discussion, a collection of blogs and other resources.

Indeed, the site itself is not alone. It’s among a growing number of voices encouraging veterans to explore the events that have shaped and changed their lives forever.

Former Marine Capt. Tyler Boudreau wrote about the importance of troops exploring their story in his own Iraq war memoir entitled “Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine.”

“I’ve been thinking about healing in unconventional terms so I’m coming up with some unconventional ideas,” he said. “Narrative — for me — is my story with meaning.” Beyond just simple chronologies, Boudreau advocates “hard-core analysis to really discern why and how you think and feel the way you do. I recommend that to anybody. For me, the book is just chapter one of that narrative. It was true when I wrote it, but there’s always going to be new truths because you’re constantly evolving.”

Sometimes that can take you to some uncomfortable places, but it’s infinitely worthwhile, he said. “It’s gray, it’s complex, it’s ambiguous, and sometimes that ambiguity is irreconcilable.”

Soul wounds

Dr. Edward Tick agrees.

“We need to tell stories,” said Tick, a therapist and author of “War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans From PTSD.”

The stories that need to be told the most, he said, are ones that are the hardest to tell. “Any painful life event that we suppress or repress so that it travels inward and we keep it secret becomes a cancer, a spiritual cancer that eats away at us from the inside.”

Breaking with traditional treatment that assigns a mental disorder to anyone who wrestles with the horrors of war, Tick argued that PTSD and depression are among the natural symptoms of an untreated “soul wound.”

“We discourage disturbing stories or their pain from emerging,” said Tick, echoing many veterans’ frustration at being led away from sharing their stories by military and VA counselors. “To control the symptoms, we offer medications, teach the sufferer relaxation and stress-reduction techniques, lecture and coach the survivor on war neurosis and proper behavior in public.”

Instead, through retreats around the country, Tick guides veterans through a process he’s modeled after the ancient warrior traditions of Native Americans that includes a ritual welcoming of returning warriors and “talking circles,” where each veteran is able to tell his story.

During one recent retreat in the Seattle area, 30 veterans, family members and care providers gathered for four days that all said left them profoundly affected. One Vietnam veteran, who had served in Special Forces through horrific fighting, broke down in tears — for the first time since returning 40 years ago. “I don’t know why, but I had been unable to grieve what I had seen — and done — until now,” he said. Initially skeptical, he said it was hearing others tell their stories that freed him to experience his own.

Pastor or plumber

The healing power of storytelling doesn’t have to happen in retreats or by writing books, said Dr. Dan Allender, author of several books on trauma recovery and the founder of Mars Hill Graduate School, a seminary that specializes in training counselors.

“The last thing the military needs to do is hire a bunch of therapists,” said Allender, who’s treated a slew of vets and other witnesses of violence. Instead, he encourages vets to find someone to help them probe their narrative.

“It could be a therapist or a pastor or a plumber or member of Alcoholics Anonymous — someone who is not so much a leader as someone who has exchanged a story in their own life.”

Ideally, Allender said, a grass-roots movement styled after AA would take hold within the ranks.

“If you don’t go into your trauma, your trauma goes deeper into you. The cure won’t kill you, but I guarantee the disease will,” he said, noting that more Vietnam vets have now died from suicide than in fighting during the war.

For many, that kind of narrative exploration is happening in real time while they’re deployed. While letter writing and journaling remain good outlets, blogging now offers both unparalleled interaction and an opportunity to probe the epic that is unfolding before them.

For former Army signal officer Lee Kelley, writing his blog “Wordsmith at War” during his deployment to Iraq was a daily act of catharsis.

“Writing about my thoughts and experiences was so therapeutic,” said Kelley, now a professional writer in southern Utah. “The act of it, getting it out, was the key. For me, when I write, I learn things quicker, I remember things better and I feel better. It’s a form of release just getting it down. Even if I burn it later, the process itself is healing.”

Former Air Force logistician Doug Traversa agrees. “My initial goal was to relay news,” said Traversa of his widely popular blog “Afghanistan Without a Clue.”

“But as it went along it became a way to vent, a way to get things off my chest.

“When you write, you have to think through what you’ve been through again in greater detail. You have to really analyze your feelings, going over it again carefully in your mind and decide what is worthy of sharing and what tone you want to set,” said Traversa, who retired in January and is now the pastor of a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee.

Going deep

Eventually, the words did come for Ranger commander Nate Self. “The more I wrote, the more I understood that it was a safe place for me. I didn’t have to show it to anyone if I didn’t want to.”

But soon, he did want to. His writing became a way to communicate to his wife and family what happened and to give context to his pain.

“It allowed me to have control over the experiences themselves. It was no longer permeating everything about me, it was no longer running rampant throughout my life and dominating me. It was more, ‘Well, here’s where it began, here’s where it ended, here’s the top and bottom of it, here’s the front and back. Now it’s in its place.’ I went as deep as I could, and it allowed me to try and make sense of what happened.”

Related reading

• Getting it down

• The things they wrote