September | 2013 |

Giving and Taking – Part One of Three

Thank you to Serve the Warrior for sharing an article from their The Flying Guinea Pig blog. Serve the Warrior is a like-minded nonprofit whose mission is creating community spaces that help heal the invisible wounds of veterans.

Giving and Taking- Part One of Three

by Robert Tanner

Nearly ten years ago, I sat in the cargo bay of a C-130 as a USMC infantryman on my way to Kuwait. I was part of a contingent of Marines deployed to Fallujah, Iraq to help restore order and bring peace to the people of the region. Seven grueling, heart-wrenching months later, I left Fallujah knowing that I had done my job to the best of my ability, but at a cost. Too many good friends had passed during our time and the mental toll this had taken on us all was enormous.

When we got back to the United States, I tried not to think much of what happened in Iraq. I fought internally to keep the bad memories out of mind. My line of thought was out of sight, out of mind. So, I avoided discussions and situations that would make me relive my experiences. I may have had an easier time blocking out those memories because what I experienced wasn’t nearly as bad as what some other guys did. I think that is the main reason I have avoided some of the horrible PTSD symptoms that a lot of us have dealt with.

A few years have passed since that deployment. I went to school, graduated, got a good job, married a wonderful woman, and was able to be there for the birth of my two sons. However, even though I was home, I was still fighting an internal war. So many good things had happened to me, but I was wracked with overwhelming guilt: why did I get to have all this when eight of my brothers would never have the same opportunity? The incessant guilt still nags at me today.

To overcome it, I tried various treatments. I went the traditional route with a doctor, but eventually quit when I didn’t see much progress. I tried taking medication, but pills just aren’t my thing. The first suggestion for an alternative way to relieve the pain actually came from the doctor. He told me to write my memories down. I thought he was full of it, but one day, when the guilt was smothering me, I decided to try it. From that point on, I was hooked. I wrote for hours and hours until each memory was out of my head and on a piece of paper. It took many years for me to write it all down, but once I did, I felt a bit of weight fall from my shoulders. I’ve actually turned those memories into a book called Memoirs of an Outlaw: Life in the Sandbox.

After feeling that sense of relief, I started to wonder if there were other things out there that would offer something similar. Researching alternative therapies, I stumbled across the Serve the Warrior Twitter account. This brought me to their website, where I must have spent an hour reading ‘The Flying Guinea Pig’ blog posts. It dawned on me that this was what I had been searching for, so I sent a quick tweet and was immediately contacted by the founder, Julia Decker. Julia’s enthusiasm for the mission of Serve The Warrior gave me the confidence I needed to sign up for an alternative therapy session.

The problem was, what would I try? I had never done anything like this before and didn’t know where to start. I turned to my wife, Melissa, who is a yoga instructor in our hometown Toms River, New Jersey. With her encouragement, I looked into several of the studios in our area before settling on a place that seemed suited to my experience and needs.

After some deliberation, I decided to try a meditation class. I didn’t think I was flexible enough for yoga, and in my mind, meditation seemed pretty straightforward. I’d go in, sit down, cross my legs, and begin chanting with the rest of the folks. I had seen it done that way numerous times on television and in movies, so obviously that was how it was going to go down, right? Boy, was I wrong.

Click here to read part two of three.

Learn more at www.servethewarrior.org

MEA Partners With Serve the Warrior

Military Experience and the Arts has forged an information-sharing partnership with the likeminded organization “Serve the Warrior,” a national all-volunteer run nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles.

Learn more about Serve the Warrior at www.servethewarrior.org

Serve the Warrior’s mission is “to create community spaces that support healing and provide therapeutic tools to defend against the invisible wounds that American Veterans bring home from war.”

Their focus isn’t just on wounds. They deal primarily with “healing and wellness themed programming and events that encompasses both traditional and nontraditional healing modalities. STW programs are offered virtually, locally, and nationally including a nonpartisan, national, annual retreat that expands across the country with programming specifically catered to each community.” As an organization that prides itself on taking the healing power of the creative arts to the masses, we’ve heard from countless veterans about how thinking outside the box can often be the first step in the healing journey. Serve the Warrior seems to share that idea and we are happy to partner with them.

Starting next week, militaryexperience.org will run a three part series from Serve the Warrior’s blog, “The Flying Guinea Pig.”

The series, entitled “Giving and Taking” and authored by Robert Tanner, is a story of one Marine’s use of yoga to overcome the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress that followed him home from the Iraq War. Part One focuses upon the return home, part two upon the author’s introduction to meditation, and part three concludes the series with an objective evaluation of the experience.

Tanner is one of several”Guinea Pigs” who contributes to the blog regularly, seeking out unique forms of healing and reporting back on them. Serve the Warrior hopes that veterans curious about alternative approaches to healing will use the perspectives found in The Flying Guinea Pig to decide for themselves what to try and what not to try.

Stay tuned to our website for the first part of Tanner’s “Giving and Taking.” In the meantime, learn more about Serve the Warrior by clicking here.

Spotlight: Rod Merkley’s “Words on a Wall”

An excerpt from “Words on a Wall,” a work of fiction by Rod Merkley that will be featured in the The Blue Falcon Review this November:

***

Dust, sweat, and blood are the three things I remember from that day. I squint through the grimy burn of sweat and dust in my eyes. I taste the saltiness of my sweat on my lips. I feel the stickiness of my soldiers’ blood as it soaked through my fire resistant gloves asI tried to save their lives. I can taste their blood on my lips. I can smell their blood. Every time I see, taste, smell, or feel any of those three things, I return to the day I became a hero, the day I lost myself, the day I died.

When I return it’s like a crazy dream. I am in the back of my truck. I feel my body running to the side of my patient, Private First Class Sarah Behunnin. An explosion is coming, but I just keep working. Then everything goes black. I either awaken in the night or come out of my trance while teaching high school students. The last thing I told Behunnin was that she would be all right. I lied. Behunnin was beautiful in a pained way, tall and muscular like a college swimmer. I remember how she walked and talked as if she was going to break free someday. Then she was on the ground in front of me, screaming that she couldn’t feel her legs. Her body was destroyed by shrapnel and violence. That’s when I told her it would be okay. In an hour she was dead.

I’ve been told what happened next. My family talks about it. The army recorded it and asked me to read their record to verify that it was true. Everyone tells me how I became a hero, but I don’t remember it. They tell me that I covered Behunnin’s broken body after the second blast, that I returned fire when the enemy came at us, that I killed a 13-year–old “terrorist.” I’ve been told this many times but I don’t remember it. Sometimes I dream of the boy I killed but in my dreams his face seems too perfect. He looks like some innocent kid off of a National Geographic documentary, young and innocent and pure. In my dreams and my memories the boy I killed looked like one of students I taught back at the high school, not like an insurgent firing an AK-47 at me. Terrorists are supposed to be scary, violent men. They aren’t supposed to be like the kids I teach. I don’t think my memory of his face is real; I hope it’s not. But the memories are always with me. Sarah Behunnin. The boy I killed. Everything else about that day is a slur of blood, sweat, and dust.

I remember shielding Behunnin from the falling rubble after the second blast in Iraq. Then I woke up in Germany. I vaguely remember some officer in a pressed uniform smiling and pinning a Purple Heart and a Silver Star on my chest. My wife was there, too. I don’t remember seeing her; but I remember feeling her presence. They were reading the award citation that told my heroic story. To me it was series of disjointed sentences that mirrored the fragmented memories that make up how my war will always be remembered. “Risked his life to protect his patients.” “Returned fire while providing crucial care.” “Worked tirelessly for an hour until he collapsed from blood loss.” “Saved the lives of five Soldiers.” That citation is full of hollow praise. They talk about the five lives I supposedly saved but don’t mention the three that I didn’t. What I honestly know is that I’m not a hero. I’m a schoolteacher who was stupid enough to join the National Guard. I will pay for that mistake for the rest of my life. I live in small town Kansas and I’m the town hero. They never let me forget it, either. My father is the worst.

***

"Madness to Gladness," by Tif Holmes Among the many fine authors to be published in the inaugural volume of The Blue Falcon Review is Rod Merkley, an Army medic of ten years with service in both Iraq and Landstuhl, Germany. His story “Words on a Wall” will appear alongside more than a dozen other authors’ and deal with a medic grappling with the “hero” status assigned to him upon returning home from war.

When deciding which author to spotlight for the upcoming volume, Blue Falcon Review editor Daniel Buckman said Rod was an obvious choice: “Rod’s story best represents what we tried to accomplish in our workshop. He came to us with a basic idea, was open to revision, accepting of criticism, and grew as a writer.”

In a recent interview with MEA’s Katt Blackwell-Starnes, Rod discussed what led him to military fiction, the success that followed his participation in the 2012 Military Experience and the Arts Symposium, and how the online workshop led by Blue Falcon Review editors Daniel Buckman and Jerad Alexander helped him take his writing to the next level.

Rod, like many military authors, was initially drawn to writing because of its therapeutic benefits: “I’ve always written about the things I’m doing. I find it to be relaxing.”

When he attended the 2012 MEA Symposium, however, Rod got the chance to share his work with a wider audience. He was introduced the founder of the Veterans Writing Project, Ron Capps, a 25-year veteran responsible for groundbreaking work that facilitates writing workshops for veterans at Walter Reed.

At the symposium Capps lectured about these efforts and led two classes: “Your New Life as a Writer” and “More than Words: Making Dialogue Work.” Capps encouraged Rod to submit work to O-Dark-Thirty, the Veterans Writing Project’s literary publication. Eventually, these interactions led to the publication of “Walk Until You Sleep.”

Rod’s short story immediately attracted attention, and Time Magazine’s Jeff Stein claims it “makes a strong case that our latest generation of wounded warriors may yet produce another Hemingway.”

Rod didn’t stop writing after this initial success. He joined an online workshop conducted by the staff of The Blue Falcon Review, one Rod claims was “more thorough and collaborative” than past workshops he’d participated in. He knew he had a good grasp on creating “strong characters” going into it, “but not the backstory, not what motivates the character.” By working with experienced authors like Buckman and Alexander, Rod was able to hone these skills and get feedback on every stage of the writing process.

Clearly, Rod’s work and growth as a writer is an example of what we try to accomplish at Military Experience and the Arts. If you are a veteran with a story to tell and want help getting it onto paper, we can help. At the moment, our staff of close to three dozen educators, professional writers, and veterans’ advocates is working on the publication of nearly two-hundred original works of fiction, non-fiction, scholarship, art, and poetry by members of military communities throughout the world.

Rod’s advice to beginning writers is simple: “Start writing whether you think you’re good at it or not.”

Rod Merkley spent over ten years as a medic in the Army Reserves. During that time he was mobilized for two years to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and deployed once to Iraq. He is currently studying clinical psychology as a 2LT in the Army Health Professions Scholarship Program and plans on serving as a psychologist in the Army after graduation. He writes short fiction and non-fiction about both his experiences in the Army and the psychological impact of war on the young men and women who fight it.