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Spotlight: Seth Kastle

by Joseph Stanfill

When news of Why Is Dad So Mad? by Seth Kastle first broke on social media and NBC news I was immediately enamored by the premise. A father of two little girls who is also a combat veteran had written a children’s book. This is no ordinary children’s book, mind you, this is a book which attempts to explain Seth’s post-traumatic stress disorder to his daughters. I turned to my wife after watching the news report on Seth and said, “This is what we need.” In researching the topic of PTSD for the past five years, I had not come across such a basic yet intriguing concept. How could one possibly take something so complex and heartfelt and translate it for an innocent child? How could a combat veteran, a former drill sergeant, and a company first sergeant put things into perspective for children? Dr. Seuss had explained numerous ideas to children through his stories, and Mr. Rodgers educated three generations of Americans on kindness, courtesy, and respect via his television show. Never has an author taken on the task of expressing such an intricate issue as PTSD to children. Until now.

The book expresses the often hard to grasp ins and outs of PTSD, yet delivers it in a way that children can understand. My copy came in the mail just two days after watching the NBC feature. My wife and I read through it, and read it to my three year old son that same night before bed. He had that look of understanding on his face that kids get when they see something clearly for the first time. I knew he didn’t have a full grasp of what was going on with me, but by reading the book with him started a very difficult dialogue to have with a child. Thanks to the book, that dialogue became easier to start

When asked about his inspiration for the book Seth doesn’t mince words.

“Well, personally it’s something that I’m not proud of. It’s the thing I hate about most about myself. So I wanted to be able to explain this to my kids. So there’s this cathartic process of getting this out there and paying things forward. You’ve talked about some of the darker days that you had, you know you had help from people, and I did also. I wish I could say that I’m a self-made man and I did this on my own, but that would be a complete lie. There’s a lot that goes along with this. If I could help others have these conversations, that’s what I would like. Maybe that’s a driving factor. Things like initiating social change is obviously an issue. If you look at the way this book has taken off, I think it speaks to the tremendous need out there. There are so many people, so many families that are impacted by PTSD. Having the ability to make that impact, hopefully helping families have these conversations and helping people understand, is a pretty big driving force for me also. My process for this was, I had had a really bad day at work, and this had been in my head a long time. I came home and sat down at my kitchen table and I wrote this in about twenty minutes. It sat there for a long time. I have a good friend who lit a fire under me to make this happen.”

Writing can be therapeutic for anyone who has suffered a trauma. While not directly dealing with Seth’s diagnosis, the writing and success has been therapeutic for him.

“If anything, I would say the therapeutic part has been the feedback I’ve received from people. It’s been extremely humbling. People are saying things like, ‘This has helped me reconnect with my kids, or ‘It’s made such a difference in my life.’ That piece has been more therapeutic than anything.”

After separating from the military, many veterans still have the drive to serve others in some capacity. As Seth says:

“I know it isn’t going to last forever. I’m trying to do as much as I can right now with the spotlight I seem to have. I was gifted 1,000 copies of the book from Amazon, and I am going to try to send them directly to the OIF/OEF counselors at every major metropolitan VA hospital. This book is geared toward our generation.”

Seth is planning a follow-up book for female veterans. When asked about the inspiration for that project he said:

“Well, I suppose it’s because my wife is a combat veteran also. She has her baggage too. When I had the idea for the first one, I knew I could do a second, that there would be a large need for it. She’s going to coauthor the book with me, and it took a long time to get her to do that. You’ve got to think about how much you are putting yourself out there when you are doing something like this. That was tough. Without question the hardest part of all of this, it’s just like, man I’m putting all of this out there you know. –Seth has PTSD, I mean – that’s hard. My wife isn’t as comfortable with stuff like that, and I finally got her to come around. I related to her that this would mean more to women if it came from a woman. Looking back on my research, there are books out there, but everything is geared toward men. So I realized we have had a decade of war that has been fought in an asymmetrical fashion…There are these blurred lines of women in combat, and there is nothing out there for them.”

Is there any message you want to send to our readers?

“Yeah, I would encourage people to go get help. My health is better because I swallowed my pride and got help. I don’t know where I would be today if I didn’t. Taking the steps to keep my family together was the best decision I ever made. If this is something you might need, get help. I would also encourage veterans to do their homework on burn pit exposure, chemical weapons exposure, and mefloquine toxicity. These are all huge things that are going to have adverse effects on our generation of veterans.”

Not everyone who puts their story down on paper will be able to publish a book. Not everyone who relates their feelings through prose will gain an audience or impact people the way that Seth’s book has done and will continue to do. What you could gain from beginning to express yourself through writing or art is a better understanding of you, and you just might offer a glimpse of the military experience to those who haven’t lived it. That is the beginnings of changing the narrative, and engaging in personal growth from trauma.

Why Is Dad So Mad? can be ordered through Amazon.

As You Were, Vol. 2 Release

MEA is proud to present you with As You Were: The Military Review, Vol. 2. This publication is the culmination of hundreds of hours of work on the part of writers, artists, and our volunteer editors. Its poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and artwork represent nearly every living generation of veterans and individuals whose lives have been impacted by the military. “We hope you’re intrigued, touched, and even moved. Above all, we hope you enjoy.”

Help support our mission by disseminating this wonderful collection of veterans’ works!

The Kill Switch

Somehow it’s a dirty little secret that the entire purpose of war is to kill human beings. That vastly important fact is becoming more well-known thanks to the work of authors and journalists like Phil Zabriskie, a former foreign correspondent for Time who has also written for National Geographic, The Washington Post Magazine, and other notable outlets. He’s more than a war correspondent, though. He’s made a study of the subject of combat. He fine tuned that study with an in-depth exploration on killing in war in his latest book, a Kindle Single called The Kill Switch.

Zabriskie delves into the phenomenon of killing with considerable skill. He expands our understanding of the concept into the societal and institutional context and contracts it into the personal. It’s perhaps the latter that gives the book its stark, chilling nature. The author chronicles the lives of several participants of the Iraq and Afghan Wars to illustrate the powerful psychological forces at work in the act of killing and the impact of the moral injury that killing causes. His coverage of these men over roughly a decade paints a clear picture of the entire process of learning to kill, applying those lessons, and attempting to find peace with that act. For instance, we learn about a Marine, Ben Nelson, who struggles with the times he killed and the times he didn’t. We learn of a Marine officer who bears the emotional burden of ordering men to kill as well as taking lives himself, and how the strict enforcement of the rules of engagement protected civilian lives as well as the combatants’ humanity. We see them in war. Then we see them in their living rooms. We see their pain with a clarity that speaks highly of Zabriskie’s expertise in recording the grim truth of war.

To his credit, Zabriskie lets the subject and those who lived it speak for themselves. But he’s packaged those voices in a concise and fast-flowing narrative, one that is buttressed by interviews with psychologists and research into relevant scholarship. It’s an engaging, educating read.

Although the book is short, it is long on authenticity and insight. Zabriskie has created a work that offers real-world examples of some of the ideas first explored by Dave Grossman. He has made a clear argument for the fact that killing is one of the most traumatic experiences of combat, and it is the very essence of war. How we treat that haunting truth – that we collectively flip a kill switch when we go to war – is up to us as a society, but Phil Zabriskie has done a remarkable job of defining it for his readers.

(Review contributed by David P. Ervin)

Down the Rabbit Hole

by David P. Ervin

I asked a buddy how he was doing the other day. I keep in touch pretty regularly with “Doc,” a combat medic who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. We live in the same town, but I hadn’t heard from in a while. He replied with a phrase that’s emerged in the lexicon of American combat veterans of the War on Terror; two words that act as a euphemism for a chilling component of life after war.

“Rabbit hole.”

Of course, we’re not talking about having tea with the Mad Hatter here. We’re talking about a flashback.

I knew what he was experiencing. Your palms sweat. Breaths come deeply and rhythmically as your body maximizes oxygen intake. Your heart thumps within a tightened chest as it pushes blood to every limb. Eyes dart and hair stands up. It’s not a hallucination in which you believe that you’re in another place and another time. Rather, you feel like it. Something (sometimes nothing) has elicited a very physical and emotional memory, a frighteningly intense mental space that we first discovered in combat. As Brian Mockenhaupt aptly wrote, they are the “darkened areas that for many remain unexplored. And once these darkened spaces are lit, they become a part of us.” Often, our time back in those places passes quickly. Sometimes, it does not. And, other times, we give in to the immense gravity those memories exert and venture further down the rabbit hole.

So I wasn’t surprised when Doc began sending me links to videos from the wars. On occasion some of us indulge ourselves in the imagery and sounds of combat. We scratch that itch in a way that’s masochistic, nostalgic, and indicative of the bizarre allure of adrenaline. Modern technology has created an internet that is awash with footage of combat. We can take our pick between an Apache strike, a machine gun’s hammering rattle, or a stream of tracers racing across those all-too-familiar cityscapes. Anyone can. Many do. We wouldn’t be the first generation to revisit these things. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussel told us about World War One veterans of Great Britain purchasing phonograph records of the sounds of artillery bombardments on the Western Front.

And, of course, as veterans we’re not really so unique in this regard, either.

There is a reason these images are at our fingertips. If America is honest with itself, we are all fascinated with war and violence on some level. It permeates our culture whether we served in war or not. Those who haven’t experienced it can be drawn to it by curiosity, and the less those who truly understand talk about it – the more it’s a dirty little secret – the greater the pull of this curiosity. David Grossman has taken it a step further in pointing out that the prevalence of fictionalized violence in video games, television, and film is widespread, so much so that it has warped our society’s fundamental understanding and beliefs about violence. Indeed, he went as far to say that the more dishonest we are about the true nature of violence, the more we associate it with positive feelings and thus perpetuate it. For most, those spectacles are just that – exciting images and sounds.

Of course, combat veterans know better. We know what a grotesque reality it is to kill and be killed. It’s the harshest reality we’ve had to face. So why would those of us ‘in the know’ seek to face this reality again by seeking out this imagery? Are we subjecting ourselves to some kind of punishment? Not really.

Down there in the rabbit hole, we fumble around in the dark for reasons why we’re there. We look in every corner of our current reality to make sense of the emotions. But for the myriad of possibilities, there is one single reason why they really occur – it’s a memory. Immersing ourselves in the images and sounds of war allow us to establish a concrete, logical connection between the way we feel now and the way we felt then. It’s a reminder that we are not insane. Our bodies and minds just hold distinct, vivid memories, and those memories have powerful emotional content. We can make sense of it, and that understanding is somewhat of a comfort even if the mechanisms we use to comprehend it make us feel strange.

Were Americans frank about their fascination with war and thorough in its desire to understand, we wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable about remembering. But we live in a conflicted society, one that alternates between peacemongering during war and warmongering in peace. Perhaps if the imagery of war and violence were packed with the horrible punch that we feel that fascination would dissipate. At the least, it would be understood for what it is.

So we write and attempt to tell stories to explain, to give a gateway into the emotional context that surrounds the phenomenon of war. We do so in the hopes that everyone can understand that it’s not really something we miss as much as it is something we can’t forget.

And we try to let others know that when they go chasing rabbits down those holes, they’re not alone.