To help veterans confront war: pen and paper

Writing about war memories is tough, but it's also therapeutic.

By Sue Diaz

from the November 9, 2007 edition

Page 1 of 2

San Diego - "Take another minute or two to bring your writing to a stopping point," I tell the six veterans sitting with me around a fold-out table at the San Diego Vet Center.

Their pens, moving more quickly now, make a soft rustling sound across the pages of their spiral notebooks. Looking up from mine, I wonder if that rustle in any way resembles sounds they might have heard or listened for on moonlit patrols decades ago along the Mekong Delta. A light wind through river reeds. A snake in a tree. The muffled footfall of Vietcong.

It's not something I'd know from direct experience. During the Vietnam era, I was a bell-bottomed college coed, a high school English teacher not long after that, and, for the past 20 years, a freelance journalist. In the last five, I've written about the war in Iraq and my son's two tours of duty as an infantryman in the area south of Baghdad known as the Triangle of Death.

During the 27 months Roman was deployed, I came to see what a helpful thing writing can be when trying to come to grips with a subject as difficult as war. And that realization has led me to lead writing workshops at this Center on Sixth Avenue every Wednesday.

I'd expected that veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan would be the ones to sign up. As it turns out, this first group mostly remembers Vietnam.

The heart of each workshop session involves writing together. I offer a prompt – a word, a phrase, an object – to get pens moving. We all write for 20 minutes, then take turns reading aloud what we've written. That part's always optional, but most make that choice. It's a chance not only to be listened to, but in some instances to at long last be heard.

Psychologists who work with men and women returning from war are well aware of the struggle most go through to come to terms with their time in combat. An essential part of that process, they say, lies in confronting the experience, difficult and complex as that might be.

At our first workshop meeting in early September, I offered the phrase "It was a place called_________" and asked each member of the group to fill in that blank, to write from that place. I wanted to get a sense of where they were willing to go. Most revisited some chapter from their youth or childhood. And that's OK, I thought. Life's full of all sorts of experiences worth writing about. That first afternoon only one from the group traveled on the page back to Southeast Asia. I took that to mean most might not want to go there.

Page 1 | 2 | Next Page