Vets Shred Uniforms to Heal Themselves

August 06, 2009
Associated Press

SAVANNAH, Georgia - Tired of taking pills prescribed to suppress his pain, Zach Choate decided to wrestle head-on with the trauma that followed him home from Iraq. He began by using a razor to shred his Army uniform to bits.

"I'm hoping I come out of this a little more whole, a little bit more at peace," said Choate, who was a gunner in the 10th Mountain Division. "I'm not an anti-war, antimilitary person. This is just me fixing me."

He chopped his camouflage jacket into strips. He diced the American flag patch on its right shoulder, along with a prescription for sleeping pills he found in a pocket. Even the Purple Heart ribbon Choate earned after being wounded by a roadside bomb got torn into tiny threads.

The 25-year-old soldier from Cartersville joined a handful of Iraq veterans at a Savannah art studio last week to destroy uniforms that had become painful reminders of their combat experience, using them to create something new.

The young vets mixed the jigsaw pieces with water and beat them into pulp to make sheets of paper - blank canvasses on which they could write, paint or screen images to tell their personal war stories.

The Combat Paper Project, a Vermont-based collective of combat vets who became artists after leaving the military, has spent the past year holding coast-to-coast workshops aimed at teaching ex-service members to help themselves by recycling fatigues into artwork.

Drew Cameron, who became opposed to the Iraq war after serving in an Army artillery unit during the 2003 invasion, started the group after moving to Burlington, Vermont, where he learned paper making from a local artist while also becoming active with Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Cameron, 27, saw it as a way reach out to other Iraq veterans haunted by memories of friends slain in battle and men they had killed, wounded physically and psychologically by bomb and mortar explosions, and struggling to direct their own lives after years of being told what to do by the military.

"It's about taking the things you did and owning them, taking responsibility and expressing them," Cameron said. "The experience is not simple. For me to translate things that are hard to express, art is the perfect medium."

The three-day Savannah workshop, held at a cinderblock studio facing a row of Victorian homes, was more like a freewheeling reunion than a rigid class.

Young vets, many sporting beards and long hair, would often arrive after lunch, two hours after the studio doors opened, and start shredding uniforms into piles on tabletops or on the floor.

"I just want to cut this thing into a million pieces," said Jason Hurd, tearing the seams of the desert camouflage jacket he wore in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 with the Tennessee National Guard.

After spending 10 years in the military, the 29-year-old from Savannah said destroying his uniform was a way of proving that his life is now his own. He says he hasn't shaved or cut his hair since leaving the Guard two years ago.

"When you hold these strips in your hand, you think about all the times you ironed it and spit polished your boots - all that was something the Army made you do," Hurd said. "This is my uniform now. I'm not Army property anymore, and neither is it."

The vets dunked their uniform scraps into water swirling through a belt-driven machine that beat the mixture into pulp before being drained into 18-gallon (68-liter) tubs. The pulp was sifted through a screen into sheets of paper, then carefully smoothed and stuck onto the windows outside to dry in the summer heat.

The finished paper is thick, almost like cardboard, with an olive-gray color accented by fine threads of red, blue and purple from any awards and decorations the ex-soldiers add.

Art can often help veterans cope with traumatic war experiences that can be difficult to put into words, said Paula Howie, an art therapist who worked for 24 years with soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

"It's interesting they're using something the person wore in combat and changing it into something else. I think that's key," said Howie, also a former president of the American Art Therapy Association. "It's the beginning of changing these negative memories or thoughts into something more positive and productive."

On the final day of their workshop, the veterans had turned their uniforms into more than 100 sheets of paper, many printed with silkscreen images in red and black: a figure of Buddha; a belt of machine-gun bullets; an image of Jesus with a quote from Matthew 5:39, "Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other."

Nate Lewis, who deployed with an Army unit to Iraq in 2003, embedded his paper with Topps trading cards with photos of bombers, cruise missiles and aircraft carriers used during the first Gulf War. He remembered buying them as a boy in the early 1990s. Now he sees them as an example of children's toys and games that glamorize war.

"They would appeal to me a lot more than football cards," said Lewis, 26, of Barker, New York. "I would say a significant portion of my youth was spent outside playing the role (of a soldier). I had a lot of toy guns."

Threads from Choate's Purple Heart stood out boldly in his paper, most of which he planned to bind together as a journal.

On one page, he screened an image of barbed wire above the letters "OIF?" - the abbreviation for Operation Iraqi Freedom, a phrase he now questions.

Choate says his misgivings about the war have left him estranged from friends who stayed in the Army. But making art with like-minded vets, he said, reminds him he's not alone.

"Each one of these guys I meet along the way, they're like family now," he said. "It's already helping. I'm starting to get the good feeling."

Love My Rifle Better Than You

(title stolen from a book title)

God help me...but there are some days I miss the life so much.

Sure...my experiences have caused me a lot of trouble over the years in terms of stress and worry...

...but I really miss the adrenaline...the camaraderie...the sweat, the pain, the discipline, the pride, the feel of a rifle in my hands....

I'll never have another life like it.

Inspiration

Disabled Vet Finishes London Marathon
By Richard Allen Greene,
CNN


LONDON, England (CNN) -- British soldier Phil Packer was told a year ago that he would never walk again, but on Saturday he finished the London Marathon.
He completed the race 13 days after it started, walking on crutches for two miles a day -- the most his doctor would allow -- in order to raise money for charity.

Flanked by cheering soldiers and supporters, an obviously emotional Packer had defied medical opinion after his lower spine was badly injured in the aftermath of a rocket attack on his base in Basra, Iraq, in February 2008.
The attack sent a vehicle rolling down a sand bank, striking Packer "head on" and dragging him under it.
The 36-year-old was left with no feeling or motor control in his legs, and no bladder or bowel control.

Packer was in hospital for more than four months and it was then he decided to complete three challenges to help raise $1.5 million for Help for Heroes, a British charity supporting wounded veterans.

In February he rowed the English Channel, and next month he plans to climb El Capitan -- one of America's iconic mountaineering sites -- a 3,000-foot vertical rock formation in California.
Packer, who was met at the marathon finish line by British Olympian Steve Redgrave, said that he was $558,000 short of his goal but he was hoping for more donations.


Dressed in a white charity T-shirt and desert fatigues, he was emotional.

"It's looking after our injured servicemen," he said. "There's a lot of people that can't do this, so this is for them."

Earlier this week he told CNN that he "wanted to be able to move on in life."

"I wanted to do something for other personnel who had been wounded.

"I don't want to be helped. I want to help other people. Not that I'm not grateful, but... you know... I really want to be able to help people."

He attributed being back on his feet to "fantastic medical support" from Britain's Ministry of Defense and National Health Service.
"So many improvements are being made" in medicine, he said. "It's an evolving process."
However, he did not know whether he would be able to walk without crutches.

"I gotta see how it goes. Take every improvement as it comes."
Packer is far from alone; the six-year war in Iraq has disabled thousands of people.
Britain's Ministry of Defense did not respond to a CNN question about how many service members had been permanently disabled in the war.

In the United States, the Congressional Research Service reported in March that 31,131 troops had been wounded in Iraq. That figure is for battlefield injuries; many more veterans were later diagnosed with some sort of traumatic brain injury, but it is difficult to determine an exact number because of how the data is kept.

It's not clear how many of the injuries are permanent because the Department of Veterans' Affairs does not classify some disabilities that way until 10 years after the injury, said Ryan Gallucci of AmVets, a veterans' service organization.
Statistics for Iraqis are even harder to come by. Estimates of the number of wounded range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Iraq's Ministry of Heath says one in four wounded Iraqis have lost at least one limb.

Britain's Prince Charles is among those who have expressed support for Packer.
"You are, if I may say so, a credit to the Royal Military Police and to the British Army as a whole," the heir to the British throne wrote in a letter posted on Packer's Web site.
Packer is still on active duty and intends to remain so.

"I've still got a career in the armed forces. I'm going to go back to it."
He has 16 years of service under his belt, including time as an enlisted man before he went to officer training school and is, he noted with a rueful laugh, 20 years from retirement.
He's been asked to be an ambassador for Prince Charles' charity, the Prince's Trust, which focuses on helping young people, in addition to his life in what he calls "the disability community."

After his two-week effort, Packer was asked whether he would be relaxing in a warm bath.
No, he said, "I'm going to have a drink." And with that, the army major lifted a shot glass and toasted his supporters.