I can't believe it's almost been a month since I last made a post. I've really missed blogging and I really wish I'd been able to do one or two instead of none, but life happened. Things got really crazy around Thanksgiving, and they've been really crazy since. Also, I've been putting this off because I've been really needing to talk about my ISP and there is so much to talk about. This will probably be super long, so bear with me.
I made fancy asparagus a couple weeks ago! I cooked it with garlic and lemon juice and cheese. It was actually really easy, I should cook stuff like this more often. Look at my awesome asparagus!
I have not cooked anything like this since then. But that's okay.
Anyways. Awesome/weird things said to me by the students at 826:
"Go back to college."
"No more burritos for you."
"You really should read the bible, you know."
"You're probably a sinner. But that's okay, because we all are. And that's okay too because God forgives us for our sins."
"You look 19…80. Like you were born in 1980."
"You don't use gmail? What are you from, the sixties?"
"What do you think is wrong with me? Don't answer that question."
Things they've said in their stories:
"The only conflict is who in the world will be my boyfriend."
"Sometimes you are going to have to be heartbroken."
"King George was a cheap-o."
Just wanted to share how awesome the kids at 826 are.
It was interesting, though. Two of the kids I've worked with at after-school tutoring in the past couple weeeks were from military families, and their stories, out of the ones I've read, were the most violent and weapons-focused. For the whole semester, the students have been working on coming up with an imaginary land, and they've been creating titles, rules, animals, weather, and people. These two kids, who were not related, had lands that were all about weapons. They had an admiration for guns and tanks and bombs and they'd look up pictures of them on the internet and show me, and they were so excited about them. They had older brothers who were in the military, and they wanted to grow up to be just like them. One of the students had it all figured out, he knew where he was going to go to high school and what exactly he wanted to get into. It was kind of concerning. Their conception of weaponry wasn't healthy, I think. They didn't seem to understand the consequences of them. Like, they were so wrapped up in what the weapons did, and that they wanted to fire them, they couldn't even grasp the fact that they kill people. Our misconception of the military and warfare that's in our society starts when we're so young. It was really weird, since I've been talking to veterans, to have these kids think warfare is just the coolest thing in the world, because it is so not. It was just hard to see. But it wasn't my place to even attempt to try to change their minds, so I just did my job and focused on helping them make the best story out of it, minus some of the violence.
A couple weeks ago, for Core Course, I took a break from little kids and helped high school kids instead. As sort of a capstone for our Education Navigation assignment about the Chicago Public Schools system, we went to the University of Chicago and worked with high school seniors to figure out how to calculate how much college will cost, and to lead a discussion about college in general. There were two hundred students there, apparently, who were applying to ACM schools, and they had each of us sitting at a table with a group of students. First we did a workshop on financial aid, then the ACM students were supposed to lead an affirmative inquiry activity, but it turned out to be more of a Q&A session on what college is really like than the activity.
I was supposed to be paired with another student, but there were more tables and more groups than they originally thought and I ended up being by myself, with 7-8 high schoolers. At first I was kind of freaked out. It's already been established that: 1) I'm not good at talking to people 2) groups are scary.
But I did okay! I hated the awkward introductions, but it was really great to get to just hang out with the group and talk about college. After the first couple of awkward questions, everyone relaxed and it became more of a conversation. We talked about the food, homework, homesickness, do college kids really sleep, is it actually fun and not just all work, how to make friends. In the end it was actually awesome. I really love Knox, it's the perfect school for me, so I like talking about it, and what the students asked about made me remember what it was like for me four years ago, when I put off applying for college because I didn't want to think about leaving home. I was terrified about making friends and being homesick. It was great to sort of help ease those fears for these students. The majority of them were first-generation college students too, so their parents couldn't help. I could see myself in them, how I was four years ago. It was recent enough that I can still relate to them.
Yeah, it turned out to be completely fine and fun. At the end, one girl asked me for my contact information, because she had some friends who wanted to apply to Knox and she wanted to give them my email so they could ask more. I haven't gotten any emails, which I expected, but the fact that she asked me meant a lot to me. That actually made me really happy! I didn't screw up. Yay. I can handle groups now maybe.
The weekend after Thanksgiving, my brother came back with me to Chicago, and it was one of the best weekends I've had on the program. He goes to school in Portland, Oregon, and what he knows of Chicago is through the touristy, short vacations we'd take growing up, and he kept saying how excited he was to see the city through my eyes, and to see what I've been doing for the past fourteen weeks.
The first day he was here, Saturday, we literally rode seven trains. We went up to NVAM, and it was so cool because Maurice's artwork is in the front hall, in the entrance to the museum, and it was the coolest thing in the world to be able to say I knew the artist and I talked to him and I knew the personal story of each piece. It was awesome. And NVAM has a room that has their permanent exhibit of the Vietnam War, and when we were in there I talked a lot about Maurice and what he's been through. The other exhibit, 100 Faces of War Experience, is made up of 100 portraits supplemented by written statements the veterans provided. Since there was 100 of them and there's all that writing, I thought Justin would go through it pretty quickly, because he's never really liked museums much and he doesn't do a lot of reading. I could tell he mostly came to the museum to see what I've been doing and because he knew it mattered to me. But when we were walking through 100 faces, after the first couple, he slowed down and he started really looking at them. He actually went through and really took the time to read the written statements, and we didn't say anything, just walked. I got bored since I've been there so many times, and I thought he'd be the bored one. But it was cool.
I also took him to 826CHI, and showed him the awesome secret agent supply store that's in the front of the space, then showed him the intern room and where we did all the tutoring. And we ate at Filter, this super hipster coffee shop on Milwaukee a couple blocks away from 826, and went and saw Mockingjay downtown and walked around Millenium Park that night. I took him to Chinatown and to Los Comales in Pilsen the next day. It was great because Justin saw Chicago's neighborhoods instead of just downtown. He also saw how much I ride public transportation and how exhausting it is and I laughed at him when he fell as the train moved the first couple times.
We also went to the field museum, which I actually haven't been to yet, because they have their Vodou exhibit, and Justin went to New Orleans last spring break and I knew as soon as I saw the ads he'd want to go. That was really cool for him too. I felt bad because I didn't think he'd want to spend too much time in the museum so we didn't get there until 2, but he spent forever in the Vodou exhibit, and he said that he could've spent the whole day in there. I didn't realize he liked walking around and looking at things so much, because he didn't used to. Yeah, I felt so bad, we had to leave the exhibit before he was done cause we'd paid for general admission, which includes a 3D movie, and the movie was starting. We saw Tiny Giants! It was the cutest movie ever! It was about a little chipmunk who's trying to get acorns for the winter, and his store gets stolen and he almost dies but he doesn't. It was the cutest movie I've ever seen. And the 3D glasses were awesome. Here's us in our glasses:
Some pictures from the Vodou exhibit:
Yeah… it was just awesome to show him everything, to take him to NVAM and 826 and the movie theater downtown, the things that have been my life for the past couple months, and to show him another side of Chicago.
Now that it's almost the end of the program, everyone's asking me if I like Chicago and if I'll come back. I didn't mean to fall in love with the city, but I really did, and I didn't realize that until Justin came to visit, and in the weeks beforehand I was thinking of all the awesome things we could do, and what I could show him from the city and I was so excited. I really love Chicago. I love walking around downtown at night and all the different neighborhoods, and Millenium Park and how much people want to help each other out here, and the trains and getting around by myself. I've just started to figure out how to get places and I know my way downtown now, and it's an awesome feeling. I actually really don't want to leave. I love it here. My boyfriend, who I'm planning on moving in with after graduation, hates big cities. But he's visiting at the end of the semester! All I have to do is make him fall in love with Chicago too. But, at this point, all I know is someday, somehow, I really really want to be here again.
Anyways. I'm not leaving yet. So. ISP. In my last post, I'd met Maurice at NVAM during the Veterans Day opening art reception, and I'd talked to Edgar without a tripod and didn't know the audio recorder just needs a change of batteries. Since then, I've had four more interviews; I interviewed Edgar at NVAM, talked to Maurice twice, and interviewed an art therapist, Suellen. My life has changed, in so many ways, through the all the knowledge I've gained about the military, what it's like to be a veteran and the struggles they go through, how art helps heal from trauma, how our nation is not there for veterans, and how to make a documentary. Basically these past couple weeks have been a crash course in documentary filmmaking, courtesy of Patrick Putze and a billion Final Cut Pro tutorials, and between what was said during the interviews and dealing with all the technical schizz with the video and the editing, this project has been really, really overwhelming. It kind of took over my life.
It's been incredibly stressful. But what I'm learning makes it worth it. Out of anything this project has made me realize that filmmaking is what I really want to do, and it's one of those things where you really have to do it in order to learn it. I was never that interested in the editing aspect, but now I realize how important it is to experience that as a screenwriter. I've learned a lot about the little things, and it always felt like there was one thing that went wrong, but then I never made that mistake again. For Edgar's second interview, I forgot to press record for the first three minutes. What he said during that won't be in the film, he just talked about the training process because I was curious, but it was really embarrassing anyways. Then my memory card ran out of space and for a while I couldn't figure out what the icon was saying and I went up to Edgar and I was like "is that the memory card?" He was probably like, wow. But I had extra memory cards! So I redeemed myself.
During Maurice's first interview, I learned that the sun is evil and we had to shift around as the interview went on, and for most of it his face is in shadow and kind of dark, and other times sunlight was right on him. Which makes the footage really meh. Also, we sat right next to vending machines, and I didn't realize until I listened to the audio afterward that you can totally hear them throughout the whole thing, they're a constant hum in the background.
People who watch this film who know anything about filmmaking will probably cringe a lot. But that's okay.
I've also learned a lot about people, in general. You can hear it in their voices in the audio when the veterans talk about things that are hard for them. They sigh, and when they talk again, their voice has changed, it's deeper, gruffer, it's weighed down. And their bodies weigh down too, they slouch more. You can see the change in their face. And whenever they choked up or struggled with what to say, they'd touch their hair or their face or scratch their head, as if their bodies were trying to make up for the loss of words, as if it was still trying to do something.
Also, memory is crazy. There were things I thought they said, and then listening to the audio afterward, I realized they never said it at all, or if they had it sometimes wasn't in the same way I thought they did. It showed me how much our mind makes things up, and substitutes what we think for the things people say, and we believe it's what happened. Going through the audio and realizing Edgar never said something I thought he did was kind of shocking.
My second interview with Edgar was at NVAM. To interview him where the 100 Faces is would've been cool since he was in Iraq, but there was this teen council thing going on, and we had to sit as far away as possible from it, in the The Things They Carried room. It was the first time I was interviewing someone the second time, and we were both so much more relaxed and comfortable. It went really, really well. There were two things that he talked about, though, that hit hard. The interview ended up being really hard to go through, emotionally.
In his first interview, Edgar brought up the fact that he's gay. I'd asked him if he would go back and change anything, and after answering that question he said that he hardest thing he went through in the military, out of everything, was having to serve under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He said that being gay and being in the military were two conflicting things and he felt like they negated each other, and it's something he still really struggles with.
One of my questions for the second interview was why exactly he felt like they negated each other. I wanted to understand that. He said how having to pretend that you're not gay, or at least not acknowledging his sexuality, was an exhausting charade that really wore him down. You basically have to live a lie, you have to be careful of what you say and who you say it to, and you can never be yourself. He said he feels like they negated each other because whenever someone would tell him he did a good job, or that he was a good soldier, he'd think, would you say that to me if you knew I was gay? And he felt like they probably wouldn't. His sexuality undercut everything, made him feel like everything he recieved he didn't deserve because it wasn't completely him who did it.
The first interview, he'd told me how he was in the reserves during college, and in his senior year he got the call to go to Baghdad. He had to quit all his classes and change everything, a few semesters away from graduation. People were telling him he didn't have to go, that he should stay here and finish school, and he was like, no, I'm going to do it, I'm the one who signed my name on the dotted line, I took the risk and I can't imagine someone else going over there in my place. He had a couple friends who knew he's gay, and they were like, "Just tell them you're gay, then you don't have to go," but that was the last thing Edgar wanted to do.
This time, he brought that up again, and he said that he went not only because there was no way he wasn't going to and it was his burden to bear, but that part of the reason was also because he hadn't come out to his family yet, and there was no way that he would be like "Hey mom and dad, I was dishonorably discharged from the military because, guess what, I'm gay! Surprise!" So he went, and he came out to his parents a couple years after he came back.
Part of the reason, he said, that he went and didn't say anything about his sexuality was because he was afraid of what his parents would think. Edgar literally told me that he was more afraid of what his family would think of the fact that he's gay, than he was of getting blown up in Iraq. "It was a little less scary," he said. "Well, a whole lot less."
We moved on in the interview because I asked him when he did come out to his family, and we talked about that. But what he said just floored me. I couldn't stop thinking about it. It's been over three weeks, and I still can't really get over that. I'll never forget that. I just can't… there has never been something that I've been so afraid to tell my parents, that I was more okay with dying than saying it. And it's not something you can change. It's an integral part to yoursef, it's who you are. I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to have to suppress who you are like that, to hate it and deny it because of other people's view of it. It is so terrible that we live in the kind of society where Edgar was more afraid of telling his parents who he is, than of what he was facing in Iraq. And on the parent's side… that would kill me, if I were a parent, and I found out that my son was more okay with getting blown up than telling me something. I would want my kids to be able to come to me and tell me anything. Especially before they left for their deployment.
That affected me a lot. Then I asked him at the end of the interview if there was anything else he wanted to talk about. He was like, "I could talk about the politics for hours," and I was like, "It's okay, you can say whatever, it's good" and he said, that some of the politcs he'd discussed "is representative of the whole thing, of the massive disconnect between how we say we value our troops and our action." He went on to tell me how he really believes that people are really ignorant about what's going on in the world, and the issues veterans are facing. A lot of people assume that veterans are okay when they come home and if they're not, that they'll get over it in the next couple years and be fine, but in reality, they deal with things for their whole lives, and they're not fine.
He talked about the statistic- which is a true statistic- that twenty-two veterans commit suicide every day, and how no one knows about it or acknowledges that we send people overseas and they come home, and they're still dying. He started telling me about a friend of his who he met through NVAM, who went to Afghanistan twice and was a great guy and when he was in Chicago in 2012, Edgar took him about to lunch and just really liked being around him, and this man took his own life in September. It wasn't until I was listening to the audio afterward that I realized that was a couple months ago. Edgar was really upset, he said how disgusted he is with the whole "support the troops" thing, because we have all this money and all this support when we send people overseas, but then that disappears when they come home. We're like, great, you survived and you're home now, you're a hero, thank you for your service. And we leave it at that. We think it's fine, and it's not fine. They need a lot of help, and we do not provide them that, because we refuse to believe that anything terrible happens in this country and we shield ourselves from what really goes on. He hates the supposed support and the concerts and the events. "What real, tangible effect does that have?" he said. "What sort of substantial change? Nothing. It does nothing."
I came away from that interview just feeling, like, whoa. I had absolutely no idea twenty-two veterans commit suicide every day. I didn't realize how little support there is when they come back home, that people know about PTSD and the transition into civilian society again, but they don't realize that it can still be a struggle five, ten, fifty years later, that the transition is never complete and PTSD isn't something you completely heal from. All I knew was that now I knew, and other people should too.
I also talked to an art therapist, Suellen. When I started the project I originally didn't have any questions about art therapy and I didn't even think of that side of it, and then Patrick Putze was like "I'm going to set you up with an art therapist" and I was just like, okay.
I went to Andersonville, I think. I'm still not entirely sure where her office was, it was in a completely new neighborhood. When we left afterwards I was like, "Where are we?" And I think Suellen said Andersonville? Hopefully that's an actual neighborhood.
Suellen was so nice! We were texting before I got there because we were both going to be late, and she was like "do you want a coffee?" and I was like "a coffee would be awesome" but when she showed up she only had one and it was hers. Throughout the interview I kept thinking about it, I was like, that question totally sounded like she was offering to buy me coffee, right? Why didn't she? Did she see my reply and be like, whoa, I'm not buying you anything? Are my social skills really that bad that I misinterpreted her and now it's awkward? But then at the end she looked at her phone and she said, "Oh, I didn't see your text." She also gave me a ride to a bus stop so I could take an express bus and be less late to my ISP class.
Going in to her interview, I was like, "all right this interview will go well, we'll talk about how art helps veterans and about happy things" and then it was one of the hardest interviews I've had. I didn't realize how therapeutic art can be for veterans and how much it provides communication between them and civilians. Art can tell you what happened when words aren't enough. We can get a sense of how they feel by looking at their productions of it.
Suellen talked about how incredibly important it is that we hear these stories. It's our military that carries the truth, who know what really goes on, and we have to listen, because what they have to say involves all of us and by helping veterans, we help ourselves. As a society, she said, the least we can do is try to understand them and listen. We owe them the support they deserve, we owe so much.
Suellen was very emotional and passionate throughout her interview, but when I asked what the role of veteran art is in society, she broke down and cried. We had to stop filming, because she asked to stop. I was kind of shocked? I didn't know what to do. I was like, I didn't think that was that hard of a question. What did I say? I just sat there and let Suellen figure herself out. She said that she wanted to stop and get herself together because she wanted to answer without any tears. I think the fact that that simple question made her break down, shows how important it is.
She discussed how asleep our nation is, how we are so out of tune with what really goes on. The people who do know what goes on, who know the true, domestic consequences of our international conflicts, are the military personnel, and she said "if there was a time that veterans needed to be looked at, listened to, highlighted, it is now." She said how incredibly important it is that we start paying attention, and we need to "understand what's going on in the world through their expression, through their poetry, through their art." The nation as a whole needs to wake up and start paying attention, and art by veterans holds such an important role in that, because not only does it help them heal, but it helps us understand.
Between Edgar's and Suellen's interviews, the purpose of my project completely changed. It's still about veteran artists and their art, but now there's an aspect to it about how important it is to listen to veterans, to not judge or stereotype or question, but just to let them talk and share their stories. We might not agree with what they say, but it's incredibly important that they're given the space to say it. There are a lot of things we're very ignorant of. And people are dying because of it.
I've seen how much veterans want to tell their stories through the project itself. My interviews became really long; Maurice's second one alone was over three hours. We really just hung out and talked, and I could tell they appreciated my questions and my interest and they really want to share what happened/is happening with other people. A lot of what Edgar and Suellen said, I came away thinking, that wasn't the original purpose of my project, but it can't not be in the film. It has to be in there. How can it not be? It's just not right to not put it in. Because they're right; people really, really need to know about all of this.
My next interview was with Maurice, who I met at the NVAM reception. He was a mortarman in Vietnam and I really liked talking to him. Well, I really liked talking to everyone. Maurice is just so cool. He's got this really gruff voice and he says "Nam" but his family is also really important to him, and he told me about his grandson and how there's another grandkid on the way, and we met for our first interview at the Newberry Library (which, it turns out, is not public, and we had to awkwardly film in the student lobby) where his daughter got married, and he showed me the stairs and said, "I walked her down those stairs." He has a problem with authority; there were a couple of things that kept you from being drafted to Vietnam, and one of them was being in college for an education degree, which he was, until he dropped out. Another thing was being in the army reserves, which he also was until he quit. So then he was drafted, he got a letter saying, "Your friends and neighbors have selected you for service in the U.S. Army," and he didn't get along with a lot of his sergeants because he wasn't there voluntarily and he expressed that.
The thing that I didn't know at all about the Vietnam war is how unpopular it was. The U.S.'s strategy was to bomb North Vietnam through air raids, and they ran search and destroy missions in South Vietnam, which were useless becasue companies never held the ground they cleared. Eighty percent of the casualties from the air raids were civilians. People in America began realizing that, and with the draft, people became hugely anti-war and there were demonstrations across the country, especially on college campuses. And veterans, whether they were drafted or not, whether it was their choice to go, were hated. Maurice told me when he got back to America, he asked his girlfriend to bring a change of clothes to the airport, and the first thing he did when he got off the plane was go into the bathroom and changed into "civies" so no one would know he was a veteran. He didn't talk about the war for thirty years, and at first it was mostly because it was socially unacceptable. It was something people just did not talk about. They knew he was a veteran, but they never asked him anything. So Maurice didn't talk about it either, and he started doing a lot of drugs. He told me how at the time he thought he was getting caught in the hippie movement, but now that he looks at it, he realizes how much he was escaping, and the heavy drug use was just a way to try to forget things. He started crying when he told me how much his wife helped him get over it and how much having a family helped.
I asked Maurice what he's done that he's proud of. He almost received a bronze star for a time when his basecamp was attacked by the Viet Cong, they tried to overrun it, and he fired mortars at the perimeter. He could've hit his own guys, but he did it well enough and helped hold the attack off; later on, the men who had been at the perimeter told him how much his mortars helped them. So he's really proud of that. He didn't get the bronze star, though, because he wasn't "real popular" with his sergeants.
When I asked him that question, Maurice said, "there's something I can tell you I'm not proud of." He talked about the bronze star thing and we moved on in the interview, but later on we came back to it because he brought it up again. He told me how, as a mortarman, he was always so far removed from the front line and he never really saw the effect his mortars had. He knew, the day he helped hold off that attack, that his mortars had probably killed some men, but it didn't bother him because he didn't know. Then a lieutenant who he was friends with invited him to join his group that was up on a mountain, and Maurice fired mortars one night, and the two of them went down the mountain the next morning to see if it'd done anything, and Maurice did see the consequences. He told me that he and the lieutenant found a VC who had been hit. Maurice's mortar had blown him to pieces, and the man had a letter to his girlfriend in his pocket. Maurice had a girlfriend then, who he married after he got back home, "back to the world" as he said they called it, and the letter really got him. The letter is what made him feel like, this guy and I are the same. There's no difference between us. His government told him to come out here, my government told me, and it could've been the other way, and why wasn't it? Maurice couldn't figure out what they were doing out there, why they were doing this. "That moment on the mountain changed me more than anything," he told me. That was the moment he decided he was anti-war, that war is not good at all and never will be, and he didn't want to fire another mortar. So when he got back to base camp, he told another guy he was going to be the gunner from now on, and he didn't do it again.
The really hard thing about talking with Maurice was that I could see and hear and feel how much seeing the man he killed is still tearing him up. It still really, really affects him. He has been carrying this guilt around for almost fifty years. As time goes on, in a way it gets worse, because as you live your life you experience all the things that the people you killed, and the friends who have committed suicide, will never get to experience. Maurice told me, that guy never got to have children or grandchildren. Maurice goes through his life and he thinks, I have denied someone this. And for what?
He's making art about what happened. He has a couple pieces he's going to start working on, and he told me that it's still painful, after all this time. I could see how painful it really was. Maurice gave me a flash drive of pictures, he had four pictures from Vietnam and about fifteen pictures of his art. We went through his photos and I asked him about each one, for the documentary. I had them up on my laptop and I'd click on them and he'd talk about it, and there were two that he didn't talk about. Like, he spent a couple minutes on a piece of art and I clicked on the next one and he said, "That's from the war, yeah." And that was all he said.
I just can't get over how long it's been and how hard it's been for him. That's… I don't even know what to say. And I look at the veterans coming back today, and wonder where we'll be in fifty years. I look at Patrick K., the first veteran I interviewed who lives in Oswego, who'll still be suffering from his TBI, his Traumatic Brain Injury, which he got when his convoy hit an IED in Afghanistan. He can't live like most people. He talked to me about it during our first interview, how his relationship to Chicago has changed and he can't come to the city anymore, because of his PTSD. He can't be in crowded areas and he can't handle noise. And he forgets things, a lot. His memory loss is really bad. His injuries have also prevented him from being the kind of artist he alway wanted to be. Before the Marine Corps, drawing was Patrick's life, and he wanted to be a comic book artist and go to art school. But when he came back, his hand-eye coordination was so messed up he couldn't draw a straight line and it's taken him years to get to the point where he is now, where he can create a painting and it takes him a couple weeks instead of a couple hours. He really believes he'll never be as good as he was before the Marine Corps.
Since I've talked to him, there are moments where I'll be sitting in a movie theater or I'll be at the Kris Kringle Market or just on the train, and I'll think, Patrick can't do this. There are so many things he's unable to do, he's literally not able to lead a normal life. Because of one day in Afghanistan when his convoy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. At NVAM, at the 100 Faces exhibit, one of the written statements by a veteran states that the day he got his injuries has never ended. That's true for Patrick. And for Maurice, that day he saw the man on the mountain has never ended either. They live with these things, they don't just heal and move on, they learn to deal with it. And I think that's what a lot of people don't understand, that it's not something you can get over. When it comes to helping veterans accept their life long injuries and nightmares and do the best they can with them, that's where we are not there for them.
It's hard too because Suellen was saying how the families of veterans are also incredibly affected. I have a lot of respect for Patrick's wife and how much she's helped him. When he came home, she was the one who was like, there's something that's changed about you, you're not the same, you need to get help. And I look at Charlie, his two year old son, and wonder how he's going to grow up. When he's five and he has certain events that his dad can't come to, how do you explain that? He's going to have to grow up dealing with his father's memory loss, with his dad not being quite like anyone else's. The war has an indirect affect on him too.
One of the most important things I've learned through this project is that when we hear of things being hard for veterans, we think of PTSD. But that's not the only thing that haunts them, that they have to deal with their whole lives. There's a huge amount of guilt too, for Maurice and for Edgar. We talk about ghosts following veterans around. Everyone thinks those ghosts are those who died overseas, who were at their side. But so many of those ghosts are people who have died since. Edgar told me that losing his friend made that suicide statistic hit hard. He's friends with a lot of veterans, and before he'd distance himself from the statistic, he'd think, yeah, I have veteran friends, but they're not those veterans. But now he looks at them and he worries about who's going to die next. That's what they had to put up with overseas, they had to face everyday the chance of their friends dying. It's complete bullshit that they go through that, and then they go through it when they come home too. That shouldn't be happening. That is just so not right. If anything, they should come home and no longer have to worry about losing people because of the war. But they do. Maurice said how they essentially fight two wars, one lifelong, and not all of them survive both. He fought in Vietnam, and then he had to fight the drugs, and they were both life threatening.
I had Edgar's interview where he talked about suicide, then a couple days later Maurice talked in his first interview about what he'd done and how hard it was, how he was trying to escape with all the drugs and he counts himself lucky he survived that, and then two days later I had Suellen's interview where she broke down and cried and told me how incredibly important art is because we're not getting what's going on. It was just, one after the other. I was so affected by what they'd said. My respect for them is huge. I was deeply affected just by hearing about it, and they're living it. If I can take what I felt when they talked to me, and make the viewer feel something like it when they watch the film, I think I'll have gotten it right.
The reason why this has affected me so much is because I had no idea it'd turn out to be this way. I knew it'd be hard, but not in this sense; I didn't know that what veterans struggle most with sometimes is what they've gone through since they've come home. I'd tell people how the interviews became really hard emotionally, and really overwhelming, and their reactions have been, "That's what you wanted, right?" "That's good though, right? For the film?" "Well you picked a heavy topic to begin with." And I did. I decided to talk to combat veterans. I knew it'd probably end up being really hard, and if I wanted the film to really make an impact, that was the route it'd need to take.
But I didn't have any questions about PTSD or what happened overseas. I didn't ask, "Did you kill anyone?" Which, interestingly, all three veterans brought up. They said as soon as they say they're a veteran, people ask them that. And out of everything you could ask a veteran, that's the worst. I didn't have any questions like that. I didn't want to assume that they have PTSD, many of them don't, or that they had that kind of experience. I didn't bring up the hard things; the veterans brought them up themselves. I wanted to talk about it if they wanted to, but I wasn't going to force it. So going in, I did not assume that this is what we would end up talking about, and because I wasn't assuming, I wasn't expecting it, so I wasn't prepared when it happened. This could've gone two ways: either the veterans would avoid talking about their hardships, or they'd address it on their own terms. And it so happened that they talked about it, without me asking.
When I say it's been hard, I know what people are thinking: they're thinking, oh, the veterans are talking about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam, and that's what's hard. And that's true. But what has happened afterward has been even harder to hear about. It's been even harder to have Patrick K. ask me what we were talking about during an interview. It's been even harder to have Edgar talk about his friend who died, and how he now wonders who's going to die next, harder to witness the pain Maurice still feels. That's what's been hardest with this whole thing. And what makes it even more difficult is that so many people are unaware of it.
It reflects my previous conception of the military and veterans, which I think is representative of society's conception of it: That it's hard overseas, not here at home. Veterans have PTSD but they get help and they get over it. You go and do your service and you come back home and thirty years later you're fine. We need to realize it's not fine. It's impossible to just get over it. That's what these veterans are saying, that's why they participated in the project; we need to do something about it. Edgar and Suellen were both stressing how incredibly important it is to know what's going on. And no one knows what goes on better than the veterans themselves. It's not like, don't listen to the government, the government is evil, they're not necessarily saying that. We just need to hear all sides of the story, hear the whole. A lot of times, we get just a part of it, and the part that's left out is too often the veterans'.
The project has also really affected me because this is the first time I've actually sat down and talked to veterans. We all hear about war and the terrible things that happen, but it's different when you talk to someone who experienced it. It's like homelessness; we all know it exists and we see it on the streets and know the terrible stories, but if you go to a shelter and volunteer, and you sit and talk with a homeless man for five hours, that's incredibly different. There's something about this that has made it seem more real to me, made it come alive. I guess because now, it's part of my life too, part of my own experience. It was real, it was right there, I was seeing and dealing with the aftermath of warfare directly.
I don't know. When I left the interviews, I was really upset. And I'd go back to class (which I'd always be late for because I'd let the interviews go for as long as they needed to) and I couldn't stop thinking about what they said. Some of the things they told me, I'll never forget. The whole thing, is just really upsetting. And it's like the CPS school system; the facts themselves are upsetting enough, but the realization of your ignorance is in a way even more upsetting. I just think, why didn't I know about this? Why don't more people know more about this?
It's also hard to have someone talk about your country this way. And it's not like, hey, I love America, how dare you talk about it that way. But it's like, I'm part of the problem. I was ignorant, like so many people are. And whose fault is that? You can't really blame civilians. There are a lot of things we are not aware of in this country, but it's not necessarily our fault, there will always be things you don't know and that's just how it works out. I just think, with Vietnam, veterans for a long time were not given such public spaces to communicate about their experiences, and now with the recent wars, we're becoming more aware than ever before.
I can't even begin to describe how glad I am that I made a film. Because people need to hear this, people need to know. I've learned all this and it's been overwhelming, and I need to share it with other people.
The next step is unclear. Where do we go from here? I don't know. How do you prevent twenty-two veterans from committing suicide each day? We're still in the learning stage. It's sad that more people will die before we get our act together, but I think it's starting to happen. I think it's starting to really come to light, what's happening, the suicide and the lifelong trauma and injuries, and how badly veterans need to be understood. I think their stories of what it's been like coming back has been heard more than before. We're still at that edge of realization, and beginning to do something about it, but there's still an uncertainty to it. I asked each veteran what we can do to help, and they said to support places like the art museum, and to listen, to accept the stories even if you might not agree with them. For now what we can do is try to understand. And, like with CPS, share that knowledge with other people. That's what veterans have been doing for years, trying to share their knowledge. More people are starting to listen. Hopefully my film will help that along, bad-quality, school-project feel and all.
Yeah, this was super long. Writing it down is how I understand things, and I really needed to just write all this out. I know a lot of people can't be bothered to read all this and kudos to you if you did. This project has just been my life for the past month, everything has been so overwhelming and now I have the responsibility of fitting it into a specific format to share with others. I've been really needing to talk about it all and get it all out and this was a place I could do it. I want to do one more post about the end of the semester and everything, so I wanted to just get it all out at once. I guess ultimately what I'll be trying to do with the film in the end is to share the veteran's stories, and raise awareness, and hopefully inspire people to at least start thinking about it and to have more converstations with it. And to do something, even if it's just listening to a veteran talk or going to NVAM, for now. Sometimes just paying attention is all we can do, but it means so much to the people who need to be heard.
I love Chicago, and I'm so glad I'm coming away with something that I created here, something that involves the people and issues here. I feel like I did something with my time, and I'm walking away with something to show for it. Something that will hopefully open people's eyes like mine have been, something that will make people learn about an issue they weren't aware of, and will make the 826CHI students who have military families realize that all the arms we need are for hugging.
- Laura
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