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Creativity helps these veterans work through pain

ST. LOUIS — The few fast-food jobs former Spc. Randy Johnson took after his medical discharge from the Army usually ended when he didn’t show for his shift.

“I just didn’t care,” Johnson said. “Sometimes I just didn’t want to come out of the house.”

He enrolled in diesel mechanic school, but the stink of fuel and the engines’ distinctive whirr triggered flashbacks of convoy duty in Iraq. His mood curdled.

Last December, tired of it all, Johnson limped to the top of a bridge in Laramie, Wyo., and scanned the frosted rail tracks below. He’d wait for a train to appear — and jump to his death. When nothing came, Johnson reluctantly hobbled down from the bridge and checked into a local hospital. He was transferred to the Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Sheridan, where he stayed for four months.

As part of the treatment designed to patch his war-wounded soul, Johnson was encouraged to paint. That’s right: paint. An unusual method of rehabilitation, maybe, but Johnson soon discovered an unexpected calm accompanies the creation of nature scenes in particular. Painting birds and flowers keeps him from dwelling on the war.

In fact, “art therapy” has become a vital part of Johnson’s rehab, helping ward off unwanted memories while providing him with a new career focus. Six months after he was released from the VA hospital, Johnson, 23, is about to begin an apprenticeship at an Arkansas tattoo parlor; he’s on schedule to earn a tattooing license by early next year. Art school may be a far-off dream, but “tattooing, right now, seems like the answer to all my prayers,” he said.

For thousands of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with similar psychological wounds, the creative process can serve as a much-needed distraction from the emotional baggage troops tote home from war or a means for making sense of the confusion that clouds combat.

“Maybe they’re remembering an experience they had in the military, a traumatic event in their lives. They want to express it, but not always by talking about it,” said Liz Mackey, director of the National Veterans Creative Arts Festival, held here during late October. For the past 19 years, the event has served as a showcase for veterans who benefit from the therapeutic power of drawing, sculpting, singing or acting.

This year, for the first time, two veterans of the current Iraq war were invited to the culmination of this national competition. Johnson was one. Marine Sgt. Chris Mandia, an inactive reservist, was the other.

Art is “a way to get out some of your deepest feelings and express them to yourself and to others,” Mackey said. “And if they’re asked to explain [their work], only then are they able to start verbally expressing what went on.”

Don’t jump

When the red light blinked green, Johnson leapt from the C-130 Hercules and plunged earthward. Several hundred feet of sky — and a safe landing — was all that stood between him and a $300 monthly bonus offered by the Army in exchange for Johnson’s faith that the parachute on his back would open each time he was ordered to jump.

It was October 2004. Johnson, then a food service specialist with the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), had just returned to Fort Carson, Colo., from Iraq, where he had spent much of the previous year guarding convoys packed with high-value prisoners and other “sensitive” cargo. He was “back jumping,” a requirement for paratroopers who want to keep their qualifications (and bonus pay) once they’re home from a deployment. As Johnson neared the drop zone, an unexpected blast of wind hurtled him to the ground. He looked around, dazed. Then he cringed.

“The cartilage band on the side of my knee was blown,” Johnson said, his right hand intuitively rubbing the inside of his left leg as though it were still purple and swollen. He spent two months in physical therapy — then his Army days were done. The service offered him a medical buyout, and he snatched it. He was discharged with a 40% disability. Johnson enlisted with every intention of staying for 20 years. But now, at just 20 years old, having survived two war tours, he was out of a job and sinking fast.

Apart from his degenerative knee disability, Johnson showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a haunting psychological condition that scars thousands of combat veterans across generations — World War II, Korea, Vietnam and, now, Iraq and Afghanistan. Fellow soldiers, friends of his, had been killed. When Johnson slept, he had nightmares. Awake, he was angry and high strung. Clinical depression quickly sank in.

Trapped in an endless cycle of emotional highs and lows, suicide seemed like a preferable alternative. The VA’s mental-health counseling and commitment to his recovery, he said, saved his life. Having time to “drown himself in painting” helped Johnson reconnect with simpler times. He encourages all veterans who are struggling with PTSD demons to find and embrace an outlet. There are consequences to letting the condition escalate, he said.

“I think they should all experiment in their own ways with something that they find relief in,” Johnson said. “If it’s art, that’s good. Amen to that. If it’s building Legos, amen to that. If it involves going out and weeding the grass every day, hey, go ahead. Do something to keep [yourself] from stewing all the time because, eventually, you’re gonna crack.”

Birds of prey

Johnson attended the show in St. Louis having won top national honors from the VA for his pastel painting “Kissing Birds,” the inspiration for which he found in National Geographic magazine. “I paint flowers. I paint birds. I paint happy stuff,” he said, his head bowed as he sketched on a scrap of hotel stationery. “I don’t try to paint a man in the bushes with a knife. That would be torture for me.”

Mandia, by contrast, is inspired by his time in Iraq. An aspiring screenwriter, the Californian made it to St. Louis based on the strength of his short two-character drama “The Haircut.” The five-minute story depicts a Marine, home from Fallujah for two weeks of R&R, explaining to his father how members of his unit discovered the severed heads of two Iraqis who worked with the Marines as barbers.

Far removed from such kill zones, he sang in the choir and served as a narrator during the art festival’s variety show.

Like Johnson, Mandia, 28, served two tours in Iraq: One during the initial invasion in early 2003 and another the next year in Fallujah. He was a machine gunner assigned to the 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment from Camp Pendleton, Calif. Both men are heavily tattooed up and down their left arms. Each is diagnosed with PTSD, and each finds solace in the arts, but the similarities end there.

Mandia has received treatment at the VA hospital in Long Beach, Calif. And although art therapy wasn’t prescribed for him, he has embraced writing. It’s cathartic, he said, and helps him make sense of the war.

Iraq memories have made him cry, but Mandia doesn’t try to obstruct them. To the contrary, he has written extensively about the war and sometimes studies snapshots from the front lines in an effort to decode events that seemed fast, vague and overwhelming when they occurred.

During the Marines’ march to Baghdad, Mandia’s unit was pushing through the mess made in the southern city of Nasiriyah. As an active participant in the devastation, Mandia was unable to calculate the breadth of that encounter. Revisiting those images offers perspective, he said.

“There was this busload of Fatiheen fighters and they got wasted — I mean big-time. I think a Hellfire got shot in there. A big missile,” Mandia said. “And I remember thinking it looked staged. People were in the process of running or hanging onto things, burnt to a crisp. It didn’t register with me what had happened, at the time, because there was so much action going on. Then I look at the pictures and say, ‘Oh f– – –, that’s what it was.’

“Everything seemed a lot bigger at the time — more bodies, more carnage, more destruction. When I look back at the pictures, it’s not as big. ... Those pictures made it so I could grasp what was going on, after the fact. At the time, I couldn’t.”

Unraveling a mystery

Now three years removed from the war, Mandia expects to graduate in December from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Graduate school in New York would be a fitting start to Act II, he said. He writes less about Iraq these days; other social topics have roused his interest. For instance, despite his Mexican lineage, Mandia worries about the influx of immigrants crowding his home state. That subject is ripe for the stage or screen, he said. Combat overkill, he fears, will typecast him.

“I kept a journal in Iraq,” he said. “I was like, ‘Man, there’s too much classic story line here. It’s almost cliché.’ Combat actions, seeing dead bodies for the first time. ... Writing has helped put some order into my life, to figure out what actually happened.”

But “talking too much about your experiences cheapens them.”

Mandia thinks about Iraq daily and suffers from “massive anxiety” before going to sleep at night. But unlike Johnson, who gets maybe two hours of rest at a time, Mandia does sleep. PTSD “is containable,” he said. “I know I can deal with it.” He’ll have to, he said, if he is going to land a job writing TV scripts for a living.

“I don’t want the war to be the biggest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.

But war, for many, is the defining event of their lives. John Folse Jr. was a sailor assigned to the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk during the Vietnam War and, although he didn’t meet the enemy face to face, lasting pain from a back injury sustained aboard the ship renders the experience unforgettable. Even after his physical wounds mended, Folse endured the sour homecoming experienced by thousands of Vietnam vets. He’s affected by it still, more than 35 years later.

Folse is a sculptor. His first-place entry featured at the creative arts festival stands less than a foot tall, but its symbolism is mammoth. “Self Opening Door” is his interpretation of self-determination. The sculpture, which shows a three-dimensional human arm emerging from a closed door and reaching for the knob, represents the many barriers Folse and fellow Vietnam vets faced after they came home from the war — and the suggestion that “no obstacles are too great,” he said. Even though he created the piece with a different war and a different group of veterans in mind, the meaning transcends generations.

Asked whether one day he, too, will be able to open those doors that for now he so desperately wants to stay shut, Johnson exhaled heavily. “I pray for that,” he said. “I think there will be a day. I don’t think I can live in misery forever.”

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See more images from this year’s National Veterans Creative Arts Festival at http://www1.va.gov/vetevent/caf/2007/2007_NVCAF_Art_Gallery/index.htm.

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