All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

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They are moving from the highly structured,
hierarchical military life to one that prizes
individuality, choice and exploration. The
decision-making skills needed for success in
college can be overwhelming for veterans,
especially for those with mental or physical
injuries. Not all who have served in the
military suffered physical injuries, but
many veterans are coming to college with
psychological needs that are different from
those of other nontraditional students. The
psychological effects from the trauma of war
often contribute to student veterans’ feelings
of isolation.
Writer Maxine Hong Kingston in Veterans
of War, Veterans of Peace (2006) explains
how she discovered in her early work
with veterans that they needed to write in
order to help heal the trauma of war. By
writing, they created a written record of
their experience and were able to see how
their thinking developed. “Processing chaos
through story and poem, the writer shapes
and forms experience, and thereby, I believe,
changes the past and remakes the existing
world. The writer becomes a new person
after every story, every poem; and if the art
is very good, perhaps the reader is changed,
too” (p. 1-2).
Dr. Edward Tick, a psychotherapist and
author of War and the Soul (2005) writes
about helping veterans recover from posttraumatic
stress disorder. He believes
that in order to heal, veterans need to tell
their stories and have a public platform:
“Veterans most often withhold their stories,
not only because of the pain evoked in
telling them but also because they fear that,
in our culture of denial, we won’t properly
receive them” (p. 221). Soldiers returning
home need to share their stories, and writing
them down helps them process their war
experience.
We were familiar with the work of James
Pennebaker and Louise DeSalvo, Marion
MacCurdy and Charles Anderson, and
Jeffrey Berman, all who have worked
with students using writing as a tool to
help process difficult life events. It got us
thinking. What if we created a study that
could support our returning veterans and
educate other students and ourselves about
the multifaceted realities of war We were
uneasy about it. What did we know of
war – in these days of an all-volunteer
army – two writing and literature mentors
with no military service, who have never
seen war firsthand We were keenly aware
of our inexperience, our naïveté. So what
business did we have mucking about
creating a war course
As experienced writing and literature
teachers, what we do know about is the
power of the written word. We know
literature can illuminate aspects of your self
and your experience; that writing helps you
process what you know and what you don’t
know; that both literature and writing are
about making meaning, and even change
people’s lives. We have experienced this
ourselves and we’ve watched it happen
to scores of students. Finding the stories,
poems, films and articles that explored
war was something we could do. We were
confident we could create meaningful
assignments that would help us all discover
what happened to people directly and
indirectly involved in war. With students,
especially those who have had direct
experience with war, we would educate each
other. In his introduction to his War (1995)
short story anthology, Jon E. Lewis writes:
“War is the ultimate, the most extreme of
human experiences … . No other human
activity is like it, or so pervaded by the
imminence of death. War is perhaps the
supreme theater for asking the questions
about what it means to be human” (p. xiv).
And so we created, War Stories: Reading
and Writing About the Impact of War,
which was first offered in 2009; the study is
currently a 4-credit study group organized
into six modules.
The first module asks an obvious question:
What do we know of war The first writing
assignment is this:
Some of us know about war from firsthand
experience, some from family and
friends who were soldiers, but all of us
got messages about war, courage and
patriotism from our families, teachers –
from different aspects of society, like
TV, the movies and books. So what
messages did you receive about war
Who or what influenced you most in
your thinking Are the messages you
received as a child different from what
you believe now
The responses we received were not
unexpected. Many students learned about
war from TV and movies – and also from
toys. Andy, who went on to become an
Army Ranger and was among the first
troops to parachute into Afghanistan during
the U.S. invasion, wrote:
I was about seven years old. I had
my Air Force academy sweatshirt on,
a sandwich in front of me, and the
television blaring. I couldn’t eat my
sandwich though, I was too intrigued
with the movie I had on. Sure, I had
seen it five times, but I couldn’t get
enough of it. I loved Top Gun, I loved
the military, I knew I wanted to be a
part of that, and I knew it at a very
young age. I wanted to be disciplined, I
wanted to look sharp in that uniform,
but most importantly I wanted to show
my patriotism in the most simple, yet
hardest way possible. I had the red,
white and blue coursing through my
veins. I had the “Star Spangled Banner”
playing in my head. Ever since my first
baseball game when my grandfather,
a Korean War veteran, had me stand
and take my Twins cap off and put it
against my chest, I knew I wanted to be
one of those sharp dressed men holding
that flag.
Laura wrote about her firsthand war
experience as a young child:
My first experience with war was in
Cuba during the Revolution. Castro
was fighting in the Sierra Madres and
Batista was trying hard to keep him
from getting a foothold in Havana and
other major cities and towns. Being
a small child, the real danger of the
situation escaped me. There were times
when windows were shot out and we
slept on mattresses on the living room
floor. My grandfather, with a shotgun
in his hand would stay up all night,
waiting and listening. Occasionally,
men, bleeding from wounds would
arrive at our back door. They would
be ushered quickly and quietly to the
kitchen, and then they were gone.
Other students reported learning about
war through the lens of good and evil as
represented by the good guys and the bad
guys; the good guys were always suppose to
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011