By Derek Turner

Up in the attic, where Ron Capps finds his words, a sign hangs on the wall to point him in the right direction.

The words on the sign are his.

“Either you control the memory or the memory controls you.”

Capps served for 25 years as an Army intelligence officer, but the last 10 years—and deployments to five war zones—redefined his life. Then, as now, he wrote.

“Writing was something that I was doing professionally. I wasn’t an infantry guy. I wasn’t a Green Beret. I was an intelligence guy,” he said. “My job was to go and recruit people to do our work for us. But also, most importantly to be able to write about what I saw.”

In Kosovo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq and Darfur, what he often saw was messy, complicated and violent. The things he saw stayed with him, just beneath the surface. His final deployment ended not with a sigh of relief, but a gasp for breath on a medevac flight.

He’d attempted suicide.

To come back from the precipice, given a second chance, he had to gain control of the memories. To gain control, he had to find the words. When he wrote for himself, the prose did not resemble the straightforward, efficient approach he had always used when writing for the military. Instead, it was a stream of consciousness—keystrokes coming in great waves—without stopping for punctuation or paragraph breaks. But it was a start.

“Medication wasn’t working, talk therapy wasn’t working, cognitive behavioral therapy wasn’t working,” he said. “What was working for me was writing. It was exposure therapy, telling that story over and over again until I got in control of it.”

‘Sergeant Psycho Has Come back From the War’

Years later, though he says he’s still working through his issues, Capps appears to all the world as a man in control. If he’s not yet conquered all that preys on his mind, he has figured out how to stare it down.

His mission now is to share that secret.

Ron Capps teaches at a Veterans Writing Project seminar in 2011. | Photo credit Jacqueline Hames

Capps founded the Veterans Writing Project, a nonprofit organization that provides no-cost writing seminars to veterans, service members and their families.

And when he stands before a group of them inside a college classroom, he carries the aura of a professor. The students are there to learn from him and from other handpicked veteran wordsmiths, each with an advanced writing degree. The pupils might have more tattoos than the average student and more scars than most, but they also have more stories.

Capps chose the academic setting to house his project because that’s where it was conceived. He turned his GI Bill benefits into a master’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University.

He was on his way home from one of those classes, excited because his most recent work had been well-received, when the idea for the Veterans Writing Project came to him.

“I was learning a lot and I knew sort of instinctively that I wanted to teach,” he said. “So the idea came to form an organization that does this, that gives away what we’ve learned. So all of our instructors—you’re a veteran, you have the degree, you’re working at it. What have you learned? Let’s give it all away.”

Capps pitched his idea to the five major universities in Washington, D.C.—Georgetown, American, Catholic, George Washington and Howard. Only George Washington responded and, after a trial run, the program has been an amazing success, with university officials vowing continued support.

Participants need not be students at the university, though the school does have an active veteran community. Instructors also regularly visit Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to teach writing as therapy to wounded veterans at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence.

Capps wrote the curriculum and compiled it in book form. Writing War: A Guide to Telling Your Own Story addresses the unique aspects of communicating the military experience to the civilian reader, as well as teaching universal elements such as scene, setting, narrative structure, dialogue and more.

The other reason he chose academia is that it’s where he saw a dire need.

He relates a story of a young Iraq veteran who, while attending community college, was encouraged to write about his experience at war.

“And what he wrote just completely scared the hell out of people,” Capps said. “The university punted and told him you can’t come back to class until you’ve had a psychological evaluation.”

He’d written that he missed the rush of killing people. It’s a feeling that few will understand—those who have seen things that most have not, those who often are still trying to gain control of their memories.

Among those who have not seen those things, Capps said, too many have not made the effort to peel back the layers of such complex emotions.

“The college was completely unprepared for understanding their responsibilities—morally, ethically, legally. They just had a knee-jerk reaction. ‘Sergeant Psycho has come back from the war. And get out. We don’t want to deal with you.’

“And I think we can do better.”

The Post-9/11 Veteran

Thomas Brennan was still six months shy of his discharge from the Marine Corps when he attended a Veterans Writing Project seminar in 2012. He thought his future might involve writing. He knew it would involve trying to help veterans.

Through an unlikely friendship with a photojournalist who had embedded with his unit in Afghanistan, Brennan had been published on a handful of occasions in The New York Times’ At War blog. His first-person reflections on his service, being wounded in combat and the resulting trauma garnered plenty of positive feedback.

So the wheels began turning when he saw a Facebook post on the Veterans Writing Project and inquired through the website. He traveled from North Carolina to D.C. to attend a weekend seminar.

“I was nervous because I was still on active duty,” he said. “I didn’t know what kind of demographic it would be. I didn’t know how far along in their transitions the other people were going to be. I didn’t know if I was going to be the anomaly.

“But from the very get-go … it was very evident that we were all on the same page. We all wanted to better ourselves, we wanted to better our writing and we wanted to better understand our experiences to be able to more effectively write about them.”

At the time, Brennan was right in the middle of some very intense therapy as he worked to overcome his post-traumatic stress, to make sense of what had happened to him in Afghanistan and to figure out how he could move forward with something like a normal life for himself and his young family. His therapist had recently recommended writing therapy.

When Capps spoke, Brennan saw a bit of himself.

“You can see that the struggle, when he talks about it, is real,” he said. “To those of us who have demons from our time in the military, they’re very real to all of us. So for him to offer up hope and say that things that haunt you do get better and that you can do things that mitigate them, that spoke words to me that I hadn’t heard before.”

When the Sunday session ended, Brennan drove back to North Carolina with one hand on the wheel and the other often reaching for a pen and a notebook. His head was swimming with ideas and he was trying to work out what he would write next.

He also had to figure out what he would do next with his life. His career in the Marine Corps was ending. What would follow? Capps had stressed that he needed a plan, that stagnation was unwise and unhealthy.

A little more than a year after returning to civilian life, Brennan is anything but stagnant. He’s a staff reporter at the Jacksonville Daily News in North Carolina, where he spends much of his time tracking down and sharing veterans’ stories. He founded a charity, Fog of War Inc., which aims to create a network of support and a place for veterans with psychological scars to share their experiences and work together to reduce the stigma associated with PTSD and other combat-related conditions.

And he’s writing a book on overcoming trauma with Finbarr O’Reilly, the embedded journalist he befriended in Afghanistan.

“It’s basically a story about overcoming combat and war and trauma,” Brennan said, “and trying to show people that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

The Vietnam Veteran

Jay Snyder arrived in Vietnam by ship in September 1965.

He remembers that, aside from the initial settling in period, he and his men fought nonstop the entire time he was in country. As much as anything, what sustained him was the anticipation of letters from a young woman he’d never met.

Jay Snyder arrived in Vietnam in September 1965 and he and his men fought nonstop the entire time he was in country. | Photo credit Jay Snyder

His sister, away at college, and a group of friends had begun writing letters to troops overseas. Snyder began corresponding with Jeanne Carson, his sister’s roommate. A friendship and the hint of something more built with each new letter sent and received.

When a mortar round sent shrapnel into Snyder’s back, he was sent home to a hospital in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Jeanne visited him there, and the relationship quickly became more than words on a page. They dated for nearly a year and married before she’d graduated college.

“I had always wanted to use those letters as the basis for writing a book,” he said. “I did some starts at it, and a lot of other kinds of things have happened in the meantime.”

He built a life with Jeanne, and they’ve been married now for nearly 47 years. In the 1970s, they adopted a son, a Vietnamese refugee named Thinh, who has worked in the communications department of the U.S. Senate for more than 20 years. He also has given Jay and Jeanne three grandchildren. The second grandchild, 8-year-old Jay, was born on his grandfather’s birthday.

Snyder’s time in the military wound down after a stint as a public relations officer for the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team. He went on to a career in Pennsylvania state government, where his writing skills were often put to use.

Later, his avocation became a second vocation and he held senior positions within the U.S. Tennis Association, including director of the national officiating program and director of the U.S. Open.

But little by little, his military experience crept back into his life. The opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial played a big part and he began to reconnect with his old brothers in arms.

Upon retirement, he rededicated himself to writing. When he learned about the Veterans Writing Project, he attended a weekend workshop and later had a piece published in the Veterans Writing Project’s quarterly literary journal, O-Dark-Thirty.

He drove to D.C. last year to participate in a weeklong seminar at George Washington University, staying in a dormitory and immersing himself in the writing life. The workshop offered training in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, playwriting and filmmaking.

Snyder joined the fiction program. For a week, Snyder and the other participants learned and wrote and shared ideas. At the end of the week, they all gathered together to show their films or read their plays or essays.

Snyder’s essay, Dog Tags to Death, came from very real memories of Vietnam.

“The biggest thing that week did for me was open a box in my head,” he said. “I’ve got pages of descriptive things. Each one is going to be a trigger for me that I need to tell a story.

“It was the enthusiasm that was present there and feeding off the energy of everybody else was the springboard and the impetus to come back and start writing.”

Jay Snyder and his wife Jeanne have been married for more than 47 years after starting their relationship with letters to and from Vietnam. | Photo credit Jay Snyder

‘I am a Writer’

The final chapter in Capps’ book Writing War is titled Your New Life as a Writer.

In it, he congratulates the students on their progress and gives them permission to quit saying that they want to be a writer and to finally say “I am a writer.”

The only caveat, of course, is that to maintain the status, one must write and write and write.

Capps offers a series of tips for fitting writing time into what might be an already full life with a job, a family and real-world responsibilities. This life requires sacrifices, he tells them, so be prepared. The first step is carving out an hour, or even a half hour, preferably around the same time every day and in the same place.

Capps’ workspace is his converted attic, where his laptop waits for him each morning beside a stack of books and beneath the sign that he reads day after day. His memoir, Seriously Not All Right: Five Wars in Ten Years, is scheduled for a May release.

He continues to publish the work of veteran writers in O-Dark-Thirty and the Veterans Writing Project has launched its own publishing house named BCG Books—a sly nod to the military’s standard-issue “birth control glasses.”

For those veterans whose desire it is to share their words with the masses, the Veterans Writing Project can help. For others, there is only the desire to find the words and bring them out of hiding.

After all, either you control the memory or the memory controls you.

To learn more about Veterans Writing Project, go to veteranswriting.org

–Derek Turner is a freelance writer and a former senior editor of On Patrol.