Literary, War-Related

Excerpt from Farewell Darkness: A Veteran’s Triumph Over Combat Trauma

We all know PTSD feels like shit. In case you’re wondering, I still have PTSD. If you think just because I’m sitting center stage, I don’t have PTSD you’re wrong. I just don’t have it as bad as I used to. I’m not here to hold myself as a model – hell, I don’t know whether my PTSD is, or was, better or worse than any of yours is, or was. For all I know, I’m still the worst head case in this room.

I’m here to talk about…. Differences, because the difference between how I was and how I am has a name and I think the name is hope.

Ron Zaczek

Excerpt from Visions of War, Dreams of Peace

Crying
I’m doing it again
Crying
It doesn’t take much to set it off these days.
This time it was a letter from Joanne
With some of her poetry.
I tell myself it’s worse when I’m tired.
But that’s not so.
It’s when Iet myself feel
And remember.

Sara J. McVicker

Excerpt from The Things They Carried

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. You look away, and then back for a moment, and then you look away again. The pictures get jumbled. You tend to miss a lot. And then afterwards, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

Tim O’Brien

Excerpt from Visions of War, Dreams of Peace

I needed to find other women who knew what I knew and more. I needed to talk to women who had seen unspeakable things, who were without self-pity, who had faced the liars and the lunatics, who had survived all of it and in surviving made a difference.

Gloria Emerson