Veterans Tackle PTSD by Getting Their Thoughts on Paper

The seminars are open to veterans, service members and their adult family members. No distinction is made between vets who saw combat or those who, like Burton, served stateside.

Veterans pay it forward

Vets who, like Capps, have advanced writing degrees teach other veterans. More than 500 have had their stories published in the Veterans Writing Project’s literary journal, O-Dark-Thirty. 

Those authors include Jay Snyder, 77, who served in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966. During his deployment, as his unit fought nonstop the entire time he was in country, he began to correspond with his sister’s college roommate, Jeanne Carson.

The two married when he returned home and adopted a son, a Vietnamese refugee, who went on to work in the U.S. Senate.

Snyder himself held management positions in Pennsylvania state government and was director of officials for the U.S. Tennis Association. He was the chair umpire for nine Grand Slam finals and worked three Olympiads.

After retiring in 2002, he began to write more about his military experiences and eventually drove from his home outside Harrisburg to attend a Veterans Writing Project seminar in Washington, D.C.

 “At some point, you realize that you have to take down that box, that part of your life, and open it up,” Snyder says. “You cannot shove such memories, no matter how traumatic, away forever.”

At his seminar’s final session, Snyder was asked to read some of what he had written.

Even though he was used to speaking in front of groups, he admits to being “really emotional that time. Still, it was so rewarding to do it.”

Snyder’s essay, “Dog Tags to Death,” was later published in the project’s quarterly journal.

Writing expands to songwriting

After Capps began his program, he wrote the curriculum for the National Endowment for the Arts when it opened creative arts therapies for service members at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Fort Belvoir (Virginia) Community Hospital, both in the Washington area. Such Creative Forces clinical sites are now operating in 10 locations from Alaska to Florida.

Veterans Writing Project instructors regularly visit the capital-area clinics, working with recently wounded veterans. Students are urged to carve out time, even a half hour a day, to devote to their creative work and telling their own story.

After earning a master’s degree in writing at Johns Hopkins University, Capps turned to music as his next creative and healing outlet. Capps, who once attempted suicide himself, used the last of his GI benefits to take classes at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

This year the National Veterans Creative Arts Festival honored two of his songs, and he is scheduled to give the keynote address Nov. 2 at the Veterans Health & Wellness Conference in Austin, Texas. The Veterans Writing Project had its first songwriting workshop this year in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

“Think of a traumatic memory as something hot,” Capps says. “If you touch it, you get burned.”

When writing, art, dance or music is put “into the mix, it’s like putting a glove on,” he says. “We can pick up, hold, shape, manipulate the memory rather than having it control us. I got my stories out of my mind and onto the page as a way of gaining control of them. I do the work with the VWP as a way of giving those skills to others."