Vets shred uniforms to heal through art?

There are things we do in life that may feel good at the moment but we end up regretting them after. Like having sex with a stranger is powerful, feels good at the moment, later comes regret. You can't undo it later.

Too many veterans came back from Vietnam believing if they got rid of their medals, if they burnt their uniforms, if they got rid of every reminder about Vietnam, the ghost would just go away and leave them alone. That didn't happen.

Nothing worked because the wrong things were done in an attempt to heal the soul and mend the heart.

I met a friend for coffee a couple of days ago and he's an example of how something like turning memories of Iraq or Afghanistan, or any other war, into something else, ends up turning them into someone else for a very short time.

He came home from Vietnam, put his papers, medals, uniform and pictures into a steel trash can. He poured lighter fluid on them and watched them burn. He took the cooled ashes and put them into the soil where he planted a garden. He thought that if he took something he viewed as ugly in his life and turned it into something beautiful, everything would be wonderful again. He was wrong.

The flowers grew but he didn't know how to take care of them right and they died soon after they blossomed. They never had a chance because the soil didn't have what it needed to sustain life and he added nothing to it like proper watering, didn't add fertilizer or even pull weeds. Everything he thought was wrong about his time in combat, serving as a draftee, was still inside of him just as it was in the soil.

My friend sank deeper into despair and soon his family fell apart. He felt lost for years until someone finally told him what he needed to know.

There was no need to get rid of a part of his life because everything in a person's life goes into what they are. All the good and bad are used for a purpose. The reason we were sent to live on this earth. It can break us if we look at it the wrong way. As if God did it to us instead of God gave us what we need to get through what other people did to us or mistakes we made in our own lives. My friend, like so many faced death in Vietnam. Because of the horrors he saw and the way he felt so ugly inside with rage boiling, he thought God had abandoned the whole earth. How could there be a God when all of this evil lived? How could there be any kind of a loving God when so many are blown to bits in a second. People who did nothing wrong except to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time?

It's a speech I've given to veterans a thousand times, but someone else told him what I've been trying to say as well but somehow this other "angel" got the message thru. I don't know the words used exactly or how they were delivered but it came down to, God was there in Vietnam, because he was.

People tend to look at destruction, evil, violence and the wrong mankind can do, then wonder where God is. They think if He exists at all, He must be evil and they don't want to know Him. They cannot see the goodness within themselves anymore. If they could, they would understand that goodness, that care and compassion within them causing them so much pain, came from God. How could they understand this if no one reminded them? The goodness inside of them couldn't have come from a God that was evil. God was in the midst of all that horror because my friend could still care.

God puts the soul within all of us no matter if we believe in Him or not, it's there inside of us. It makes some of us care deeply for other people and equipped with a tremendous level of courage to do what we have been sent to do. It's all there within us, but if we do not listen, do not allow ourselves to be guided and sustained, then we will not grow in the love we have been given. Much like the garden had all it needed to grow, it did not receive what it needed to thrive. It withered away. It became a snarled mess instead of a beautiful garden filled with flowers.

When we do not know much about God or view Him as evil, then we turn from Him and then we turn from ourselves. If we do not see that He sent caring people to give of themselves because there would be so many turning away because of their own freewill, then we cannot see any goodness at all.

My friend ended up getting the message and changed his mindset. He turned back to God, eventually saw the goodness within him and viewed his time in the hell of combat as a part of him. He cannot get back what he destroyed with his act but what he misses the most were the pictures of his friends. Some of them died there. He does find comfort knowing they live on in his heart.

Getting rid of reminders of our life does not remove them from our lives. Turning them into something else cannot be done by simply making them look like something else. They have to be changed from within. Otherwise it's just one more regret that cannot be undone.

Vets shred uniforms to heal through art

By Russ Bynum - The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Aug 6, 2009 11:48:18 EDT

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Tired of taking pills prescribed to suppress his pain, Zach Choate decided to wrestle head-on with the trauma that followed him home from Iraq. He began by using a razor to shred his Army uniform to bits.

“I’m hoping I come out of this a little more whole, a little bit more at peace,” said Choate, who was a gunner in the 10th Mountain Division. “I’m not an anti-war, anti-military person. This is just me fixing me.”

He chopped his camouflage jacket into inchlong strips. He diced the American flag patch on its right shoulder, along with a prescription for sleeping pills he found in a pocket. Even the Purple Heart ribbon Choate earned after being wounded by a roadside bomb got torn into tiny threads.

The 25-year-old soldier from Cartersville joined a handful of Iraq veterans at a Savannah art studio last week to destroy uniforms that had become painful reminders of their combat experience, using them to create something new.
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Vets shred uniforms to heal through art