The Making and Unmaking of a Marine is now on Amazon

The long wait for my book to hit amazon is over. If you would rather give amazon the 60% instead of my publishing company Millrock Collective then you may find my book on the big book seller. If you'd like to help the smaller publisher you can get The Making and Unmaking of a Marine on my website makingandunmaking.com I welcome all feed back.

Larry

Poems Can Heal

There is a chapbook that was just published by Vietnam vet named Dayl Wise. There are 18 vets that have written poems including Dayl. The title of the book is Post Traumatic Press 2007 poems by veterans. It can be purchased by emailing dswbike@aol.com. I have several poems in it and of course highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding what war does to human beings.
Poem

When a man kills another man
he must dig two graves.
One in the earth for the dead man.
One in his heart for his spirit,
or he will not return.

Larry Winters

Homeless Vets

This past Wednesday I spoke at Montrose VA in Peekill NY. The topic was homeless veterans. There were sixty people there many from the Montrose staff including homeless vets, who by the way asked several questions, and made some important statements about there personal plight. There were also folks there from the VVA and other veteran related organizations in the community. The talk went well, my main focus was helping them to role reverse with the vet in order to understand them better when they show up in their offices unwashed, drug addicted, and angry that at once time they offered their lives for this country. Here is a little of what I said, “Yes we have a volunteer army; these men and women did sign up. Did they know the truth about what they were getting into? No. Nor did we. And yet the revelations since then has not slowed down the number of jobless volunteers enlisting. So what would support to our returning soldiers look like? To start with, let's acknowledge that they offer the ultimate - their lives. This deserves the highest honors we civilians can bestow: Care, concern and acceptance when they come home.

War is a powerful initiation. No one comes back from it the way they left. We must accept this and stop expecting to see the same young people we sent off to war return home. Their wounds, both physical and psychological, have altered them. These changes need to be integrated and healed so veterans can find productive roles in society.

Our veterans are more than soldiers who served. They are our warriors who protected our country. In today's high-tech gigabit world there is a danger in seeing our soldiers as little more than "war-bits." It becomes easy to forget that a human being is holding the joy stick in a M1 Abrams tanks and that the video feed is a killing field. Video games can be turned on and off. In war, when the power switch is turned off it's never turned back on.”

It was my experience that many at the VA are folks who are working hard with an overload of clients; they show interest in trying to understand the perspective of the vets they serve.

At the end of the workshop one of the administrators approached me about buying my book “The Making and Unmaking of a Marine”, she agreed to supply her staff with books. This of course made my day selling ninety book warmed my heart and opened my mind to seeing that here were folks that had a true interest in hearing what returning soldiers feel. If you haven’t read the book yet please put your order in the website is makingandunmaking.com

The New Website makingandunmaking.com

I want to say a little about the incredible support I have been getting from my friend Mike from www.HillsideAS.com. He has worked tirelessly on the site. His belief in helping the Veterans cause goes beyond the call of duty. Mike is also one of the actors in the play I have written titled “Nothing Means Nothing.” We have done one animated reading at Pumpkin Hollow NY for Soldiers Heart organization and are hoping to perform the play in January 2008. It is only with the help of folks like Mike that we can get the message out that vets need support, honor and our concern when they return from war. I raise my arm in a sharp salute to Mike for his commitment to caring for the pains of war. If you have the opportunity please check out the new website at makingandunmaking.com.

Larry

The Military Oath Soldiers Take

"I Larry Winters do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

I have been thinking about the above military oath I took Oct 3, 1970 when I joined the United States Marines. Right now for the first time in my life I started wondering what oath did the citizenry I was protecting from communist insurgents take. If born in the US the answer is none, if you applied for citizenship here there is an oath you must take.

Then I started wondering if oaths were commitments that people still took seriously? Historically oaths were solemn statements that had to do with the truth, allegiance, promises, honor, ethics and the preservation of life. May oaths invoked a divine witness. As I contemplated this question of oaths I thought that maybe I’d missed the oath I was supposed to have taken as a young US citizen, my education was quite lackluster and maybe I was out the day we studied citizen oaths. Or was it as simple as the US constitution was the oath we all were given to live by. Maybe I never really understood that this was a deep commitment that should guide my personal life and behavior. Doing some research on this topic I found that there is no citizen oath for those born here in the US. I also found that there was a citizen oath in ancient Grease called the Athenian Ephebic Oath. The next installment with start with the Ephebic Oath. Comment Welcome

How to Speak with Vets

I was asked by my friend Ed Tick author of WAR AND THE SOUL to give him some of my thoughts on a chapter he is working on in his new book, the chapter title is “How to Speak with Vets”

“How to Speak with Vets”

No one can speak to vets if they haven't listened to vets. The kind of listening is with more then the ears and mind, it is what you Ed Tick might call soul listening. Many can hear the facts, assess the circumstances and analyze the difficulty and then come up with a game diagram, program or treatment plan. It is the unusual listener who has taken the time needed to hear why soldiers can’t talk about war. If one has listened long enough, opened themselves enough, they may learn to pick up the subtle tones of the oblique tenor of war. It is also important to understand what is being said in the punctuating silences. Souls speak to each other in many ways other than words. Silences’ are often the most articulated statements and if heard as simply empty moments one has missed the message. Taking time, tolerating silences, waiting, witnessing, and staying in the room, are tools a vet therapist needs to know well. It has so much more to do with not speaking then speaking. If the vet feels heard, if a vet feels safe, if a vet feels not judged, if a vet feels honored, he may let you speak to him.

Ed the part that you may not be able to see could be honor. You do honor vets. Honor is a shape sword and cuts through many layers of the “Gordian Knots” of war. It is one of the strands of brotherhood that soldiers have between them. It is a doorway that civilians are allowed through. Honor is part of the fabric of identity. Please let me know how you might feel about how this subject.

Hard Question

I spoke at a Veterans for Peace conference this past Saturday. My talk was about PTSD and how it is as much a society disorder as it is an individual disorder. Most of the folks in the audience were hard core fighters for peace, sprinkled in were a few vets for peace. Many of these folk seemed to have a bit of a hard time finding compassion for vets. a Comment that was made in the question answer session at the end was, "Why should I thank the vets for what they did, when I did not send the to war? I did not vote for the politicians that sent them."
I must admit this was not an easy question to address. What I said was, you are a member of the society that sent these men and women to war. You may not have voted for those who sent them but this does not excuse you from the responsibility for there care and healing when they come home. If history repeats its self returning vets have shown up in high number in the homeless population, in the addicted population, in our homes with incident of domestic violence. You and I as members of this society are paying with our dollars for this social unrest. We may not have voted to have a crack addict rob our home but it happens.