By Kelly Black
Vietnam, 1967.
A world of split-second—life or death—decisions. This time the decision involves the life of a 12-year old boy riding a water buffalo.
The buffalo is charging the wire fence perimeter 20-yards from where three marines hunker in the mud.
Did the brown cloth bag slung around the boy’s neck contain rice balls or hand grenades?
“Dung lai, dung lai,” a marine yells. Stop.
Ten feet, five feet, two feet from the wire.
The marines shoulder their weapons.
Desperate, the marine screams, “Toi se ban! I will shoot!”
The boy whips the buffalo with his bamboo cane and the beast steps into the wire.
Skip Nichols, a veteran of Vietnam, first told his story about the boy on the water buffalo to a group of veterans at a Red Badge class at the Walla Walla Public Library. The Red Badge Project helps veterans work through PTSD, anxiety and depression by teaching them the art of story telling. In part, the process works because although veterans cannot control what happened to them in the past, they discover they can control the message of what happened to them.
“That’s the heart of storytelling, being able to control the message,” said Shawn Wong, professor of screenwriting at the University of Washington and founding faculty member of the Red Badge Project.
Six years ago Wong began teaching Red Badge workshops at Joint Base Lewis McCord for active duty soldiers who were in the process of transitioning out of the army. The trauma they experienced was very recent, in some cases just a few months old.
Unlike army therapy, no one was writing in a file. It was not recorded.
Still, nobody wanted to write about combat.
When teaching storytelling, Wong uses various writing prompts and the assignments tend to be sequential. He starts with something really benign and easy to write, like: “What keeps you up at night?” or “What drives you insane?”
One student, a helicopter pilot, had spent half his life in the military. As a pilot, everything has to be done in a very precise way—if you do something wrong, people can die. Then you transition to civilian life and are bothered by the fact that some kid walks by you with his shirt untucked or that your son left the top off the peanut butter jar on the counter. And you can’t cope with the chaos.
“So part of it, is not telling your most serious, traumatic story of your life but just being able to say, it is not important that some kid has his shirt untucked or that the Starbucks barista spelled my name wrong,” said Wong.
Sometimes, when Wong talks to active duty soldiers and mentions stuff like the peanut butter jar and the shirt untucked, they look at him like, “How did you know?”
Wong likes to have fun in his workshops.
“People shouldn’t expect that because they brought a notebook and a pen to class that it is like school,” Wong said.
There is a lot of laugher. Whether it is telling jokes or commiserating about common life experiences, laughter helps make the room feel safe.
“When you have a classroom full of soldiers they share a common experience,” Wong said. “They also support each other in a different way.”
It becomes safe for their stories to exist on the page.
Wong’s writing philosophy is three-fold.
First, he tells his students to tell the truth not the facts. He does not want them to get wrapped up in just telling a factual story.
Next, he tells them to write down what they are trying to understand not what they already know.
One soldier had a bomber detonate a suicide vest right in front of him and he spent an entire year in a hospital. Three days after he got blown up, he got word that his father had died of cancer. He had been slated for a home visit.
When asked if he wanted to write about getting injured in Afghanistan, the soldier said no. He wanted to write a story about sitting at his father’s bedside telling him the things he had planned to tell his dad on that scheduled visit home.
“No one can deny that that particular story, even though it is fictional, is not the truth,” Wong said. “That is actually what I am reaching for as a teacher.”
The soldier began to understand the healing nature of being able to tell his father—though his story—what he never got the chance to say.
The final tenant of Wong’s writing philosophy might be the most important: you can’t control what happened to you but you can control the message of what happened to you.
One time after class, a student handed Wong a piece of paper with a single paragraph written in pencil. It stated that her father sexually abused her from the age of nine until she left home.
She said to Wong, “I have never written that down, ever. You are only the third person to know.”
To which Wong replied, “Why did you write it?”
She said, “Because you told me I could control the message of what happened to me.”
After returning from Vietnam, Nichols tried to write some snippets about Vietnam, including the story about the boy and the water buffalo, but the process was so stressful he finally quit.
“I didn’t know how to get it out in a form in which I could feel dignity and not shame,” said Nichols.
So he put them away and shut the door. But the memories put a lot of pressure on him.
Once he started writing at a Red Badge class it felt like a big burden had been taken off his shoulders.
Nichols remembers the first time he read a story he wrote about a traumatic incident from Vietnam in class.
“The comfort I felt in that group setting was palpable to me,” said Nichols.
Nichols hopes that other veterans will give the Red Badge workshops a try.
“Even if they are screaming and kicking, I would like for them to come to class and learn that there are others who feel the same things,” said Nichols.
Nichols took the stage at the Gesa Power House theatre last August to read his story about the boy and the water buffalo to an audience of primarily non-veterans.
Concluding, Nichols read, “I was 19, serving with the Third Marines, when we killed the boy riding the water buffalo. It happened during my first week in the war. We later learned the boy had been mentally handicapped since birth and simply wanted chocolate, like the kind we gave out when we were on patrol.”
In the audience that night, were people who had been staunchly against the war in Vietnam. In a later conversation they told Nichols that his story helped them understand what he, and other veterans, had endured as 19-year olds making decisions in a theatre of war.
Although it is a painful story to share, Nichols found tremendous freedom from the experience.
“I’ve been to counseling. The VA has given me all sorts of drugs,” Nichols said. “But I don’t think there is anything as powerful as these writing classes.
The next Red Badge classes will be held at the Walla Walla Public Library on March 30, March 31, April 6, April 7, April 13 and April 14. Friday classes are from 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m., and Saturday classes are held from 10-12 p.m. and 1-3p.m. Veterans are welcome to come to one or all classes. For registration details call Beth Hudson at 524 4433, your VA health team or the Vet Center at 509 526 8387.