More Tyler Boudreau, from "Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine," on why he writes:
They live inside the narrative like a cell, and their only escape is to understand its dimensions. Once you get it, maybe you can start tearing down the walls. Every soldier’s mind is different. There is no single code to break. It’s ever-changing. I don’t have a recipe, but there’s one thing I do know, and that is the power of the narrative. Put the story together. Understand the story. Ask questions of the story; make it answer you. Make it. You don’t take no for an answer. You keep building that narrative until the answer comes around. That’s the low road out of hell."
Okay, the low road out of hell: Maybe. It's not the first time someone's thought that telling their story -- just getting the words down on paper -- would have curative powers. Read another Marine captain, Nate Fick's, essay for Powells, the great used book store in Portland, Oregon, about why he wrote "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer." See other veterans from other eras -- for example Claude Anshin Thomas, who wrote At Hell's Gate: a Soldier's Journey from War to Peace -- as they grapple with the narrative, to pull themselves to safety -- or sanity. See and feel the way they fight for it, with every breath, with every word on the page. The same goes for the veterans who are the authors and the poets in Maxine Hong Kingston's anthology, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Many, many people feel...that this way lies redemption.
Or does it?
A little over a year ago, I was "gifted" with a narrative worthy of a Charles Dickens, if Charles Dickens had been to war. Forty years the combat veteran had spent, trying to crack his own case (of severe, combat-induced PTSD), trying to get it all down on paper. To make sense of it for himself, to make sense of it for his family. And 40 years is not an insignificant amount of time. He followed the narrative, all right; he clung to it like a rope. But you know what? All it did is lead him to the precipice of healing. It wasn't even the precipice itself. What it did do was, in a way, detail the exhausting of his options, and get him in touch with the many things he'd tried -- including, in his case, religion -- so that he could he could continue the search, this time going even deeper.
Ironically, and we had several conversations about this -- he never finished the narrative, even after 40 years. He didn't finish it, and he couldn't finish it -- we eventually agreed because it was his LIFE, and there was no real need to sum that up as though it was already over, because it wasn't. It, and he, were still very much "a work in progress." And there weren't any simple answers, that would put everything into perspective. Not for the combat veteran, not for his family either. It was a pretty good narrative of what he endured, and the sense he was able to make of it. But it was not in any way curative, though getting it down on paper was powerful, and compelling, and both moved his readers -- and himself. It moved his readers (including his family) towards empathy, or a better, deeper understanding of what he'd gone through. And it moved himself to continue going after the true prize, which was healing -- not just setting down what he had experienced. IF writing were truly curative, we'd see more mentally unbalanced, yet otherwise fabulous authors experience "the cure." (And one has only to think of the great Virginia Woolf, her pockets loaded with rocks, headed into the water to drown herself, to reflect on the apparent wisdom encoded in that statement.) What writing is, or can be, is deeply cathartic. What it isn't, is the actual "cure."
