Prologue
Jake pulled into the schoolyard. I heard his truck door slam and glanced up as he sauntered over.
I hadn’t seen him since he’d returned from Iraq. “Hey, how’s it going?” I asked. We stood next to my SUV, watching our kids scamper across the playground. Jake’s son was six; mine was four—both blond and blue-eyed—reflections of our Scandinavian heritage.
“Good. What’re you up to these days?”
“Writing, full time. I just finished a novel.” I leaned on the open back passenger door, my two-year-old daughter sat in her car seat, nibbling a cookie, eyeing us carefully.
“What’s it about?”
“An American forensic scientist in Bosnia. She discovers the remains of two children who died hugging each other and becomes obsessed with finding their truth.”
Jake squinted in the afternoon sun and nodded. He’d served in Bosnia while I’d been living there.
“I wrote it for Bosnians actually, to remind them that despite their scars and everything they’ve been through, their souls are still beautiful.”
Jake’s sun-lined face fell silent. I wondered if he knew that his soul was still beautiful.
We watched our kids for a moment.
“So, how is it being back?”
“It’s tough.” Jake shifted his weight and stared off as his son climbed to the top of the slide.
“You know, if I could just get some sleep—I get three, four hours a night—if I’m lucky,” he glanced at the pavement, then back at me.
“Nightmares.”
I nodded. He didn’t have to say more.
“It’s just really hard for me to relate to people,” he whispered.
“It’ll take time.”
“Yeah. A lot of time.” He grinned half-way, took a breath and the fatigue poured out. Did he believe in time? He wore a positive attitude like a Boy Scout badge. It matched the smile on his lips. It didn’t match what I saw in his eyes.
Jake’s son ran up and hugged his dad’s legs, his eyes lighting up as he chatted away. Jake smiled and took the heavy backpack from his son’s small shoulders.
“We’ll see ya,” Jake said as they headed toward their truck.
Sadness sank into my chest.
He wasn’t anywhere close to home.
I’d seen him six months earlier when he’d been home from Iraq on leave and still had been himself: fun-loving, laughing, spirited, able to interact as if we hadn’t seen each other since prom. Now he was an old, old man. My age, thirty-one.
I drove home sobered by the realization that what I had just seen is what happens when we keep soldiers on the battlefield too long. That there is a line we cross, a day, a point in time, one second even, when a soldier kills one too many insurgents, lives through one too many near-deaths, watches one too many buddies get their face blown off. And is asked—no, ordered—to stay one day, just one day, too long.
Back at my house, I sat at the computer. Somewhere between being home on leave and coming home for good, Jake had crossed that line. His National Guard unit had been fighting in Iraq for a year and a half. His unit was scheduled to return to Minnesota in March. Much to the outrage of their families, they’re mission had been extended until July, a twenty-two month-long combat mission—at that point, the longest deployment of any military unit in Iraq. Jake had arrived home early due to a family emergency.
An email popped up on my inbox; I shut off the screen, uninterested in my day’s writing. The image of Jake, of what my soul recognized in him, threw me off center. It raised emotions I had dealt with and held back for years. The ravages of war. The price the soul pays. The unending questions that strip your nerves raw.
Jake and I were nine when we met. He grew up to be tough, loyal, strong, humorous, a well-loved platoon sergeant. The kind of guy who works twelve-hour days at his family business, volunteers at community clean-up and teaches his son to fish. Not the well-muscled man who’d stood next to me dangling from life’s edge. My strongest memory of Jake was playing ‘army’ as kids—me a bit of a tomboy and he an all-out military enthusiast—we’d line up bucket loads of little German and American army men in mounds of beach sand until the Americans fought and won Normandy. Then we’d line them up, fight, and win it again the next day and the day after that. We were addicted to old Combat! re-runs and John Wayne World War II flicks. As teenagers, Jake collected antique military gear and I fell in love with people dying in the Balkans. Jake joined the National Guard and at twenty-four, I headed to Sarajevo, married a Bosnian war survivor who was an Associated Press war correspondent—and lived and reported from a society that felt war’s wounds deeply. I knew that haunted look. I knew what it felt like to have the ravages of war steal your soul. I’d almost lost mine.
I returned to America when we were at the height of our own war. Time, distance, a new baby—it took over two years just to begin to feel that wholeness could be possible. To rise above the murky waters of incredible suffering my husband, family, colleagues and every single person I had met in Bosnia had endured, to find solid ground to climb up on and catch my breath. To rest. And wait. And rest. And watch as life continued to breathe through me, in and out, until, slowly, I regained consciousness.
I woke to realize that what I had been through in a post-war society, the questions I had lived, were ones my generation and our parents were just beginning to ask. Questions that war presents, but does not answer. True, the Iraq war was not mine; not in the emotional sense that Bosnia had been. I don’t know Iraq intimately like I know the streets of Sarajevo or to avoid landmines in Bosnia’s hills. The conflict there in Europe ended over a decade ago. For many, it’s long forgotten, ‘old news.’ But what war does to the soul is not.
War transcends time, space, place, societies. It bridges cultures, race, religion—it is, perhaps, one of the most fundamental experiences that unites humanity. Survivors, veterans, anyone who has had war touch their lives knows its mark, can trace the scar tissue over its incision, can feel the instant bond when eyes meet: “you were there, you know a part of me that no one else, but the two of us, can know.”
As my husband, Sasha, likes to say: “You had to be there, to know.”
I haven’t been to war or lived through it. I’m not a survivor. So how can I write this book, you ask? And why should you read it? It’s true, I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t have a PhD behind my name. What I offer you is my experience as a human being whose life journey has taken me into depths few civilians have ventured—life in a post-war zone. I’ve lived in the aftermath of war, in the devastation that haunts a country and survivors for a lifetime. I live with and love a survivor. For years, I listened carefully and compassionately to survivors talk about their war experiences and faced their pain with them. I learned to discern when to gently ask questions and when silence and a hug were most needed. I learned that listening and non-judgment are often the greatest contributors to healing and that the act of sharing pain can break the isolation emotional trauma so often induces. As a journalist, I wrote about the remains of war until my heart bled, fought back tears recounting one too many mass graves, and learned the intricacies and surprising resilient nuances that human beings develop in response to war. I know survivors. I know the dead. I know fate’s shadow, the thin, thin line we walk on and the abyss on each side.
And I know what war has done to my soul.
The emotional and soul wounds that war inflicts are universal, but finding your way to a healing journey is not. Many are searching for this path. I have been blessed to have had enough personal exposure to the devastation of war to have had my own soul forever altered, and then to have been given the grace to find a measure of healing—or, perhaps better put, a new sense of wholeness. I am very humbled to have the honor of offering you what I have learned and, in some sense, to walk with you on your journey.
This book isn’t meant to replace the wisdom and training of healthcare practitioners—although I hope that it will find its way as a companion to such care. I truly respect and cherish the work of licensed practitioners, and I know that they offer healing guidance and answers that truly make a difference. Sometimes, though, it helps to read advice from those who aren’t “experts” and, more often than not, in my own journey, it has been “regular people” who have appeared in my life to offer the guidance I most needed. They shared their humanity with me, had the courage to offer their own opinions, and freely gave the gifts of insight and guidance that the Universe had taught them. That’s what this book is all about. It is simply a personal conversation with you. Born out of deep love and care for those who have survived war and those who love them.
Strangely enough, I hadn’t planned to write this book. I didn’t think I had the right to say anything. But when I saw Jake and his son I knew I had to. I had to share what I had learned and the path to renewed meaning that I had found. I had to stand up and say something. Not just for war survivors, but for their children. For the next generation who will now grow up affected by war’s ocean-spanning tentacles. For the children who have endured countless nights crying for daddy or mommy, facing a child’s ultimate fear—that mommy or daddy will never come back. Of course, they don’t understand everything that’s happening, but they know their parents are brave people who fight for freedom. They know that, everyone tells them that, but all they really want is for mommy or daddy to come home. To be okay again.
That’s why our hardest battle is yet to be fought. The battle to find wholeness, to not feel shattered into a million little pieces, to someday believe in good again. We have to reach down inside ourselves and know beyond a doubt, regardless of the darkness we’ve created or endured, that underneath it all—our souls are beautiful.
Because your soul is still beautiful.
And your life has just begun.
As you read this book, know that you are held close in the Universe’s loving embrace—that there is unlimited grace, abundance and compassion for you. You may not feel it now, but that doesn’t change it. It’s there.
This book is designed to be read in short spans. Many war survivors find they have shortened attention spans and sometimes have difficulty reading and processing information at length. Feel free to jump in, read a few paragraphs, skip around. Revisit the pages that have meaning to you. If something seems irrelevant, or you disagree, skip it. If you never finish, that’s fine, too. This book is for you. To say what you may not be able to say. To help you give yourself the words for what you are experiencing, what you may want to share with others, and some straightforward advice and suggestions for dealing with it. It’s also for caring family, friends, and healthcare practitioners who want insight into what life after war is like—and real-life advice for how to approach it and how to help.
You’ll find at the end of each chapter a section called “Voices”—where veterans have shared their stories and experiences with you. Following each chapter, there are two blank pages, called “What’s Running Through My Mind Now”—use those to write down your thoughts, make notes or give voice to what you are holding inside.
Click Here to Read the First Chapter
