The Duality

I live with a duality regarding my service in Iraq. On the one hand, I am wildly proud to have worn a Desert Camouflage Uniform (DCU) and, later in that deployment, the god-awful, ugly Army Combat Uniform (ACU). On the other hand, I feel conflicted about my participation in a war I never fully agreed with. We were attacked and wanted blood. Any blood. It’s also very easy for me to look back with jaded eyes and dissect politics and policies that have long since become irrelevant. At the time, none of that really mattered. Right or wrong, my duty was to serve, and our country was at war. Hindsight may give me the perspective I didn’t have then. The privilege of surviving that war has likely given me time to tune in to the static that has set in with the compounding of years. I’m lucky to be able to wrestle with it.

Dissonance is a word I picked up in one of the few counseling sessions I did at a local Vet Center before my counselor quit. It is defined as a tension or clash resulting from combining two disharmonious or unsuitable elements. In music, it denotes a lack of harmony in notes, and as someone who grew up playing in metalcore bands, we lived on dissonant notes to create tension. It also summed up my military service perfectly. I’ve glommed on to that phrase because it so succinctly illustrates the war for me. I’m proud I deployed during my generation’s war. I worry that history will continue to show it as a war on false pretenses.

The thing is, none of that stuff mattered at the time. Sure, the leap from 9/11 to Iraq was blurry at best, but we all bought the propaganda about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and wanted to do our part. Was any of it true? I don’t know. Would I do it all again? Probably. Again, dissonance. This tension lives inside of me, and as I age, it only resonates louder. I don’t know what to do with it, other than try to sort it all out with words scrawled on computer screens riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.

We’re told to tell our stories as a way to process complex emotions. The “experts” say that journalling helps. Talking with professionals or other veterans also seems to lessen the mental ambiguity of the Global War on Terror at times. During another attempt at receiving VA counseling, I enrolled in a six-week Narrative Therapy program which was a new approach for them at the time. The doctor had me take one event from Iraq and hand-write it out in as much detail as I could.

Each week, for the remainder of our sessions, I’d write about that event from every conceivable angle. He’d ask me leading questions and then leave me to my devices for thirty minutes or so to write in my spiralbound notebook. What did it smell like? Why did it affect me so much? What was happening surrounding that event, etc? By the end of our sessions, I had somewhere around thirty or forty handwritten pages about a bridge near Baghdad, and the kicker is that it was just one event of many, but they forced me to just pick one, and it seemed an obvious choice.

(You can read about the event in an article here: https://havokjournal.com/culture/military/the-bridge/)

I can’t say it helped a whole lot, but it got that story out of my brain and on the page. The nightmares intensified during that process, but after a while, they became less and less. I saw the value in purging my brain of the traumas and triumphs alike as a way to clear my brain’s cache. Just like a slow hard drive on the computer, the more I was able to free up, the more I was able to operate at a more optimal level. Writing isn’t a cure-all by any means, but as someone whose brain seems to run like a cracked-out gerbil in a rusty wheel, it helps me slow the pace and work through the issues methodically.

I’ve used writing weekly as a discipline to both strengthen my resolve as a writer and hopefully help me become a better person. Time will tell on both accords. What I do know is that that errant note that still won’t resolve finds harmonic resonance from time to time in a well-crafted phrase in an article, and it makes it all make sense. So, if you’re like me and wrestle with the nuances of military service and are trying to make sense of things that often don’t have easy answers, put pen to page.

Start writing your story. Be vulnerable and bleed on the page. You don’t have to publish it—at least not at first. It could be just for you. But, in my experience, I’ve learned that what I thought were unique ideas in my fractured brain seem to resonate more universally than I could have imagined before I started sharing these thoughts online. Just know you’re not alone, and the thoughts you’re grappling with may be the key to unlocking doors to your healing—or others—once they’re out in the wild and on the page.

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**This article was originally published on Feb 4, 2025 by the Havok Journal.

You can find many of my musings on the war and military things at this link: https://havokjournal.com/author/stan-lake/

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