“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” -Aeschylus
The Marine was in his mid-twenties when he entered my photo lab at the Wounded Warrior Battalion West onboard Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, California.
“I have to sit in a corner so I can have eyes on the room at all times,” he said, staring intently at me.
“The room is filled with your brother Marines,” I said.
“I don’t care who they are, I trust nobody,” he told me as he dragged a chair into the far corner of the lab.
After he almost quit the class and then had some major emotional setbacks, the Marine began making surprisingly brilliant photographs. “When I’m taking pictures, I feel no pain anymore,” he told me as he kept clicking away.
This is how it goes at Camp Pendleton in the “f-Stop Warrior Project,” a program I launched two years ago to teach photography to returning Marines suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
The surprise, the magic really, is that studying photography has helped warriors returning from multiple combat deployments focus on something outside of themselves, something beyond their anxiety and fear, something positive and healing. Many of these Marines find themselves unable to express their feelings in words. Yet when I give them a camera and teach them the basics of photography, they create amazing pictures that subliminally speak about their current emotional state. They begin to feel heard, understood. They begin to heal.
The f-Stop Warrior Project requires students to create their images off base, part of helping them move back into the civilian world. As they succeed, even excel, as creative photographers and as their images improve, they begin to view that “other world” as a less hostile, alien place.
Leaving the Marines and transitioning back into the civilian world can be daunting at best for the issues these warriors confront are multifold. But for those suffering from PTSD, reentering the “real world” is often extremely difficult and takes time. It has become clear to me and to those at Camp Pendleton’s Wounded Warrior Battalion West that digital photography has allowed these wounded warriors to be good at something immediately and has provided them an important – even life saving – new way to communicate.
Because of their injuries these warriors, who have given their lives to the Marines for the most part since the age of 17 or 18, will be medically retired from the Marines. They are often at a loss of what to do, what’s next, what they can look forward to. After finishing the f-Stop Warrior Project’s 12-week session, they leave with a new skill, a new confidence. Hopefully, some will even turn it into a livelihood following further study, such as my reluctant student who sat in the corner.
The fact is the work of my warriors is very good. They are “naturals” with a camera. Perhaps this is partly because these young Marines have grown up in the digital world with smart phones, computers and the Internet. Having looked at photos, text messages, movies and books through a frame since childhood, they come to my class with a strong sense of the compositional elements of a good photograph.
Camp Pendleton, which is home to 42,000 young macho men and women in camouflage uniforms, can prove intimidating to a socialist, pacifist, draft dodging, leftover hippie like myself. Until January 2013, the closest I had ever come to our military was trying to place flowers down the gun barrels of the Army soldiers when I joined Abby Hoffman’s attempt to levitate the Pentagon in 1967.
When I arrived at the Battalion in 2013, the Gunny Sergeant staff (who really run the Battalion and make the United States Marines work) reveled in giving me endless amounts of grief about my long hair and clothes. A retired Marine told me this was a good sign (“If they didn’t like you, they wouldn’t even be talking to you.”) Encouraged, I began giving it back to them. When they call me “hippie” and make insinuations about my “manliness,” I call them “a bunch of sissy little schoolgirls.” They love it.
Using humor in my photography class has brought us closer. These days I get hugs from the warriors (the motto: “keep it brief and don’t move your hips”) and am frequently called “brother,” another sign I am accepted as one of their own. There is, in fact, an immense amount of love and caring for the wounded and injured at the Battalion. It’s why I’m there.
My photography students are in pain a great deal of the time, both physically and mentally. They don’t talk about it that much; they will simply tell you if they are having a good day or a bad day. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a constant for many of these men and women. PTSD has been described by some as the warrior’s shadow. It’s always there, all the time; it follows you day and night. There is no relief from it. One of the tasks our wounded warriors bear is to learn to live with their “shadows.”
In the past two years, we have proved that the f-Stop Warrior Project has supported the recovery of wounded warriors, significantly reduced their symptoms of PTSD, and speeded up their transition back to civilian life.
Working with America’s warriors has changed my life and I have learned a lot from them. After all, any teacher, if he is really any good, learns in equal parts from his students. The Marines have taught me the true meaning of honor, of courage, of commitment. Hopefully, I have helped them heal their wounded bodies and souls as they begin to explore the world through a new magical lens – the lens of digital photograph
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Terence Ford is a professional photographer with a background in media production . His program, fStop Warrior Project, is supported by the fStop Foundation, whose mission is to support military veterans and first responders in Santa Barbara County thru the restorative power of learning digital photography.