Art Saves Lives: The Fire Within by J.G.P. MacAdam

We admire stoics. Those who bear the wounds of this life in venerable silence. The grandfather or uncle who never spoke of their wartime experiences, for instance. We might pity stoics, too. Those who never found a voice of their own—the words, the ability, the opportunity to speak their truth.

Within myself, I’ve already blasted away the stoic walls: I write, I discuss, I speak, though I have not always done so. In fact, I often resisted identifying as a Veteran at all. How did I open up? Where did I find my voice?

It was perhaps pivotal that from a young, young age, I drew, I painted, I sculpted. More than one family member expected I’d grow up to be a visual artist of some sort. I dabbled in writing as well, filling entire notebooks. Once upon a time, an English teacher pulled me aside and said they really liked the short story I had written. Another had me present a funny little play with talking crows in it to the whole class. And then… I didn’t.

I didn’t sculpt.

I didn’t paint.

I didn’t sketch.

I didn’t write.

No one told me to quit. No adult told me that I would someday need a real job. No one ever pointed at any story or artwork of mine and said, Not good enough. I was the one who told myself that. Only me. Teachers, parents, counselors spouted words in my direction like art school and scholarship and portfolio. They might as well have been talking about the moon.

Art comes from a vulnerable place. You create something, write something, you expose a part of yourself, inner tissue, the soft pinkness within.

Between freshman and sophomore years, I sat on a stool in the basement of some artsy-fartsy summer camp birthing out of clay a giant hand in the mold of Auguste Rodin. I agonized over every knuckle, every vein, every line across the palm, until it was, finally, perfect. I let the greatest single piece of art I’d ever created in my short adolescent life dry and at the end of the summer took it home, unsure what to do with it, only glad, at the time, that it simply existed. Until, that is, some months later, when in a fit of teenaged angst—who knows what set me off—I stomped out of the rental house we were living in at the time, to the garage, where I picked up my giant Rodin hand, aimed it at the concrete floor, and swung it down.

Dismembered fingers.

Severed wrist.

Dust.

I had no idea what to do with myself. What does an eighteen-year-old dropout and chronic runaway tell themselves? You tell yourself: you need a job, you need money. You need to be able to take care of yourself, because—if your life so far has proven anything, kiddo—no one else is going to.

I burned my bridges. I ran away, again and again, on repeat, until I ran all the way into the U.S. Army where I buried that creative impulse so deep, anyone who met me, spoke with me, shared barracks rooms with me, or even served under fire with me, never knew of this special, elemental ember within.

It began with a prayer. To no one, really. I don’t pray. And yet, rereading it decades later, what else could it have been but a form of invocation? A hope that someone somewhere might answer?

After my first combat deployment, I burned in a little bonfire beside a Pennsylvania creek every notebook I’d ever so much as jotted a sentence in. I told myself I wasn’t a child anymore. I’d proven it, hadn’t I? All this childhood art stuff wasn’t a part of me anymore… or so the twenty-something version of myself thought.

Art comes from a vulnerable place. You create something, write something, you expose a part of yourself, inner tissue, the soft pinkness within. I chose, instead, to wear a mask, a shield, a cloak of invisibility, a uniform. I suppose I wanted to become an exemplary stoic—unflinching in the face of fire, of atrocity, uncomplaining, hopelessly bound to my job, to duty. I wanted to burn every spark of sensitivity out of me—the part of me that felt anything at all.

Certainly, other soldiers did, and do, manage to share their creative, self-expressive sides. In every infantry platoon, there’s always one person who knows how to shred a guitar. At least one skilled with brush or aerosol can (many of the murals decorating T-barriers across Iraq and Afghanistan were testament to this). More than a few openly composed lyrics, rap ballads, prose and poetry.

But not me.

I never sketched any platoon logo for my superior’s approval. Never snapped shots of the sunset over the mountains. I wrote more award citations and counseling statements than anything so much as remotely resembling creative expression. In what you could call the oppressively un-private life of a rank-and-file soldier, as a sergeant, I kept this one burning part of myself—arguably the most vital part—absolutely locked up. I didn’t want this, this heartwood of mine, exposed, judged, hurt.

In time, I forgot it was even there.

Until something happened. It began with one horrible little poem. More of a series of secret diary entries, at night, within the intimate glow of my laptop in my hooch. I had been watching a movie with my earbuds in; trying to unwind from the events of the day; to forget, for a little while, the persistent crappy news of a mean little war, the casualties, the loss. It began with a few words. No intention whatsoever of anyone discovering these pathetic lines. It began with a prayer. To no one, really. I don’t pray. And yet, rereading it decades later, what else could it have been but a form of invocation? A hope that someone somewhere might answer?

cool mountain sparks anger
unlikely truth likens to falsehood
clear lines obfuscate reason
one must further purpose in danger

One horrible little poem became months’ worth of diary entries; ramblings; recordings of daily existence on a dusty, impromptu base; details of our operations; the contradictions, absurdities, howls of hope, fear, despair, sheer aggression exploding out of my mind.

And the rest, as they say, is history…

My motivations for writing have certainly morphed over time. Nowadays, I feel a responsibility to speak up, to express, to extol what truth I’m able to. Short stories, personal essays, drafts of novels—I write, I talk, I speak. Time helps—distance between this self and the one before, between what you do now and what you did then. Hope helps, too.

My hope came from a few lines typed into a laptop one night in my hooch. It was that creative impulse which I had learned to tap into at a young, young age reigniting itself. My own little fire within. When I most needed it, it was there. As though, in a child’s voice, saying What took you so long?