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Military

Former Pendleton Marine Shares His Combat Experience and PTSD in Book and Upcoming Film

Clint Van Winkle book
Clint Van Winkle book

You can leave war, but war never really leaves you. For Clint Van Winkle, a former Camp Pendleton Marine Sgt, there is at least one combat memory that still haunts him, a blurry but deeply disturbing vision of a single moment that Van Winkle still isn't sure was real or imagined.

It happened during a raging firefight in Nasiriyah, Iraq. Van Winkle and the others in his unit were attacked by insurgents from a nearby building. As they fired back into the building, for just a split second Van Winkle thought he saw a little girl who looked no older than ten getting hit by one of his bullets. But then the image of the little girl just disappeared.

"I don't know to this day if what I saw in that split second was even really there," he says. "It could have been a dog, it could have been anything, or nothing. But the image has stuck with me, for a long time."

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Van Winkle, a Marine Corps martial arts instructor and amphibious assault vehicle (AAV) section leader, was deployed to Iraq in 2003. His platoon was attached to Lima Company 3/1, which was a part of Regimental Combat Team 1 that fought in some of the bloodiest battles in the early days of the Iraq War. He describes the rampant violence and his reaction to it graphically and with total honesty in his book, 'Soft Spots: A Marine's Memoir of Combat and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.'

"There were dead bodies everywhere, including civilians, children, and constant firefights, it was out of control," recalls Van Winkle, who spent six months on that tour and who, like so many before him, came home a different man than the one who went off to war.

He had post-traumatic stress disorder, and he knew it. He had menacing flashbacks and deep anger issues and knew he could be a danger to himself or someone else. All he wanted to do was keep killing the enemy and blow stuff up. But it took several years before he decided to seek help."For a long time I just went to school, and drank a lot," says Van Winkle. "I was on the edge."

He continued to be haunted not just by the vision of that little girl, but by all the "butchery" he says he saw in Iraq. And he began writing about it. That prose turned into his book, which in its combination of compassion for and condemnation of his fellow Marines for some of the unthinkable things he saw some of them do, is unlike any other book I've ever read written by a Marine.

Above all a survival story, "Soft Spots" has been reviewed glowingly. The Washington Post writes, 'Nothing gets held back... lacerating honesty, the narrative is dreamlike and surreal, and The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. says the book 'gives voice to the thousands of forgotten soldiers returning home from Iraq, or those whose souls are still stuck there. He gives us his poor haunted head, only mapped out and numbered, and the effect will make you weep.'

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When he did finally decide it was time to get help, Van Winkle, who is married with no kids and lives in Phoenix, reached out to the Veterans Administration. But, he says, "They were cold, uncaring, just terrible. They asked bizarre, stupid questions, and I fought and fought just to be seen. It was all very degrading. When they finally diagnosed me with PTSD, they said come back in a month to see the psychiatrist. I've heard things have improved there since I was there. I hope so."

Van Winkle instead turned to the Vet Center, a part of the VA system but a separate entity. "It's kind of like the VA's bastard child," Van Winkle says with a laugh. "It's run by veterans, but it's more counselors and social workers and PhDs than psychiatrists. It works. They helped me."

He says the real turning point came when he met a therapist at the Vet Center named Joseph Little, a decorated Vietnam veteran who used EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) on Van Winkle. A controversial but increasingly accepted method of psychotherapy, EMDR has its champions an detractors, but studies suggest that it has been very successful in treating people who have suffered from traumatic events.

Writing about his experience, too, helped Van Winkle make the transition back. And he recently finished a film about it. Van Winkle is one of five war veterans chosen by the Brave New Foundation in Los Angeles to tell their war stories on film. Each of the five veterans attended a three-day filmmaking boot camp where they learned storytelling and film direction. Then they were handed a $7,500 stipend, a professional cameraman, and $10,000 for expenses. Van Winkle's film, titled "The Guilt," is a short documentary focusing on how two of his buddies conquered their demons, adjusted to the return to civilian life, and dealt with the phenomenon known as "survivor's guilt" after they lost a close friend in Iraq in 2005.

Despite his own lingering demons, Van Winkle has excelled since leaving the Marines. He attended Arizona State University and graduated with a B.A. in English in 2005 and then went on to earn an M.A. in Creative and Media Writing from Swansea University in Wales (U.K.). He now teaches English Composition classes at ASU, and is preparing for the Los Angeles premiere of his film on Nov. 9. a class at ASU. But his main objective now is to help his fellow veterans make the very difficult transition from the battlefront to the home front.

"I didn't talk about PTSD much at first, I told one or two close buddies, but I eventually came to realize that so many others have the same issues," he says. "You don't think much about it when you're there, there's just no time, it's just about staying alive. But when you come home, all the things you did and saw start coming back to you. That's the hard part, and I just want to help as many people as I can make it back."

Here's a preview of Van Winkle's forthcoming film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPCb9JwsorA