I step off the elevator on the ninth floor of Milwaukee’s Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center. It’s where the long-term and palliative care units are located. The nurses often give me tips about patients who might want to tell their stories. I find one -- a Navy veteran -- and introduce myself. There’s a stuffed animal on the bed table. A turtle. “I love turtles,” I say. He lights up and responds: “Then I love you!”
I sit and ask him about his life. He developed Type 1 diabetes while still in the service and describes his awful experiences needing dialysis while away from home. But he also shares a sweet anecdote about the time his wife attended graduate school in another city; they would meet in New York over Thanksgiving weekend and watch the Macy’s parade floats be inflated the night before the holiday. I think of him every Thanksgiving eve.
I’m a poet and writer. Before retirement, I spent 25 years at the Milwaukee Health Department writing orders to correct food safety violations. I discovered the My Life, My Story program in 2018. Staff at the VA or volunteers like myself interview veterans about their lives and the resulting stories are included in the patient’s medical record.
Patients find it’s healing to have someone’s undivided attention and then a written story about their lives. And the stories offer providers insight and points of connection that might never be discovered in routine visits. It can be a portal to better care.
Catching stories at the VA has pushed me to grow as a listener and writer. My partner is a Vietnam veteran who receives VA care, so I’ve also learned a lot about this huge institution. So far, I’ve conducted about 60 interviews with veterans and their stories are a testament to the diverse lives drawn to military service.
Over the years, I have interviewed a maker of stringed instruments from upper Michigan, whose relationship with tools, wood, and musical traditions was the stuff of poetry. I met a Mennonite farmer who served in the Seabees, keeping his pledge not to bear arms. A commercial artist. A builder of pipe organs. A veteran who, late in life, met and married his true love -- another man.
One of my first interviews was a Navy veteran whose recollections of a rough-and-tumble childhood in Northern Wisconsin, deployments all over the globe, and a long post-Navy career in the restaurant business could have filled an entire book. I focused on events that showed his wheeling and dealing, ready-for-anything spirit.
I take notes at a furious pace, but those are only the raw material. The motivations, joys, fears, and sorrows of each veteran are jumbled in there. It’s my job to bring them forward. The 1,000-word limit is a stern mentor.
I hear fewer combat stories than one might expect. A veteran deployed in Lebanon in the 1980s opened his interview saying, “I’m not going to talk about my time in the military.” Instead, he spoke about visiting the school kitchen his mother managed and riding along with his father, a policeman by day who drove a bus in the evening.
A Korean war veteran mentioned his service, then moved on to the jobs he held in civilian life. I noticed that those jobs were light duty. I backed up the interview a bit. Had he gotten injured? Turns out that, yes, he’d had a harrowing fall during combat in Korea.
A Navy lithographer talked about shipboard practices of trading goods and favors. Another veteran who spent six months in Antarctica told me how their surface installations were beset by penguins attracted to trash. Who knew penguins were like gulls and pigeons?
On another ninth floor visit, I sat with a veteran in her 90s whose speaking ability was limited by her cancer treatment. She spoke of her childhood in a tiny logging town, more like a hamlet, in Northern Wisconsin where she studied in a one-room schoolhouse. She’d been a cook at Camp Stoneman in California where thousands of troops were processed on their way to the Pacific Theater during World War II.
It was a challenging interview. I had to lean in to hear. I asked her to repeat herself, and then, as she tired, I handed her my notebook and pen. She wrote her answers in a neat cursive script. She had worked a swing shift in the 24-hour-a-day kitchen and described her schedule in detail. When I returned to her room another day and read it back to her, she wasn’t happy. I’d gotten the sequence of time on/time off wrong and she wasn’t having it!
She had a commanding demeanor despite her faint voice. Is this it? NO. I’m in my 60s, yet I felt like a child being reprimanded. I stuck with it till she gave me the thumbs-up. When I got up to leave, her face softened. She took my hand and thanked me. I strolled out feeling joy for both of us.
Sometimes, family is front and center. Once I sat with a man who’d had a short, unremarkable stint in the Air Force. He was losing his memory, but they hadn’t yet figured out why. He shared the names of each of his sons with a tenderness I’ll always remember -- first name, middle name. ... One of those sons had died in a car accident, and that experience brought him and his ex-wife closer.
One time the ninth floor crew contacted the My Life, My Story staff coordinator because two veterans on the floor were born Dutch citizens in Dutch colonized Indonesia, and later emigrated to the United States. Both had joined the U.S. military, settled in Milwaukee, and met each other there decades earlier.
Now they were both in the hospital and the staff thought their stories and reunion should be captured. I jumped at the chance. One gentleman was frail but gave a vivid account of his childhood. When the Japanese invaded what was then the Dutch East Indies, his father, a plantation manager, had to flee. This man, his mother, and his sisters moved from village to village to elude the Japanese. He had mastered several indigenous Indonesian languages during this odyssey. He described how the Red Cross found them after the war and reunited them with his father.
He became tired that day and couldn’t finish. He passed before I could talk to him again, though his children later told me about his life and career in Milwaukee. The other veteran’s father was taken by Japanese troops to work on the Burma Road, leaving him and his family to survive a series of violent encounters. After the Japanese troops and Dutch colonial functionaries were ousted from Indonesia, both men -- children at the time -- were sent to the Netherlands, the “home” country they hadn’t grown up in.
I’ve never faced the kind of turmoil these men had to navigate before reaching their teen years. When I see images of refugees on the move in current wars, I think of those two, and of all the children displaced and victimized by leaders and circumstances they didn’t create.
I review the narratives with the veterans for their approval before adding them to their medical charts. I’m calm and prepared when I read my poetry to audiences, but the first time I read a veteran his story -- as I had captured it -- I was nervous. We write these stories in the first person, and it feels intensely personal to speak as the veteran, to the veteran.
Each time I watch as someone leans forward and listens and I see them gain an outsider’s perspective on their adventures and choices, sacrifices, and relationships. I see them nod or smile. The energy is palpable: I did that? That’s me? Yes, that is me, that’s my life. Then there’s me -- listener and writer -- gratified to find I’ve hit the mark. That I connected. That’s a writer’s greatest reward.
This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headline.
Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter
