"The Making and Un-making of a Marine"

What I offer in my book The Making and Un-making of a Marine is my life's journey, which includes as part of its central theme the Viet Nam War and my search for a role in the world after the War.

My father and my community were where the first makings of a Marine happened. I grew up in the small town of New Paltz during 1950s and '60s. Dad's dedication to making me a man through hard work and the local boy scouts planting the seeds of heroism became my boyhood tools.

At 19, the U.S. Marine Corps took over the stripping away and reshaping of my identity. The Marines sent me to Viet Nam where my exposure to violence and inhumanity deeply wounded my being at a level that would take years to recognize and longer yet to start curing.

There was no useful help from our government along this highway. Whatever they offered, my previous experience with the military had alienated me and I did not trust anything official sources provided. I was forced to find people and situations to facilitate my own healing.

No one – neither friends nor family - recognized I was wounded. I felt like I was expected to return to the old me - the one they had raised, married, and befriended. The cliché of lost innocence unfortunately fits.

Growing up in New Paltz did not prepare me for what I was to see and do in Viet Nam. Upon my return I carried grief, shame, disillusionment, and a deep rage for feeling betrayed by my government. All of these powerful emotions I keep under tight wraps for fear of frightening those who love me.

Over time I was able to find help and understanding. I have spent half my life in therapy. I have read extensively about PTSD and how it has affected our veterans. In the 1980s, I decide to change my career path from carpenter to therapist. For the past 20 years, I have worked at Four Winds Hospital as a group psychotherapist. My daily work involves dealing with the life and death situations of our patients.

This was the first time I thought my history of waiting to die in Viet Nam could be of use to me and to others.

In 1994 I returned to Viet Nam with a group of healthcare professionals from the VA. We were there to study PTSD in the Vietnamese people. This trip was the turning point of my own healing. I met with Viet Nam generals and was able to ask for their forgiveness for my part in the destruction of their country. After reading my forgiveness poem before a collection of Viet Cong, including General Geip, I was honored with their acceptance.

Today I am interested in helping veterans like myself. Their numbers are increasing daily and the need for addressing this reality is great. The cost we have asked these men and women to pay is immeasurable. There is no role for the warrior in our society and this must change.

There is a profound wisdom about life that veterans have learned from war. We as a society need that wisdom to inform our decisions. If their wounds are not healed and their initiation from the war is not integrated we all will pay a dear price.

A startling statistic from the Viet Nam era: As of today, over 100,000 Viet Nam veterans have committed suicide. It does not take much foresight to project what society will look like ten to fifteen years from now if we don't address the men and women returning home. Homelessness, suicide, battering, and joblessness will become more rampant, costing society financially as well as emotionally.

I believe we can offer a way for our veterans to reintegrate into their worlds. We need warriors in our culture, and we have larger numbers of them needing to be accepted. To quote my friend Dr. Edward Ticks book, War and the Soul,

"Indeed war has perhaps always been the most compelling initiation into adulthood. This may be because war replicated all the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual challenges of life in their most intense and threatening forms."

If we are to move towards peace in a true sense we will need warrior men and women who have been tempered by war to lead us. What I have learned in my life struggle is that personal and cultural peace is within our reach if we have the courage to reach for it.

Please join me in making it happen.

Larry Winters
The Making and Un-making of a Marine

A recommendation for Larry Winters' "The Making and Un-making of a Marine"

In 1989, Robert Bly told Bill Moyers that, regarding the Vietnam War, "Only the veterans are grieving. This is not right." Almost twenty years later, it's still not right. Larry's work is a knowing, heartfelt reminder of what's still not right. He calls us to remember what cannot be forgotten and heal what remains unhealed in a national wound that cuts across time and generations. His work could not be more important.

Rick Belden
Author, Iron Man Family Outing
www.rickbelden.com
December 13, 2008

Larry Winters relates a thread of the most significant narrative in human history. In language that is terrifying and compelling, yet full of compassion and hope, he pulls us into his own story of war and redemption, guilt, despair, and rebirth. He poses questions that are difficult yet essential: How do we heal from the wounds of war? How do we grant ourselves forgiveness? How do we create a culture of life? How are we to welcome home our warriors, and join with them to change our history from one characterized by violent conflict to a history of collaboration to create a sustainable human community? Larry doesn't pretend to know all these answers, but his powerful writing poses all the right questions.

Andrew Himes
executive director of the Voices in Wartime Education Project,  technology journalist and editor, and producer of his first film, Voices in Wartime, co-editor of the Voices in Wartime Anthology, and director of the short film on PTSD, Beyond Wartime.

The Making & Un-making of A Marine is a superbly written, engaging book. A must read for anyone who has been to any war, loved someone who has been to war and even those of us who have never been to war. Winters' story is full of anger, grief, rage, hope and healing. I couldn't put it down.

John Lee
Author of The Flying Boy,  Growing Yourself Back Up, and THE MISSING PEACE: Solving The Anger Problem For Alcoholics/Addicts and Those Who Love Them

The Making and Unmaking of a Marine would be a must read if it was just  about the deeply personal pathways a young man takes to war. But Larry Winters also brings us home and en route shows us an invaluable and compelling roadmap to redemption.

Steven Lewis
Author of Zen and the Art of Fatherhood, The ABCs of Real Family Values, The Complete Guide for the Anxious Groom, Fear and Loathing of Boca Raton: A Hippies Guide to the Second Sixties

Many go. Not as many return. Those who return are changed, often wounded in soul as well as in body. How does one heal from the wounds of war? An eternal question, from Troy to Baghdad, via Gettysburg, Flanders, Iwo Jima, and Pleiku. Here is one man's heart-rending account of his journey out and back, about the making and unmaking of a Marine.

Peter Pitzele Ph.D.
Author of Our Fathers' Wells: A personal encounter with the myths of Genesis. (Harper 1997)

See Peter Pitzele's "Odysseus Mask" inspired by Making and Unmaking of a Marine.

The Making and Un-making of a Marine is an American odyssey, written with heart and fire, hunger and love. Winters' story is not just his own, but the journey of many of the Vietnam generation from home to war and back, from brokenness and pain to healing and forgiveness. But more, Winters has the courage, wisdom and determination to make meaning from his time in hell. He discovers a path of service that brings hope and healing to others lost in those fires. Salute Larry Winters and take this compelling journey with him. It will guide, inspire and transform you.

Edward Tick, Ph.D.
Author, War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation's Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Book Review: Tales of Three Veterans  by Anne Pyburn, May 31, 2007
Chronogram Magazine, June 01, 2007  

Larry Winters was a Marine grunt, bunking in a tent referred to by the rest of the platoon as “The Wild Kingdom” for the shenanigans and radical politics of its inhabitants. A young poet in the making with his beliefs in God and country shot to hell, Winters lived to come home and then found homecoming to be a struggle all its own. His healing journey led him to study psychodrama and become a therapist, and that perspective informs his look back at life before, during, and after ’Nam....  [read entire review]

Mr. Winters-

I just finished reading your book and felt compelled to write you and
thank you for having the courage to share your story. I read it as part
of a class I am taking with Steve Lewis. I am a 41 year old cop, who
after 20 years "on the street" is FINALLY going back to school. I knew
the challenges and changes I would go through as I try to think again
after so many years, but your book has made it all worth while. If I
never take another course, I have learned enough for a lifetime after
reading your book.

I had a similar upbringing to yours. Our dads could be separated at
birth. My dad and a close uncle were vets and I don't know how many
"A-ha" moments I had reading your book when things you described made
sense of things I have seen and heard from them. I, like my dad, turned
to drugs and alcohol to tame the demons. I have been sober for 13 years
and work a 12 step program. I have been in therapy most of my adult
life and pray that I reach the level you have in being able to forgive
and move on. I have read and reread your book. I have underlined and
highlighted parts. I have found such inspiration in your story.

What makes you unique is you chose to use your life and what you have
so painfully learned to help others. You could have been selfish and
healed just yourself, but you help others through your work and your
writing. I worked with abused children and women for 5 years before I
burned out. I believe I did that as a way of trying to save some other
families when I couldn't save my own.

Thank You for surviving and sharing what you know with others. I am
inspired to address some past issues of forgiveness, guilt and
redemption solely because I read your book.

Thank You for serving our nation and giving us all the freedoms we all
enjoy. I would have been a boy when you came home. Because I grew up in
Poughkeepsie I like to think I may have seen you in uniform and
hopefully waved or saluted and shown you someone was glad you were home
safe and was proud of you.

Sincerely,
Erik Lindmark

I just read the chapter you have on your web site; I became lost in the writing.  It wasn't Larry, my friend, who was the author that I was reading, it was just the story. I have to say it was every bit as gripping as R. Lee Ermey playing Gny. Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, a 45-minute display of character acting that has yet to have been duplicated, ever. I was never there but your Chapter 16 was as descriptive and gut wrenching as to confirm those first 45 minutes of the movie as the truth. I cannot wait for the rest of the book. Good job Marine!

Bill Bright
     

Hi Larry,

While recuperating from surgery this past week, I read your new book.  What a read!  A must read for every Vietnam Vet and Iraq Vet ... Hoping we can get you here to help us with a retreat sometime. That's the it of it now.  Peace.

Bill Rodefer
     

The descriptions are beautiful and awful, at once bringing me right into scenes I could not possibly imagine. The author makes no judgment of his actions; there is no flowery pretense, no rationalizations, nor excuses. It simply lays out the story of one of thousands of young men, barely more than kids, who went off to war with no real idea of what they were getting themselves into. We see their ideals get forever changed when subjected to the horrors of war.

I came to partially understand, and feel, on a visceral level, the inner conflict of these men who have one vision before signing up, and then find themselves dealing with things so drastically different…the slaughter of innocent people, the senseless destruction…things they can't possibly understand, let alone process and absorb. The real tragedy is that they, themselves, think they know what they are signing on for and it seems noble. The most powerful line in the story for me was, "I was proud to be a marine, I was ashamed to be a marine." This inner conflict has taken a lifetime to resolve and I am left wondering if one can ever really come to terms with it. I want to thank Mr. Winters for having the courage to delve into his soul and dredge this up, putting a personal face on the Vietnam War. It is such an important story which needs to be told.

Claudia Battaglia,  11/16/2010  (This review is also on Amazon.com)

Hello Larry,

In the airport the other day, reading bits of your book, caught my breath

"Steam and Cream"--

Namaste to oriental goddess treating the soldier's heart.

Ancient, essential healing ---

Gratitude for The Goddess presence at the gates of hell -- gratitude for  her care to you.

sincerely, I say to you: Thanks for sharing

Kristin Van Huysen,6/23/07

Larry,

NEWS FLASH!  I just finished your book and I loved it -- I found it to be a page turner that I could not put down -- read it in one weekend. I'm going to see if I can get it into the hands of my friend who's an editor and book agent. There was so much I loved -- it seems like it should be required reading in courses on PTSD and treating vets. Such a great story. I loved that little bit about the dragonfly because being singled out by a dragonfly seemed significant to me at a moment of transition in my life.

Thanks so much for sharing that with me personally and all the others who will read it.

~mb

It was such a pleasure to meet you at the asgpp conference. I have read your book and found it extremely moving. Your writing is so descriptive and captures one's heart and soul. I found your early years compelling and felt myself right back in my parents' and grandparents' homes as I read your written word. The gathering of the rocks -- at my house it was pulling the ever-producing dandelions. I thought they would never stop growing. The persuader, the handed-down pain from the previous generation. I truly connected to your journey.

I enjoyed learning how you came to psychodrama with your work at Beacon. I wish I had even know there was a Beacon back then.

I appreciated your sharing on Vietnam. My dad was a World War II vet and would never discuss the war when we (as children) asked him. It wasn't until about a month before he died that I learned he had received an award for capturing a German Lt. He said it was an accident; they went into a house to get some food, and the Lt. was hiding under the porch.

Your poetry was touching and tears came to my eyes many times, especially when you gave General Diep your Crew Wings.

Thank you for sharing your life story in word. Reading is sometimes difficult for me, but I found I couldn't put your book down. I started it on the plane and finished it today.

Thank you for all you are doing to heal others.

Warmly,
Sue McMunn
     

Dear Larry,

I had a lot to do today. I was supposed to finish up some radio pieces. I was supposed to go to the pharmacy. I was hoping to buy mega-mosquito repellent. I was hoping to buy hiking boots. I should have taken my dogs for a walk. I'd liked to have found a job. None of these things were accomplished. Instead, I started paging through your book this morning... and I literally could not put it down. Spent most of the day curled up on my bed... reading. The book is completely gripping... it's wonderful. So moving, so compelling, so sad, so powerful... I am so impressed. Congratulations. You should be so proud of yourself. You did good.

Pam
     

I have been reading through your site and must concur with her - the pain, the anger, the gut level despair of a seemingly uncaring, ungrateful nation come through loud and clear. What you are doing, what you are saying, needs to be done and said. ...

I was very pleased to note that a lot of women are reading your book. That is one of my goals, to make more women understand the verities of war. It is the framework for the book at my site, Loving.

Mr. Winters, thank you, not only for your combat service in an environment that no one could really have been prepared for, but for caring enough to go through the pain to tell the truth. It is my feeling that our Vietnam Veterans have been, and are, creating a magnificent legacy through war to peace by having the incredible courage to stand up to say that war is a lifelong nightmare and that we have to face that, go through that, to find a better way. Your words contribute to the blood flow of that legacy which must be brought to fruition.  Perhaps if we all pull together we can speed up the time to that fruition.

Blessings on your work,

Miz' Remy
(Ms.)Remy Benoit
Author of Letty, Island Quilts, Peace, Now, and Loving

... Larry Winters' story is powerful, thought provoking, and question raising because it is honest, open, and forthright. His pain, his hopes, his illusions and disillusions, pour through the pages of this book with such intensity that we find on his path with him the rocks under which lie hidden things that must be brought out into the light and dealt with. Larry prompts those who travel with him to find the courage to turn over their own rocks, to see what lies beneath....  [Read Ms. Benoit's full review...]
     

Dear Larry,

Just finished reading a great book, one I'll be more than happy to recommend! It's raw and real, and somehow, I'm not surprised. Thanks for sharing so much of yourself, and your story. I now have a deeper understanding about the experience of one Viet Nam Vet. It's like I've finally been allowed to look in a window, that until now had the blinds drawn... and for that I am deeply grateful!

In celebration of who you are,
and of the gift of your book.

Paula