Finding healing in joyless reflections

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, September 2nd, 2021. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the healing power of making music.

With the recent U.S. pullout from Afghanistan a lot of people are being reminded of the challenges our military personnel face when returning home.

REICHARD: This summer, WORLD intern Grace Snell met an Afghanistan war veteran who traded in his gun for a pen and a guitar. Here’s his story.

MARTINEZ: So, I was deployed to Afghanistan at Bagram Air Base and when I was there we got rocketed a lot...

GRACE SNELL, INTERN: Juan Martinez Jr. is a retired staff sergeant. He deployed to Afghanistan in 20-13.

MARTINEZ: The thing about being deployed is that you have a job to do, and if you don't do your job, things can go wrong, because other people are depending on you.

Between missions, he wrote poetry to cope with the stress. Martinez poured his heart into one poem especially: “Joyless Reflections.”

MARTINEZ: Streams of conflicting emotions race through my troubled head/ Sometimes not knowing if living alive, I may be found dead…

Poetry helped Martinez survive deployment. But even after he returned home nine months later, memories of war still haunted him.

Then, a friend told him about The Veteran’s Guitar Project.

SOUND: ARRIVING AT COMMUNITY MUSIC SCHOOL

On a Sunday afternoon, three veterans gather with their guitar teacher in a classroom of the Armstrong Community Music School. Two more join on Zoom. They mill around, exchanging greetings and plugging in guitars.

A vet named Jack taps on a drum set.

Starting out, Martinez didn’t even own a guitar, let alone know how to play one. But here, he doesn’t feel self-conscious about his music—or his emotions.

MARTINEZ: It was a place where I could be open and talk about things that I went through, feelings that I had, and they would support me. It's good to have support from others because when you're alone, you go down the rabbit hole, and that's not a good place to be

BASINI: A one, a two, a skiddly-diddly-doo.

The group’s guitar teacher, Anthony Basini, coaches the vets. Although trained at the Berklee College of Music, Basini doesn’t talk down to any of the guys. He leads them through new songs and breaks down the tricky parts.

BASINI: Nice. Yeah, you got it...

With help, Martinez set the poems he wrote in Afghanistan to music. Now the group plays them together. Martinez’s voice teacher Chrissy sings with them.

MUSIC: JOYLESS REFLECTIONS

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Smith-Henry co-founded the group and serves as chaplain. He says music helps veterans cope with wounds from their past.

SMITH-HENRY: This context is a healing context, you know, music is healing. We have talked about this many, many times, right.

Talking about emotions isn’t easy for the guys. It runs against the grain of military culture.

MARTINEZ: In the military, they tell you, you're not issued feelings or emotions, okay? So suck it up and get the job done. But writing these songs helps me to get that out so it's not weighing heavy on my soul. For a lot of veterans, they don't know how to express themselves, or talk to people. Music is the avenue that I have to say what I need to say to heal and to move on, and to help other people around me to get through that.

The group has improved a lot over the years.

SMITH-HENRY: When we started out, it was tough. We didn't always have this level of communication and interconnectedness. We started basically as veterans who were strangers to each other, coming from each of our own military experiences.

Smith-Henry says the songs they play today sound nothing like the versions five or six years ago.

SMITH-HENRY: Those songs have gone through a whole process of change, and input from all people in the group adding their voice to it. It's not like someone sits down and writes something, and it's in concrete, and that's the way it always is.

“Joyless Reflections” is a hard song to sing, but the veterans keep doing it week after week. Smith-Henry appreciates writers like Martinez.

SMITH-HENRY: What they express that some of us can't, who don't write songs, they express the same things that we feel and they do it for us.

The heart of the guitar project is to help veterans heal. Some of the songs, like “Joyless Reflections,” give voice to their shared pain. But a song called “Rescue Me” is one of Smith-Henry’s favorites.

SMITH-HENRY: That is a cry for help that I think all those in the military we've been at some point in our life, where we have felt those things, we said those very same things, Rescue me, so, yeah, those things, those are the words that touch my soul

MUSIC: RESCUE ME

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Grace Snell in Austin, Texas.

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