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Captain Frederick Foote: I always wrote it, but more urgently after treating the wounded—both American and Iraqi—on the hospital ship Comfort during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That was the origin of many of the poems in the book, which focuses on the wounded of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.In a poem about the Comfort, you tell the detached, emotionally AWOL generals to "come live two weeks on our ward, with the harm we have here— / You'll be mutinous then—and as pacifist as we." Have you always been a pacifist? How has this complicated your identity as a member of the armed forces?
This is the place to note I'm retired Navy—after 29 years of service—and not a federal employee, so nothing I say represents the views of the US government.In any case, my breed of pacifism is "Hate the war but love and honor the warrior." For now, unfortunately, we may need to accept the existence of conflict as necessary if we are to reach justice.As Robert Gates has said, some of the biggest pacifists in Washington wear uniforms. I'm one of those odd, seldom-promoted intellectuals whom the military keeps on the shelf in case of need. When they needed new approaches for treating brain injury and PTSD—the main health problems afflicting veterans of the current wars—they dusted me off and put me to work at Walter Reed, our flagship military hospital near the capital.
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Writing them was automatic after I got to back to the States. I needed to witness and interpret what I'd seen. I think it's really the truth that heals—for both reader and writer.What's the role of the arts, and truth telling, in your clinical practice? How is your work as a poet related to your work as a neurologist?
I've been developing holistic, integrative medicine programs for the military since 2001. That year, I started the Epidaurus Project, which engages civilian experts to lend advanced health ideas to the military. It's paid off. My other big projects include the Walter Reed Arts Program, which we're now spreading into the veterans' community, and the $4 million Green Road Project, the nation's largest healing garden. Baltimore's Institute for Integrative Health, where I am a scholar, is involved in these efforts.The Warrior Poetry Project is my small current piece of the Walter Reed Arts Program, which I co-founded in 2011. With the help of an extensive staff—including three paid coordinators, more than a dozen paid artists in residence, and many therapists and volunteers—nearly all our wounded warriors make art or music during their stay at Walter Reed. It has huge healing effects, especially in brain injury and PTSD.
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Absolutely. Making music seems to be especially powerful, but all the arts work. We are in the process of proving this by "hard-science" research. In brain injury and PTSD, patients routinely tell us that the arts program was the most helpful part of their entire therapy.Why do you think the arts have been so effective in the veterans' hospitals? From Tolstoy to David Foster Wallace, countless writers have remarked on the therapeutic power of literature. Does having an audience—as veterans do in the journal you help edit, O-Dark Thirty—lessen their sense of isolation and make them feel that their suffering is shared? Does the focus of poetry, the act of distilling their anxieties into a concrete, innocuous form, offer a kind of exorcism?
We're doing research on that, but some clues emerge from what vets in writing workshops tell us. One said that writing about his experiences lets him control his memories, instead of their controlling him. Another told us that writing allowed her to put the painful experience away in a mental drawer, and only take it out when she wanted to.You've written that Western medicine has been plagued by reductionism since the Enlightenment. At the same time that Descartes and Leibniz insisted on breaking the world into its constituent parts in philosophy, physicians began addressing the body in terms of its individual organs. Why is the opposite view, a whole-person approach, essential to treating conditions like brain injury and PTSD?
Conventional medicine treats a single-organ system with pills or surgery—the Cartesian approach. Holistic care refers to "whole-body" therapies, such as healing buildings, family engagement, integration of care, basic wellness (nutrition, exercise, and alternative medicine), and advanced wellness (use of nature, art, and spirituality in health care). I've done projects on all the above during my years at Walter Reed.
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Many of these innovations—healing buildings and gardens, family-centered care, and arts and literature programs—are already spreading widely within the Military Health System and the VA. Many earlier advances in medicine—anesthesia, complex surgery, infectious-disease control—were pioneered in the military. I'm writing a book to explain what we've done at Walter Reed to a general audience. The next step is to go directly to towns and communities and show them how to heal their own veterans via locally managed arts and garden projects. I have funding to start this "Johnny Appleseed"–type work across Maryland in 2015–16. By doing a multimedia show of my poetry, I can educate and motivate audiences very quickly, bridging the military/civilian divide. Programs for healing are the result. Who can say where art stops and "real life" begins?