Voices Of Vets

Help Us Launch this Film!

Voices of Vets (working title) documents a remarkable five day healing retreat for veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, along with several family members.  The event culminates in a powerful public welcome home ceremony/performance where the vets read personal poetry they have written on the retreat to an awestruck standing room only crowd in Ashland, OR on Memorial Day, 2008.

We are asking for help in making this important, non-partisan and very timely documentary film a reality. Here is our plan:

Timetable: Shooting for the film was complete in May, 2008. Editing of a fifteen minute fundraising clip is complete and is available for viewing on DVD or on this web site. Editing of the film will begin in October, and should be completed in the Spring, 2010. At that point we will enter it in appropriate festivals, including Sundance, San Francisco International Film Festival, Hot Docs, Tribeca, and others. We will also seek national television broadcast and internet showings and distribution.  (For more details see the "Outreach" page on this web site).

Please help us to make this a reality by making a donation to this film.

The Story:

On the afternoon of May 22, 2008, twenty three men and women, including five spouses or partners, arrived at Buckhorn Springs Retreat Center in S. Oregon. Each of them was a veteran - from Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, or from marriages and partnerships dominated by memories of these wars. They came with the hope of a new way to work with PTSD, a new way to understand themselves and who they had become. All of them were nervous, uncomfortable with this new situation: unknown people, a new place, a history of inadequate approaches to PTSD, and an unusual notion of working with war and its aftermath with stories, myths, song and their own poetry. They did this knowing that they would be presenting themselves to the public in a large community welcome home ceremony at the end of the retreat. And they did this knowing that they would be the subjects of an intensely personal documentary film.

For the next five days these courageous men and women came together, formed what Michael Meade, story teller, mythologist and master facilitator of the event, called a “sudden community”, and began the process of healing from their experience of war. The days included deep conflict, dark personal anguish, and a slow coming together of men and women who felt supported and understood as only other veterans can understand and support each other. They listened to ancient stories about war and healing, and began to tell their own. They listened to each other and began to unfold the beauty that along with pain lies at the heart of tragedy. To bring out this beauty they wrote deeply personal poetry describing their reality, both in war and at home. Finally, on Memorial Day, 2008, they brought their poetry and song and presented themselves and their stories to an audience of over 600 men and women, many veterans themselves, who came to honor and receive these men and women back into the community, to truly welcome them home.

Why make this extremely personal event into a documentary film? Unlike most of the movies that have been made about these wars, which slam the viewer with death, destruction, conflict and partisan intent, Voices of Vets is about healing. It is about finding the beauty and the wisdom that great ordeals bring out in people. Where the viewer is invited into an intimate gathering of the wounded in which traditional stories and the dignity of ceremony provide the structure that allows the painful stories of war and its aftermath to be transformed into poetry. Perhaps most important of all, the film will demonstrate the courageous willingness and value of the civilian community coming forward to witness the truth of what our war veterans bring home. This coming together of veterans and the civilian public is what has been missing in the discussions about Post Traumatic Stress, suicide, divorce, substance abuse, etc. Without a community open and willing to receive everything about them, many veterans and their families are destined to live in isolation, reminded only of the wars they fought, not of the wisdom they now have to offer.

The film will be used in communities around the country to inspire the creation of local welcome home ceremonies, renewed efforts at conversation, understanding and acceptance. As Jack Maclean, one of the veteran/poets asks at the end of his poem, “can we make a village as strong as a war?” Voices of Vets is about creating this village. Please join us and help make this transformative film a reality.

What we need:

1.  OIF and OEF veterans, along with vets from other more recent war zones, to join us as allies in our efforts at connection and outreach to younger vets.  We need people with the proper credibility to introduce us to other veterans and to veterans organizations around the country.

2. Older veterans who would take point in helping us make connections with the national veteran community. We need men and women who have the skills and the history of making businesses or programs work and who would be willing to offer that expertise to us and other veterans by involvement with promotion of the film.

3. Individual civilians and business leaders, moved by what we are doing here, willing to host viewings of the fund raising trailer and to act as allies in our efforts at public outreach. Please contact us for more details.

4.  Church leaders willing to introduce this film and to take the lead in educating and encouraging civilian involvement with veterans, their families and the realities of what they bring back to their local communities.

5.  An introduction to Michelle Obama, who has pledged to make veterans and their families a primary focus of her role as First Lady.  Obviously, she could be pivotal in bringing veterans and the civilian public together in a long avoided conversation.

6.  We need donations. Donations can be large or small, and in the end we need about $135,000 (as of April, 2009) more to complete the film in the timeframe described above. Please visit the donation page to make your donation.

With nearly two million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the hundreds of thousands from earlier wars, the time is right for a much wider awareness and civilian participation in this issue. Voices of Vets offers a way to be involved and the effect could be immense.