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The Healing Power of Arts Education for Veterans
HigherEdMilitary
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Planning for the Future
After staring at her military renewal contract for hours, Petty Officer Jill Schwartz made her mind up. She had been in the service for seven years, but knew it was time to go. Not anxious to leave the people in her unit whom she had grown to love and depend on, she had decided that fighting in military battles was not a career choice. At least, not for her.
Schwartz was seated on her regulation cot in the middle of her assigned barracks. Directly behind her was a packed duffle bag. She reached back and grabbed the two weather-worn handles, preparing to leave. Having survived tours of duty to Iraq and Afghanistan, she felt like it was the right time for her to re-enter the private sector and find a job.
Schwartz had actually made the decision to transition one year before she retired. And she knew there was no turning back. She was leaving the service as an E-5, or a Petty Officer Second Class. Any more promotions would be difficult without a degree.
But the non-commissioned officer had high hopes about her prospects of finding a well-paying job in the private sector. She had decided that, regardless of whether she stayed in the service or not, she needed to go to college and get her degree. Really, wasn’t that the reason she had joined in the first place?
Realizing the Dream
Because her family was not well off, Jill had faced the fact that if she wanted to go to college, she would have to take out loans. Then the idea of joining the military entered her head, and she realized that she had other options.
Seven years later, here she sat, in her small one-room apartment, waiting to log on to her first online class. She was tense and excited. But, she was most worried about interacting with her civilian classmates, who had never experienced the kind of battle conditions she had been through.
“War really is hell,” she thought to herself, as the words on her computer danced in front of her eyes. Like most vets, Jill has scars to prove her years of service. These kinds of scars were unseen.
She worried a lot more than she used to and had a hard time looking at herself in the mirror. Sometimes, when those memories of her deployment started to come back, all she wanted to do was crawl in her and pull the covers over her head. The feelings could last two, maybe three days, and she would get these excruciating headaches that made her keep her blinds closed, until they went away.
“How,” Jill thought to herself, “am I ever going to succeed in school, if I have trouble concentrating and getting along with people?”
Jill felt isolated in the challenges she faced, trying to prevent her military experiences from interfering with her life. While she would never trade those experiences for the world, she wondered how she was going to be able to function in an academic and doubted her ability to pursue a degree.
Answers to Unanswered Questions
Unbeknownst to this non-commissioned officer, there are programs in place that can help Jill to achieve her goals.
Just ask professional actor, stand-up comedian, and Director of Education for Theater of Arts, David Conolly. The Theater of Arts is “… an accredited, military-friendly college, registered with the VA for vocational rehabilitation.” Moreover, their veteran military actor training is geared toward individuals like Jill, who are in transition, as well as veterans who have been out of the service for a much longer time.
Among the illustrious graduates of the acting conservatory, which has been in business since 1927, are Clinton Eastwood, Gregory Peck, and Andre Pelzer.
“It is kind of interesting teaching acting,” Conolly said. “We have a lot of people who had been in war situations.”
Conolly, who has no military experience himself, said he started working with veterans in 2014. And that is when he saw a different kind of transition occur in many of his students.
“We are working with military learners with no acting experience, but they have been to Iraq or Afghanistan. And when I teach them, I see people get demonstrably better.”
“You see people on day one who are really closed off and rigid, and you think, ‘I’m never going to be able to get through to this person.’ It is amazing how far you can push these individuals.”
As if to support his point of view, he reflected on the story of one vet who benefited more from his participation in the program than anyone could have anticipated.
“One guy came up to me after an improv class and said, ‘How do I improve?’ I said, ‘You need to open your mind.’ He came back, and he was brilliant. He was in character. Everything he did was believable. I asked him what happened between last week and this week, and he responded: ’You said I have to open my mind.’ He turned out to be just great. And then I realized that people just got better and better, if you gave them the freedom they needed to express themselves.”
While Conolly acknowledged that acting is a very difficult profession, he also said the film industry is one of the largest employers in Los Angeles. They need people, both on and off-camera; to fill the roles that contribute to the production of a film or TV show.
And that is where the veterans military actors training comes in.
“It’s been one of the most successful parts of our program,” Conolly said. “We now reach out to the bases and send people to 29 Palms military base every two months. The response is good. They get applications from vets of various ages who have served in all branches of the service.”
To support these students as they learn to express themselves through acting, Conolly said the Theater of Arts provides them with counselors, academic advisors, and support groups.
But it is up to the vets to decide if they want to pursue an acting Before they graduate, they must have learned how to reach deep down into themselves and reveal their true emotions.
“The main thing I’m looking for in an actor is that they have the passion to do it, and they can take direction. I will say that the vets we have here are the ones who get through it.”
Conolly remembered one former Marine who came from a military family. After this veteran started taking classes, he decided that he really enjoyed being behind the camera, as much as taking part in the scene. When that student graduated, he made a speech about how his life and outlook had changed. He had found a new passion in life, because he had become an artist.
Besides becoming actors, veterans have other creative choices of how to pursue their education, post-transition. The Veterans Art Project School of Ceramics and Glass in Vista, Calif., offers them the chance to be multimedia artists.
Functional, semi-autobiographical, and cultural artist, Steve Dilley, explained.
“Many classes in college are passive. In a ceramics class, the teacher may talk, but the student is encouraged to share through nonverbal means of communication, such as working with the clay. That may facilitate verbal skills, and allow people to find a space for reflection, as well as an opportunity to heal.”
Like Conolly, Dilley said he is a civilian with no military experience. But he, too, developed this incredible passion and desire to help veterans succeed in a college environment.
“I just felt that I could encourage them by using the same technique that always helped me, which is my “art making.”
The Encinitas resident said that his wish to affect change among the veteran population was very personal. Dilley has always loved reading. While doing research for an undergraduate course in art history, he read an article that described some of the conditions veterans experienced after transitioning to civilian life. Conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and thoughts of suicide.
“I would say around 2003, if you were paying attention and reading the newspaper here in San Diego, it was very common that you heard of the deployed Marine who came back with a stack of money, purchased a motorcycle, and maybe, a 30-pack of beer. I felt as a society, we had put them in harm’s way; it just seemed like a tragedy that we weren’t offering them better options for their future.”
After Dilley graduated and began teaching at a local junior college, he started talking to students about his desire to assist vets in achieving their educational goals.
His interest in helping vets led him to found and serve as executive director of The Veterans Art Project.
“I do have to say that I was a fortunate enough to talk it into existence.”
And Dilley said, he has story after story to tell about students in his program who transformed their lives due to their experiences.
“My favorite is the story about the spouse who comes into my studio and said: 'What did you do to my husband? You know, I’ve been married to him for 12 years, and he wouldn’t say anything more than, ‘Pass the salt.’ But now, I feel I can be present for him, because he has opened up, and shares more of his life with me.’
Dilley, who has a master’s degree in fine arts (MFA), admitted that the progress can be slow at first. But, as an instructor, he has seen that during the critiques of his students’ work, they became more adept at sharing their ideas, their thoughts, and their emotions.
“It was common for them to leave the studio in a way that helped them to engage in other areas of their lives too. I also think that a ceramics class may go to the heart of the problem of creating community.”
Bringing the World into Focus
“At the end of the day,” Dilley added, “What is the need here? We want to diminish the rate of veteran suicides and help them to define who it is they want to be post-service.”
“College can be overwhelming and having a community to support you may go a long way for some people.”
Realizing a Dream
For Petty Officer Schwartz, the dream is still very much alive. She belongs to a veterans group where someone told her about a novel-writing class she could take as an elective. Unsure of her civilian storytelling skills, she decided to enroll anyway. What she found was the experience not only gave her confidence to complete her classwork, but also provided her with a way to release some of the feelings she had bottled up about her time in the service.
As Jill logged onto the first of her online courses for the day, she smiled to herself. She knew that she had overcome some of her greatest obstacles, and now, she would not let fear stand in the way of making a successful transition.
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