"It was like that scene from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves where he picks up the soil and kisses it," says Brandon Willitts, recalling the moment he returned home from Afghanistan in 2005. The first thing Willitts did when he touched down on American soil was spend some time standing alone on the tarmac in Pearl Harbor. The journey home had been lonely. As an intelligence analyst, Willitts handled classified material and therefore had the cargo bay of a C-17 to himself on the 24-hour trip from Kabul to Hawaii via Ramstein Air Base in Germany and Seattle. The solitary experience stuck with him for several years; he describes it as a defining moment of his time in the Navy, amplified by the feeling of arriving to no one, then being told the next day that he would soon be headed back out on another deployment — to Iraq.
When he smiles, Willitts' boyish face, thinly disguised by the scruff of a full beard and designer glasses, makes him look like an oversized kid stuffed into his best Sunday suit rather than a 30-year-old veteran of war. His tall frame hints at his past as a SEAL trainee, before a chronic knee injury forced him into a different career as an enlisted intelligence analyst. In that role he served at the Pentagon during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, with an anti-submarine warfare squadron in Hawaii, and as part of counterterror operations in Kandahar, a strategic and symbolically important city in Afghanistan.
His Navy contract was due to expire soon after that last deployment, and when told he was headed to Iraq, he opted not to sign up for an extension, instead leaving the service and taking a very different career path. First, as a newfound civilian, he caught up on a rite of passage delayed: college. He enrolled first at Piedmont Community College near Charlottesville, Virginia, then Marlboro, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, where he studied literature. There, he also developed an interest in writing, which he found to be a helpful way of exploring the isolation and loss he'd experienced.
Willitts' road since Afghanistan has been a winding one, but it all led to what he now sees as his primary mission: the launch of his nonprofit Words After War, or as he calls it, "a literary organization that just happens to focus on veterans."
"I saw a need in the veteran service space for a nonprofit focused less on the therapy value of writing and more on the artistic value of writing," he says. Words After War isn't a therapy group, but rather, "a community of people interested in the defining moments of the last decade" — namely, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Willitts sees writing as a chance for self-examination through art, not a replacement for therapy. "It's less about how writing makes me feel better and more that it makes me a better human being," he says.
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He also sees writing about war as a way of closing the gap that has grown between the armed services and civilians since the military became all-volunteer. Willitts hopes that by giving veterans, their families and interested civilians the chance to share their experiences about writing, the organization can help bridge the divide between those who have served in America's wars and those disengaged from them.
"For a lot of my friends, my girlfriend, for instance — I was the first post-9/11 veteran she'd ever met," says Willitts. "I was like a goddamn unicorn to her. She thought it was so strange that I'd been in the military. Not in a pejorative way, but in a fascinated way."
While Words After War is only just getting off the ground, Willitts' goals are lofty. He hopes to launch a literary mentoring program that matches veterans with established writers, host retreats for veteran writers to work on creative projects, and set up a residency program with various colleges to increase the exposure civilian students have to former service members. Ultimately, he wants to give veterans interested in writing an outlet and opportunity to hone their skills to the point where they are known as seasoned writers who happen to be veterans, rather than veterans interested in writing.
Willitts' path to founding Words After War began December 18, 2001. It's the day he enlisted, and the last day he saw his younger sister Ashley alive.
"I joined the Navy in 2001, driven largely by patriotism, military family, etc.," he explains. "And then I was barely a month in the military and my sister committed suicide." At 16 she hanged herself. Willitts had three days to go home to Waldorf, Maryland, for the funeral before returning to basic training. The full impact of her suicide stayed buried within him for years, he says. His commitment to the military, he feels, didn't allow him to stop and evaluate that loss.
The loss of his sister preceded two deaths of friends from service: Sean Carson, an explosive ordnance disposal technician who was killed in a Blackhawk helicopter crash, and Jeremy Wise, a former Navy SEAL-turned-security contractor who died in the infamous triple-agent suicide bombing dramatized by the movie Zero Dark Thirty.
"It took me a really long time to make the connection between my sister's death, and the emotions I experienced around it, and being
home from war and losing two friends in Afghanistan," says Willitts. "For some reason I thought they were these two disparate things that had zero connection to one another."
Willitts himself went through a brief marriage, to a woman he met while stationed in Hawaii, and a prolonged divorce. He and his wife separated within four months and divorced two years to the day of their wedding. "We went down to the courthouse on our second wedding anniversary," he said. "I honestly got married because I was reaching out for something, some sort of stability. Filling some sort of void in my life. And after that I just drank. I drank for years and years."
Narrativelyis an online magazine devoted to original, in-depth and untold stories. Each week, Narratively explores a different theme and publishes just one story a day. It was one of Time's50 Best Websites of 2013.
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