Seriously Not All Right

March 31, 2014
Capps served as an army officer for nine years then became a Foreign Service officer documenting war crimes in Kosovo, Central Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq and Darfur. This searing memoir recounts the horrors Capps encountered and their devastating effects on his psyche and soul. “This book tells the story of how I got to the point in my life when I was sitting alone in a pickup truck in the middle of the African continent ready to end it all, and how I came back from there.” Capps does an admirable job of painting a picture of war for those who know little about life in the military or the Foreign Service. In 2002, Capps received a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, though obtaining any help for his condition became another battle: “The government that sent me to war, that encouraged me to return again and again, dropped me as soon as I stumbled,” Capps writes. After returning home, Capps attended a graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins University. He founded the Veterans Writing Project, which provides tools for veterans to communalize their experiences through the telling of their stories. Capps’s telling of his story of war and bearing witness is vitally important for “the 99% of Americans who sat out the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

April 1, 2014
As a foreign service officer and soldier, Capps discovered firsthand the psychological and emotional tolls of wartime. The author, who is the founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project, begins his memoir with an account of the time he nearly committed suicide. Capps joined the military as a careerist back in the mid-1980s, though he was sharp enough to take and pass the foreign service exam, and he traveled to many global flashpoints during his career. The author writes in a fairly straightforward style--in Kabul, the "old market is...just as much a warren of alleys as it was five hundred years ago. It was a great place to take the temperature of the city--to walk around and get a feel for how safe things felt or what people were talking about"--but the narrative is thick with portent. Capps has seemingly seen it all, including Rwanda when the Hutus and Tutsis were slaughtering each other and battlegrounds in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The horrors of what he has witnessed, and his inability to right just one of the overturned carts, have followed him to bed at night--to call them nightmares would be to diminish their stark terror--and inflicted him with shakes, panic attacks and severe depression, as well as a horrible fear: "[T]he thing that really scares me and sends me running for help--is that I am not in control of my mind." Eventually, to combat his raging PTSD, Capps sought both psychiatric and pharmacological help, and he is now glad to no longer be a participant in the suffering of war. "There will always be wars and there will always be dead guys," he writes in closing. "But someone else is out there now. Godspeed to them. I've done my share. I'm going home." A mostly even-keeled soldier's memoir that occasionally throws sparks.

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