About three-quarters of the way through his memoir of soldiering, Five Wars: A Soldier’s Journey to Peace (2017), Col. Fred Johnson (Ret.) recalls a scene from his time in Bosnia. It’s January 1995, and his commander is meeting with the Serbian military leadership in their area of operations. Fred takes a stroll around a bombed-out school, finds a room littered with crayon-covered drawings of the sort children make in the earliest grades. “Except,” he writes, “when I picked one up, I saw that the child had drawn a house completely engulfed in flames. Green blobs with rifle barrels—tanks, I assumed—lined the background. Stick figures formed a line out of the burning building; one of the stick figures was on fire, scratched over red and orange and yellow. Another stick figure was drawn in the yard beside the house, laid horizontally, with red crayon coming away from its mouth in drops.”
Like so much in this book, it is the contrast between the comic and the tragic, the sacred and the abundantly profane, that penetrates our consciousness like one of the Iraqi EFP’s (Explosively Formed Penetrators) the author describes, or like a sergeant major through BS. Reading works of this type, military memories and the like is part of my job. I have read dozens of them, from the classics to the offbeat and iconoclastic and can say that Johnson has accomplished something special.
There is no lack of literature that takes us inside the world of soldiers at war. From Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel which paints a picture of trench warfare in World War I as sublime to Piers Platt’s Combat and Other Shenanigans which is subtitled Tales of the Absurd from a Deployment to Iraq. Five Wars delivers the quiet pathos of too-wise children’s drawings alongside the frenetic summary of the Bosnian peacekeeping mission with endless repetitions of the “You gotta keep ‘em separated” lyric from the Offspring’s song “Come Out and Play.” It gives us the perennial soldier’s game of dropping the perfect quote from a hit movie into conversation—as in the case of the memorable Staff Sergeant Hudgeons who would invariably end his daily briefing on the insurgents in the area with, “And that’s all I have to say about that.”
There is, however, another layer to this book, in my mind the most important. Col. Johnson delves into the aftermath of war. At this point, PTSD has become something akin to a cliche in American culture, all-too-often imagining combat veterans as psychological basket cases. Fred’s story—the story of a retired bird colonel and twenty-eight-year veteran—humanizes the reality of psychological damage. He recounts the siren call of suicide and the useless oblivion of self-medication. He admits to basking in the addictive drug of war and to an obsessive push to physical challenges. Most importantly, he relates the complex ways in which soldierly experience intertwines with memories of beloved friends who never came home and the pain of those who continue to wait for a spouse or parent present in body only.
If you are a veteran or a family member of a veteran, there will be much here that is familiar, though it is crucial to bear in mind every vet’s story is unique. Near the end of the book, Col. Johnson tells us about the healing power of art in conjunction with a willingness to seek help from therapeutic professionals. On a personal note, I will add that as a beneficiary of the Shakespeare With Veterans program that he created—in collaboration with the wonderful folks at Kentucky Shakespeare—I will add that you have done more than I can say for your fellow vets. Fred, reading your story only confirms for me what I already knew: we are, as human beings, made of stories at the most fundamental level. Thank you.
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”