Soft Spots: A Marine's Memoir of Combat and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

If you are the wife or significant other of a military man who has deployed, this book will give you a glimpse of what your husband will probably never tell you about. As a military wife with a deployed husband, this book tore my heart apart while explaining a lot. Intellectually, I understand what my husband does and what it takes, but this book made me understand deeper in my heart what it really costs him to serve. I cried through much of the book. It is written with clarity and raw detail. It is not for the feint of heart - but then none of the military wives I know have a feint heart. I think that every military wife whose husband patrols "outside the wire" should read this book, regardless of their branch of service.

This slim book feels like something all Americans should read. The author paints a portrait of his experience as a Marine in Iraq which is fascinating, chilling, horrifying, and at times even briefly funny. He succeeded in helping me better understand both the mindset and the experiences of young Marines coming home from the war. The author vividly describes his life with his Marine buddies and comrades, painting a picture of personalities, places, events, and dilemmas... and eventually the emotional reactions which begin to filter through. It's an incredibly powerful piece of writing, and a real example of "courage after fire". I'm grateful to the author for sharing both his experiences and his process of beginning to face how the war has changed him (and hundreds of thousands of other men and women). I think this book is especially valuable for those who love a Marine (or soldier) serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, since it is unflinching in sharing an inside view of a military culture which rewards toughness and suppression of emotions. While the episodes of violence, fear, rage, and horror are at times difficult to read, they may be very helpful in understanding what the person you love has lived through. Even the harsh language and vulgar humor of the men in this story are helpful in picturing their lives and world view. The episode in which a pathetic dog is repeatedly shot at by a fellow Marine for absolutely no reason (and neither the author nor anyone else intervenes to save it) was very powerful for me, especially knowing that the author owns a yellow lab at the end of the book. (The moment in which his dog nudges his arm to ask for a pat on the head was one of the first moments when it began to feel as if the author was really home.) The author shows real courage in sharing how difficult it has been to live with his experiences in Iraq, and how difficult it is even to be sure what happened when looking back through the fog of war. At the end of the book, I was really grateful for the moment of clarity the author experienced, realizing that he is not alone with his experience. I am sure this book will succeed in helping family, friends, and fellow citizens be better equipped to help and support veterans through the long process of coming home. Mr. Van Winkle, thank you for your service to our country both as a Marine and as an author.

This book needs to be read so we can all understand what our soldiers went through that the government won't tell us. My son was there 3 times and this is all true. I wanted to know more of what he went through hoping it would help me to help him, things he can't seem to say but now I know why. Soft Spots is what he was picking up off the ground just two weeks before he left from his 3rd extended tour and one from his own unit. This is very difficult and heart breaking to read but it should be required reading for our junior high and high school students. Everyone needs to know the horror our soldiers faced from what they had to see and do while they were there. There will never be anyway we can fully feel thier pain but it helps too understand where it is coming from. This is not a long book but expect it to take some time to read it all the way through as it is hard to stop crying and see the pages while you read it and feel a small amount of what they withstood. There really are no words to describe it, you just need to read it for yourself.

I should probably begin by saying that Clint Van Winkle, the author of Soft Spots, is as much of a hero as most of the other US Marines with whom he served. Not more and not less. Those of us who haven't served seem to idolize our soldiers, but Van Winkle seems, in turn, to not want idolatry. There are as many stories about fighting wars as there are people who are involved in war. Van Winkle wrote about something that's been whispered about for centuries, even today: mental illness. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a severe, debilitating anxiety that develops after a person is subjected to terrifying events, such as rape, witnessing a murder... or being part of a war. PTSD occurs, as per a recent [2009] study, in approximately 17% of US armed forces (all branches). Van Winkle talks about, early in his story, opening a sandy box of mementos he brought back from his most recent tour in Iraq, a land that's mostly desert. "The box released the land when I opened it," he said. The velocity of his mental sandstorms varied. They had no rhyme, reason, or mercy. His sandstorms occur randomly throughout the book. In most books, this jumping around would be unnecessary and, in fact, annoying. However, why should the reader be able to sift through the story neatly when the author could not? The job was to "carry out your mission, and keep your honor clean." Marines leave no man behind - but sometimes they had to. A Forward of the book defined "Soft Spots" as the remains of a US Marine who had died in combat. The Marines fell onto religion as they hadn't as civilians, searching for something to get them through everything. The Marines were told to write Death Letters before the mission began: a Death Letter would be the letter that would be presented to the loved ones of a soldier who died in combat, as a means of closure for the family. With all that, and the death and destruction and disgusting conditions and the loneliness, it's surprising that the percentage of troops coming home with PTSD isn't higher. Clint Van Winkle may not have received a million medals, but he told the story of his view of the war, and of his demons and hallucinations, eloquently. He told of his monsters, his uncontrollable drinking, his trials and tribulations with the Veterans' Affairs bureaucracy, and of the girl who stuck by him. His words were concise and full of description. He has a wonderful command of the written word and of language, and it's a darned shame that his skills are needed to explain something so ugly.

My wife Kathy is a counselor with specialized training in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and she did her internship at a local veteran's center. As the significant other, I have been exposed to a great deal of pillow talk about the problems of veterans in general and those with PTSD in particular. I also accompanied Kathy to a daylong seminar where the topic was PTSD in war veterans. While all cases are of course different, there are many similarities in their cases. Van Winkle experiences spurts of anger, memory flashbacks that are altered in many ways, he self-medicates in the form of significant alcohol consumption and keeps weapons close at hand. All these are behaviors fairly typical of war veterans suffering from PTSD. What is different about this book is how well Van Winkle describes his experiences, after leaving Iraq he graduated from college as an English major and pursued graduate studies in Wales. He learned those lessons well, his descriptions of combat missions and patrols in Iraq and his relationships with his buddies are told with an understated calm characteristic of the best writers. There are several disturbing aspects to this book; the first is how many places Van Winkle had to go before he receives anything approaching quality treatment for his problems. The second is the realization of how much emotional, psychological and monetary treasure this nation has bled out into the soil of Iraq. These accounts will continue to be settled for decades to come and the cost will continue to be very high.