Yeah, this was, this is kind of the everyday uniform.
Matthew Kraw is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps.
He received his Combat Action Award ribbon while serving during the first surge of Operation
Iraqi Freedom.
When I returned from Iraq, I was a mess.
The skills as a Marine, they teach you how to swim.
You know, I would act like I was cool and smile and everything's fine.
I'm happy to be here, but deep down inside, I was going through some things.
We were doing combat operations and we went into a house.
Something went wrong and people died and I have to live with that.
I hope that God sees it the way that I saw it.
It's something that I relive in my dreams every night.
As a result of that, I have serious post-traumatic stress disorder.
We were going through this place called Sniper's Alley and we were scared.
Our officers said, keep alert, there's going to be people trying to kill you.
So we're going through this place.
Matt found writing to be therapeutic.
Eventually, he had completed a full-length book about his experience as a Marine in Iraq.
Matthew Kraw is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps.
He has finished his first book, The Song Each Bullet Sings, a story of Operation Iraqi
Freedom through the eyes of what Marine is currently shopping into publishers and agents.
I definitely wouldn't be here right now if I didn't, if I didn't write about it.
Matt suffers from reoccurring nightmares as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder.
He says a persistent feeling of paranoia invades his day-to-day activities as a civilian.
He came to a sliding stop, almost having my M16 poking directly in the eye.
And things didn't begin to get any better until he began to talk and write about what
he was going through.
That's what a lot of veterans right now are dealing with.
These kids are coming home and they don't know how to talk about it and it's hard to
get the beginning part out to say, this is something to happen that I don't want to talk
about and it's eating me away inside.
You don't know how to direct that energy or how to say it so you don't sound like a psycho
or how to say it so people don't think you're this murderous person but you were just doing
your job.
You suppress it just like anybody would do if there's a bad thing in their life.
You push it down and that's, we did that, we exemplified that in the Marine Corps.
Just now recently I would say over the past couple years he's more open to talking about
stuff but in the beginning I would have no idea what's going on in his head.
You knew he had been traumatized immediately.
He flinched, he checked doors, people didn't like people being too close to him, didn't
like people being too close to his mother, very protective, overprotective, paranoid.
This stuff was locked up.
I didn't want to talk about it.
I didn't want to look at this stuff because I couldn't deal with it.
Brighting helps substantially get through that.
Seeing an actual human being's body like this was an experience that I found incredibly
hard to accept as reality.
But the men in Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 11th Marines didn't have a long or sad expression
among them.
Everybody took pictures and pointed like tourists and some even laughed.
I looked pretty good in this thing a couple years ago, now not so much.
Despite its effect on his health, Matt is quick to point out that he doesn't regret
his time in the Marines.
As hard as it is, and as much as it drives me crazy at night when I wake up with these
nightmares, the Marine Corps saved my life.
It makes me remember who I am down inside, the good qualities that makes you you, and
it helped me find those qualities again when I had lost them.
Morgan's a buddy of mine.
We were in Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 11th Marines together.
So Morgan's like a perfect example or small microcosm of a Marine who's seen a lot of
combat and doesn't talk about it at all.
Maybe I should be a bit more like Matt, and it might help with different aspects of my
life to be a bit more open, but I'm content that I'm just kind of keeping it to myself.
There's a certain honor in it, and I don't think that I should have to feed it to other
people.
I don't want other people to live that honor.
I think that if they want to live the honor, then they should go through it.
I have so much pride in this game, I respect them so much, because you can just swallow
them and like hold on and own it as soon as I get up, I just want to be moving.
He just said something that I've kind of knew, but I've never heard him actually say it,
and he stays busy as part of his process of dealing with what's going on, and that's
kind of cool, because I kind of had a feeling, but I've never heard Morgan say it.
I don't think I've ever relaxed, bro, since 2001, bro.
When you go into some rooms or some people, some environments, and then to hear that you're
a combat veteran Marine, their immediate question is, have you killed people, or that's what
they're thinking, and you don't want to answer that.
I just try to shy away from the whole conversation coming up, because I don't see how you can't
talk to a woman who's been raped and ask her how it felt, or for a mother to have lost
a child during birth, like how does it feel?
The person who's asked the question knows exactly how it feels.
I can't fault him for it, but I'll tell him to buzz off, tell him to beat it and go ask
somebody else.
So what I'm trying to get across with the book is so people can see kind of what we're
going through.
And maybe if America could hear a little bit about it, they would understand it a little
better, and maybe react differently towards a veteran like yourself and me.
These people don't have a clue about what the veteran is dealing with and how they're
changed.
I feel like America doesn't really want to know.
That's why I think if my story could get out, it could help veterans, and people understand
these bad asses, these real American heroes, like here we go, a little bit better.
But if it never succeeds, if I self-publish it on a computer and it sits in a box for
the rest of my life, it will have helped me become a little bit more normal.
