Steel Will
by Shilo Harris, with Robin Overby Cox
***
Shortly after Saving
Private Ryan appeared in movie theaters, I was aghast to hear that one of
my co-workers had taken her then-teenage son to see it. She did it, she said,
to keep him from getting any ideas that war was glamorous. But that was the
‘90’s. Then came 9/11, and wars when both civilians and soldiers die—or
sometimes worse, live−without any thought of glamour, under circumstances of
almost unimaginable, unremitting horror. Those are the kinds of wars Shilo Harris writes about in his memoir, Steel
Will.
“This generation of soldiers grew up on video games
and TV shows that glamorize violence,” he writes. “We don’t speak of pink mist
with you; it represents the vapor that once was a whole soldier. Or it might be
the remains of the enemy after taking a 25mm high-explosive round…Either way, a
human being becomes annihilated into pink mist.”
The book’s subtitle, My Journey through Hell to Become the Man I was Meant to Be, is Harris’s
theme. It’s the inside story of what his life was like after an IED explosion
while on patrol in Iraq left him burned over 30 percent of his body, with
broken bones, fingers lost, and almost faceless. And how, although living with
still unremitting pain, with PTSD, with occasions when he comes close to
suicide, he learns to find new meaning in life.
I met Harris last summer at the DFW Writers
Conference. Now retired from his military career, he works as an inspirational
speaker. Some conference organizer booked him, probably hoping his story would
put our writerly whining about agents into a broader perspective. It did.
Once we recovered from the shock of Harris’s
appearance which children at his daughter’s school likened to a Halloween
costume his charm (he admits to being the class clown of his high school in
tiny Coleman, Texas) and self-deprecating humor, including stories about his
“Spock” artificial ears, won us over. Still, I was reluctant to crack open his
memoir until recently. Would Harris’s
story be too much to take? Instead, his book turned out to be one of those
can’t put it down reads.
It’s full of no holds barred talk about what it’s like
to have your Kevlar and ceramic plate body armor melt into your burning skin, to
see the horror of your ruined face and body reflected in a comrade’s eyes, even
to wake, after your supposed recovery, to your beloved wife's finding you with a half-emptied bottle of vodka between your knees (because
your hands are too ruined to hold it). But beyond all, there’s the acknowledgement that grace and love and meaning
still exist.
If readers find the religious faith Harris achieved
through his agony too much to take, they need to get over it. His life speaks
for itself. A self-admitted wild child before his marriage, fathering three
children out of wedlock, he says not that he found God, but that God found him
in his agony and convinced him that his life still had purpose despite all his
losses.
Those losses have since included a divorce from the
woman he credits with the courage to stand by him in circumstances beyond
anything they imagined when they promised “for better or for worse.” He doesn’t
blame her. “It’s called compassion fatigue. It happens when caregivers who give
and give and give get to the bottom of their buckets.” Estimates of divorce
rates in families of injured military members can run as high as 90 percent.
It’s part of the price.
Harris’s book includes a glossary of military terms as
well as extensive lists of resources for veterans, their families, and those
willing to help them; a reading list; and brief biographies of the three
comrades in Harris’s Humvee who didn’t survive the IED explosion that injured
him. It’s widely available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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