When the Past Burns the Future Begins

Recently, while listening to the Literature of War podcast featuring a friend of mine, Worth Parker, I got to thinking about the written word—the letters soldiers send home and the journals we keep during hard times. I am no patriot. I carried a certain level of dissonance about the war in Iraq, which I’ve made abundantly clear in prior articles. I don’t have many regrets, but over the years I’ve begun to doubt a decision I made in 2009. I decided to burn my collective personal history so I could purge my past and redefine my future.

I kept a journal every day I was deployed. I had one journal for our four months of pre-deployment training at Camp Atterbury and Fort McClellan. The other journal was for the deployment in Iraq and Kuwait. I burned them both. I had photo albums, letters to and from war, spiral-bound poetry notebooks—everything I’d ever created prior to 2009 was heaped onto a large pyre and burned. It was a lot. The fire got kind of out of control. Who knew photos and dry notebooks would burn so furiously?

My best friend, Daniel, with whom I lived at the time, always said I’d regret it. Just to spite him, I always said I didn’t think it was a bad decision. If I’m being honest, of course I have some sentimentality and loss regarding all that I turned to ash that day. Let me explain my rationale for the sacrificial blaze, and perhaps it will also shed light on why I so fervently write these memoir articles.

In 2009, I had recently become a Christian and was daily reading through the Bible. I was working in a youth group, enrolled in a small Bible college, and about to ask my now-wife to marry me. I’d only known her for a few months at that point—that’s another story. So at the time, I had the thought of offering every bit of my past—my creativity, past relationships, and trauma—as a burnt offering to God. I know, that sounds a little woo-woo, but hear me out. I used it as a way to purge myself of all former attachments. My photo albums and journals were littered with memories of my former life. Not all of it was bad, but there were many things I’d rather not remember—or didn’t need to dwell on anyway.

My war journals were full of events that were both traumatic and uplifting, but those things weren’t why I burned them. I wrote a lot about a former fiancée. All the ups and downs of high school sweethearts separated by training and war. We were together from the time we both just turned seventeen until sometime right before I turned twenty-four. I scraped together my meager savings and bought a tiny diamond ring after Basic Training, like many irrational new privates. We were unceremoniously engaged, marriage date TBD.

A few years later, when I deployed overseas, I decided I didn’t want to leave behind a widow. So, I opted to further postpone our nuptials until after I returned from Iraq. I fully assumed I wouldn’t make it home. Call me morbid, but early in the war no one knew what we were walking into. I would write letter after letter home and scribble homesick musings in my journal. If I could find a payphone or call center at whichever FOB or base I was at while deployed, I would call her first. The distance made me edgy. Our conversations usually devolved into fighting, and I often left the phone tent angry. I should have seen the writing on the wall.

I came home from war lost, confused, and really, really angry. I was depressed and, overall, not fun to be around. I still assumed we’d get married, but now we were deferring until after college. We were both taking heavy loads as biology majors, and the stresses of college—plus me faking that I was okay after my tour of duty—added extra layers of stress on an already fractured foundation. Then, I found out my wife-to-be had been having nocturnal encounters with my (former) best friend. Well, damn. I became a trope. To be fair, he had a Corvette and all I had was PTSD. I don’t blame her for it, and truly it just boiled down to being young, dumb, and not being able to cope with the stresses accompanying war on either side of the pond.

So, on Easter weekend of 2007, I decided to end an engagement and a friendship in one clean cut. At the time, that wound felt less like a clean cut and more like a rusty knife across my heart. Life goes on. Then, like now, I used writing to process complex emotions. Into my journals and poetry it went.

Fast forward to the winter of 2009. I was in Bible college and volunteering in a church as part of my school requirements. I met a girl in my Biblical Geography class. My life was finally beginning to make sense. Those old wounds had healed—mostly—and I was moving in a positive direction. So that’s when I decided to burn it all. I wanted every memory, every piece of the “old me,” to be surrendered on that altar in Daniel’s backyard.

My thought process was that I’ve been creative my entire life, and by sacrificing all I’d ever created, I could rebuild even better. The stories I wrote after that purge were some of the best things I’d ever written. Many articles have since been published in magazines, books, and other outlets. The poetry I wrote after that period showed a growth that I could have only dreamed of way back when. I’m now a published poet in two veteran anthology books and have a manuscript waiting with a publisher that should see the light of day in 2024, God willing. I have written three children’s books since that time, with illustrations from one of my best friends on Earth.

I guess by sacrificing my “first fruits” of creativity, love, and trauma, I’ve been able to come out the other side better all around. The memories that were burned into my brain remained. Those not worth remembering floated on the wind with the ashes of my former self.

Do I regret burning it all? Not really. There are things I wish I’d preserved, but they were tied to things I hoped to forget. The benefits outweigh the regret. So this is why I reflect and constantly refer back. It’s why I’m so passionate about telling stories from times long past. These words are my only legacy, and stories are important.

I now remember things not as I wished they were, and not as pictures pretended they were. I’m rebuilding my past through a new lens—one that can finally see things for what they are. I like to think I’ve made the right choice. I guess time will tell.

Stan Lake is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker from Bethania, North Carolina. His work has been published in Reptiles Magazine, Dirtbag Magazine, Lethal Minds Journal, Backcountry Journal, Wildlife in North Carolina, SOFLETE, The Tarheel Guardsman, Wildsound Writing Festival, and others. His poetry collection “A Toad in a Glass Jar” is scheduled for publication in late fall 2024 by Dead Reckoning Collective. He has written three Children’s books and one Christian Devotional book. He filmed and directed a documentary about his deployment in Iraq with the Army called “Hammer Down.” He spends most of his free time wrangling toads.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.