Veteran pens his pain in poetry

Besides writing, Ed Brown has also taken up carving to honour his First Nations heritage. He stands proudly holding one of his own designs.

Local poet and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) veteran Cpl (Ret’d) Ed Brown has hung up his uniform and taken up the pen.

The 19-year veteran of the CAF recently self-published “A Soldier’s Fortune and Other Poems: Moving Past PTSD and Creating a Fun-Loving Life.”

The book is a collection of Brown’s musings on his struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), life in the military, and the personal effects of war.

“I wanted to put my work out there as a way of showing others who suffer from PTSD that there’s help for them,” says Brown. “I came from a very old school of thought, that if you were hurting and needed help you just sucked it up and did your job. That isn’t healthy, and it isn’t right. If you need help you have to talk about it.”

During his long and varied career, Brown served in all three branches of the military, seeing three tours of duty including the former Yugoslavia in 1994, Israel and Syria in 2004, and a support mission in Istanbul serving forces in Afghanistan in 2007.

“I came back from Istanbul and I was angry. I was really angry,” he says. “After each deployment I came back with a head full of things I’d rather forget. Losing friends, having your life in mortal danger, the stress, the tension, the fear, it all just became too much.”

Returning home that third and final time Brown took to drugs and drink to keep his demons at bay. His marriage and family life were in shambles, and he was a man on the verge of breaking.

“I dealt with my feelings poorly. It was a really bad time in my life, and I’m not proud of what I did, but I can’t deny it happened,” he says. “I started seeing a psychiatrist, and they suggested I find an outlet for my feelings. I wasn’t sure where to go with it, but eventually I started writing.”

Taking to the written word as a way of dealing with his volatile emotions, Brown began writing poems. Starting with personal pieces, he developed a style and compiled a significant body of work.

“A lot of it is very angry, especially the earlier stuff,” he says. “It was coming from a dark, angry place, so a lot of my feelings about that time and the work I did and what I saw bled into it pretty heavily.”

After a few years of writing Brown had the idea of publishing his work. Working with a local self-publisher he released “A Soldier’s Fortune”, which is now available in print and digital copies through Amazon.

“It’s been a really amazing experience, putting myself out there through my writing,” he says. “If people can read my work and realize there are others out there going through the same thing they are, that’s amazing.

For civilians, I want people to understand the things service men and women go through, and how it changes them. It’s important and it needs to be said.”

“A Soldier’s Fortune and Other Poems: Moving Past PTSD and Creating a Fun-Loving Life” can be found at www.amazon.ca.

Shawn O’Hara, Staff Writer