TUNKHANNOCK — Jenny Pacanowski is a professional facilitator for veterans. It’s her job to make sure the veterans who attend the Veterans Meetup and Workshop at the Dietrich Theater feel safe sharing their experiences in a comforting environment.
Twice a year, the veterans program opens itself up to the public. Normally, the veterans group meets on Fridays every month. It’s a place for veterans to meet up for conversation and comaraderie with fellow veterans and military service members of all wars. According to Pacanowski, these workshops help to empower veterans through the creative process of writing as to how they feel about their experiences as warriors for our country.
Pacanowski joined the military at 23, not for patriotic reasons, but to set forth on a new path.
“I had acquired $40,000 in student loans that I wasn’t able to pay back. I didn’t get a degree or anything and was working a minimum wage job,” Pacanowski explained. “I got into a car accident and totaled my car. I didn’t have anywhere to live, and I didn’t want to live with mom and dad in my 20s. So, I ended up going to different branches of the military seeing who did a student loan repayment. I ended up in the army as a private.”
Pacanowski wound up in Iraq for all of 2004 as a healthcare specialist and then as a combat medic. Her co-facilitator and former Vietnam veteran Gary Morgan said, “Jenny saw a lot of bad stuff. She was scraping up after the convoys she traveled with.”
The program is intended to help veterans who aren’t sharing their stories and not speaking their truth. Instead, Pacanowski hopes to empower them to not hide their experiences as well as the guilt and shame they might be going through.
“How I got involved in the performance aspect of it was a lot of veterans assume writing is very feminine,” she said. “They don’t make the connection of veterans and the arts.”
According to Pacanowski, that connection began thousands and thousands of years ago when the Greeks and the Romans and Native American warriors had rituals of homecoming. One of the rituals was their returning to their community and sharing their stories. The community, according to Pacanowski, would be witness, essentially upholding their civic duty to the veterans as a warrior returning.
Pacanowski believes in the last century or so, we’ve lost that.
“We’re not listening to the veterans’ stories,” she said. “It’s suck it up and drive on. The military has been training us not to express emotions. They train us to be elite service members, and we excel at it, most of us, and we’re never retrained to see the world in a different way.”
What Pacanowski took away from the war … and believes isn’t going to be a popular answer in the Tunkhannock area, hesitated, “I didn’t feel we were there for the reasons we were told we were there for – the whole winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. We were supposed to be rebuilding, and I was a medic helping people and saving my fellow service members. That’s not exactly how the story played out.”
Pacanowski believed the troops were destroying and creating unrest more than they were creating a bridge.
“If they had told us when we were going over there it was just to destroy this country, and that’s what war is, and that’s what we were going to do, then that would have been up front. But, they said we were going over to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and we did not follow through on that mission,” Pacanowski said.
The Veterans Meetup and Workshop at the Dietrich has been in existence for a few years. Both Pacanowski and Morgan hope to get more veterans involved and sharing their stories.
“It’s only at certain times this group is open to the public, and when we do presentations,” Pacanowski said. “It’s never required of the veterans to read their stories to the public, only if they feel comfortable and want to. Some veterans never feel comfortable telling their stories and find other outlets like running or painting. Research has been done that shows keeping it inside – keeping these traumas and experiences inside are hurting them physically … you know, chronic pain and things like that.”
Morgan, a former Marine veteran who served in Vietnam in 1965-1966 and lost a leg as a result of a combat operation, added the veterans talk and exchange background stories. He explained they write, but it doesn’t have to be about war experiences.
“It’s a way of dealing with PTSD which we all have, to a greater or lesser extent,” he said. “You can’t go through a war without having experienced some sort of stress. The military itself is a stressful organization. What we’re trying to do is cathartic, I suppose. I wasn’t drafted. I was in the Marine Corp as a Lance Corporal in the infantry. Marine boot camp was just as stressful as Vietnam. It was a very scary experience.”
Morgan also related a story about how, one day, he was wearing a baseball cap that says, ‘I’m a Vietnam Veteran.’ He was amazed when a 10-year-old boy approached him, acknowledging he knew he was a veteran. The boy proceeded to shake his hand and thanked him for his service. Morgan feels the boy must have gotten it from his folks somewhere down the line.
On recruiting veterans for the workshop, Morgan expressed how spelling doesn’t have to be right or handwriting can be terrible. He said the veterans might write for 10 minutes and then talk about it.
Morgan laughed. “Sometimes the language gets a little blue (we clean it up for the public). The thing is, as a veteran, you’re safe. It’s like what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens stays amongst ourselves.”
Pacanowski believes the collaboration of open mic and the veterans is a beautiful thing that can verge the gap between veterans and civilians.
