Military Health, military health and wellness, military physical fitness - Military Times

Marine war vet begins cross country journey

SEATTLE — A Marine captain-turned-author began a 3,000-mile bicycle trek June 15 that he hopes will be as much an inner journey of the soul as a cross-country campaign to encourage a national conversation on veteran’s issues.

“The central point of all this is dialogue; let’s have a conversation,” said Tyler Boudreau, an Iraq veteran, as he stood atop a grassy hill in Seattle’s Gas Works Park that marked the starting point of his three-month odyssey back to his wife and three kids in Northampton, Mass.

“With more than 90 days on the road, that’s going leave a lot time to explore my own soul,” he said, sporting tan cargo shorts and a simple gray T-shirt, bulging saddlebags strapped to his black, spray-painted bicycle.

As part of that conversation — with himself and those he meets along the way — he hopes to delve into the issues of post-traumatic stress disorder. Actually, he says he prefers to drop the word “disorder.”

“There’s such a stigma with that word,” Boudreau says. “I think it would do the country a lot of good to lose it.”

He should know.

Boudreau left the Corps in 2005 after a tour in Iraq that included the Battle of Fallujah. Sleepless nights, hair-trigger rage and entire days curled in ball left him wrestling with the demons of his own war experience.

That’s part of what drove him to write his book “Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine,” published this year. The book chronicles his journey through war and home again, and why he resigned his commission in protest against the war. The book was a big part of his own recovery process, and he hopes to share what he’s learned along the trek cross country.

Retired Army Lt. Col. George James, who also spent 29 years working in mental health at the Veterans Administration, was among about a dozen supporters who rode with Boudreau in the first leg of his journey out of Seattle.

“I wanted to support what he’s doing,” said James, now an organizer for the local chapter of Veterans for Peace. “He’s doing what everyone in the country should be doing: educating people on the cost of war. People need to know when you send people into combat, s--- happens; it wounds the soul.”

Boudreau will be speaking at events and doing book signings along the 12-state route across the country.

“In many respects, this project is a fresh attempt at ‘Coming Home,’ ” Boudreau writes on his blog. “Veterans of the current wars and their communities have been struggling to find each other but are in so many ways blinded or blocked by political and cultural barriers. A major objective of this project is to get to ‘the other side’ of those barriers and find home — possibly a better version of home ... possibly as better versions of ourselves.”

Veterans and nonveterans are invited join Boudreau along the way. Visit Boudreau’s Web site for location updates and more information about the tour.