Ron Capps: Seriously Not All Right

Ron Capps served in five wars in ten years, in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Darfur.

Capps joined the Army in 1983 and the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer in the early 90s while continuing in the Army Reserve. His unique career led him at times to serve as a diplomat, and at other times as an intelligence officer, investigating and documenting some of the bloodiest war zones in recent history. 

As both a senior military intelligence officer for the Army and an observer for the U.S. Department of State, Capps was witness to some of the most devastating scenes of mass atrocity, human violence, and genocide the world has seen in the last 20 years—spending time in Kosovo, Chad, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Darfur. In Seriously Not All Right, he recounts his role as an intelligence gatherer and reporter who was diplomatically restrained from taking preventive action, or, as he puts it, “a bystander, for the most part, to hideous violence; an observer among hundreds of thousands of dead on three continents.”  That role would see him reporting first hand on: 

• The killing fields of Kosovo, including the look in the eyes of an old man who  had just recovered the lifeless bodies of six of his family members, and the pleas of a mother for Capps to take her baby so the Serbs wouldn’t kill him—a request he couldn’t meet;
• The cruelties perpetrated over the span of several conflicts in central Africa, including the Hutu vs. Tutsi war that would claim the lives of nearly one million people in a hundred days, and the day Capps interviewed a nun who had been raped by three soldiers who had killed the parish priest moments before;
• The brutality of the wars in both Afghanistan, where Capps first began experiencing symptoms of PTSD, and Iraq, where he was deployed soon after, while in a precarious mental state; 
• And the horrors of ethnic cleansing he witnessed in Darfur, where the government sought to drive out the non-Arab population by starving and killing their cattle and camels, burning their villages and farms, and poisoning their wells, among other tactics, and where Capps came close to taking his own life.

“During these wars, one of my jobs was to talk to people and report their stories and what I thought about them back to my readership—U.S. government policy makers. We were instructed to write crisp, dry reports about messy, horrible acts of cruelty.  I knew those reports were not sufficient to tell the tale.  I needed to tell the deeper story of what was happening in these ‘small wars.’  So I wrote in order to remember.  Over time, I didn’t want to remember any longer.  But that’s not how these things work.  Once an image is in your head, it’s there forever.” - from Seriously Not All Right

Ron Capps is the founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project, a non-profit program that provides no-cost writing seminars and workshops for veterans, service members, and their family members.  He is the curriculum developer and lead instructor for the National Endowment for the Arts programs that bring expressive and creative writing seminars to wounded warriors at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence.  Ron is a graduate of both the Master of Liberal Arts program and the MA in Writing program of the Johns Hopkins University.