Home of the Providence Clemente Veterans' Initiative
“I was motivated by the opportunity to connect with other veterans and employ the humanities as a means to understand my/our military experiences…I benefited from the course in a number of ways. It helped me gain a better understanding of my military service and enabled me to view that service from a perspective that stretches back millennia yet has commonality with the difficulties veterans continue to experience today.
I would recommend this course to any veteran able to take it. I think it’s immensely valuable in a way that every veteran could benefit from…I made real friends and changed my own understanding of what it meant to be a veteran, as well as learned a good deal of useful philosophy.
I learned a considerable amount about the feelings of my fellow veterans and no longer feel as alone in my own experience.
I have had thoughts of committing suicide in the past, but they are more present and persistent now than ever before. I have known Soldiers who took their lives after returning from war. I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to bring pain to others, but I don’t want to live with the way I’m feeling.
I joined PCVI and it’s helped me to begin to understand the nature of that Weight…that necessarily rests on the shoulders of every service member who makes it out alive…We discuss art, poetry, philosophy, and history, starting all the way back from Ancient Greece and coming up to the modern day. But we don’t just talk about war, we talk about veterans, and movements, and revolutions, and the effects those things have on the world and on ourselves.
Thank you to PCVI for opening up the humanities to me. I gained historical knowledge and the study of the arts have given me catharsis just like the plays of Sophocles and Euripides did for the Greeks 3000 years ago. The value of PCVI cannot be understated.
“I am a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. I came to the PCVI through a suggestion made to me by my PTSD counsellor at the Providence VA Hospital. She had always been trying to find ways to push me to go outside my comfort zone, and thought that taking this course would fit the bill. It was here at PCVI that I first learned that there had been books written just about homecoming. Through reading and discussion, I learned that homecoming is complicated for all parties concerned…I have learned that conflicts like war have a humanities connection.
“It is hard to put into words exactly what PCVI offers to ALL of us involved in it. This class is far more than just the study of war throughout the ages or looking at pretty pictures or sculptures. PCVI is a class that requires everyone involved to be introspective in ways we were too afraid, unable, or unaware to try before. It is a class that cares nothing about your race, religion, or political affiliation. It cares about us on a human level, something that is missing from the society in which we return to. When we come home, we are expected to act like we did NOT serve.
“As a PCVI student I was presented with the opportunity to share my story…I was in a safe zone. With each passing class my feeling of safety increased as we moved forward in studying the Greek tragedies…Antigone, the subject of a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles, is a threat to the status quo; she invokes divine law as defense of her actions. She sacrifices her life out of devotion to principles higher than human law. This young woman was calling me.
In the PCVI we read Plato. Plato gives us the Allegory of the Cave where two Philosophers talk about someone who has walked out of darkness into the glaring light of reality. Veterans have seen some of this harsh reality and learned some painful lessons about themselves, their friends and the cruelties of the wide … Read more