“Inevitably, everyone in the military has experienced some sort of trauma,” says Ryan Stroud. “In military life, all the rules of society are turned upside down.”
It’s a world that’s hierarchical, structured, demanding, and sometimes violent—and for three years, Stroud has been encouraging PSU student veterans to talk about it in a storytelling night called #FUBAR.
“I think the veteran experience is particularly unique,” says Stroud, who’s a veteran himself, “in that you have to find humor, but you find humor in very dark places.” That darkness and humor is right there in the title’s acronym: “Fucked up beyond all recognition” is military slang that can refer to malfunctioning equipment, grisly casualties, or soldiers who have been disabled or psychologically scarred by their experiences.
