Survivor's story a sad, haunting memoir

SOFT SPOTS: A Marine's Memoir of Combat and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. By Clint Van Winkle. St. Martin's Press. 213 pages. $24.95.

Marine Sgt. Clint Van Winkle is plagued by the past, by that insufferable question of what is real, what really happened. It surfaces like a canker sore and must be answered. He starts his story drunk, trying futilely to fit into his old dress blues. But nothing fits anymore.

He's lost in memories of Iraq, the invasion replaying in his mind infinitely; in anger that wells up like a watershed, that doesn't fit into civilian life; now lost in the Veterans Administration bureaucracy, where Marines are mentally ill and homeless, even hustling a buck on the street. Nothing fits. Ghosts walk in and out of waking life, on and off his computer screen as he tries to write, tries to tell what happened, if only to find redemption.

The answer, of course, is this exorcism of a memoir, cased in beautiful prose and bone-crushing honesty.

The horrifying thing at the heart of every lost Marine, it would seem, sitting here in this VA waiting room, is the truth. "Soft Spots" is a survival story, not just of combat but the mental warfare that follows, the oppressive nightmares that flesh is heir to, but mostly, it's a restoration of what's human, an unflinching stab at forgiveness, desperately in search of a meaning.

Van Winkle, who spent much of his childhood in Charleston, now gives voice to the thousands of forgotten soldiers returning home from Iraq, or those whose souls are still stuck there. He gives us his poor haunted head, only mapped out and numbered, and the effect will make you weep.