SC military-connected arts group helps veterans handle trauma through storytelling

Since publishing its first volume more than a decade ago, Bullets and Bandaids has worked with more than 100 veterans, mostly from South Carolina, giving them a platform to share their experiences through written stories and art.

And in the last two years, the organization has reached some 60,000 people through traveling art shows and events around the state and country.

Now, the veteran-founded nonprofit is preparing to launch its fifth edition. Supporters gathered in Columbia ahead of the July Fourth holiday to celebrate and raise the funds to make it happen.

“The amount of healing that we have done is wild,” founder Robert LeHeup told the SC Daily Gazette.

LeHeup was among the first groups of United States Marines to push into Afghanistan following 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. His unit helped take control of the Kandahar airport in 2001 and then secured the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

LeHeup left the Marine Corps in 2004 as a sergeant, returning to South Carolina and enrolling at the University of South Carolina, where he earned a writing degree and began working with different media forms.

“I was dealing with the same issues as so many other veterans when they first get back, which is violence and anger without a place to put it — substance abuse, depression, suicidal ideation — and I hadn’t even really addressed it,” he said.

Then, about 13 years ago, LeHeup gave a talk in Columbia. He spoke about a snowy night on patrol during his final weeks in Kabul. His unit was on high alert after they were told there could be members of the Islamic militant group Al-Qaeda in a nearby home. What LeHeup heard drifting over the embassy walls instead was music from a man playing a homemade flute. He stood listening to the man’s song and icicles like wind chimes in the trees as snowflakes fell around him.

“In the writing of it, I gained a sense of ownership over the story,” LeHeup said. “But that wasn’t anything compared to after I had performed it, because that’s when I knew that my story had been heard. This profound sense of isolation, which had caused all of these different problems, was being addressed through my telling of the story and knowing that people had heard it.”

He started Bullets and Bandaids to give other veterans a similar experience.

LeHeup records interviews with veterans, friends and family. Then, that recording is fact checked and shared with a volunteer writer, often someone who has not been in the military, who turns it into a written story. Finally, an artist will create a painting, music poetry or other work of art inspired by the story.

“We’ve had people say things like, I wouldn’t have been able to tell my wife this story were it not for Bullets and Bandaids. I’m still alive today because you guys are continuing to tour. I wouldn’t be here were it not for the connections that I had made,” LeHeup said.

By pairing veterans with civilian writers and artists, LeHeup said the group also works to bridge the divide that often exists between military members and those without a military connection.

“I think veterans are forced to be in one of two boxes, either they are broken or they are heroes that need nothing,” LeHeup said. “I believe that our humanity, our lives, are in the gray area in between. And I hope that civilians will recognize that we live in that gray area, and that both civilians and veterans find the strength in acknowledging that shared human journey.”

Kristine Hartvigsen, of Columbia, was never in the military herself but her father spent his career in the U.S. Army as a physician. Her aunt was an Army nurse during the war in Vietnam. Her son enlisted, too, deploying twice — in 2017 to Afghanistan and last year to Syria — and currently stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia.

“I do have just a real strong affinity for veterans and am trying to understand my son’s experience better by learning from other vets, because he was definitely changed when he came home,” Hartvigsen said.

About four years ago, she volunteered as a writer for Bullets and Bandaids after learning about it from a friend.

“What I really hear is the stuff that I think about when my son is deployed. I’m trying to picture where he is, what he sees, what he’s doing. So it’s the little details that veterans share,” Hartvigsen said.

One story that particularly stuck with her came from Corey Norrell, a self-proclaimed Navy brat who enlisted when he turned 18. He told her about a rite of passage in the U.S. Navy, known as the crossing the line ceremony, held when a sailor crosses the equator for the first time and becomes a “trusty shellback” or a “Son of Neptune.”

The “shellbacks” crawl on their hands and knees across the non-skid deck with a surface so rough “sandpaper doesn’t hold a candle to it,” he said.

“It’s not a combat story, but it’s part of the experience, because there’s a brotherhood and sisterhood that forms among military service members,” Hartvigsen said.

Hartvigsen said her son prefers not to speak about his deployments but she does remember talking to him on the phone and him telling her he could see enemy soldiers in the distance from the wall he was standing on.

“It was just shocking to me that he could see them across the way. But unless they fire, they’re all just watching each other and that’s stressful in itself, just not knowing what’s going to happen,” Hartvigsen said.

Unlike Hartvigsen, Andrew Cooke was in the military — the U.S. Air Force — and also produces art for Bullets and Bandsaids.

Cooke retired from the Air Force as a staff sergeant in 2012 after developing a heart condition following an injury sustained during an attack on Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where he was deployed in 2010. He’d also done earlier tours in Kandahar and Al Dahfra, in the United Arab Emirates.

After leaving the Air Force, Cooke took up photography as part of therapy. He particularly liked photographing storms and landscapes near his home in Tucson, Arizona. Being in nature and away from crowded spaces calmed him.

The Darlington native then moved back to South Carolina and currently lives in Spartanburg, working as a construction manager. He still does photography on the side.

Cooke, who is now on the board of directors for Bullets and Bandaids, finds value in how the organization connects civilians and veterans and the level of appreciation that develops between the soldiers and their story tellers.

Cooke said Bullets and Bandaids needs financial help from the community to keep going. The organization is supported both by private donations and government grants, including a $10,000 grant from the state Arts Commission for 2025 and $10,000 from the state Humanities Council in 2024.