Composing music helped this Arizona veteran with PTSD build a ‘sound sanctuary’

Jason Phillips thought about joining the military after high school.

He’d always had a deep admiration for veterans, including his grandfather who’d served in WWII. But his mom talked him out of signing up.

Later, though, he decided to enlist. The day he went to the recruiter’s station to sign his contract: Sept. 11, 2001. He officially signed about an hour before the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

After that, sirens started going off and doors slammed at the station. He was taken to a conference room where he watched the attacks unfold on TV. It was at that point, he says, that he knew he was going to war.

Phillips was in the Army for five years. He was deployed to Iraq for 18 months in 2003-04.

He’s an Arizona State University grad and the music director and organist at Mountain View Lutheran Church in Phoenix. He’ll be presenting his “Service to Sanctuary” performance Friday night — his musical perspective of war and service — including his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and how composing music helped him through them.

Phillips stopped by KJZZ's studios recently to talk about his experiences. He talked about his state of mind while he was in Iraq.

Full conversation

JASON PHILLIPS: In one sense, time stretched out into this, every moment was significant in a very profound and deep way, like you start counting like the molecules of time, in a sense. And I experienced some of the best times of my life in Iraq with my fellow soldiers. Sometimes that I laughed so hard, I felt like I would never stop laughing. I met so many wonderful men and women, young and old, and I treasure all of that.

In every war, there are going to be moments of terrible things, and I don’t know who said it or exactly where I read this, but war is like ... 95% tedium and then 5% is terror. And I think that’s the experience I took away from it is that every part of life when I was in Iraq just seemed amplified.

MARK BRODIE: It sounds like that would be, given that, hard to then transition back to civilian life when your time in the military was done.

PHILLIPS: I thought it was going to be smooth. I felt very grateful to have left my military service without ever having been physically wounded, and that the further I got away from my military time, I would transition smoother and smoother into the next stage of my life.

My wife and I got married shortly after my military time, and we moved to Southern California, about 5 miles from Disneyland. And that changed everything because they had fireworks every night and it just brought back flashbacks and nightmares that I was already suffering from, and that was the beginning of a very difficult journey.

BRODIE: Yeah, what was it like for you before maybe you recognized that you had PTSD and before you were able to get help for it?

PHILLIPS: When I first returned from my time in Iraq, my mother was the first to notice some things — this is right after I returned — that she thought might be symptoms of PTSD. I had never heard that term before.

And so part of my presentation that I’m gonna be doing talks about how I resisted that. I also felt like, who am I to seek treatment for stress when I have people that I know who lost their lives and lost their limbs?

So PTSD did not ring true to me, and I resisted that diagnosis for a long time. But internally, I was struggling with almost like what I would say was a malignant tumor of emotion and confusion, and it just got worse over time.

BRODIE: Phillips says about a decade ago, he suffered what he calls a real break from reality and had a complete mental breakdown. He says he had to look at himself and recognize there was something inside him he needed to address — and that if he didn’t, he’d lose everything, including his life.

Phillips says he’s grateful to his wife and family for sticking with him — and that music was also a huge help in processing what he was dealing with.

PHILLIPS: To try to pull myself out of that lowest of low points, I returned to school. I was pursuing a Ph.D. in music education. And in one of the first classes that I took after I had enrolled, I was introduced to a composer named Daphne Oram.

She’s a British composer of electronic music, and as a woman in the middle of the 20th century, she faced some discrimination. Men didn’t think she should be involved in electronics.

So on her studio wall, she hung a post, a framed picture of her favorite quote from a novel. And it said, “We also have sound houses.” Now, she was referring to herself as a woman and a composer, having a sound house just like the men did.

I immediately, that that quote hit me like a lightning bolt. And I thought what I need internally are sound houses that I build for myself out of music, and they could become this internal shelter built out of my melody and my harmony and my form.

I went home that very day, sat down in my office and composed one of the first songs that will be presented on my program. And I just felt so different as I was doing that, and after that I felt so grounded. The turmoil internally, the voices, the visions, they all went away, and all I had was music.

And that set me on this journey of discovering that music wasn’t just a sound house, but really the sound sanctuary that helps me to find healing and find meaning and peace and purpose after my experiences in and after war.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Klauss Baesu

BRODIE: So you talk about building sort of a house of sound like what were the components of that house that were so meaningful to you?

I would imagine it wasn’t just any trapped house, as it were. It had to be something that would speak to you in a particular way or make you feel a particular way.

What was it about the music that spoke to you so well?

PHILLIPS: It’s nothing specific about the music itself, but that for me, music represents the deepest, most meaningful, personal human experience that I’ve had in life since I was a child. Music struck me from the moment that I first heard it.

So, for me, connecting to that part of myself intentionally to create this sound house and part of a sound sanctuary, and create something that was ordered out of everything that war had disordered, that was the process that helped me.

And I feel these pieces inside me. Every composition leaves me with the impression that I have built something in me that is there permanently.

BRODIE: What does it mean to you to be able to perform these pieces for other people?

You’re obviously composing them, as you say, for yourself. But what does it mean to you to be able to perform these for other people and maybe help them the way these pieces helped you?

PHILLIPS: Yeah, I’ve, I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently, and it’s helped me to understand every part of this journey has helped me understand more and more what I’m doing here. And I realized that If I can give people a deeper and more nuanced and more thorough understanding of psychological war wounds, then I will have found meaning.

If I can encourage some people to help combat veterans, then I will have found meaning. And if I can encourage my fellow combat veterans to find their own sanctuaries — and to embark on this healing journey when they’re at their lowest point or hopefully before — then I will have found meaning.