The Marine was in his mid-20s when he entered the photo lab at the Wounded Warrior Battalion West onboard Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego County.

“I have to sit in a corner so I can have eyes on the room at all times,” he said, staring intently at me.

“The room is filled with your brother Marines,” I said.

“I don’t care who they are, I trust nobody,” he told me as he dragged a chair into the far corner of the lab.

After he almost quit the class and then had some major emotional setbacks, the Marine began making surprisingly brilliant photographs. “When I’m taking pictures, I feel no pain anymore,” he told me.

f-Stop Warrior Project was launched with the support of the Tug McGraw Foundation in Yountville to teach digital photography to wounded Marines suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

The magic was that studying photography helped warriors returning from multiple combat deployments focus on something outside themselves, something beyond their anxiety and fear, something positive and healing. Many of these Marines found themselves unable to express their feelings in words. Yet when I gave them a camera (thank you, Canon USA) and taught them the basics of photography, they created amazing images that subliminally spoke about their current emotional state. They began to feel heard, understood. They began to heal.

The f-Stop Warrior Project required our students to create their images off-base, part of helping them move back into the civilian world. As their images improved, they began to view that “other world” as a less hostile, alien place.

Leaving the Marines and transitioning back into the civilian world is often a daunting, difficult and long process, especially for those suffering from PTSD. Digital photography allowed these wounded warriors to be good at something immediately and provided them an important, even life-saving, new way to communicate, as well as a new skill and confidence. Some of them even turned it into a livelihood following further study, like my reluctant student who sat in the corner.

The work of my warriors was very good. Having looked at photos, text messages, movies and books through a frame since childhood, they came to my class with a strong sense of the compositional elements of a good photograph.

Camp Pendleton, which is home to 42,000 young men and women in camouflage uniforms, proved intimidating to a socialist, pacifist, draft-dodging, leftover hippie like myself. Until January 2013, the closest I’d ever come to our military was trying to place flowers down the gun barrels of the Army soldiers when I joined Abbie Hoffman’s attempt to levitate the Pentagon in 1967.

At first the Gunnery Sergeant staff reveled in giving me endless amounts of grief about my long hair and clothes. A retired Marine told me this was a good sign (“If they didn’t like you, they wouldn’t even be talking to you.”) Encouraged, I began giving it back to them. When they called me a “hippie” and made insinuations about my “manliness,” I called them “a bunch of sissy little schoolgirls.” They loved it.

Using humor during class brought us closer. I got hugs from the warriors (“keep it brief and don’t move your hips”) and was frequently called “brother,” another sign f-Stop was working. There was an immense amount of love and caring for the wounded and injured at the Battalion. It’s why I was there.

My students were often in pain, physically and spiritually. They didn’t talk about their injuries much; they’d simply tell me if they were having a good or bad day. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) was a constant for many of these warriors. PTSD has been described as the warrior’s shadow. It’s always there, all the time; it follows you day and night. There’s no relief from it. One of the tasks our wounded warriors had was to learn to live with their “shadows.”

For three years, the f-Stop Warrior Project supported the recovery of wounded warriors, significantly reduced their PTSD symptoms, and eased their transition to civilian life.

Working with America’s wounded warriors changed my life. After all, any teacher, if they are any good, learns in equal parts from their students. The Marines taught me the true meaning of honor, courage and commitment. Hopefully, I helped them heal their wounded bodies and souls as they began to explore the world through a new magical lens — the lens of digital photography.