Veterans and Coloring: The Unexpected Therapy Nobody Talks About
Where service and creativity meet. August 2026.
My husband was a Marine for twenty-three years. Two tours in Vietnam. A Bronze Star he never talks about. A drawer full of medals he keeps in a sock. For fifty years, his therapy was his garage — a space of sawdust and engine grease and projects that never quite finished, because finishing meant stopping, and stopping meant thinking, and thinking was the thing he had spent his entire adult life avoiding.
He doesn't sleep well. He never has. The VA gave him pills that made him feel like a stranger in his own body, so he stopped taking them. He drinks two beers at dinner, never three, never one — two, like a ritual, like a prescription he wrote himself. He watches the news with the volume too loud and mutters at the screen, and I have learned not to ask what he's muttering about, because the answer is always 1968, always Da Nang, always the things he saw and did and can never undo.
I have tried everything the VA suggested. Group therapy — he went once and never went back. Individual counseling — he sat in silence for fifty minutes and the therapist gave up. Exercise, meditation, journaling, fishing, woodworking, volunteering at the VA. Some of it helped a little. None of it helped enough. And then, last spring, our granddaughter left a coloring book in his garage.
He wrote me letters from Vietnam on whatever paper he could find — ration cards, supply lists, the backs of maps. He drew in the margins. Small things — a palm tree, a helicopter, the face of a dog that followed his unit through the jungle. "Drawing keeps my hands busy," he wrote, "and when my hands are busy, my head is quiet." He stopped drawing after he came home. I don't know why. I asked once, early in our marriage, and he looked at me like I had asked him to explain the war itself. He never drew again. Until last spring.
The Book
It was USA Cozy Places to Go. Bold lines. Simple designs. A lighthouse on the cover that looked like every lighthouse on every coast he'd ever been stationed near. Our granddaughter left it on his workbench, along with a set of colored pencils, and didn't say a word about it. She was twelve. She understood something about her grandfather that I had spent fifty years trying to learn — that you cannot offer a Marine help directly. You have to leave it where he'll find it, and walk away.
He didn't touch it for a week. I watched it sit there, gathering sawdust, and I wanted to throw it away before he could reject it, before he could tell me that coloring was for children and civilians and people who had never held a rifle. But I left it. I left it because our granddaughter had left it, and because something in my husband's face when he looked at that lighthouse — a flicker, a half-second of something I couldn't name — made me think he might need it more than he would ever admit.
On the eighth day, I found him at the workbench at five in the morning. The garage door was open. The birds were just starting. He had the book open to a page of a covered bridge, and he was coloring the roof red with a pencil grip I recognized from his letters — tight, controlled, the way you hold something that might escape if you relax. He didn't look up when I came in. He said, "Couldn't sleep."
I didn't say anything. I made coffee in the kitchen and brought him a cup, and when I came back, he was still coloring. The red roof was finished. He had moved on to the water, blue in three shades he must have tested on the margin first. His hand shook — it has shaken since his sixties, a tremor the doctors call essential, as if any part of this could be called essential — but the lines were steady. He was inside the lines. He was focused in a way I hadn't seen in decades.
The Change
That was six months ago. My husband has colored every day since. Not for long — twenty minutes, sometimes thirty, never more than an hour. He does it in the early morning, when the house is dark and the world is quiet and the memories are loudest. He told me once, without looking at me, "It's the only time my head is quiet."
I didn't understand at first. How could coloring — a child's activity, something so simple, so gentle — quiet the mind of a man who had seen what he had seen? But I watched him. I watched the way his shoulders dropped when he picked up the pencil. I watched the way his jaw unclenched when he chose a color. I watched the way he breathed — slowly, deeply, the way people breathe when they are finally safe.
"It's not thinking," he told me last month. We were in the garage. He was coloring a lighthouse — his third lighthouse, each one different, each one more detailed than the last. "It's not not-thinking either. It's..." He paused, the pencil hovering over the page. "It's like patrol. You know? You're focused on one thing. The next step. The next color. You can't think about anything else because you're doing this one thing, and it takes everything you have, but not in a bad way. In a..." He trailed off, shook his head. "You wouldn't understand."
But I did understand. I understood that for fifty years, my husband had been searching for something that would give his mind the same focus that combat had given it — a single point of attention, a task that demanded everything and asked for nothing in return. He had found it not in therapy, not in medication, not in the VA programs designed by people who had never heard a shot fired in anger. He had found it in a coloring book, left on his workbench by a twelve-year-old girl who saw her grandfather more clearly than anyone else ever had.
The Books That Reach Him
My husband is particular about his coloring books. He won't use anything with flowers or butterflies or abstract patterns that don't look like anything. He wants subjects he can understand, images that make sense to a mind trained to assess terrain and identify threats. These are the three books that have earned a permanent place in his garage.
USA Cozy Places to Go
$7.99This was the first book — the one our granddaughter left on his workbench. American landmarks with bold, simple lines. Lighthouses, covered bridges, main streets. My husband colors these and tells me about places he's been, places he's driven through on leave, places that look like somewhere safe. "I know what this is," he said about the lighthouse. "I don't have to guess. I don't have to think. I just have to make it red and white and call it done." For a man who spent his life in uncertainty, that certainty is medicine.
View on Amazon →
Big Animal Moments
$9.99I bought this one because my husband was a hunter before the war, and because animals — real animals, powerful animals — make more sense to him than flowers ever could. The large portraits with thick outlines are forgiving of his shaking hands. He colored the eagle and didn't speak for an hour afterward. When he finally did, he told me about an eagle he saw in the mountains near Da Nang, circling above a valley while his unit rested. "It was beautiful," he said, and I realized it was the first time in fifty years he had described anything from that place as beautiful.
View on Amazon →
The Blob Drawing Book
$9.99This one surprised me. My husband — a twenty-three-year Marine, a Bronze Star recipient, a man who built his identity on discipline and precision — loves the blob book. Simple shapes that become characters. No rules. No right way. "It's stupid," he says, every time he opens it. Then he spends forty minutes on a blob that becomes a dragon, and he laughs — actually laughs — when he shows it to me. I think it's the freedom that reaches him. The permission to be silly, to be imperfect, to make something that doesn't matter to anyone but him. After a lifetime of mattering to everyone else, that freedom must feel like flying.
View on Amazon →He came home from Vietnam in March. I met him at the airport in his dress blues, which didn't fit anymore because he had lost twenty pounds. He wouldn't let me touch him in public — too much contact, too many people, too much everything. At home, he sat in our kitchen for three hours without speaking, staring at the table like it was the most interesting thing in the world. "I don't know how to be here," he said finally. I didn't know what to say. I still don't, most days. But I have learned that being there is enough. And now, fifty years later, I have learned that a coloring book can be there too.
What I Know Now
I am not a therapist. I am not a doctor. I am a woman who has been married to a veteran for fifty-one years, who has watched him struggle and fail and try again, who has learned that love is sometimes just sitting in the same room without speaking. I cannot tell you that coloring will fix your veteran. I cannot tell you that it will cure PTSD or erase trauma or make the memories go away. Nothing does that. Nothing ever will.
But I can tell you what I have seen. I have seen my husband sleep through the night for the first time in decades, because he colored for twenty minutes before bed and his mind was tired in a good way. I have seen him smile at our granddaughter without the shadow that usually crosses his face when he remembers what the world has taken from him. I have seen him hold up a finished page — a lighthouse, an eagle, a ridiculous blob-dragon — and say, "Look what I made," with pride that has nothing to do with medals or rank or the things that used to define him.
Coloring is not therapy. It is not treatment. It is not a cure. But it is a door. A small, simple, ridiculous door that opens into a room where the mind can rest, where the hands can be busy without being destructive, where a veteran can be something other than a veteran for twenty minutes every morning. And sometimes — often, actually — that is enough.
If You're Reading This Because You Love a Veteran
I know what you're going through. I know the sleepless nights, the silences that last for days, the way they flinch at sounds that don't bother anyone else. I know the frustration of trying to help someone who cannot accept help, who has been trained to be self-sufficient in a world that keeps proving they can't be. I know the love that keeps you there, even when it feels like you're shouting into a void.
Buy the book. Not just any book — one with subjects he can understand, images that make sense to a mind trained for clarity and purpose. Leave it where he'll find it. Don't wrap it. Don't explain it. Don't call it therapy or self-care or any of the words that will make him reject it before he opens it. Let him discover it alone, in the quiet, where no one can see him being vulnerable.
He might color a lighthouse. He might color an eagle. He might laugh at a blob that becomes a dragon, and you will hear that laugh and remember why you stayed, why you keep staying, why love is sometimes just leaving a book on a workbench and walking away.
The war doesn't end for them. But for twenty minutes every morning, the lighthouse gets colored. And that is not nothing. That is not small. That is a peace they fought for, finally found, one pencil stroke at a time.
I am writing this in my husband's garage. It is five in the morning. He is at the workbench, coloring a lighthouse — his fourth lighthouse, each one different, each one more his own. The coffee is hot. The birds are starting. The world is quiet in a way that feels safe, finally, after fifty years of noise.
I don't know your veteran. I don't know what they saw or what they carry or what keeps them awake at night. But I know this: there is still beauty to be made. There is still quiet to be found. There is still a version of them that exists outside the war, outside the memories, outside the person they became when they came home.
Buy the book. Leave it there. Let them find their way to the light.
With hope,
Looking for Coloring Books for the Veteran in Your Life?
These are the books that reached my husband when nothing else could. Bold lines. Familiar subjects. No flowers, no fluff, no pretending.
Browse My Coloring Books on AmazonFrequently Asked Questions
While coloring books are not a replacement for professional mental health treatment, many veterans report that the repetitive, focused nature of coloring helps calm racing thoughts and reduces anxiety. The act of choosing colors and filling spaces provides a gentle structure that can be grounding for minds accustomed to hypervigilance. For veterans who are resistant to traditional therapy, coloring offers a non-threatening entry point to mindfulness and self-care. Always encourage veterans to seek professional help alongside any self-directed activities.
Many veterans, especially those from earlier eras, were raised with rigid ideas about masculinity and productivity. Creative activities may be seen as frivolous or unmasculine. Additionally, veterans with PTSD often struggle with activities that require stillness or quiet, as these states can feel vulnerable or trigger intrusive thoughts. The key is introducing coloring in a way that doesn't feel like therapy — as a project, a challenge, or simply something to do with the hands while the mind unwinds.
Choose themes that connect to their service or interests. USA Cozy Places to Go features American landmarks that may resonate with veterans who traveled or served domestically. Big Animal Moments has powerful, straightforward imagery that appeals to outdoorsmen and hunters. The Blob Drawing Book offers simple, no-pressure shapes that become characters — ideal for veterans who resist anything that feels artistic or complicated. Avoid abstract or floral designs that may feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Bold lines and familiar subjects are essential.
Don't frame it as therapy or self-care. Leave the book where they'll find it — a workbench, a coffee table, a toolbox. Choose masculine-adjacent themes like landmarks, vehicles, or animals. Let them discover it on their own terms. If they resist, don't push. Many veterans need to feel in control of the decision. Some caregivers have success by coloring alongside the veteran, creating a shared activity rather than an assignment. The goal is not a finished page — it's a moment of peace, however brief.