for those who don't read sources...
snippets:
"Amy Amidon, a Navy psychologist, stated in an interview regarding moral injury that:
“Civilians are lucky that we still have a sense of naiveté about what the world is like. The average American means well, but what they need to know is that these [military] men and women are seeing incredible evil, and coming home with that weighing on them and not knowing how to fit back into society.”
…The people at home may not have pulled the trigger, but they asked the soldier to go in their place. What many don’t realize is that a 2004 study found that “grief over losing a combat buddy was comparable, more than 30 years later, to that of bereaved a spouse whose partner had died in the previous six months.” The soul wounds we experience are much greater and require the society as a whole to come alongside us as opposed to pointing us to the VA.
Link to all of Sledge's articles and posts:
https://medium.com/@benjaminsledge
I can only hope that this guy doesn’t feel like he had had it any worse than us Viet Nam vets had it. Don’t remember anyone at the airports welcoming us home.
They were picked up by these SpecOps squads and he never saw them again.
His other job, because he was not a trained fighter, was to clip the index finger from the enemy dead and bag them for analysis, count and catalogue.
He had married an Arab-American woman (he was hispanic, she was born in LA) in LA before he enlisted.
When he came home, he could not tolerate Arabic being spoken, really spun him up. Also could not stand the smell of the food.
When she refused to let him have a dog in the house (because her parents were devout) he lost it. Beat her up pretty bad and "kidnapped" his kid and took off.
In that group there were a couple of dozen guys that would come and go...dealing with their "stuff" and substances that helped them deal with their "stuff".
Some things cannot be undone. Some things cannot be unseen. They are ghosts forever haunting.
It’s a good article and Sledge makes some excellent observations. However, he’s really a bit new to this stuff.
I served for 27 years in the Marines, starting out as an enlisted man in Vietnam. I was more prepared than most because I knew many WWII and Korean War vets and listened to their stories and their advice well before joining. The bottom line is that all combat veterans experience life-changing fear, horror, and sorrow. It’s just part of the human mechanism. PTSD, or whatever they call it, has always been there in varying degrees. You can’t do and see the things that happen in war without it affecting you.
The sad truth is that we get fine and mostly naive young men and put them into something no sane person can fully accept and then do close to nothing to help bring them back. You’re expected to just “suck it up” and drive on and above all, not bother the people back home with your problems.
It is what it is.
““Civilians are lucky that we still have a sense of naiveté about what the world is like”
Maybe a lot of them do — those that think the hoards of 3rd world foreigners that are coming into our country will make it better.