I’ve made light of my USAF service before – I was “chairborne,” and a “legend in my own mind,” as my friends used to say when we were stationed in Berlin. But that’s not to say that our relatively cushy assignment there was without its perils: we had a fairly legendary traitor in our mix, for one thing, and there were some severe injuries that occurred during a training exercise shortly after I left. These are all in the daily mix for service members, but for those who currently serve our country, well, let’s take a moment to acknowledge and appreciate the sacrifices they make.
This story is a little dated, but it is one that I often recall when I think about the veterans returning from service in Afghanistan and Iraq, where post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been an emerging problem. PTSD isn’t something that was often diagnosed in past conflicts, but it may just be part of the reason so many of our veterans have found that reintegrating into every day society is so challenging.
My friend and I were driving in my Alexandria neighborhood and saw some teenagers skateboarding in the street ahead. As we approached, they got out of the road and stood in a group, lurking in their teenage resentment because we’d interrupted their fun, waiting for us to pass. My friend had gone quiet for a moment, and then told me he had passed the same group on his way to my house.
Except that time, he was taken back to his experiences driving the cratered and bombed out roads in Afghanistan, where groups like this one might harbor a conspiracy to do harm. He told me that when he’d seen the kids before, something clicked, taking him back to the days where he would automatically identify the first one in the group to “take out” – to shoot, should a confrontation ensue.
“But these are just kids here,” I said, “and we’re driving through a suburban neighborhood. You’re not thinking you have to do that here, are you?” My friend said he understood the difference of time and place, and he’d been more troubled by these kinds of thoughts earlier (he had been back for 2 months at that point). He said that the thoughts came less frequently and that he thought he was making his way through the issues. He never shared with me any details of encounters that might have reinforced these feelings when he was in Afghanistan – just this experience that had brought it all back.
So from time to time when I think about today’s veterans – the ones I encounter down near the Pentagon, often moving down the escalators on prosthetic legs, or even the fellow I saw in an Irish bar last weekend enjoying a Guinness with a colleague – I think not only of those who have physical reminders of what they’ve given for the rest of us, but also those who have these other wounds that aren’t so readily apparent.
A couple of years after that conversation with my friend I came across the organization “The Mission Continues” (linked below) – an organization that helps returning bets continue their service through fellowships and community projects. It’s meant to be a help for those returning from duty – whether they may have lost limbs, hearing, eyesight…or relationships…or loss of purpose. As they exit the service, the readjustment to life without the structure and camaraderie of their units can make things exceptionally difficult, and The Mission Continues attempts to support them by providing an outlet to further their lifelong mission of service.
Stay tuned for some follow-up posts on this topic, but thanks for taking a moment to think about our returning veterans today. And if you want to take that thought a step further, check out the web site below.
http://www.missioncontinues.org/
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