Our Returning Vets, Are We Prepared to Receive Them?

PTSD, anger, depression, alienation, distancing, silence, and yes even suicide; the fact is that our vets do not come back home and simply pick up where they left off.

For returning vets, it’s not just a simple matter of reintegrating back into civilian life, whether it’s reconnecting with one’s spouse and children or finding a job and pursuing a career, or going back to school.  Their lives have changed.  They have changed.  They are not the same and they never will be who they were, before their war experience.

The sad thing is, most of us who remained at home, anxiously waiting for their safe return—family, friends, relatives, and co-workers—are not ready and don’t understand what has happened to them.  We just don’t get it.  And they know we don’t.  So, they may clam up and refuse to talk about it.  We may feel as if there’s a wall, thirty feet high and ten feet thick, that we just can’t penetrate.  We’re exasperated.  And they… well, they’re exasperated too, only more so.

What are the real effects of war upon a person?  No one knows better, than those who have been through it.  How does one even begin to deal with the wounding effects of war upon one’s soul?  It’s both deeply personal and hauntingly private.  For example, war can pulverize one’s sense of trust, wellbeing, security, and safety in this world.  And worse it can destroy one’s internal moral compass, cauterizing the soul.   It’s ugly.  And only fellow comrades-in-arms understand the real nature of war’s impact upon a soul—mind, heart, spirit, and emotions—even if they do come back physically unscathed (and those are considered the lucky ones).

How many will be returning?  How many will be thus affected?  Are we talking about hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands?  We’ve deployed about 2.5 million in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan!  So, exactly how have we prepared for their return?

Here are some things that we might consider doing:

• We can get informed.   We can learn as much as we can about the effects of war on veterans.  We can seek to understand and realize as much as possible what they will be facing as they return home.

• We can encourage our churches our places of worship to also become informed so as to know best how to receive and welcome veterans with as much ease and support as possible.

• We can seek political, administrative, social, and economic structural and institutional support for our returning veterans.  They will need ongoing assistance to reintegrate back into civilian life.

• We can learn to become listeners and learners rather than presume to teach and direct our returning veterans.  They must teach us.  We must be willing to hear and learn.  Not too long ago, I heard one young veteran tell his story of having had to shoot and kill a ten year old boy while on duty in Afghanistan.  There were reasons he did this, good reasons; still, he was not proud of what he had to do.  It did something to him.  The point is this: They need to tell their stories, as heart rending and painful as they may be for us to hear them.  And we need to receive and hear their stories without judgment, condemnation, or with expressions of horror and disgust.  For their souls have been wounded by war.

There is no doubt that our returning vets will need time, place, and space to recover from the severe effects of war.  They did their duty.  Now it is time for us to do ours.

Many of us did not agree with the idea of pursuing these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that does not exclude us from the necessity of taking ownership and responsibility for the wellbeing of our veterans.  And such ownership and responsibility means a whole lot more than simply displaying a yellow-ribbon bumper-sticker on our cars saying, “We support our troops!”