More love for our troops from the top...
POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 02:51
VIEWED: 3565
PAGE 7 of 7
You know, none of this addresses something the VA and military pointedly don't offer, or at least to my knowledge do not.
When a lot of these guys come home, especially from multiple stop-loss extended tours, they have difficulty re-entering civilian life, especially if their civilian life as they knew it has in some way deteriorated in the process (lost the house, wife left, got outsourced, etc) or if some physical disability has occured.
Now, barring physical disability, I have long suspected the reason they don't out-counsel was because, feeling adrift and unable to cope, most of those folks would turn around and re-up, into the only thing that they really understood anymore, rather than deal with a traumatic and difficult adjustment into a world they no longer recognised.
But it's easy to leave the military physically, once discharged, leaving it mentally is far and away something else again, all your responses are wrong, there's no hard and fast structure to cling to, no supervisor to ask for directions, and the conditioning against making your own decisions all conspire against you and left you feeling... lost and adrift in a world you don't really comprehend anymore... remember, I served too, a long time ago, and the adjustment was a right bitch given the death of every current supportive member of the family during that period.
I call this phenom "Decompression Sickness", for lack of a better term, and do a LOT of counselling on it for guys coming back to "The World" and just not assimilating well, as one who did serve, even as a supply grunt and truck driver, there's a common background, and being disabled myself, I can relate to most of the injured ones (I have some pretty specialised knowledge of prosthetics as well, and a TON of local contacts with the docs and engineers who make the very best ones) enough to get through to em.
VA support is pretty sporadic, they'll go all out for one guy, and stall/ignore another with no apparent method to the madness, so it's real helpful for these guys to have something, or someone, solid to lean on when they get back and can't cope so well - not everyone on my mailing list bought it, and not all of em come back in one piece, one Spec4 who was mortified at the thought of being unable to walk... we had a sachs-foot standard heavy bar all ready for him when he got here, and all we had to do was the initial fit (the final socket fitting comes about 3 weeks later) and the look on his face after having been wheeled into the clinic, he got to WALK out, on his own power, was something to treasure.
WE can support the troops, not with some stupid magnetic ribbon on the back of a gas guzzler (which I notice have mostly disappeared) but with information, comfort and counsel, without regard to how we feel about the dimwits cutting the orders - and here's a non-shocker, a lotta THEM feel the same way about the SOBs.
It's pretty shameful how the powers that be have always regarded "used-up" troops, with about the value and meaning of a used kleenex, and how they've never gotten their due since at least the 1860s...
I may not be that sympathetic, but what most of em need is HELP, not sympathy, and comfort and sympathy are different things anyway, leastways in my book.
So if you know, even distantly, any of these guys when they come back, talk to em, BE there for em, cause that adjustment is a helluva lot harder than most civvies think it is.
-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it
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Absolutely, do whatever you can to help. I have an employee who was over there last year. He handled it pretty well, but when people bring it up he kind of moves away. He has to go back in teh spring for six months. I am not looking forward to that.
Oley
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Ok, now I'm pissed. *picks up bat*
*goes to breakables room*
*pokes head back in door for a sec* yeah, if I get my leg blown off and they ask me to repay part of my enlistment bonus, they can kiss my ass and go to hell.
__________________________
Have you ever wondered why in a dream you can touch a falling sky?
Or fly to the heavens that watch over you?
"I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar."
A man is least himself when he speaks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will show you his true self.
You can't take the sky from me...
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