A Letter to Injured War Vets (and the people who love them)

I was reading a newspaper article about “helping injured war vets put the pieces back together”. I read a lot of articles that talk about helping vets get back to “normal” The articles always have the same effect on me, they bug the CRAP out of me and here’s why.

I think this language can, and often does, cause more pain than healing. When I read words like “help veterans get back on track and put the pieces of a very shattered puzzle together again” I think, “Ummm, not likely.” Not likely for that vet who’s got one original limb left after being hammered by roadside projectiles. I say you don’t put the pieces back together; you have to build a whole new kind of puzzle. That vet is going to learn to walk and button his shirts up in a new way; that’s not an old puzzle for him, it’s a new one.

I don’t want to sound like a hardass bitch, I just want to say, what’s gone is gone, and it hurts, it sucks and it deserves to be mourned. But to think it’s going to all fit back together neatly again like it once was, that life is going to be put back on track is doing people a disservice. Not just for the returning solder either but everyone. You and me and everyone. It’s hoping for the imposable and asking someone who’s gone through hell to come home and do the impossible. What a crappy thing to do to someone. And what a crappy thing to look on in disappointment as they try and fail at “putting the pieces together again.”

These are new lives being built. Maybe even better lives, yes better even with shrapnel still lodged in someone‘s gut. You’ve just got to get that no one is going to get back to normal. NORMAL does not exist anyway; “normal” is nothing more than a setting on a washing machine, period.

I read how an event is designed to help “wounded veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan become whole again.” I’m not sure what to say to that. If you are trying to go BACK to anything, anything whatsoever, it is
just not possible. Wholeness is what you make of it in a given moment. To tell the Iraq vet that an event will help him become whole again, might sting a bit. This man is whole and remains whole three limbs down. He is as whole as he is willing to work for being. Just like everyone else. But let‘s not lie to him either. He’s going to be looked at in a new way and even maybe talked to differently. To pretend he’s the same guy he has always been is patronizing. He’s a new him, with a new puzzle to design. I’m not suggesting that he asked for this new construction of his body, I’m not, I’m saying it is what it is. Go forward from there.

The one thing that is the same for every vet that has sustained a physical injury is that they have passions that can not and were not blown away by a roadside bomb. They may think it’s been lost to despair or impossible to disability, but I full heartedly disagree. You cannot amputate a dream, and a passion is only fogged by PTSD, not lost.

The dreams of loved ones of injured vets are also still intact. You, too, might need to design those dreams so they can be expressed given the new conditions for which you will be developing them. You, like the vet, must know that those dreams remain.

Trauma does not take your dreams. Injury does not steal a goal; only thinking it is gone and no longer attainable will rob you of your deepest and best self. I’m not saying it’s going to be a cakewalk getting your dreams expressed. I am saying it is by far the most important thing for you to do.

If you want to help people feel whole, help them express their dreams. Identify and address the new challenges head on, but only as fresh obstacles to accomplishing what always has been and always will be who they really are.