Reply #17: You rock, too, Josh!

[pinboy3niner]

I'm just a little slower than you, having had to go to war to learn some things about compassion and empathy that seem to come so naturally to you. For me, it took going to war--and living for a year and-a-half on an Army hospital ward that had all the other facial casualties and all the amputees--to knock some sense into me and put me in touch with my anger and my rage about war.

And while common understandings about PTSD tend to focus on the dramatic (flashbacks and vets "acting out"), another common reaction mental health professionals have identified in survivors of war and other traumatic experience is a hypersensitivity to injustice.

As you know, I've been away for most of the last 3 weeks working at my vet group's mobile, half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial during its display here in my community and in another city. Obviously, that entails a lot of intense and emotional experiences with visitors, both with vets and with others like the woman who came every day to visit her brother's name and the man who came to find the names of both of his brothers on the Wall.

Late one night at the Wall I spent 3 hours with an Iraq/Afghan War vet, a former Marine machine gunner who returned to civilian life 5 or 6 years ago after 3 deployments and is struggling with the psychological trauma of his war experience.

He cried in my arms and shared a lot of things, including his hopes for the future. This macho Marine 3-combat-tour machine gunner's dream? To become a registered nurse. He's in school now, working toward that goal. His "battle buddies" aren't much help to him, as many are jobless and drinking or drugging in dealing--or avoiding dealing--with their own pain and grief. So he's turned to VN vets for a support system to help him through his personal struggles.

My new Marine vet friend is a good example of both the negative--and the positive--effects of war.