Will Selber's piece today is a stinging reminder of personal past experiences, but I'm glad more veterans of this conflict are speaking up about their experiences, because bottling this shit up is exactly why veteran suicide rates are so high. Like Will, my unit also lost one of our guys in the turret to a sniper when we stopped for an I…
Will Selber's piece today is a stinging reminder of personal past experiences, but I'm glad more veterans of this conflict are speaking up about their experiences, because bottling this shit up is exactly why veteran suicide rates are so high. Like Will, my unit also lost one of our guys in the turret to a sniper when we stopped for an IED just three months after Will had lost his. The kid was 19, on his first deployment, and had never even got to drink a legal beer back home before losing his life.
The note that Will ends on, the stinging resentment of a whole generation of veterans who were immersed in this business while the rest of the country mostly checked out, is something I still feel deep down in my bones every day. I compare it to the folks who didn't wear masks throughout the first two years of the pandemic. Back in 2006, it felt like all of America wasn't wearing their masks while the guys like us were living in the hospital every day for a year at a time, exposed to the death and suffering while everyone else just kind of put it in the back of their minds. I came home to NYC in 2008--the literal "ground zero" for the global war on terror--only to find a depleted social circle, an economic recession, and very few job opportunities on hand for a 21-year-old without college.
The War on Terror was the first real war we mobilized for on the contract system, and the civ/mil divide I witnessed during and in the aftermath of combat is probably what has affected me the most, even beyond the things I saw in combat. It felt like all that survival was for nothing when you come home to nothing. I asked myself "why the hell did you bother to fight for your survival all that time if *this* is what you got to come back home to after all of that struggle?" I returned home to NYC at the age of 21 as a 3-time combat veteran, but it felt more like I was coming back home as an immigrant in my own country. I had no community to return to, no career prospects lined up, and very little direction in life. I'm lucky I made it to where I am today, but I saw a lot of other guys from my old units not make it out as well as I had, likely for the same reasons I struggled with. I can now unfortunately say that I've lost more platoon members to suicide than I did to combat. I worry for the next generation of volunteers who will find out what it's like to go to a prolonged war on the contract system. They're going to get recycled too, and probably to a conflict(S) with higher casualty rates.
This thread of yours has certainly cemented the fact that you have a growing fan base. In the 1+ years I have been reading your comments, I am now seeing a shift in your writing style, which makes it more thoughtful and beautiful to read.
Keep up the good work. We will be in line for the signings.
"I've lost more platoon members to suicide than I did to combat."
That's horrific. I'm sorry. I would say "Thank you for your service," but that sounds hollow and meaningless.
Do you think we should bring back the draft? Have more people share the burden? I'm not saying it will ever happen, just, hypothetically, what do you think of it?
Assuming we don't bring back the draft, what could/should society as a whole do to better support returning veterans?
This is a question I've only recently come to ask regarding the draft. Looking back at the history of why the draft went away, it's clear to me that Nixon did it as a way of hollowing out the antiwar movement against Vietnam in 1973. He figured that if the college kid's asses weren't on the line anymore they'd have less motivation to protest the war. I think the global war on terror proved him right, because it's the first war that lasted more than a year that we ran on the contract system since the draft went away and I saw just how badly DOD struggled to maintain manpower. They're still struggling today just to maintain peacetime manpower numbers. It's literally a readiness issue. The draft going away made it easier for people to ignore wars of choice that subsequently went on for years and I'm very doubtful that if we had a draft since 9/11 that the wars would have been allowed to go on as long as they did with the failures of our counterinsurgency and nation-building policies within sight as early as the mid-2000's. Iraq was the more "successful" outcome of the 2 wars, and it only rates something like a 29/100 on the Freedom House index ("Not great Bob").
Our wars only saw a collective KIA rate of something like 7,000+ with the majority of those casualties happening between the years 2003-2008 in Iraq (you have to double the entire KIA rate of the AFG war in order to match the KIA rate in Iraq from 2003-2007). To put that into perspective, Russia just lost something like 10,000+ in Bakhmut in a week. What happens when we get into a war some years from now, perhaps against China, and we're losing something like 10,000+ per *month*? If manpower was so short that we had to recycle guys like me to a combat zone 3 times in 3.5 years due to manpower shortages, how many kids do you think will get recycled to combat in a war with China when even fewer young people are willing to serve in a war that produces much higher casualty rates than counterinsurgency campaigns? Whoever is unfortunate enough to be in a ground combat MOS when the next war happens will get recycled to a much deadlier conflict with much higher KIA rates. "Rolling the iron dice" deployment after deployment in that threat environment is going to get a lot of people killed on their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tours as the KIA odds go up. We're going to be forcing kids to "roll the iron dice" multiple times on worse odds simply because there aren't enough fresh bodies willing to roll the iron dice just once.
That's what I worry about the most. If you think my generation of veterans are broken off, just wait until you see how broken the next generation of veterans are going to be when they get recycled in a conflict with someone like China. Shit will look more like the Iran-Iraq War than "Operation Iraqi Freedom." American service member casualties will cross the hundreds of thousands mark let alone the tens of thousands mark. How many people will be volunteering to put down 4 years in the Marines at that point? These are the thought points that make me wonder if bringing a draft back is a must rather than a maybe. More of the country will need to share that burden, including the rich kids. It can't just be us recycling high school kids with few options to hideous conflicts over and over again.
If we don't bring back the draft, we should at least raise the age requirement for enlistment to 21 or 22. The brain doesn't stop developing until around 25, and the younger you send kids off to war, the more likely they are to have severe PTSD outcomes, especially if they are recycled. Make the recruiters go after older kids instead of younger high school kids and 1st or 2nd year college students. Even if we went to a draft system I would support raising the draft age to 21 or 22. We shouldn't be sending teenagers off to kill people if we don't even think they're mature enough to drink a beer.
I heard Adm. Mike Mullen on NPR proposing that we decrease the size of the military, because it would cause a debate on drafting kids for wars that people think they want to engage in. I thought it was an interesting idea. Getting into wars seems to be a bit too easy.
I can relate a bit to the challenges of “coming back”, although not from actual combat. My daughter lived on a military base for four years in South Korea. It was only supposed to be three years but they requested an extension because . . . They didn’t want to come back, to school shootings, Trump fouling the White House, crime, people at each others’ throats, etc.
A bizarre situation, to be serving a country that you’d prefer not to live in, once you experience another existence, with less strife.
"A million years?” persisted the jeering old man with keen, sadistic zest. “A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as… the frog?”
Actually the whole conversation, but that part works here.
Combat or not, the communal isolation is felt across all service members. That's why you don't see as much of a delta between the suicide rates of combat veterans versus non-combat veterans. Everyone in uniform kind of experiences some commonalities:
- Your individuality is broken down in recruit training and you're built back up as part of a team that puts the team before its component individuals
- You get immersed in this "team over self" environment for four years or more
- You return to a society that celebrates the individual and sees thinking about the team (Team America) collectively as "communism" or "socialism" or "wokeism"
- You have lost both the community you left before serving *and* the community you served with and now feel alone and isolated and different from everyone else around you
^I call this dynamic the "losing home, losing self" dynamic, because that's the most concise way I could describe the way it feels in just four words or so. It's also why I want to focus my current/future writings on this sort of thing rather than combat experience because we so often focus on the trauma of combat while ignoring all the rest of it that is probably equally traumatic or even more so than the combat itself. At least, for me it felt that way, and I saw a fair amount of death and hardship during the civil war years of Iraq when casualty rates peaked. That's why I empathize a lot with the non-combat folks. We're all equally unprepared for this "transition" stuff that veterans/active duty tend to focus a lot less on compared to combat experience. It's a different "shell shock" of its own kind.
Nothing against Travis or the content of these posts, but I have said and will continue to say that my military experience(s) during my 30 year career was/were different than his. Travis is well aware of this and I'm only noting this on this thread to point this out that we all had our military career paths that were defined by which branch of service we chose, the military occupation/job we did, the Commands/Commanders we served under, the era we served and a million other things including who we are and how we respond to the various situations...so there are just a lot of factors involved preventing us from all having the exact same experiences and feelings about it.
I will add that there are far too many service member suicides and I was also appalled by the number of sexual assaults that were happening as well. It's bad enough fighting an enemy but when the enemy are in your own ranks...that's even worse.
Bravo, Travis, on your book endeavor and you can count me in on buying a copy and reading it.
All fair points. I've also served as a naval officer for five years, so I've seen what the non-ground combat stuff looks like in addition to the enlisted/officer differences. I'll let you know when I get a publisher and what not.
I think I asked you this before, Travis, but I can't recall. Did you ever read "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging" by Sebastian Junger? One of my favorite books. And very apropos to your writing.
I predict you will find it interesting. I might read it again; it’s been a long time. It explains a lot of unexplored human needs and behaviors, past and present. It might even explain MAGAs - the need to belong to something bigger than yourself. That’s one reason I support the idea of compulsory national service; too many people have an emptiness that could be filled to the benefit of everyone and the country.
Travis, have you considered writing an article or even a book? You are a good writer and obviously very smart and thoughtful, as well as knowledgeable about a lot of different topics. I have learned a lot from reading your comments.
I'm 200+ pages into my own personal story that I hope to share some day, but have had a bit of writer's block lately, partly because there are parts of my post-service life that still feel very shameful and embarrassing to me. I'm getting through some of that personal shame via therapy, specifically the "internal family system" way of understanding the self and all of its parts that are sort of showcased in the Pixar film "Inside Out." I'm only dedicating about 1/3rd of the book to the experiences of combat, because I want the focus to be on what happens to us *after* combat and not during. There are a million books written by veterans about combat, but very few are written about the struggles we face *after* we get back, probably because those parts are less about glory or valor and are often more so about personal mistakes and failures, but those are also the parts that future veterans will need to be better prepared for when they get out. Combat training, while often not sufficient for the realities of combat we face, is at least *an attempt* to prepare you for what you're going to face. Entire field doctrines are written about it. The one thing you don't get training for is how to readjust to being an individual when you get out and what to expect when you do get out. Very little has been written about those parts, and I feel like most of us face that new challenge completely unprepared, which sets our expectations in a bad way. We expected combat to be the hard part and returning home to be the easy part when so often the reverse is true.
I got the idea to start writing when I was listening to a podcast called "Third Squad." It was a passing detail that involved infantry Marines from 1st MarDiv reading books like Bob Lecky's "Helmet for my Pillow" or Eugen Sledge's "With the Old Breed"--stories written by infantry Marines of the same division during WWII. That passing moment really spoke to me because I realized that veterans who never knew each other or never lived during the same periods could still speak to one another across time. That was extremely powerful and was an eye-opener for me. Equally powerful was understanding that Marines past and present spent a lot of time talking about their combat experiences, but not enough about their return home experiences. I had to find Homer's "The Odyssey" before I found a story that came close to touching on that aspect. The part in The Shawkshank Redemption when Brooks gets out of prison as an old man and has to readapt is probably the closest thing in art to capture that sense of being lost that I've found. That and the scene at the end of Hurt Locker where he's lost at the grocery store before going off to another deployment.
I hope that if for nothing else, sharing my nothing-special average Joe story will at least get more guys like me to write about their post-service experiences and to get to a point where that kind of thing is more normalized and we can end the stigma of our own personal self-shaming.
There is no such thing as a nothing-special average Joe. Each of us is unique, A one of a kind. And each of us has a story. But some stories are more significant in the Story of Us All. Yours is one of those. Because it reverberates through so very many of us and through the story of the country and probably of mankind. It takes courage and honesty to even think about writing it. Good for you, Travis! (Keep us posted on the pre-order.)
Keep at it, Travis. I will pre-order! And give copies to all and sundry! You've got a lot of us here who are pulling for you, and I always learn something from your posts.
What Carolyn says! I always look forward to reading what you have written when I can, and often learn something. I look forward to reading your personal story in full!
It is wonderful that you are writing about what happens to soldiers after they get home. This needs to become a widely known and accepted issue so that just like there is training for combat, there is a system for training and ongoing support for reintegration into society for veterans after combat.
My bet is that a whole bunch of us in the Bulwark community are cheering you on in your writing project and would love to read it.
I looked up the "Internal Family Systems Model" of therapy and it sounds really interesting. I'm glad you are getting therapy and that it's helping.
I looked up"No Bad Parts" and it's now on my list. I am part of a small group that selects books and writes questions for online book studies whose target audience is teachers and counselors of children and adolescents with emotional disabilities and other disabilities. Many of these students have experienced a lot of trauma that is hindering them from becoming happy and successful. This approach might be a helpful way for the adults to think about those they work with.
Thank you Travis for your post. One of the most eye opening things for me has been reading about Active or retired Military opening up and wanting to tell their stories and how it’s helping them. I appreciate this. I grew up around a lot of Military that had the mentality of not talking about the experiences they had in War. WW2 , Korean and Vietnam vets in particular… didn’t want to talk about their experiences outside of the funny ones. As a kid and young man I wanted to hear those stories.. however I now felt it was in-polite to ask. Thankfully I have started to ask now.. and just listen.
I agree with you regarding the speaking out. Will's piece was powerful. We'll be hearing stories and reading articles about this for a while since this is the anniversary of going to war. So far, what I have heard is how much we did not know about Iraq and how unprepared our soldiers were for dealing with this. The coming back to the US is another piece that needs to discussed.
Will Selber's piece today is a stinging reminder of personal past experiences, but I'm glad more veterans of this conflict are speaking up about their experiences, because bottling this shit up is exactly why veteran suicide rates are so high. Like Will, my unit also lost one of our guys in the turret to a sniper when we stopped for an IED just three months after Will had lost his. The kid was 19, on his first deployment, and had never even got to drink a legal beer back home before losing his life.
The note that Will ends on, the stinging resentment of a whole generation of veterans who were immersed in this business while the rest of the country mostly checked out, is something I still feel deep down in my bones every day. I compare it to the folks who didn't wear masks throughout the first two years of the pandemic. Back in 2006, it felt like all of America wasn't wearing their masks while the guys like us were living in the hospital every day for a year at a time, exposed to the death and suffering while everyone else just kind of put it in the back of their minds. I came home to NYC in 2008--the literal "ground zero" for the global war on terror--only to find a depleted social circle, an economic recession, and very few job opportunities on hand for a 21-year-old without college.
The War on Terror was the first real war we mobilized for on the contract system, and the civ/mil divide I witnessed during and in the aftermath of combat is probably what has affected me the most, even beyond the things I saw in combat. It felt like all that survival was for nothing when you come home to nothing. I asked myself "why the hell did you bother to fight for your survival all that time if *this* is what you got to come back home to after all of that struggle?" I returned home to NYC at the age of 21 as a 3-time combat veteran, but it felt more like I was coming back home as an immigrant in my own country. I had no community to return to, no career prospects lined up, and very little direction in life. I'm lucky I made it to where I am today, but I saw a lot of other guys from my old units not make it out as well as I had, likely for the same reasons I struggled with. I can now unfortunately say that I've lost more platoon members to suicide than I did to combat. I worry for the next generation of volunteers who will find out what it's like to go to a prolonged war on the contract system. They're going to get recycled too, and probably to a conflict(S) with higher casualty rates.
This thread of yours has certainly cemented the fact that you have a growing fan base. In the 1+ years I have been reading your comments, I am now seeing a shift in your writing style, which makes it more thoughtful and beautiful to read.
Keep up the good work. We will be in line for the signings.
"I've lost more platoon members to suicide than I did to combat."
That's horrific. I'm sorry. I would say "Thank you for your service," but that sounds hollow and meaningless.
Do you think we should bring back the draft? Have more people share the burden? I'm not saying it will ever happen, just, hypothetically, what do you think of it?
Assuming we don't bring back the draft, what could/should society as a whole do to better support returning veterans?
This is a question I've only recently come to ask regarding the draft. Looking back at the history of why the draft went away, it's clear to me that Nixon did it as a way of hollowing out the antiwar movement against Vietnam in 1973. He figured that if the college kid's asses weren't on the line anymore they'd have less motivation to protest the war. I think the global war on terror proved him right, because it's the first war that lasted more than a year that we ran on the contract system since the draft went away and I saw just how badly DOD struggled to maintain manpower. They're still struggling today just to maintain peacetime manpower numbers. It's literally a readiness issue. The draft going away made it easier for people to ignore wars of choice that subsequently went on for years and I'm very doubtful that if we had a draft since 9/11 that the wars would have been allowed to go on as long as they did with the failures of our counterinsurgency and nation-building policies within sight as early as the mid-2000's. Iraq was the more "successful" outcome of the 2 wars, and it only rates something like a 29/100 on the Freedom House index ("Not great Bob").
Our wars only saw a collective KIA rate of something like 7,000+ with the majority of those casualties happening between the years 2003-2008 in Iraq (you have to double the entire KIA rate of the AFG war in order to match the KIA rate in Iraq from 2003-2007). To put that into perspective, Russia just lost something like 10,000+ in Bakhmut in a week. What happens when we get into a war some years from now, perhaps against China, and we're losing something like 10,000+ per *month*? If manpower was so short that we had to recycle guys like me to a combat zone 3 times in 3.5 years due to manpower shortages, how many kids do you think will get recycled to combat in a war with China when even fewer young people are willing to serve in a war that produces much higher casualty rates than counterinsurgency campaigns? Whoever is unfortunate enough to be in a ground combat MOS when the next war happens will get recycled to a much deadlier conflict with much higher KIA rates. "Rolling the iron dice" deployment after deployment in that threat environment is going to get a lot of people killed on their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tours as the KIA odds go up. We're going to be forcing kids to "roll the iron dice" multiple times on worse odds simply because there aren't enough fresh bodies willing to roll the iron dice just once.
That's what I worry about the most. If you think my generation of veterans are broken off, just wait until you see how broken the next generation of veterans are going to be when they get recycled in a conflict with someone like China. Shit will look more like the Iran-Iraq War than "Operation Iraqi Freedom." American service member casualties will cross the hundreds of thousands mark let alone the tens of thousands mark. How many people will be volunteering to put down 4 years in the Marines at that point? These are the thought points that make me wonder if bringing a draft back is a must rather than a maybe. More of the country will need to share that burden, including the rich kids. It can't just be us recycling high school kids with few options to hideous conflicts over and over again.
If we don't bring back the draft, we should at least raise the age requirement for enlistment to 21 or 22. The brain doesn't stop developing until around 25, and the younger you send kids off to war, the more likely they are to have severe PTSD outcomes, especially if they are recycled. Make the recruiters go after older kids instead of younger high school kids and 1st or 2nd year college students. Even if we went to a draft system I would support raising the draft age to 21 or 22. We shouldn't be sending teenagers off to kill people if we don't even think they're mature enough to drink a beer.
For myself and the many others who have said as much in various Bulwark newsletters, national service is a key to the cure.
I heard Adm. Mike Mullen on NPR proposing that we decrease the size of the military, because it would cause a debate on drafting kids for wars that people think they want to engage in. I thought it was an interesting idea. Getting into wars seems to be a bit too easy.
I can relate a bit to the challenges of “coming back”, although not from actual combat. My daughter lived on a military base for four years in South Korea. It was only supposed to be three years but they requested an extension because . . . They didn’t want to come back, to school shootings, Trump fouling the White House, crime, people at each others’ throats, etc.
A bizarre situation, to be serving a country that you’d prefer not to live in, once you experience another existence, with less strife.
Yes, GG, it is a very sad state of affairs to be living now in the country that is supposed to be the "Shining city on the hill."
Maybe there’s a bit of confession in my despair; I arrogantly assumed we would always hold steady.
Reminds me a bit of this passage from Catch-22:
"A million years?” persisted the jeering old man with keen, sadistic zest. “A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as… the frog?”
Actually the whole conversation, but that part works here.
Yup, that’s apropos. I remember my first trip to Europe, and realizing how the term “old” is situational. Americans do have irrational hubris.
Combat or not, the communal isolation is felt across all service members. That's why you don't see as much of a delta between the suicide rates of combat veterans versus non-combat veterans. Everyone in uniform kind of experiences some commonalities:
- Your individuality is broken down in recruit training and you're built back up as part of a team that puts the team before its component individuals
- You get immersed in this "team over self" environment for four years or more
- You return to a society that celebrates the individual and sees thinking about the team (Team America) collectively as "communism" or "socialism" or "wokeism"
- You have lost both the community you left before serving *and* the community you served with and now feel alone and isolated and different from everyone else around you
^I call this dynamic the "losing home, losing self" dynamic, because that's the most concise way I could describe the way it feels in just four words or so. It's also why I want to focus my current/future writings on this sort of thing rather than combat experience because we so often focus on the trauma of combat while ignoring all the rest of it that is probably equally traumatic or even more so than the combat itself. At least, for me it felt that way, and I saw a fair amount of death and hardship during the civil war years of Iraq when casualty rates peaked. That's why I empathize a lot with the non-combat folks. We're all equally unprepared for this "transition" stuff that veterans/active duty tend to focus a lot less on compared to combat experience. It's a different "shell shock" of its own kind.
Nothing against Travis or the content of these posts, but I have said and will continue to say that my military experience(s) during my 30 year career was/were different than his. Travis is well aware of this and I'm only noting this on this thread to point this out that we all had our military career paths that were defined by which branch of service we chose, the military occupation/job we did, the Commands/Commanders we served under, the era we served and a million other things including who we are and how we respond to the various situations...so there are just a lot of factors involved preventing us from all having the exact same experiences and feelings about it.
I will add that there are far too many service member suicides and I was also appalled by the number of sexual assaults that were happening as well. It's bad enough fighting an enemy but when the enemy are in your own ranks...that's even worse.
Bravo, Travis, on your book endeavor and you can count me in on buying a copy and reading it.
All fair points. I've also served as a naval officer for five years, so I've seen what the non-ground combat stuff looks like in addition to the enlisted/officer differences. I'll let you know when I get a publisher and what not.
I think I asked you this before, Travis, but I can't recall. Did you ever read "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging" by Sebastian Junger? One of my favorite books. And very apropos to your writing.
I plan on reading that based upon your recommendation. Thanks.
I predict you will find it interesting. I might read it again; it’s been a long time. It explains a lot of unexplored human needs and behaviors, past and present. It might even explain MAGAs - the need to belong to something bigger than yourself. That’s one reason I support the idea of compulsory national service; too many people have an emptiness that could be filled to the benefit of everyone and the country.
I've read and watched a lot of Junger's work, including listening to "Tribe" on audio. I love his stuff.
Travis, have you considered writing an article or even a book? You are a good writer and obviously very smart and thoughtful, as well as knowledgeable about a lot of different topics. I have learned a lot from reading your comments.
I'm 200+ pages into my own personal story that I hope to share some day, but have had a bit of writer's block lately, partly because there are parts of my post-service life that still feel very shameful and embarrassing to me. I'm getting through some of that personal shame via therapy, specifically the "internal family system" way of understanding the self and all of its parts that are sort of showcased in the Pixar film "Inside Out." I'm only dedicating about 1/3rd of the book to the experiences of combat, because I want the focus to be on what happens to us *after* combat and not during. There are a million books written by veterans about combat, but very few are written about the struggles we face *after* we get back, probably because those parts are less about glory or valor and are often more so about personal mistakes and failures, but those are also the parts that future veterans will need to be better prepared for when they get out. Combat training, while often not sufficient for the realities of combat we face, is at least *an attempt* to prepare you for what you're going to face. Entire field doctrines are written about it. The one thing you don't get training for is how to readjust to being an individual when you get out and what to expect when you do get out. Very little has been written about those parts, and I feel like most of us face that new challenge completely unprepared, which sets our expectations in a bad way. We expected combat to be the hard part and returning home to be the easy part when so often the reverse is true.
I got the idea to start writing when I was listening to a podcast called "Third Squad." It was a passing detail that involved infantry Marines from 1st MarDiv reading books like Bob Lecky's "Helmet for my Pillow" or Eugen Sledge's "With the Old Breed"--stories written by infantry Marines of the same division during WWII. That passing moment really spoke to me because I realized that veterans who never knew each other or never lived during the same periods could still speak to one another across time. That was extremely powerful and was an eye-opener for me. Equally powerful was understanding that Marines past and present spent a lot of time talking about their combat experiences, but not enough about their return home experiences. I had to find Homer's "The Odyssey" before I found a story that came close to touching on that aspect. The part in The Shawkshank Redemption when Brooks gets out of prison as an old man and has to readapt is probably the closest thing in art to capture that sense of being lost that I've found. That and the scene at the end of Hurt Locker where he's lost at the grocery store before going off to another deployment.
I hope that if for nothing else, sharing my nothing-special average Joe story will at least get more guys like me to write about their post-service experiences and to get to a point where that kind of thing is more normalized and we can end the stigma of our own personal self-shaming.
There is no such thing as a nothing-special average Joe. Each of us is unique, A one of a kind. And each of us has a story. But some stories are more significant in the Story of Us All. Yours is one of those. Because it reverberates through so very many of us and through the story of the country and probably of mankind. It takes courage and honesty to even think about writing it. Good for you, Travis! (Keep us posted on the pre-order.)
Keep at it, Travis. I will pre-order! And give copies to all and sundry! You've got a lot of us here who are pulling for you, and I always learn something from your posts.
Thank you <3
What Carolyn says! I always look forward to reading what you have written when I can, and often learn something. I look forward to reading your personal story in full!
It is wonderful that you are writing about what happens to soldiers after they get home. This needs to become a widely known and accepted issue so that just like there is training for combat, there is a system for training and ongoing support for reintegration into society for veterans after combat.
My bet is that a whole bunch of us in the Bulwark community are cheering you on in your writing project and would love to read it.
I looked up the "Internal Family Systems Model" of therapy and it sounds really interesting. I'm glad you are getting therapy and that it's helping.
I'm reading Richard Schwartz's "No Bad Parts" right now and finding it very helpful if you're interested in further reading.
I looked up"No Bad Parts" and it's now on my list. I am part of a small group that selects books and writes questions for online book studies whose target audience is teachers and counselors of children and adolescents with emotional disabilities and other disabilities. Many of these students have experienced a lot of trauma that is hindering them from becoming happy and successful. This approach might be a helpful way for the adults to think about those they work with.
Mary, are you familiar with "The Drama of the Gifted Child"? If not, might be worth your while.
Thank you Travis for your post. One of the most eye opening things for me has been reading about Active or retired Military opening up and wanting to tell their stories and how it’s helping them. I appreciate this. I grew up around a lot of Military that had the mentality of not talking about the experiences they had in War. WW2 , Korean and Vietnam vets in particular… didn’t want to talk about their experiences outside of the funny ones. As a kid and young man I wanted to hear those stories.. however I now felt it was in-polite to ask. Thankfully I have started to ask now.. and just listen.
I agree with you regarding the speaking out. Will's piece was powerful. We'll be hearing stories and reading articles about this for a while since this is the anniversary of going to war. So far, what I have heard is how much we did not know about Iraq and how unprepared our soldiers were for dealing with this. The coming back to the US is another piece that needs to discussed.