Tough enough to be touched

by
Chaplain Kathie




Yesterday I was on a motorcycle charity ride for a wounded Iraq veteran. During lunch I was talking to the Mom of Marine. He had been deployed to Haiti. I asked her what tugged at his heart more, combat or deployments like Haiti. She said humanitarian missions. They see so much suffering on these missions, people in need, lost, shocked, afraid and driven by desperation to do unreasonable things. They are there to obviously help the survivors but these are the same people we send into combat yet we wonder why what they see touches them so much some end up with PTSD.

They train to be tough and ready to pull the trigger. One moment they will kill an enemy fighter, filled with rage and the next fall to the ground, hold a fallen brother in their arms and weep. They allow themselves a few moments of acknowledging their grief and then snap back to being tough all over again so they can do their jobs.

We hear someone we know has passed away. We order flowers and make some phone calls. We pay a visit to the family. Then we show up at the wake to comfort them. We show up at the funeral if we can and then we may even pay the family more attention for a week or so after knowing how hard it must be for them to lose someone they love. For at least a week, the family is comforted, allowed to cry as much as they need to, provided with a caring ear to listen and hugs whenever they need it. For servicemen and women, they get a few moments to grieve for someone in their military family after the shooting ends and then they have to stand up and get back to the mission.

Do you think that would take a "tough as nails" person to be able to do that? We just assume a tough Marine or Soldier will just recover after brothers and sisters have died right before their eyes. When others are wounded right in front of them and they see what can happen to the human body. Someone they care about has just been killed. Someone they care about has just been wounded. They have just been shocked. They have just experienced trauma so severe it would leave the rest of us unable to go to work for days afterward, surrounded by family and friends and bosses allowing us time to grieve. They have to push themselves to pick up their weapons and return to duty after only moments to grieve.

We pass off what they are able to do as just part of their job, part of their training never once acknowledging the fact they are still just humans filled with the same emotions the rest of us have. When we lose a sibling, a husband or wife, a child or a parent, it takes months, sometimes years to recover to the point when it no longer hurts to think about them and how much we miss them. We will look at the chair they used to sit in and cry. We will do things we used to do with them by our side and feel empty because they are no longer there. Other people fully understand that we need time to heal from the loss but we expect the men and women in the military to "get over it" deal with it.

They cannot simply allow themselves the luxury of healing with time off. They cannot leave Iraq or Afghanistan just because someone they cared about has died and they want to go to the funeral any more than they could have left Vietnam to bury a friend, or Korea or any other nation during WWI or WWII. They have to put the mission before themselves and their human need.

For weeks and months, they carry around that pain. They do their duty with that pain. They see others die and others wounded while they still have that pain inside their skin. When they come home, it is all still there and they are finally allowed time to grieve but other people can't seem to understand why so longer after the loss, they are acting as if it just happened.

For them, it is worse than a recent death because the pain has been added onto by other events they had to endure. Imagine if someone you loved died and you were not allowed to acknowledge it for a year. By the time you were allowed to grieve, it would be like it just happened for you but the time between the loss and the time you were allowed to feel it, those emotions have gotten stronger.

Now think of how strong these men and women are that they were able to wait until they could grieve the loss. It is not that they couldn't care about the loss but that they were able to put others before their own grief, their own self.

They return home and carry it all back with them. For some, they are able to recover sooner than others just as some of us recover from our own losses sooner than others do. Some of them need help to recover just as some of us have to go through grief counseling and others have to go on medication to ease the emotional pain. We don't seem to understand that they are just as human as the rest of us, but unlike the rest of us, their healing is always put on hold until the demands on them have ended.

This is how PTSD takes hold. The doorway is the emotional part of their brain. The same quality of their level of caring tugging at their hearts on humanitarian missions is the same one touched by loss in battle. The same quality within them allowing them to put others before their own life is the same one touched by loss.

When they think of PTSD as a sign of weakness they fail to see just how tough they were that they went on doing their duty, fighting off the pain they felt, pushing themselves to the back of the list of things to do, worrying about their brothers and doing their duty no matter what it cost them. They cannot see the difference between what they are allowed to do back home as a person and what they are unable to do as a human when they are deployed into combat.

PTSD is a sign they were able to care deeply but strong enough to overcome the pain long enough to finish the mission. They have a hard time seeing that makes them as tough as they come because while carrying around that depth of pain, they did not give in when they were needed. They had that much strength within them they were able to put others first because they cared that deeply about their brothers.

Want to see a tough veteran? Talk to a veteran with PTSD and you'll find one as tough as they come because their "hearts" were caring enough to feel but their courage pushed on despite that pain.