Home should never be more dangerous than war

Think about that. 18 veterans committed suicide today. They survived combat but could not survive back home. Pretty horrible when you think about what they faced in combat knowing they made it back home but died because of combat.

After months of the most intense training getting civilians to adapt into soldiers, they are baptized by combat and in that moment, they are no longer the same person. They are transformed by the most intense violence known to man.

For a year or more they adapt to the constant threat of dying knowing each day can be their last. They witness death of friends and of other people. Civilians they were sent to save as well as others they were sent to defeat die in front of their eyes.

Combat becomes normal to the person they have just become. This is why combat veterans keep saying they want to go back.

Last night I was talking to a daughter of a Vietnam veteran. He had three tours of Vietnam. He never talked about any of it. His wife told him after his third tour that had to be the end of it or she wanted a divorce. She couldn't take the constant fear and the months apart. He was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and died because of what it did to his body. One more thing we never talk about. PTSD damages the body because of the constant stress.

Adapt to make fit (as for a new use) often by modification

He was modified to fit the challenges of combat but no one attempted to modify him back to being a civilian. He wanted to go back because where he was sent became normal to him. He knew what to expect there but back home, it was all different. At least that was how he felt. It was not that home changed. He did. Life as he knew it before was gone.

Most of us know what it is like to move from the home we always knew. Sometimes it is just a different house in a new neighborhood but other times it is a new state where everything is different. We have to get to know where we are, find stores, doctors, schools, churches and attempt to make new friends. We have to adapt to the new home, finding places to put everything we have and then trying to remember where we put them. Sooner or later we toss out old things and buy new things to fit our new surroundings. Moving is stressful and we end up missing how we used to know where everything was, going to visit friends, seeing friendly faces and the feeling of being home. A lot of changes in us are not noticed until we try to go back home again. We don't have the same feelings we had before. It is not that "home" has changed but we have.

It is the same for them. Home seems different because they are. Their lives changed. Back home they want to go back to the way they were before. This illusion is carried during their deployment and they convince themselves they can pick up where they left off not noticing nothing inside of them is the way it was before.

They need help sorting things out. They need to make peace with the changes and use all of it to adapt back to civilian life. This becomes harder for active duty forces and even harder for National Guards as well as Reservists. They are expected to hang onto the "warrior" at the same time they are expected to release the "warrior" as they spend time back home.

They go back to work with the memories of combat living on. They go back to their families and friends as they are expected to be unchanged. They actually do a good job covering up the changes within them for a while but sooner or later, the changes become noticed. The problem is the people who care about them don't understand what the changes mean. They don't know how to help or how to react.

Awareness will help them adapt back to civilian life and make coming home feel safe again. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can only come after a traumatic event. For combat veterans, there were many of them piled onto others. Their memories are so powerful every part of their body is involved.

In nightmares they are back in combat so vividly their bodies actually have the same reactions as during the event itself. Their hearts beat faster; their muscles tense; they smell it, hear it and fear it all over again. For flashbacks, it is the same way and can be set off by a trigger as simple as a sound or smell of diesel fuel. They become afraid they are going "crazy" and they try to hide it simply because they don't understand it. What makes it worse is when their own families don't understand it. Our reaction to them can make it worse if we react the wrong way.

When they drink too much, we can yell at them and threaten to leave them if they don't stop but this ends up making them want to drink more unless the intervention is coupled with understanding why they drink. They are trying to kill off bad feelings and calm their nerves down to numb.

We can think they are suddenly lazy when another night of terrors has left them emotionally, spiritually and physically drained instead of understanding why they can't get out of bed or make it into work.

We can think they stopped loving us when they seem cold, distant, detached from the people they are supposed to care about when there is just a wall of pain trapping in how they really feel behind it.

We can think they are suddenly nasty when they overreact to common situations that never bothered them before.

Something as simple as going out to eat can set them off if we can't understand they have to sit in a place where they feel safe and usually that means waiting for a table near a wall out of the center of the room. If we understand this, then we won't demand they just take the first available table because we're hungry.

There are so many little things we can do to help them live but far too many discover what they did wrong when it is too late to save the lives of veterans.

We keep reading about hearings in Washington and conferences around the country trying to find answers on military suicides but hearing about the problems and failures doesn't do enough good. They need to start looking at successes in all of this so they stop repeating the same failures. Until they look at what works, uncomplicated and simply stated, we will keep seeing suicides go up and survivals go down along with the families taken with them.