Veteran leaves message "And let my demon sleep"

"And let my demon sleep" sounds like such an easy thing to do. It also sounds like a good thing to do. Letting a "demon" sleep should mean the veteran is able to rest, and in many cases, rest does come, but the problem is, rest does not last. The demon gains strength while resting. When it awakens, he does it without warning and attacks with vengeance. The best time to fight this demon is as soon as he shows up. Defeat it with the weapons known to destroy it. The truth, support, faith and above all, forgiveness.

Facing up to hidden wounds
Published: Tuesday, April 03, 2012
By The Oregonian Editorial Board

Jamie Francis / The Oregonian More than 1500 ribbons like this are display inside the PTSD unit of Roseburg Veterans Medical Center. Each ribbons was placed there by a graduate of the program.

During the first few years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Patricia Horoho told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee last week, the Army medical system was "overwhelmed."

The Army had sent so many soldiers to war so many times that its longstanding medical evaluation process simply couldn't keep up with the demand. This imbalance, Horoho told committee chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., was especially acute for those suffering from invisible wounds such as post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.

The Army overhauled its medical evaluation system in 2007, but all the services are still scrambling to catch up. And the effort can be messy.

The latest evidence comes from up the highway at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the military base near Tacoma that most Oregon National Guard soldiers have passed through on their way home from deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Investigators are studying whether medical officers at Madigan Army Medical Center deliberately chose not to diagnose soldiers suffering from PTSD in order to limit costs to the government.

Those costs are substantial. In 2008, Congress granted a 50 percent disability rating for any service member who left the military with a PTSD diagnosis. That means each diagnosis puts the government -- the taxpayers -- on the hook for a lifetime of benefits.
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Truth comes when the veteran faces the truth about himself/herself. Not the way they see themselves in the moment of deepest suffering but in the moments leading up to the event haunting them. What were they thinking? What was going on around them? What was their intention? Watch the "whole movie" in their minds instead of the end result frozen in time. There was a lot more going on causing the outcome.

They usually forget about what they had inside of them pulling them to enter into the military in the first place. It was not about killing but more about defending. Then it became a cause greater than themselves. Being willing to die for the sake of someone else. There is no "demon" able to defeat that when they see the truth within them.

War is so horrible most wonder where God was and why He allowed it. The truth again is already known to them. God does not interfere with freewill. What man does to man is up to them and since the beginning of time, they have gone to war. Yet even during such horrific events, God is there but they cannot see Him. They cannot connect their ability to care at all to the fact that God is there with them. When there is an act of kindness or heroic act, He was there. When one of them shed a single tear for someone they called enemy as well as for a friend, He was there.

We know there is nothing God cannot forgive but too often it is harder for a veteran to forgive him/herself for what they had to do and the fact they survived. The demon is defeated when they are able to make peace with themselves. They can do that with the right support, someone to listen to them without judging them. They don't need judgement since they already judged themselves and are punishing from within.

The old warrior can only rest when the demon is defeated.