Through Meditation, Veterans Relearn Compassion

Through Meditation, Veterans Relearn Compassion
By Amy Standen
Wednesday, November 21, 2012

The epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder has pushed the VA to explore new and sometimes unorthodox treatments. In one VA facility in Menlo Park, Calif., veterans of current and past wars gather to meditate and break down the shields that combat forced them to hold.

Marine Esteban Brojas is rocking back and forth in his chair in a rehabilitation center for veterans in Menlo Park, Calif. He rubs his hands together so quickly you can hear them.

"You know, you're going into a building, and you know there's a grenade being popped in there," he says, "and there's a woman and a child in there ... and you're part of that?"

When Brojas came back from Iraq in 2003 to his home in Greenfield, Calif., he reunited with his wife and met his newborn daughter for the first time. His wife was excited to see him, but he found himself not wanting to pick up his daughter.

"The fact of holding my daughter in my arms, you know, or even being intimate with my wife? Very difficult. Very difficult because of the trauma," he says.

Multiply Brojas by the hundreds of thousands of newly returned servicemen and servicewomen the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates are suffering from PTSD, and you can see the scale of the problem here. These men and women cannot leave combat completely behind.
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