Advocacy for Veterans

                I have begun advocating for veterans every day of my life.  I am not sure when it happened, but now in many conversations I find myself explaining them: their advantages, their disadvantages, their issues, and their resilience.  I find irony in the audience to whom I am constantly educating and explaining.  Civilians cannot grasp veterans, too many differences divide us.  Two distinctly different paths lead us ever away from each other.  The audience with whom I advocate for veterans with is veterans themselves. 

Due to the training we receive, through social learning and operant conditioning, we are able to face a reality of civilized society that most civilians will never be able to stand:  Killing; government sanctioned, righteous killing for the U.S.A.  We are forever changed in many ways by this training, and mostly by killing, and by being vigilant to kill our government’s enemies.  

You see?  Veterans must be convinced that they are not just okay, but that they are a cut above.  They struggle with killing and with death because these are hard realities they have faced, not because there is something intrinsically wrong with them. 

"For those who fought for it, freedom has a taste the protected will never know." 
-- Willie "Bo" Nelson, Mancelona, MI

This semester I have completed two excellent books which have forever changed my perceptions of veterans and thereby…myself:  On Killing and On Combat by Dave Grossman.  These have unlocked an understanding that I believe essential for anyone wishing to counsel veterans.   The new information I have gleaned from these books has allowed me to accept a large part of myself. 

Now with this knowledge I speak to the questions and concerns of my fellow veterans. I assuage their fears and confusion by speaking intelligently to their deepest self with a message: These feelings and fears you now have are understandable, explainable, and more importantly shareable. 

                I looked around about a week ago and realized that I was ministering to quite a few different veterans throughout my week days on campus, speaking life, hope, and information into their disquieted hearts.  I didn’t set out to take these actions, but I, now, hear the hurt between their words, and I have information bursting out of me to aid them.

                For example, one of my friends from the Veteran’s Group Therapy group shared that something must be wrong with him, because he killed people in Iraq and didn’t feel anything, he felt normal.  Dave Grossman specifically addresses this feeling which my friend felt.  So, I delivered Mr. Grossman’s response: (paraphrasing) In light of the social learning and operant conditioning you were trained with, this is a normal response.

We are taught to shoot and kill without thinking about it, if ordered by our leadership and if the ROE’s (Rules of Engagement) are met.  My friend shot and killed under the right conditions, for the right reasons, without emotion, because that was how he was trained, not because something was wrong with him.  Since delivering quite a few of these messages to him from Dave Grossman, we became fast friends.  Every time we meet and talk, he shares more, and I am more than happy to explain from my newly established knowledge and ease his internal strife and suffering a little more.  I do direct him to these book quite often, and sometimes only answer his concerns and questions with a location in either of these books that could help him understand.  He is, after all, the person who suggested the first book to me, in the first place.

References

Grossman, D., & Christensen, L. W. (2008). On combat: The psychology and physiology of deadly conflict in war and in peace. Millstadt, IL: Warrior Science Pub.

Grossman, D. (1995). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. Boston: Little, Brown.