“Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.”
~ Paul Fussell
We all have two people inside of us, one that is who we are and one that is who we can be. But what if who we can be gets interrupted, by the call to arms of war or any kind of trauma leaving a long lasting and undetected silent imprint on our souls?
Soldiers of yesterday, today and the future share a common thread of post traumatic stress disorder; one that I never realized touched me, my children and my siblings, not until after I published my fathers wartime letters from WWII as a 101st Airborne paratrooper in Comes A Soldier’s Whisper www.amazon.com/Jenny-La-Sala/e/B00NR36UYM/ref
It must be very difficult for a soldier to return from a group and life style where he served an important military function for his country. A soldier is in charge of others and has a built in family of peers. Then he returns to life back home. His family functioned without him. His kids are busy. His spouse has been handling everything. Now he is told to find a place back home. Yet he closes his eyes and sees a different world and life that he has left behind, a life that was surreal in the setting of war, a life of which people cannot even begin to imagine…
My father carried sadness and boxed up memories from WWII. I always believed that much of that sadness and anger was from losing his mother, father and sister at young ages, all before he was 19 years old, leaving 4 younger siblings to be cared for by his elderly grandmother. But it was so much more than that, as he did suffer from PTSD, moaning in his sleep every single night. I don’t remember questioning that and thought all fathers moaned and cried out in their sleep.
We need to explore, question and understand this silent weapon that follows our soldiers home. I have known 3 people during my life who suffered from PTSD, my father from WWII, my ex-husband from the Vietnam War and my brother from the Gulf War. I have often questioned why I was surrounded by angry men in my life with tempers flared, sadness and the like. Why even my children have expressed anger over the years, grandchildren of a WWII Vet, niece and nephew to their uncle from the Gulf War and children of a Vietnam Veteran who did not realize that they were all suffering from the past.
In looking back, I believe now that my ex-husband’s PTSD was lying dormant, silently waiting for another traumatic episode before rising to the surface. My children’s father, a Vietnam Veteran did not seek help until 2005, after two of his comrades committed suicide. This was twenty years after our divorce and 37 years after he served in Vietnam. Could it be that my son and daughter were affected by their father’s PTSD? Was I as a spouse and caregiver by association taking on my husband’s depression and feelings of isolation?
We as children, wives, brothers and sisters also suffer from the effects of second hand PTSD assisting in the shaping and molding of our personalities, interrupting who we could have been…
We need to open our hearts and minds to our returning soldiers and help them to transition back home again for the benefit of the soldier, his family and society as a whole.
God Bless Our Troops!
~ Jenny La Sala
Veteran Tributes: www.facebook.com/ComesASoldiersWhisper
Author Website: www.JennyLasala.com
