“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 or my siblings, not until after I published my fathers wartime letters from WWII as a 101st Airborne paratrooper in Comes A Soldier’s Whisper.

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 the war. I always believed that much of that sadness and anger was carried over from losing his mother, father and sister at young ages, all before he was 18 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 and developing a temper and over reactions to noise. 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 weaponthat follows our soldiers home. I have known 3 people during my life who suffered from PTSD, my father from WWII, my ex-husband from Vietnam and my brother from the Gulf. 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, children of a Vietnam veteran who did not realize that he was suffering from the past. But neither one of us realized what was happening, when we divorced in 1987. 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 to strike, and strike it did.

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 are only just beginning to identify the effects of how combat stress changes a soldier and his family drawing new battle lines on the home front, as they return. Although there was not help for us then, there are wonderful organizations emerging today, ready and armed with help for our returning soldiers AND their families. I have posted two fabulous links for OPERATION FIRST RESPONSE and WIVES OF PTSD. You have a voice. They will listen and help. We should not be defined by the stress we have learned or encountered.

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… There needs to be an understanding and education of the public, that these men and women do not have a disease or disorder, but rather are experiencing involuntary reactions and responses to a stressful situation.

The colors in our American flag don’t run, and neither should we from helping ourselves and each other to heal this silent wound of the past and present. 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 our society as a whole.

God Bless Our Troops!

Jenny Tharp La Sala
Proud Airborne Veteran’s Daughter

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