Veterans For Pompeo

The link above is to an interesting article about veterans shying away from receiving care.  One of the most difficult things for a veteran to do is to talk about his or her service – particularly when it comes to a traumatic, emotional event.  Much of this stems from military training that tells you that you must be tough to survive – that you need to “suck it up and drive on”.  Every veteran knows someone (or perhaps is someone) that has concealed an injury, depression, nightmares, etc in order to either stay on active duty or to appear strong, “normal”.

Some of it lies in the fact that many of us aren’t comfortable talking to civilians – even if they are family members or have been best friends forever.  How many of us clam up around family but bump into a veteran at random and end up talking at length about our experiences, while our family members watch with a mix of jealousy and irritation?

I believe that the mind and emotions are very similar to our muscles – if you have a particularly vigorous workout, you will be sore the next day.  If you don’t recognize that and act accordingly (stretch, ice, etc) then you suffer longer term effects in terms of increased discomfort and perhaps even injury.  Mental/emotional trauma is similar – and if we don’t take the time to process this we also suffer long term effects.  Unfortunately, the military continues to refer to this as “mental illness” or a “disorder” rather than mental trauma.  How can it be a “disorder” when it is a completely normal human reaction?

The Kansas National Guard now leads the nation in resiliency training (http://www.kansas.gov/ksadjutantgeneral/Library/Resiliency/Resiliency%20home.htm).  Even so, while the Kansas Army National Guard has lost eleven soldiers to combat casualties, it has lost more than eleven to post-deployment suicide.

We want to hear from our Kansas veterans.  Have you participated in this resiliency training?  Has it helped?  How can it be improved?

Thank you for your service, and God bless our active duty military and our veterans!

Karl Monger

MAJ, USA (ret)