Your sacrifices: Gone in 60 seconds

I recently read a blog about the isolation military spouses feel in the civilian community.  Sometimes this is the most overwhelming thing about being a military spouse. The isolation can feel all encompassing.  I was brought back to exactly those same feelings when I read the Wall Street Journal’s article on how Americans experience the war in brief interludes, approximately 60 seconds or less in duration. For me, what hit home was a wounded veteran and business major explaining how incredulous his fellow students were when he tried to explain his scars. He states that he developed a 10-second narrative to get past the questions and stares:

“To explain his scars, Wise developed a short account of his military service: “I was in Afghanistan, and there was a firefight,” he would say. “The guy next to me stepped on a mine. It blew me up, and I was in the hospital for a while.”

There was his entire war, reduced to a 10-second exchange.

Instead of closing the gap with his fellow students, the truncated version of events seemed to widen it.”

I read these words and I felt sick. This is exactly my experiences as a military spouse, only I have no visible scars to contend with.  That got me thinking. No one who has served leaves the military without scars. Some are obvious, others are invisible marks made on the psyches of the men and women who have sacrificed so much for America’s foreign policy decisions. Being stared at is awful, but it still hurts to have people around you expect you to function normally when nothing about what you have experienced or are experiencing falls within the statistically normal experience for the average American.  In either case, re-entering society brings about all sorts of awkward situations not unlike those I have experienced as a military spouse including people pulling you aside to tell you all about why American foreign policy is wrong because they assume you have an opposing viewpoint, or everyone’s personal favorite fuck you phrase “That’s what you signed up for.” (as if they put in print on the contract all the things you would experience during your service), and a million other fun dismissive phrases like “Well at least you got to see the world.”

The DoD is trying to bridge the military-civilian gap (I’d call it a chasm personally), but the truth is that while it is helpful to use twitter to communicate and to have the First Lady and Dr. Biden talk to people, it simply isn’t enough. Clearly.

One need only read the rest of the article to realize this.  Mr. Byrne, an advertising executive said he spied a family being reunited on while their soldier was on leave from Afghanistan.  He states: “I literally had to fight the tears, man up and keep walking,” he said. “I was like, ‘That is amazing.’ It never left me.” Later he used this experience to translate into an advertising campaign for Budweiser to highlight the experience of a servicemember coming home. This sounds great right?

Well, the truth is that the answer is complicated. On the one hand, you can argue that any publicity is good publicity, but most military families find commercialization of our experiences offensive. We give USAA a pass, because they actually are staffed by primarily veterans and spouses who actually do get that their commercial tagline “Military lives are different” means something real and profound. The rest come across as shameless shills to get Americans to buy a product by making them feel patriotic about it, or worse that they can capture the true depth of grieve and joy experienced by military families by buying a product. I don’t understand how one can equate a commercial with doing something valuable to acknowledge the experience of our servicemembers, veterans, and their families. Sadly, this may be the only experience some Americans have with the war: a commercial spot that trades on servicemembers’ sacrifices. Assuming this is the case, the divide between the civilian and military communities will only widen.

This has practical ramifications for our servicemembers, veterans and their families. We have seen military “benefits” liberally placed on the chopping block. Some civilians have begun to equate these benefits with handouts. Part of this is the result of over a decade of DoD advertising the military as a defacto jobs program. Part of this is due to the separation that has occurred as a result of the force being “all-volunteer”. Most Americans have no ties to the war. They can avoid informing themselves on the issue because it is not heavily covered in the press. Even if they do inform themselves, it is based on second or third hand information that bears little resemblance to the experience of previous generations who either experienced war first-hand or knew someone who did. The effects used to be obvious, now they are obvious only if the wounds themselves are obvious. Even then most people effectively distance themselves from the experiences tied to those wounds.

I thought about talking about who is at fault for this: the American people, journalists, the impact of the 24 hr news cycle on attention spans, etc. There is nothing useful to be gained by playing the blame game.  What is important is what we can do going forward.

I have been a big advocate for speaking out to anyone and everyone for a long time. Information alone won’t reach people. Based on 2.5 yrs of professional outreach experience, I am convinced that personal experiences and interactions are required to reach people. We have to stop letting our discomfort and fear of personal interactions with civilians who say a lot of uninformed things to us keep us from reaching out. We have to reach out knowing full well that sometimes, maybe a lot of times, we’ll get hurt. We simply cannot stand behind the gates of the bases and blame others for not building a bridge.

I know we are tired, exhausted even. I know how many of us are walking wounded, but this is something we have to do for ourselves, for our men and women coming home, for the families of those who lost someone, for those who have visible wounds and those who have emotional ones, for veterans, for spouses, and for military kids. As 1% of the population, we have to speak out, because we have to win people’s compassion in order to make sure that psychological services are available to military personnel, veterans and their families, so the suicide rate doesn’t continue to climb to ever more astronomical numbers. We need every day American’s support for VA benefits for our servicemembers coming home and to preserve the retirement benefits they have fought for. The risk is obvious. If we don’t make it personal, answer every question, share every experience, and really lobby for ourselves, the people who have sacrificed the most since 9/11 will end up with little more than missing limbs and careless disregard from the people they have so selflessly served.

I know how hard this will be for us. I avoid talking about the military sometimes when people ask me how I or my husband  are doing because I am afraid I will turn into a sniffling mess if I answer the question. Definitely, I believe we need to take care of ourselves first, but after that, we have to walk beyond the walls of the base and reach out. It doesn’t have to be a big dissertation on military life that you share. It needs to be brief, but open up the possibility of a more meaningful discussion, like an abstract. Each of us has a different experience from this war. Every perspective needs to be represented. We need to not only write our congressmen, but write our local papers, offer to speak at the library or other venues in our community. We need to move beyond the DoD and TV’s 60 sec Homecoming spots and tell the truth of our stories, just as McDonough Military Association did.

I know most spouses blog now, but these blogs aren’t really read by people outside the military community. We need to move beyond this. Spouses, you are the people who really need to speak out. Our servicemembers cannot. Veterans may not be in a physical or emotional position to either. Some spouses may not be able to do this outreach because they are not in an emotionally safe place. Those of us who can need to carry the load to help all of us integrate back into the larger community, while preserving the benefits that our veterans and their families need.

If we do not act, the past decade of sacrifices will be gone 60 sec after it is announced the war is over.

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