Tag: Memorial Day

When the Demons Come – Memorial Day 2018

Once I loved a military man. My husband and I dated him after he’d already come home with his wound and his medal. We’d go to sleep in a twist of sheets and warm bodies, me in the middle of my two men, but he’d wake in the middle of the night driven by dreams of those that didn’t come home with him. Things done and things left undone. I’d wake to find his side of the bed empty and I’d go searching in the darkened rooms. I’d usually find him on the couch not sleeping, but not wanting to wake anyone else. I’d coax him back to bed, asking him to let me hold him, even if he didn’t sleep, just come back to bed. I learned his breathing, the feel of his body, the change in weight as the demons came. If I could catch it soon enough I could pet him back to sleep. Caress him until his breathing evened out, his body relaxed beside me, and I’d cuddle back down between my two men. Some of the most peace I’d known was sleeping between my husband and our soldier. Until by the time we parted ways I missed his snoring, and had to relearn how to sleep without it.

I love a military man, he’s my best friend. I knew him before he put on a uniform, and I’ve known him ever since. He trusts me and I trust him. He trusts me enough that he knew he could call on the day that he had his gun in his hand. He didn’t tell me he had it, I heard the metallic clack-clack as the slide went back on the gun. There’s no other sound like it and I knew it meant he’d put a bullet in it and it was live. I knew he was sitting there on the other end of the phone with a loaded gun. I remember the spurt of fear, the panic as I thought, what do I do, what do I say? First, I told him I knew what that sound was, he’d known I would. No bullshit between us, no lies. I knew he was sitting there thinking about it, but I trusted him enough to believe I was his call for help, not his suicide note. I heard the slide go back again, knew he’d ejected the live bullet. I breathed a sigh of relief and kept talking. I tried doing the whole, all you have to live for speech. I tried to be comforting. The slide went back again. And that was it, I called him names, I asked how could he do to me what his friend’s death had done to him? How could he make his family feel the pain of loss he was feeling right then? I used some more colorful phrases, some of which he’d help me prefect over the years. I got angry at him, fuck softness and hand holding. If this was it, we were both going down fighting. I heard the slide go back again, and I yelled at him some more, that we weren’t doing this again, and he agreed. He put the gun up. I told him if he took the easy way out and I didn’t, then I won. I’d be the better man. What military man wants to lose to a girl?

I love another military man, and the demons wake him, too. The loss of his brother in arms haunts him. I’ve held him while he railed against the loss. I’ve held him while he screamed his rage at those that didn’t come home, and why was he alive, why him and not them? I helped hold him and finally screamed myself, until he could hear me. That I was glad he was alive. That I was glad he was in my life. That his brother would want him to live. That his lost friend wouldn’t want him to die with him, but to live, and to keep on living.

Memorial Day is to honor the dead who have fallen in defense of our country and our freedom, but we don’t just lose our soldiers to the violence of war. Every day twenty veterans commit suicide. Every day an average of twenty of our brave men and women that have served in our armed forces take their own lives. Every day, not just Memorial Day, not just Veterans Day, but every day.

We need to lower these numbers. We need to figure out how to help the men and women that we send to fight our battles for us.

If you, or someone you know, may be considering suicide, please reach out.

Veterans Crisis Line

Call 1-800-273-8255 ext 1

Or text 838255

Mission 22

http://www.mission22.com

Battle In Distress

http://www.battleindistress.org

Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors

http://www.taps.org

We are Built upon the Bones of the Dead

All of us are built upon the bones of the dead. The experiences of loss are part of what make us who we are. We talk about survivors, but if the tragedy is large enough, painful enough, traumatic enough, then the person who walks into the room isn’t the same person who walks out of it. In a way, none of us are survivors, because the person we were dies on that floor, on that road, in that moment, with the people we lose. We walk away, we’re still alive, but everything we thought we were is brought into question if the loss is big enough. 

  

 The Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington DC. 
Memorial day was originally Decoration Day, to remember the Fallen from the Civil War. It was a war like no other that America has fought in because of how much it divided our country. Brother fought brother, father fought son, families literally met each other across the battlefield lines time and time again. We lost 620,000 people, which is still the largest loss of American life in a single armed conflict, before or since. We needed a way to mourn all our dead, those that fought on “our” side, and those we loved that fought on the “other” side. So Decoration Day was born, and then there was World War I, where Europe lost, from best estimates, 15% of it’s men between the ages of 18-30. An entire generation of men and countless civilians were lost across the face of Europe. Americans came to fight, to bleed, and some to die, but we did not lose the number that some of our European allies and enemies lost, because it wasn’t our fight at first, and it was never fought on our home soil like our Civil War. It was supposed to be the war that ended all wars because it was fought at such a terrible cost; but we all know that it wasn’t the last war.

 

World War II came and this one didn’t kill as many soldiers but it still made us pay in a loss of life that no one expected. The soldiers that helped free the concentration camp victims would tell stories of horrors beyond imagining. One of the reasons it hurt the consciousness of Europe, and us, is that we considered the Germans civilized. Germany wasn’t the idea of a barbaric nation, which was still something that people believed sincerely then, that the poor, uncivilized savages could be forgiven atrocities because they didn’t know any better; “we,” meaning the civilized world, hadn’t taught them our ways yet. The Germans had given the world Wagner, Brahms, Beethoven, and Handel, Goethe, Rilke, Heine, and Schiller, the Dusseldorf school of painting, Cornith, Caspar David Friedrich, Franz Marc, and Albrecht Durer – they were “us.” For the soldiers who freed the camps of WWII in Europe, and those who would come later to help gather evidence of the crimes committed, the thought that seemed to bother them the most was that the people who did this evil, and it is evil by any definition I am aware of, were fellow Europeans, and for Americans there was still this ideal that the Europeans were more cultured than we were. But what was behind the barbed wire, written in meticulous detail, was barbarism on a grand scale. Let me add that America interred Japanese Americans in our own camps. We didn’t do the experiments and atrocities that the Nazis did, but it is still a black mark on our country. There were Japanese Americans that fought on our side in the war while the rest of their families were prisoners. So much horror, so much gone wrong; for some reason I thought this was when Memorial Day became an official three day holiday, but I was wrong.

 

It was 1971 when then President Richard Nixon made Memorial Day a national three day weekend. It wasn’t WWII with it’s more clear cut rights and wrongs, but the Vietnam War that gave us the holiday as we know it. I was totally puzzled for a few minutes as I reviewed the history, and then I realized that if ever America had needed a holiday to remind us that our soldiers had given their lives first in the Revolutionary War that made us a country, through two World Wars, the Korean Conflict/War, and others, it was then, during the most unpopular war that we had ever fought. 1971 and the Vietnam War was part of what would forever change our country and how we viewed a lot of things. It was the end of an almost childlike faith that America had, that we were the good guys. We would come out of this time in our history far less sure of many things and out of that confusion came Memorial Day. 
I wish that I could stop this blog here in the ’70’s, but the losses have continued. We have sent hundreds of thousands of our men and women to foreign lands for one conflict or another since then, including the on-going conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. This is the weekend to remember those who never came home.  

 

Veterans Day on November 11 is the anniversary of the Armistice of WWI. It’s the day we thank the men and women who have served our country. Hug a vet, shake their hands, say thank you for your service, on Veterans Day. It’s a day to let them know we appreciate them. Memorial Day is for remembering the Fallen, those that gave their all to defend the Constitution of the United States of America, because that’s what their oath is to; not the President, not any of the politicians, but to the document that formed our country. They fight and die for our freedoms, not just freedom, but specific freedoms guaranteed us in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Soldiers can have as many issues with our politicians as the rest of us, they didn’t give their oath of fidelity to the politicians in Washington but to the very concepts that forged our nation. They gave their word they would defend their country from all enemies both foreign and domestic, and for some men and women their word is still their bond, honor is still a real concept and not just a pretty word in a speech. Truth, honor, respect, these words should still mean something to all of us.

 

While you’re grilling that steak, or watching your kids play in the pool, remember that this weekend is to honor and remember those that couldn’t come home. The men that aren’t there to grill for their family. The children that are motherless because their mother gave her life for her country. Those that couldn’t come home to their wives, their husbands, their loved ones. You can disagree with the politics that sent them to war, and trust me a lot of military men and women do, but they do their duty because they took an oath to do just that.  

 

This weekend is for the Fallen, regardless of politics. It is to honor those who truly gave their all in service. If that’s not worth a moment of silence and prayer, I don’t know what is. 

 

 

Memorial Day

Happy Memorial Day, everyone, but this message is especially for those who have served in our armed forces. Thank for your service whether it is in the past, or the present. If you are all having a great day of barbecuing, or sports, family reunions, whatever makes you happy then take my thanks and go back to your day.

The rest of this blog is those of us who aren’t having that great day. You can walk off the battlefield bleeding, but fixable. The wound heals, maybe you have a scar, maybe not even that, but you survive. You survived, and part of you is happy to have survived. Embrace that part of you that enjoys life, celebrate it! But it’s okay that theres that other part that feels, why did I survive? Why did I crawl out of the mess and stink and the chaos? Why did I make it and my friend, my brother, my sister . . . Why didn’t they make it out? Why couldn’t I save them, too? Why didn’t the person who saved me, save them? Why me? Why not them?

If I had an answer I would give it to you, but I don’t know. I know that sometimes you leave people behind, because you can either drowned with them, or live without them. Is that the worst guilt? Maybe? Or is when everyone lives, but they come back in pieces broken beyond the ability to have a normal life, let alone a happy one. And you feel guilty about that too, how dare you have family and happiness when your friend, your brother, your sister, is a ghost of what they could have been. Why are they the walking wounded and you aren’t?

But here’s the real secret, just because we walked away, bandaged, healed, old scars, doesn’t mean we aren’t still wounded, too. We walked out of the chaos, we survived, but every day is a choice to keep surviving. We survived, the wounds healed, but the haunting of it calls us back again and again, and we know that we choose every day to keep surviving. Sometimes just continuing through the memories the sounds, the sensations that wake you from a sound sleep into a cold sweat. That you have a heartbeat to remember that this person beside you loves you and would never hurt you, and isn’t the nightmare that tried to kill, so you double check that they are your spouse, that your kids are asleep down the hall, and your dogs, your house, you life is intact, and sometimes you can go back to sleep, but sometimes that flash of remembering haunts too hard and you sit up waiting for the dawn, because you don’t trust what awaits you when you close your eyes.

What do you do? I’m contacting my therapist again, because I will survive. I will keep surviving, and I will try to explain the survivor’s guilt, the choices not taken, and that feeling of throat closing terror that the smallest sound, the lightest touch, a smell, a moment of seeing something out of place and you’re right back there in the bad place. We don’t remember, we are haunted, as my best friend said today. He’s a non-practicing Marine, and ex-cop. I’ve never worn a uniform this lifetime, my bad stuff was all as a civilian, but we’ve discovered that it’s given me a unique perspective into the after effects of certain things. PTSD isn’t just for uniforms, and neither is survivors guilt.

If you read this blog and think I have been impertinent, my apologies, but if one person reads this and understands that it’s not just them, that you aren’t alone, then that’s what’s important. We survived, and it’s okay that we did, don’t let the guilt, or the confusion take away the victory of just surviving. Now, our next battle is to thrive, to succeed, to let ourselves be happy. There are moments when being happy seems harder than any of the rest, doesn’t it? But if we survived all the rest, we can conquer the hardest thing of all, ourselves, the ghosts, and enjoy that we lived.