What Things Were Difficult to Communicate to Family and Friends About Your Military Service? Login & Share to Win!

One of the questions I was uncomfortable with was "Did you kill anybody or How many people did you kill?".

There were many thing that my family didn't know. Of course like anyone they learned a lot from movies which didn't contain any real truths. So just the day to day operations, doing PT, getting to work call, formations and the list goes on. My family came to know the military lifestyle but didn't really learn the "lingo" or comments made while in service. Hooah or HUA (heard, understood, acknowledged) wasn't well known in my family but they got it eventually. Kind of funny on a side note, growing up in Montana, you never heard "y'all" but I came to use that a lot. My family gave me a real hard time about that one! haha. I think though all in all, the closeness between brothers, being in combat and not truly understanding what combat does and how it changes people, I could tell they couldn't relate at all. My family didn't have military experience except for my dad. We could relate on that level, but he was the only one. We didn't talk about that too much.

For me it was trying to communicate how it felt to be in armed combat. For those who have been in combat, life has a flavor the protected can never know and no amount of explaining can ever bridge that gulf.

My experiences. What I saw, what I witnessed, what I underwent, where I was, who I was around with, about everything. My folks from Desert Storm onward have been armchair generals and TV cheerleaders. They think it's all a football game and such attitudes make me SICK. They think I can be persuaded to believe anything, they don't understand my alienation issues or have even tried to. Same goes for my PTSD. When I went to college on Voc Rehab I got a university degree (it wasn't easy but I stuck it out and did it) but they didn't encourage me emotionally at all in my aspirations and dreams. They just wanted me to keep slaving for chump change. They didn't care about what I felt about things, then or now.

And now after the Afghanistan biz theey're playing 'karma chameleon' with me by saying they were against that war (and other ones in the past 30 years) all along. The same goes for the crap of the past number of years. I can't express these things to them, they think it makes me something less. They don't care, they don't give a ****. It's like we're Roman gladiators.

And my experiences about being with and serving with 'different' types of people mean nothing to them. All I hear about that is unchristian judgement and hatred. Everybody likes to think they made a difference. My VERY teeny-tiny role in the late Cold War seemed to have been all worthwhile when it ended in late 1989. Since then the American public's gullabilities and the PTSD I had buried in the back of my mind only made things worse. Alienation snowballed. They make me feel like it's all been in vain and pretty much my immediate family just doesn't care. And wars have become entertainment for so many.

Giving priority to the mission, it gives less time to have a direct conversation with the family during training or dispatch. And it is difficult to tell the details of the work due to concerns about the leak of military secrets or military-related information.

Giving priority to the mission, it gives time to have a direct conversation with the family during training or dispatch. And it is difficult to tell the details of the work due to concerns about the leak of military secrets or military-related information.

It was next to impossible to get any of my family, with the exception of my mother, to understand the difference between "War is hell", and that being in the army during war (Vietnam) isn't always hell unless you make it so. My mother was the first black WAC from Chicago in WWII, and she knew the difference. Guess you had to go, to know.

Finding a feeling of camaraderie, and a streamlined process when it comes to chain of command. I find in the civilian workforce there’s too many cooks in the kitchen, and not a lot of working your way up the ladder.

My Time in Vietnam. The things i saw while I was there and the things after word. It was very difficult to talk about it. Only those that were there understood. I still can't talk about it. God bless those who came back and may god hold them in his hands for those that did not.

Serving onboard an antiquated diesel submarine in the early 80's - experiencing a near collision on just my second dive, that could have easily killed the entire crew. Dealing with PTSD (I'm a disabled veteran) and the associated symptoms that come with it.