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

The mindset of just doing. Keeping your bearing and discipline and just doing the job without question.

It was difficult to explain the sense of belonging and the “tightness” with both the aircrews and the ground teams we supported. Coming home from RVN in 1970, in the midst of protests, made for difficult conversations around the fact that whether or not someone supported “the war” , you always supported the people who were there with you. Hard to explain if you were not there.

The experience of telling my ultra racist Dad how much I loved ALL of my Army family. He honest to God thought there were separate barracks and even tried to make me come home.

MY job description was hard to explain in non-military language.

Being under fire. What I saw sometimes, things that some did.

The intensity of the comradeship on a submarine. I don’t mean friendship. I didn’t like all my shipmates. But I respected and TRUSTED every one of them. (Well, there were a couple who made it obvious they should have washed out in sub school, but they were transferred out after one patrol and watched carefully until they were gone.)

The Brotherhood we have and the bond we share . The conditions we lived in a war zone.

I was overseas in Germany. We did not have smart phones and in order to talk to my family, I had to go to a phone booth with 5 mark coins to call home. Even though there were a lot of things to do and places to go and fun to be had, it was still a little lonely. None of my family had a clue that I was homesick and missing all my friends from School. With my family, any sign of emotion was weakness and was frowned upon. So, being somewhat lonely with no one to discuss it with was the one thing that they never understood.

Witnessing not one but two suicides, one on the rifle range in basic training , and the second in Germany being the last person, a friend who I was joking with right before he became one of the 22. I also had a hard time speaking about seeing a fellow soldier being cut in half by two tanks. I learned that people in my family didn’t believe me or thought I was exaggerating.

I had a very hard time communicating the ideas that made the difference between civilian me and military me to my friends from high school; things like devotion to your unit and to the country, or like the knowledge that there are circumstances where I personally might need to lay down my life or somebody close to me would do it for me.
It was especially hard to communicate to my wife -- who had zero experience with the military before meeting me -- why being late was such a huge taboo, or how -- in the middle of an argument over a critical matter -- I had to leave with the issue unresolved because I was on duty.
But the biggest toughie I had was trying to explain why after his wife got drunk and beat him up our next-door neighbor had to go to alcohol and drug abuse counselling when it was his wife who was an alcoholic.
Ahhh... welcome to army life.