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

Thanks for sharing

It was difficult to share what my 70% VA disability is with family and friends because they can't "see" my disability of depression, anxiety and PTSD due to Military Sexual Trauma (MST). Its difficult for people that love me to show support when they don't want to say or do the wrong things. It makes them uncomfortable to think I experienced these traumas. They don't need to know the details. I deal with my MST with my VA therapist and God. Just knowing they have a loved one that has come forth with my experiences and how I am continually affected gives them pause before speaking ignorantly about women in the military and that honorable servicemen wouldn't abuse their fellow service member. I don't look disabled so how can I get VA disability. If I can share my experiences and healing with fellow female MST survivors to help in their recovery it helps me heal too.

Just about anything is hard to communicate. They can't understand how you can work to death, sacrifice so much, hate and love your job simultaneously, and with all the bad stuff (not always combat-related) why you still miss it. I've never been able to fully transition, but maybe what I perceive as transitioning is not what it actually is. As previous people have stated, the camaraderie is something that cannot be understood. Get two veterans together, and it's like they've always known each other, no matter what era they served. We speak a language that civilians cannot understand.

Being raped in the service and trying to explain to my dad exactly what had happened and yet couldn't really tell him who was all involved which was a white Sgt who said" Rape is nothing to cry about". Until my dad's death in 2005, I still couldn't tell him about what the Sgt. said to me. My dad was also in the Army and he didn't know how bad it was for women being in the military was. To this day, even my husband don't know the whole story of who was involved and I keep that to myself. Sometimes when I hear about women being assaulted in all branches of the service, it gets my blood boiling knowing that the ones who are responsible for the acts don't get punished or not enough. The three that raped me got $500 fine and a dishonorable discharge and that was it. No jail time. As for me, I have a life time of nightmares, can't be in a room with only one door in and out. The guys can't be black. I have no hard feelings toward black men and they can't understand why I won't stay in a room with them, even though, there are other people in the room.

Family time was and is the hardest to explain lets be honest My whole career was hard for me and my Family. It was not like you could just say hey 16:30 hours i'm going home, and in most cases it wasn't your supervisor making the call it was you, the Mission had to be accomplished. I had a child that went to counseling because Dad was never there. If you were on the boarder it wasn't like a 9to5 job. Talking to your wife wasn't much easier "why always you can't someone else do it?" Gee babe there will be 12 more people there with me. This is what we do.
Vacations Haa not like you got paid enough to jump a big iron bird to go home and see everyone. I some times think i could have done something and been more proactive spent more time with family but i still see no opening where i could have. I now find more things to do around the house and property rather than go fishing or seeing sites that kind of thing, family spread all over the state not like a trip 4 blocks over. I some times feel I failed as a Father and Husband but i did the b best i could with time i had. It was rough but at the same time addictive. Some days i wish i had stayed until they threw me out. Some of the time was just a blur because you were so busy. I managed to finally admit that i have much less patients today then before enlisting things don't go right BOOM. NOT LATER NOW RIGHT NOW. Now new wife new life and still the same habits Mission first but now i make the rules i am my own worst employer working at home. JMTC

Simply why I did it. Why spend all that time away from family? It didn't pay that much. Hard to explain the love of country is the love of family. I think it was only after 9/11 did my husband fully understand it.

The most difficult thing to communicate was why we do what we do. They don't understand the need to serve and then our need to stand for and next to the people we serve with. They are proud we serve and defend our country, but they don't understand why.

You know how it is when you tell a war story to someone who wasn't there? No one understands what it was like. Even two warriors, each from a different war, have trouble with understanding the differences. The same is true for family and friends. They don't understand the situation, the terrain, the outcome. They have the images they saw in war movies - whether it was John Wayne at Iwo Jima or Charlie Sheen in the jungles of Vietnam - what civilians know is what they saw on the screen. Maybe that's why we keep to ourselves... We lost the ability to talk to someone who knows EXACTLY what we went through.

Why sometimes you just do what you're told, and sort the bullshit out later.

Death of a roommate by his own hand