7 Things No One Tells Families About Life After The Military | Task & Purpose

I've never heard of CV4A, DAV, or Heroes on the Water. What do you like about them?

More context to the poem:

By Randall Stevenson
(10/22/2013 3:06:00 PM)

John Donne was a lawyer, poet, satirist and clergyman. It was an English traditional to ring the bells of a law school when one of its barristers (lawyers) died. Law offices would send messengers to the school to inquire who died by asking, “For whom does the bell toll? ” John Donne had lost his father at age 4. Although John Donne had completed education at Cambridge and Oxford he was denied degrees because he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, an oath that recognized the sovereign of England as the head of religion of the country. Although a barrister (lawyer) , this forced him to live a life bordering on poverty. Several of John Donne’s friends and close relatives were killed or exiled because they were Catholics who refused to take the Oath of Supremacy. His brother, who after being tortured for harboring a Catholic priest until he betrayed the priest, was imprisoned in Newgate prison, where he died of bubonic plague. The harbored priest was then tortured on the rack, hung until he was almost dead and then killed by disembowelment. John Donne reconsidered and took the Oath of Supremacy, for which he was materially rewarded with influential positions. However, he saw how each of these deaths had diminished him; and years later published this meditation. In the full meditation he talks about the complete connectedness of the universal church and how the impact of one impacts all. I think it was a reflection on I Cor.12: 12-31 and/or Romans 12: 4-5 (For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.)

thank you for sharing this heartfelt post, I am glad that you are here and helping others out to include me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/08/15/new-five-finger-death-punch-music-video-highlights-veteran-homelessness-but-is-it-accurate/

This song makes me tear up every time I watch it.

Sir, it has been tough for me to see the Survivors of combat from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom come through my office doors at times and tell me how the Military screwed them over, instead of protecting them as much as possible from bad paper (an UOTH) discharge or some over screw over, that is on top of the trauma of war and moral injury they suffered, there was the additional shock of being treated as a disposable commodity. The Military I have learned is like making a deal with the devil, most days are good, but every now and then (or probably a lot more for the folks in the special ops fields-more deployments, more combat and more dangerous missions). the Devil calls his due. All that BS about how "The (Insert Here) _______ (Navy Army Marine Corps, Air Force) takes Care of their Own." When you have screwed up in one way or another (Alcoholism, voluntary drug ingestion as a form of self-medication, a DUI or a DV incident, minor infractions, whatever), I have seen the system react with a zero tolerance reaction way to often, without truly trying to rehabilitate, or to understand what the combat vet is going through. Not eveyone deals with the same experience of war the same. What can leave one man devastate, his combat buddy shrugs off with the "Shit happens, this is war." So experiencing the randmon craziness of combat, one soldier or Marine develops PTSD or Moral Injury and his fellow warfighter, feels nothing intense.

This was one of big points in Col. David Hackworth's book, "About Face" where he said every man is like a Bottle, some had bigger bottles that could absorb more traumatic experiences, before they cracked, and others less. He even thought that you could increase the size of your "trauma Bottle" through various practices (like spiritual practices, and reading about combat from Survivors as well as talking to combat survivors about what they had seen and done in war and how they had processed the experiences.). But every combat vet he believed could only take so much, even the strongest men. Therefore R & R and a rotation schedule, and time away from the Front so that men could empty their bottles of the stored up trauma or combat experiences. I think men need time to grieve, to mourn and to process and try to make sense of it all. Everything I have heard first hand through the combat survivors in my family seems to confirm this, as well as all that I have read about men in combat, and surviving the peace, and the return to civilian life.