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The War Comes Home

Being in the armed forces fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan is one thing....coming home and dealing with all that that service entailed is quite another. Those returning seem almost to be a forgotten group of people, most of whom do need help in many ways and on many levels.

The Texas Observer has a powerful insight into the lives of 3 people - in a piece "The War Comes Home" - who have returned from active duty. It doesn't make for happy reading and only goes to show that fighting a war isn't without its consequences in so many ways. One has to wonder whether the politicians who are so trigger happy into going into war have any idea of the real fallout for those actually fighting. Consider Bush, Blair and Howard. How many people would they have spoken to, or met, who have been on active military duty in combat zones like Iraq or Afghanistan? Very few, if any, one suspects.

"Statistics are one way to tell the story of the approximately 1.4 million servicemen and women who’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004, 86 percent of soldiers in Iraq reported knowing someone who was seriously injured or killed there. Some 77 percent reported shooting at the enemy; 75 percent reported seeing women or children in imminent peril and being unable to help. Fifty-one percent reported handling or uncovering human remains; 28 percent were responsible for the death of a noncombatant. One in five Iraq veterans returns home seriously impaired by post-traumatic stress disorder.

Words are another way. Below are the stories of three veterans of this war, told in their voices, edited for flow and efficiency but otherwise unchanged. They bear out the statistics and suggest that even those who are not diagnosably impaired return burdened by experiences they can neither forget nor integrate into their postwar lives. They speak of the inadequacy of what the military calls reintegration counseling, of the immediacy of their worst memories, of their helplessness in battle, of the struggle to rejoin a society that seems unwilling or unable to comprehend the price of their service. Strangers to one another and to me, they nevertheless tried, sometimes through tears, to communicate what the intensity of an ambiguous war has done to them. One veteran, Sue Randolph, put it this way: “People walk up to me and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ And I know they mean well, but I want to ask, ‘Do you know what you’re thanking me for?’” She, Rocky, and Michael Goss offer their stories here in the hope that citizens will begin to know.

Michael Goss, 29, served two tours in Iraq. He grew up in Corpus Christi and returned there after his other-than-honorable discharge. He lives with his brother. He is divorced and sees his children every other weekend while working the graveyard shift as a bail bondsman. He is quietly intelligent, thoughtful, and attentive, always saying ma’am and holding the door. He struggles with severe PTSD and is obsessed with learning about the insurgency by studying reports and videos online. He is awaiting treatment from the Veterans Administration. He has been waiting for over a year."

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