It’s Memorial Day weekend which means the boards here will be inundated with posts reminding you to remember the fallen and what this holiday is really about. You’ll be cautioned against thanking all veterans and asked to hold off on that for November. Many veterans will take to social media and to podiums to tell you of the friends they lost along the way in impassioned made for Hollywood tales of landings in Normandy, helicopters in Vietnam, harrowing tales of Tora Bora, and street fights in Fallujah. While these stories are important and these reminders are relevant I’d like to go a different direction.
I want to talk about something less exciting, which will never be printed above the fold, never be made into a movie, and aside from the average enlisted veteran, won’t pull any heartstrings. I want to discuss the thousands of veterans that leave us under a flag every year without a story of heroic glory. The veterans that at the rate of 2 to 1 above the rest of the population take their own lives every day. Among these veterans we find other disproportionate numbers, female veterans, veterans of color, enlisted veterans as opposed to veteran officers. Some politicians will point to these numbers and pound their fists about better mental health care, telling you about PTSD, and stories of being awoken from nightmares of holding their battle buddy as he bled out. The truth is these stories are for you, for civilians, they are just that, stories. The average veteran doesn’t have these stories. We weren’t all in Fallujah, in the first assault, watching our entire unit die. If you’ve heard that story, the chances are 99 to 1 you were lied to. We weren’t all there. We weren’t all in helicopters, behind gun turrets, firing on rice paddies. We just weren’t. We tell these stories because they are the ones you’ll listen to. You don’t care to hear how we just stood there while a “butter bar” dressed us down for putting a red X in his aircraft forms, because he wants to fly and mechanics are a waste of his time. You want that Kubrick moment where we told him off with biting James Dean cool; except we didn’t. That doesn’t happen. We think by telling you the stories you want to hear we’ll make you listen. That it will drive you to treat our suicide, addiction and homelessness problems. So you try. You try, because you’re moved by heroics and sleepless nights. The truth is you’re treating the wrong problem though, because that Veteran doesn’t exist. He’s out there, sure, but he’s one in a million not 20 a day.
The average veteran isn’t struggling with horrifying memories of survivor guilt. He’s wrestling with purpose. For 4-20 years we listen daily to lectures and briefings on our purpose, our service, our sacrifice. We are drilled in core values that teach us to always put service first, and then we wake up one day and look around and no one cares. That’s when the real battle begins for the average veteran. We struggle with waiting in line at the Post Office, because civilians don’t know how to properly wait in line, they never are prepared when their time comes, they can’t seem to stand in a straight line, they stand too close or leave too much room, the inefficiency of it all is infuriating. Our 4-20 years of doing everything that is asked of us, finding a way to learn a skill that isn’t in your job description, adapting and overcoming, don’t fit neatly onto a resume and we end up selling cars and waiting tables. We end up in college classes with 20 somethings that want to hear stories about Iraq, but don’t value your experience, and professors that think all this new to you, because you don’t have a degree.
This is why Veteran transition services are so important to me. I don’t want to serve those who have served because we owe them. I want to make sure that men and women who have served can continue to serve, because we owe it to ourselves. The purpose, the place, I’ve watched my fellow veterans struggle to find is out there. Our communities need it. We need to provide bridge programs that certify and recognize the unique experiences of our enlisted veterans. That place our veterans in places where they can serve with excellence and integrity because it’s what we do. We drive trucks, we schedule maintenance, we order parts, we input data, we train to place nasopharyngeal airways, we call bingo, we shoot guns, we cook shit on a shingle, but mostly we wake up every day knowing what we do and why we do it. We know our mission and our place in it. A discharge means a lot of different things to a lot of different veterans, but it always means we are suddenly without this final piece, and that we have just left a world where we have been told every day, that this piece is ALL that matters. A world where our stories of sending a new Airmen to find 50 feet of flight line, make sense, and everyone knows we weren’t in Fallujah, and doesn’t expect us to tell that story, a world where service matters, no matter the type of service only the character of it.
While celebrating or somberly reflecting this Memorial Day, do this veteran a favor and as you take a break from BBQ’s and hiking to place a flag at the base of a hero’s tomb, think for a minute that maybe patriotism is about fewer flags not more. Maybe the best way to honor our fallen is to honestly think about why they fall, so that we can make sure fewer of us fall. To those who we thank in November, I say I do not want to thank you in May, call me if you need to tell the stories no one else wants to hear, and know I value the price you’ve paid and will do whatever I can to make sure the price doesn’t increase. Finally to those who have paid the ultimate price, that we remember this last Monday in May, I say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your gift of service, that you paid such a dear price for, you were not disposable, you were valuable, and you deserve more than a flag and a few typed words, but I give you what I have.