This story begins with my father
for decades. I could not remember some of his stories and I had no idea why
good actors make good storytellers. And he was a great actor.
You've never heard of him?
Because at Columbia University in New York during the depression,
he was too poor to go to acting school.
And then he was drafted into World War Two.
And after that,
he was working hard making a living to
support his wife and two Children in Springfield,
Missouri.
He was gracious, loving, smart, completely unassuming,
funny, deeply but quietly engaged in everything
and interested
in life,
especially listening to others.
He could draw out the shy people because he listened intently,
his blue eyes focused completely on you.
The only listener I ever saw who's listening
matched his was talk show host Phil Donahue.
On whose show I was a guest from the back of a big audience.
Donahue could look at you up on stage and make you feel like no one else was in the room.
That's how my father was.
But why was I sometimes a bad listener for him
after my father died, a Vietnam veteran who had known him,
told me there was no way I would ever know what he had been through.
I'm sure he is right.
But by listening, since his death,
to many other veterans including Isaac Pope and Charles Johnson,
who served with him,
I have learned much
and they and others have generously fed my longing to
know how life has been for veterans from all ears.
I have also learned how important it is for non veterans to listen to them
funding for. Is anybody listening was made possible by Tak?
My father,
Jerome Kaplan was captain of an all black artillery battery during World War two.
They fought in the battle of the bulge at Bastone which
was a crucial battle of the war against the Nazis.
They were the first black unit allowed to go into
battle in World War Two because their performance was sterling
and they won a presidential citation for meritorious service after my father died.
I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Isaac Pope who had been
my father's first sergeant and he told me how they won the citation.
They ordered
the 969
houses to go into action.
Not, I'll
be back with the first one got into action,
got those guns into action
and wiped out them tanks.
We were headed around, you know, we cut everything off, you know,
we wiped them out.
That's, that's what caused us to get that citation from the president.
I was a non veteran growing up in the home of a veteran.
Unlike many veterans, my father spoke about his war experiences.
But for most of my life, I absorbed very little
like most veterans who speak about their experiences.
He never said he did anything important or heroic.
Instead, he told stories about how wonderful were the men with whom he served?
Some of the stories were funny. Some were interesting,
some were poignant,
but something bothered me.
And when I figured out what bothered me,
it started me on a journey of listening to veterans
and speaking to others about what I've learned
every year when I was growing up when Christmas was approaching,
which was the anniversary of the battle of the bulge.
My father would say 12 years ago tonight or 15 years
ago tonight and then describe how the weather was freezing,
snow was falling heavily.
Each year. I hung on his every word.
But each year when he began to tell the stories again,
it would strike me that if you ask me right now to tell you what those stories were.
I couldn't remember any of them.
Then when I was about 40 a friend made a videotape
of my father telling his stories and gave me a copy.
I put the tape on, sat alone in my room
and sure enough there he was telling the stories that I recognized
and all of a sudden I heard him say the words.
I was a forward observer
and I had to turn off the tape
because I broke down and wept.
I knew what a forward observer was.
That's the person who goes out ahead and is closest to the enemy.
And that's when I realized that all those years,
I couldn't bear to think of my father in such danger.
So I just blocked the stories out
all those years. My father and I were part of what Colonel David Sutherland
calls the epidemic of disconnection between veterans and non veterans.
As I see things, the relationship uh between the American people
and the military
is a disconnect
in this country of 317 million people.
Only 23 million, that's less than 7% are veterans from any era
and only 2.2 million are combat veterans
that makes those veterans who've been in combat 1% of the American population.
Some people call them the other 1%.
The experience with my father showed me how little I knew
that we live in a nation that is war, illiterate and even military illiterate.
I wanted to learn more.
And so began my years of listening to veterans.
What began with my father
has led to years of listening to veterans
and telling non veterans what I've learned from listening
things. I had not learned from my father
at the beginning of my first deployment. I was only in the fleet for maybe
no more than three months. And next thing I know. Bam, you're going to Iraq.
We got, we're going to Fallujah. We got less than, uh 30 no, less than 30 days
to get everything ready. Paperwork wills life insurance. Uh, everything.
That was my first, you know, it was like bam, bam, bam, bam,
late after flight ops at two in the morning,
you'll find yourself somewhere on the ship that's private
and quiet in one of the catwalks or at
the bow or stern of the ship
and you're looking up at the stars going,
I'm really lonely
and it's, it's an oxymoron
because you're on a small ship with 4999 other guys and girls.
And you feel alone
after the disillusionment occurred
and the realization hit that,
uh, the war was a whole different thing than they had been
told or it was indicated to them before they went to Vietnam
firefights after firefights.
Um, when the enemy was still in the area,
guys would have to go back out to the field when there was no logistical reason
that would be beneficial to do this
and was only to get, they were told to go back and get a body count
those
sacred moments from the battlefield, turning into secrets
where I can't share
or I can't talk about them
or I get asked, did you kill somebody?
I spent my entire life
learning
that
thou shalt not kill.
And then I go into a combat zone and I'm expected to perhaps kill
that moral injury
is something that I don't need to talk about.
But if I do
it'll be on my terms.
Non combat veterans have other memories to contend with.
The naval investigation Service was knocking at my door
and they wanted to know, you know, did I know of any lesbians on board my ship?
And I told them no,
I'm not ratting out anybody, you know,
and I was asked, what about you? And I said, what about me? Are you gay? I said, yes,
I'm gay. I'm thinking I have a stellar background in the military.
I had a great future,
you know,
and I was released from active service,
like two months later,
honorably discharged, but I could never reenlist again.
So,
you know,
thank you for your service
from veterans.
I learned that going from civilian life to the military is a culture shock
and so is coming home.
What happens to the body and the mind
when you're in that kind of environment
is the body and the mind protect each
individual person by shutting down the emotions.
Because when you see a guy get hit or a guy get killed or you see body parts fly off.
If your emotional self was totally intact, you'd be a basket case in six weeks.
You can't
leave an environment like that
and go back to the place you left and be the same person.
Veterans and non veterans have mistaken beliefs about each other.
A lot of veterans assume that non veterans could not possibly understand
and that they will judge them to be crazy.
And a lot of non veterans believe that all veterans
are mentally ill.
You hear about it all the time in the media
that all veterans are violent
and that they join the military because they wanted to go kill people.
Well, in more than 35 years of listening to veterans,
I have never met anyone who joined the military for that reason,
what better way to
give back to
your country and protect your family
than join the military.
Well, as far back as I can remember,
it began when I was a kid in the eighties and seeing that army commercial on TV,
with the tank coming over the hill, be all you can be.
It was so glorious.
And you know that I remember thinking that
I would love to do that
when it came to the time where I was old enough, um, that I could join.
I really wanted to go to college also
and
I didn't really have the money to go to college.
So I decided to join the National Guard. So I could do both.
At the same time, the, both the military and college.
When I went to the recruiter,
he asked me what job I wanted.
And I told him I wanted to be a tanker,
mainly based on those commercials that I saw growing up.
And then when I told him I wanted to be a tanker, he laughed at me
and he's like, well, you can't be a tanker. You're a woman.
So I asked him, I said, well, what's the next, next best thing?
And he says he shows me a picture of a bulldozer and that's how I picked the job.
And World War Two broke out
and then that changed the picture of the whole nation. Everything changed.
Uh If you were on a drive
up,
you couldn't get no job. So that was a
handicap.
So
uh
I was forced to drop out of school,
sign up for the army
rather than wait for the draft for the draft.
I
just went on volunteer.
I knew the military offered uh the G I Bill and other benefits for school and all that,
that's what I needed.
So,
so they went to the, we went to go see my friend, recruiters signed up.
And next thing I know I'm in the Marine Corps, uh
doing things I didn't plan on doing to begin with.
Non veterans have told me that all veterans
are mentally ill and only therapists can help.
So there's nothing anyone else can do.
That.
War trauma manifests itself in front of our families,
our neighbors and our communities.
And it creates a misunderstanding, a stereotype
that's driven in most cases by media
and the unwarranted hysterics
that the media creates,
expands that sense of isolation. That, that feeling of not feeling like you fit in,
you feel like you don't belong.
And so to defeat that to, to make that connection,
people have to understand compassion and outreach,
what we used to call friendship.
I had long suspected that most Americans who are not veterans just don't want to
think about veterans perhaps because they're associated with
war and who wants to think about war
in blogging for psychology.
Today,
I've sometimes written about veterans and they show you
how many people have read each of your essays.
When you look at the numbers, it turns out that with one exception,
every time I write anything about veterans,
only 30% to as few as 3% the number of people read them as read.
Anything else I ever write about
there in black and white is evidence of that divide.
We don't have to think about it. So we won't,
there are many reasons veterans often don't talk to non veterans.
I can't force them to make them understand what I'm going through. You know,
there's some veterans who are able to talk about it
and those who just tell you. No, I don't want to talk to you.
You don't understand squat, you know,
some veterans are afraid to talk to non
veterans because they are afraid of being considered crazy
or completely misunderstood.
Too many of us have been perceived as just angry or insane veterans.
But what we feel are the deeply human reactions of
being so desperately distressed by war or other devastating experiences.
Some who have not been told they are mentally ill are afraid that they really are.
They think I'm home. I'm safe. Why am I not over it by now?
I must be crazy.
But the fact of the matter is
that not a one of us comes home unscathed,
sadness is real.
Fear is real. So are loss of innocence and moral anguish.
But do we need to call everything a mental illness?
If you want to call being devastated by war or sexual assault, a mental illness,
then what would be a healthy response?
It's a helplessness that happens when you feel like you're
about to be molested, raped,
whatever the case may be and you can't do anything about it.
I was in the build of a ship where I was a storekeeper in the navy.
I was asked about a couple of parts. I went to go check it out in the store room
when I came back. I guess these, these cats thought they were gonna have a party,
you know, um
they wanted to make me straight,
you know. So, um
you know, it was a little tight in the space. I couldn't get away, you know, there was
uh ripped uniform and things of that nature and,
but it was enough,
you know, to definitely cause fear and anxiety.
Uh I don't like enclosed places like these guys are very cool.
But if you weren't in the room,
the door would not be shut and I wouldn't be in here with them.
What I was going through those things that made me survive on the battlefield.
The hyper vigilance,
paranoia, anger, sleeplessness. These are all trained
and you execute those same things for months on
the battlefield because they are what keep you alive.
And then I came home
and I didn't feel like I fit in
with my family, but I have a very strong and very patient family.
But when you don't smile for two years
and the response is, well, you have a disorder.
No, I don't.
These
trained responses in battle don't just turn off
when you come home. But I couldn't figure out what was going on.
And when I started talking
and people started not only listening
but hearing me,
I started feeling comfortable in my own skin again.
When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began,
I thought,
I'm afraid I know what's going to happen because our country is now more psychiatr.
Everything is considered a mental illness than during any other war.
And I had a mental image like those old World War two era news reels on the huge screen.
And the image was of the veterans from the new wars pouring back to this country.
Many of them devastated, tormented.
And I thought
I know what's going to happen.
Not only therapists, but the whole country will say Oh, we know what that is.
That's a mental illness, post traumatic stress disorder. So here's what you do.
You go see a therapist,
close the door behind you because we don't really
want to hear about it and take your drugs.
And what I had feared has indeed come to
pass the wholesale diagnosing of mental illness in veterans.
I want to tell you about how PTSD came to be created.
It was after the Vietnam War
and the suffering of so many veterans was being ignored.
So a group of people with wonderful intentions got together and said,
let's make a list
of the ways that we are seeing this suffering.
They put on the list,
emotional numbness, hypervigilance, startling, easily, flashbacks,
nightmares and so on.
And then they said, great idea.
Let's get this cluster of kinds of suffering in the
psychiatric diagnostic manual because they felt that would dignify it,
that would somehow make it more real.
And so they got it included.
And here's what's really interesting when it first went in there,
there was a sentence that said this was a normal reaction to an abnormal experience.
So if you were a therapist
and were going to give someone that label,
you could read that sentence aloud to them and
say you're just having a normal understandable reaction.
It was still kind of strange because if that's the case,
what is it doing in a manual of mental disorders?
But at least that sentence was a saving grace.
But then in 1994 when the next edition of the manual came out,
that sentence was removed. So PTSD is only a mental illness.
There are reasons some veterans want this label. One
is that for many of them, it's the only way anyone has ever said to them.
I believe your suffering.
How about we say instead,
I believe your suffering instead of saying you have to let me call you
mentally ill for me to believe your suffering and try to help you.
Another reason some veterans like getting the PTSD label is that it's
a way for them to obtain benefits which of course they deserve.
But as some have said,
it ought to be possible to get benefits without having to be called mentally ill.
And the label is a way for them to get services.
Now,
those services too often consist of therapy and drugs
that have not been shown to work well enough.
And in the case of drugs, they are often shown to be harmful.
When you get diagnosed with a mental illness,
you're almost certainly going to be placed on a psychiatric medication.
Veterans probably more than anyone else are likely to
be placed on not just one but on many,
I know of many cases where veterans have been prescribed 36 or 12 or even hefty bags
filled with psychiatric medications.
Too many have already died as a result of over prescription of these drugs
journalist Robert Whitaker wrote about this.
He looked at data from two very mainstream organizations,
the World Health Organization and the National Institute of Mental Health.
And here's what he found.
Every psychiatric drug does help some people sometimes at least for a while,
but far more often, every one of those drugs does more harm than good.
And the drug companies are deficient enough in
doing adequate research about one of their drugs.
Almost no research is done about how these drugs interact with each other.
So veterans, as well as many others in this country are guinea pigs.
They are being subjected to unexplored harm
back in the civil war. What did they call it when someone had been in battle
and was tormented?
They called it soldier's heart.
I think that's beautiful.
It's also very honest.
It was being a soldier that hurt your heart.
And after that, until PTSD came along,
there were other terms that also had a war word in them.
They were all telling the truth about what caused the upset
war trauma,
shell shock, combat fatigue.
But now we have post traumatic stress disorder.
If I say someone who's going to walk in and tell us they have ptsd, what do we know?
We know they've been through something terrible,
but it puts a curtain because of its vagueness between them and us.
If they say I was in Iraq,
if they say my sergeant raped me, we get it.
Those fears that veterans have, that non veterans won't understand them.
The more specific,
the more we can use the words the poets and
the novelists use and ordinary people used to use,
the more we create the possibility of connection between veterans and others.
The next word is stress. Everybody is stressed.
Your massage therapist tells you too much stress in your life
in more than a dozen years of listening to veterans. Let me tell you what I've heard.
I've heard about heartbreaking grief,
despair,
terror, guilt, shame, loss of innocence, moral anguish,
existential and spiritual crisis
to my mind
to call that stress
is hurtful.
Then the word disorder is what makes it a mental illness.
There's been a move to get rid of the D, let's not call it a disorder.
That's fine as far as it goes.
But if I say to you, somebody has post traumatic stress,
it's going to be years if not generations before you stop thinking.
D
I say PTS, you think D disorder?
So maybe we should think about going back to the
words that help us understand each other words like fear,
despair,
anguish, and grief.
During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars,
the military recruited and the va hired hoards,
more therapists and condone the prescribing of far more psychiatric drugs.
They wanted to help.
They saw that people were suffering.
They even deployed a lot of therapists and a lot
of drugs and shipped them overseas into the combat theater.
So if you were active duty military,
you had your therapist and you had your drugs right there.
But in spite of all those increases and those traditional approaches,
the rates of suffering have skyrocketed.
You may have heard that there are 22 veteran suicides a day,
but those reports stem from only 21 states
and the rates are actually much higher among older veterans from World War Two.
The Korean War and the Vietnam War.
A
big part of that reason is that they have been isolated for so much longer,
58,000 veterans are homeless
every night.
And that doesn't even include the ones who are so tormented
and isolated that they disappear into the forests and the mountains.
So
there is all that unknown, silent suffering
as for substance abuse among veterans abuse of drugs and
alcohol first doubled and then tripled over a six year period
and is continuing to rise
and drugs and alcohol are used by
about half of the veterans who commit suicide.
Even if every one of those therapists is terrific.
And even if every psychiatric pill has been helpful and not harmful,
at the very least, so much more is needed.
Doctor David Collier is a psychologist and Vietnam veteran
based on decades of experience, he has said,
if you want to help reduce veterans suffering,
it doesn't matter what kind of technique you use,
what matters is the relationship between the two people.
I said to him,
I hear from people who say they'd like to help,
but they think there's nothing they can do because they're not therapists.
And I asked him, what is it that you do
that somebody who's not a veteran and not a therapist can't do?
And he said absolutely nothing.
He told me in our training programs,
we pussy foot around and we use terms like empathy.
But it's really about love.
Colonel David Sutherland who led a brigade during the surge in Iraq.
And I wrote about the four main reasons veterans killed themselves.
You'd be amazed at how many people say they must
have been mentally ill before they joined the military.
The first main reason we wrote about is that war is vile
on the battlefield.
It is that place where you find the intersection between vileness and valor
and where they cross the valor of our service members. But the vileness of war,
it is one of the most
obscene things that you can imagine.
The second main reason we wrote about was isolation.
Jason Dominguez an Iraq war.
Vet said when he came back from Iraq,
he would look at people he'd been close to before he left
and he felt like they were in a bubble over there
and he didn't know if he would ever feel like he was back inside that bubble.
The third main reason veterans killed themselves
starts with being diagnosed as mentally ill
for veterans.
As for anyone from getting a psychiatric label, you can lose self confidence,
lose a job or custody of a child or security clearance or
the right to make decisions about your medical and legal affairs,
your human rights
and the drugs are the fourth main reason because
those drugs not only increase the rates of suicide,
but they also suppress the whole nervous system.
Many of them making it hard even to know how you feel, make you more withdrawn.
So it can be hard enough to find someone to connect with you if you're a veteran.
But if when someone is there to have a relationship with you,
you don't even know what you feel. It makes everything harder.
The seed for the welcome Johnny and Jane Home project, which is about non veterans.
Listening to veterans came from a story I heard from Michelle Dilla,
an Iraq war veteran.
When I came back from Iraq in 2006,
I came back with the expectation that I would come back home to my family,
my friends go back to college and that everything would be how it was before I left.
And when I came home, I realized that wasn't the case.
I came home with an uncomfortable feeling
that I couldn't find what I had before. I had the same family and friends
and rolled back in my college courses.
But something was lingering.
You know, I couldn't figure out why I, I couldn't sleep.
Um I was so enraged at things people would say,
um, about their opinions about the war, et cetera.
You know, and people asking me questions, like, did you kill somebody?
You know, those are,
that's not necessarily what a veteran wants to be asked when they come home from war.
And
so dealing with that and not knowing exactly how to deal with it.
Um,
I had a professor asked me to speak in
a college course that was about military history.
I began a personal dialogue about
my own feelings about it and telling the, the class members,
even though none of them were veterans,
but they just, they were there to listen.
So I began telling them my rage, you know, the fact that I can't sleep, my anxiety
um
and really bringing all of it on to myself,
what is wrong with me that I can't feel like a normal
person and one student raised her hand and she said to me,
don't you think you're being too hard on yourself?
And for me, that was such a pivotal moment because
that's the first time that someone had said something like that to me.
And I felt like,
yeah, maybe I am being too hard on myself.
And at that point, I began to realize a factor of, you know, well,
maybe this is my new normal, you know,
I don't necessarily have to go back to the same
life I had before because war has changed me.
So I need to accept my new normal.
And as soon as I began to accept that I began to sleep better,
um The rage started to go away, the anxiety slowly started to drift away. And
just that group of students listening to me talk
really helped my progression back into civilian life.
People often ask me, how much training do I need to listen to a veteran?
And I say about 37 seconds,
there are two sentences you will speak. And as for the rest, you just listen.
The first sentence is the one you use to begin the session.
You say
as a citizen of this country,
I feel a certain sense of responsibility for the time
that you spent in the military and coming home.
So if you'd like to talk, I'm here to listen for as long as you want to talk
and I promise not to judge
and then you just wait,
we even take care not to say, tell your story because if you've been traumatized,
that's fragmenting.
So it's fine. If the veteran describes a smell, they remember an image, an incident,
a buddy that they've lost
and there will be silences.
The crucial part is to listen with 100% of your attention
and your whole heart.
You don't ask questions. It's not an interview and it's certainly not therapy.
You don't ask them to define military terms because what matters is not your
understanding every single detail but that you're giving them a chance to speak.
And the point isn't about what you think.
The point is what they want to say.
Your silence clears the path for them to come forward.
The second sentence comes well into the session and you say it,
if the veteran describes some terrible experience
and says how it affects them. Now,
if I had experienced what you had
what you did
and I'm sure I'd be going through the same thing. I would have nightmares,
flashbacks and, and even insomnia. But that's a deeply human reaction.
You there's no mental illness. You are not crazy.
Spiritual advisor Henry Nowen
said this about listening.
Listening is much more than allowing another to
talk while waiting for a chance to respond.
Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them
into our very beings.
The beauty of listening is that those who are listened to
start to feel accepted,
they start taking their own words more
seriously and discovering their true selves.
We have forgotten as a culture about the astonishing power of listening at
Harvard Kennedy school.
We had listening sessions for veterans from World War Two to the present.
And then we asked them,
what if anything was good about this and what if anything was bad?
The answers were only positive.
Many said it was the only time they'd
ever been given a chance to speak without interruption
without judgment.
They were grateful that the person listening wasn't planning to diagnose them
just bearing witness.
One thing I have realized it was easier to talk to a non
veteran that wasn't necessarily a member of my family or even somebody I knew
because with, with a stranger it's,
it's more like you have an open forum,
there's no barriers of feeling like you have to protect someone.
It's like a,
a burden gets lifted off of your shoulders because you can finally say those
things that you're afraid to say to the people that you really care about.
I feel that having a listening session with, you know, just a non veteran,
a regular person on the other side of town or your community
would be more fortunate than talking to a therapist.
And, and the, and the reason of the fact that
when, when you're talking to a therapist, you, you feel like you're being diagnosed
and that's one thing that,
you know, would kind of be a barrier or a judgment
of very, if,
if I say this certain thing is this person going to say that I'm mentally ill,
are they going to say that I have a disorder?
Are they going to call me crazy?
And
when you do speak to someone,
you want to be able to have that open forum
that you feel like you can say whatever you want.
And that person is not going to judge you for it.
If I'm talking to a civilian,
I think I'm less likely to be concerned about being judged,
not manly as a military guy or be worried that someone's gonna
tell my CEO and it's gonna affect my promotion or whatever.
And so if the, if, if there was, if is, if everything I say there's one takeaway,
I would just say to civilians,
you know, you don't necessarily need to be able to understand
what he feels. You don't need to have gone through what he feels.
You don't need to have had a similar loss in your own family.
Sometimes it's just having an ear.
Some of us experience mili military sexual trauma,
you know, in the war, some of us did not do it in the war, you know,
but it happens and it's real and people are suffering from it,
you know, and I mean, it gets to such degree sometimes that even on the highway,
you know, something can trigger and I'll just kind of lose it
and we don't always lose limbs.
You know, it's not always physical, you know, it's emotional as well.
I love this country, but this country needs to learn how to love me.
Black gay and female. Just love me.
A man who had served four years in Laos,
Vietnam and Cambodia had attended groups at the
vet center for years and found them helpful.
He was listened to by my mother who was 88 at the time
and said afterward, he told her things,
he had never told anyone and he was able to make
connections between thoughts and feelings that he'd never understood before.
Another veteran said her listening session inspired her
to write a novel and a screenplay.
And she was accepted into a prestigious writing program.
Still another veteran had been seriously suicidal
for decades after coming back from war,
he had one listening session with a member of his community.
And when I ran into him, eight months later, he told me that since that session,
he
had stopped thinking of killing himself.
It's different when it's someone who hasn't served saying, hey, I wanna help you.
You know, I'm a vet, I say I wanna help you like, oh, it's because we feel this bond.
But when someone who's never served is like, I wanna help you.
Like, that's kind of a tearing event. You know, you're like, wow, like, wow, that
you feel that
listeners describe positive transformations in themselves.
They say that hearing the veterans speak about their
life and death experiences or their moral anguish,
made them aware of the veterans, humanity
and therefore of their own
veterans are the forward observers to life and death. For the rest of us.
I came into the Ready room. Fat, dumb and happy young lieutenant
and I walk in and see the XO and the co in tears.
It's not something I'd ever seen since
and I've never seen before
and it's,
you immediately process something's bad and it's really bad,
but you have no idea what it is.
And then someone says, oh yeah, Matt and, and Hawkeye are dead.
It's your silence. Like,
and
you have to process that
however you process grief
and then open the drawer and put it in. You go on the next flight.
I would look for one of my men.
I saw a place in some bushes like pile up
and I
went to the edge of those bushes
and a guy was down there in a hole
with a machine gun
right up in my face.
You know, uh
you know,
there it was
and when I found out one of one of
the 104 airborne troops had been dropped by parachute
and he was standing right there that going
with the machine going point right at me. You know,
I don't know why he didn't shoot.
I really know.
I right
there. I don't know why he didn't kill me.
I would see bodies
uh that were,
uh stood up on stakes, uh pick off fences and see the bodies just, you know,
in position.
Uh
that's frozen.
But the saddest thing is to see a G I like and,
and, and the picture always will remain with me one G I lying in the snow
with this whole back
just exploded out.
And that's one of the most movie things that you,
it stays with you
for the,
for individual things like that, not the overall picture
but or the smell of burning flesh. Close to a tank,
uh, where it's a G I Tank and you know it.
All
right.
That's exactly
to be sure veterans have had experiences that we have not had.
But as Gloria Steinem has said people
with different histories can trade abilities.
So our differences become sources of learning from each other.
Some veterans will say listening session. I don't need it.
If you're in the military, you're not supposed to need anything.
You're supposed to take care of everybody else.
We remind them, this is not therapy.
It's about connecting you with someone in
your community who's not there to diagnose you
just to listen.
Some veterans consider doing a listening session a
way to continue to serve because they know in
a visceral way that the rest of us
don't know how war illiterate and military illiterate.
The rest of us are by speaking to a listener. They help educate the populace.
Sometimes a veteran is hesitant to do a listening
session because they're afraid of what might come out
that they might end up more upset than before.
We point out it's completely up to them to choose what to say.
And we ask them not only right after the session
but also a month later how it was for them,
the fears that they had had ahead of time,
including about how the listener would react turned out to be unfounded.
First of all, guys, mostly don't talk about combat.
You come back home
And uh from, you know,
from Christ was a corporal back to the first battles of Jericho.
Guys didn't talk about battle about combat to people who were not there.
And the same thing it pertains today
because you don't understand.
It's, it's, if you ever began to talk about it, you may not stop
and the people who would be listening would be shocked to death.
So you just kind of
let it go and you don't talk about it.
And once I started talking about it, once I started sharing,
and once people started listening,
I became much more comfortable.
I got to
share on my terms,
not someone else's agenda.
And when you do that,
that's pretty powerful.
People have asked me what if the veterans
politics are different from the listener's politics?
It turns out not to matter because this is about human connection
to illustrate that. Let me tell you a story. I heard from one Iraq war veteran.
A man told me that he had enlisted because he wanted to help liberate Iraq
and help protect this country. He
had gone to Iraq been injured in every organ of his body and sent home.
He said to me,
I did help liberate Iraq and I did help protect this country.
And I'd go back again in a minute,
but the army won't let me because I'm too injured.
And then because I just listened,
here's what he said with long silences after each sentence.
But every night when I'm trying to go to sleep, I hear a woman scream.
You see,
there was a woman across from us and we thought
she had dynamite and was going to kill us.
And I killed her
and we found out she did have dynamite and she would have killed us.
But every night when I'm trying to go to sleep, it's her scream I hear
because I wasn't raised to kill
people across the country, whether they support or oppose a war or war in general.
Here is someone who thought his war was right.
He was proud of what he had done and would go back in a moment.
But he's tormented.
And if that torment is experienced in isolation,
people are going to blow up,
the suffering is transforming this country
in ways that we cannot even conceive of
what, what's, what's out there for me that I want that everybody, you know, saying
life is so much better but
what's out there for me? What am I gonna do? How am I, you know, continue my income?
You know how I get medical, you know,
do I know what happened
to the guys that, you know, tried to have their way with me? I don't,
you know,
you know, but I live with it. I remember it,
you know,
I take medication so I can sleep at night because of it.
I still believe in the camaraderie of the military.
I really do.
And I'll always believe in it no matter what.
So,
you know,
I'm a sailor. That's what I am.
I uh I just was not comfortable and I stayed in the house
for about literally close to about 30 days.
I went out minimally a few hours, maybe an hour a day.
A lot of times I never even went outside.
I just was not comfortable
and I drank a lot and um
spent about 100 bucks a day for
30 days.
Everything was, everything was different and fine and
not, uh not like I left it
now when you're back from a mission and you're, and you're on stand down or whatever,
that's when you, everything kind of starts flooding in and yeah,
you have friends there and that's, and that's great.
John. Bill Mary and Ted are my best friends right now.
But I, but I don't mean for this to sound more warmer that will come out.
But, but two things, one,
there's gonna be a point where they rotate out
and new people rotate in that part of the business
and two in our business like tomorrow,
Bill Ted John or Mary might not come back. They could be dead.
And I think I had 19
aviator friends who
uh it sounds really bad, but we would just say they m they, they were morts,
you know, pe people who died while I served
and I still have nightmares about air.
Airplane crashes is 98 99% aircraft crash dreams
was tested a lot,
mentally and physically.
And
there was a lot of times where I thought I had hit my breaking point
and I thought I was gonna give up
and
I was having this inner battle in my head of give up. No, don't give up. And
you're weak and you can't do this and know you're strong and, and keep going,
keep fighting.
Takes a little getting used to,
to get back
and be normal.
That's why I wear this earring.
My last bastion
of resistance
to becoming a part of this society.
That's the reason I wear it.
The welcome, Johnny and Jane Home project happens in various ways.
Sometimes just one listener goes to a veteran's home or a
veterans organization post or a library and just sits and listens
in Mansfield Ohio.
Community organizer, Steve Stone created a consortium of three campuses,
the airbase and veterans and community representatives to do listening sessions
in 2011.
Vietnam veteran,
Ted Engelman heard about the welcome Johnny and Jane Home
project and suggested there be national days of listening to veterans
when he was Rhode Island.
Governor Lincoln Chafee issued a proclamation for listening to Veterans Day.
Any city or state or the US Congress could do the very same
to convey the idea
that you can go beyond thanking a veteran for their service.
You can actually listen to them.
David E Jones, a Vietnam veteran wrote poetry to deal with his war trauma.
His book, a soldier's story,
the power of words includes these lines from a poem about how it feels.
If you're a veteran and a non veteran, just listens to you
directions. I do not provide with this, you only need a heart.
And if you understand a vet,
you've made a small, small start
now that I have listened to many veterans,
I've gone back and watched my father's video again
this time absorbing every word, every image, every detail,
listening to veterans and also to non veterans who've been their
listeners has immersed me in matters of life and death,
of love and joy,
of fear and moral anguish,
more of the richness of humanity than anything I have ever done.
And my journey has taken me from listening to my dear father but not hearing him
to listening to other veterans
and hearing my father in them
gonna be
Yeah,
hear me. If I speak
when you leave,
will you get me,
please? My dear friends,
my dear friends, Americans all over America.
Listen to a veteran,
please
ins
you
in your
will. I heard you make you hate me.
You think
I'm insane.
Other
I was just thinking,
I'm straight.
You would see
low iss
you would see word out
in
but you would see the
diy
then
nice
crazy. Not to be
crazy enough,
crazy, not to be
crazy, not to
do
praise,
not
crazy enough
to
do
for months we breathed together.
Why did my father get his birth?
The gold, it
bey,
the, the,
the, the
traffic
kiss us
in desert Storm
Koo.
Then
now I have a lone
unit scout
and I can,
it's on the desert sand and
nachos.
This is
against
anybody.