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It Hurts To See Young People Hurting
by James Glaser November 1, 2012 
Because of our constant state of war for the last decade plus, more and more young veterans are seeking treatment at our Veterans Administration's hospitals and clinics. I remember when I returned from Vietnam how the World War II and Korean vets were not very sociable. They didn't talk to you and were not a very smiley bunch. I always thought it was that the young vets were making the place more crowded and because of the larger vet population, appointments were harder to get, and that made us competition for services for these older veterans. Now WWII and Korean veterans are not all that common at the VA today as their age group is dying out, and as hard as it is to say, I have become one of the older guys, and I can't help but think that the new Iraqi and Afghan vets are looking at my age group like I looked at those veterans from wars before mine. I have realized though that those older vets of my youth were not looking at me with distain or as an impediment to their timely care, but rather they were looking at me and my age group with sorrow and pity, because they knew that what I had gone through was the same life-altering thing they had experienced. Veterans know that it makes no difference if you fought on some hot muggy Pacific island or the cold European forests in the Battle of the Bulge, you froze your toes off at the Chosen Reservoir, toiled your way up the slope of Hamburger Hill, sweated your way across the sands to Baghdad, or were blown from your Humvee in the mountains of Afghanistan. They know it doesn't matter how you earned your place in line at the VA, because the horror of war is sitting right there in the minds of every man and now woman in that waiting room taking up way too much room like an uninvited relative. Those older vets just might not seem so sociable because they know that if they start talking to you about how you got there, all the memories they have been fighting a life-time to suppress will come flooding back like it was yesterday. Many older vets don't want to talk to younger vets because those younger vets remind them of those comrades they lost, who never got the chance to grow old. So in their mind those who they left on the battlefield are still young—just like the ones sitting beside them in the clinic. Now when I go to the VA and happen to sit by some young vet whose memories of war are fresh and maybe not as easy to keep at bay, I make an effort to make small talk about life here and now. Maybe I can get them to talk about what they are doing for school or work, and I talk about my woodworking. It seems that talking about my tree-house building piques their interest. Because their war is such a raw nerve sparking in their minds, many have to gravitate to their story and their losses, and I try and give them an ear, knowing their words will open old wounds in my mind, but I that is the price we continue to pay for our time of war. I guess it was just a dream, but I have had this hope that this new group of veterans will grow old and not have young war vets sitting in their waiting room. Then I realize that is really a false hope, because those who start wars and send young men and women off to fight them never had to sit in the VA waiting room and see the overlapping generations of Americans whose lives and bodies have been damaged and wasted. |
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