veterans-in their words
“A moving target is harder to kill, and I didn’t stop running, maneuvering, until I reached home base, where I could breathe between death-defying sprints. I just need to make it home alive, and this will all be over, I told myself. Home.”
M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
"The Marine Corps forced me to come home from Afghanistan. It’s up to me to allow myself to come home.”
Thomas J. Brennan, Shooting Ghosts: A U.S. Marine, a Combat
Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War
“Post-Traumatic Stress Injury isn’t a disease. It’s a wound to the soul that never heals.”
Tom Glenn, Vietnam Veteran
“You don’t get a purple heart for being mentally shot.”
M. Gillespie, Iraq and Back: A Journey with Depression
“Veterans being sent into unjust wars for corporate profit is a perversion of trust, at best. I found the emotional manipulation of both sides, the propaganda at play so incredibly revolting that I couldn’t stand to idly wave a flag or flaunt yellow ribbons without asking serious questions regarding motive.”
M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
“Today, a soldier can go out on patrol and kill someone or have one of his friends killed and call his girlfriend on his cell phone that night and talk about everything except what just happened...And if society itself tries to blur it as much as possible, by conscious wellintended efforts to provide all the ‘comforts of home’ and modern transportation and communication, what chance does your average eighteen-year-old have of not being confused? “
Karl Marlantes, Vietnam Veteran, What It’s Like to Go to War
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“I was immobilized...It’s like being frozen, just watching time pass. It’s crazy.”
Army veteran, Frank Lesnefsky, Interview, CBS Evening News, 9/7/2016
“I get extremely nervous in crowded situations and become hypersensitive to my surroundings. Before entering any building, I make a quick survey of all people around me and seek out any and all exits. I sit with my back to a wall so I have a good view of people approaching me. I get startled and anxious at unexpected and loud noises. What I don’t get is violent. What I don’t do is threaten people.”
Veteran Interview, The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association (APHA), April 2012
“For a long time I didn’t think I was bad enough to need treatment...I didn’t want to take an appointment from somebody who needed it more than I did. You could call it age, or maturity, but I was suffering with it for so long that it was finally time to fix me.”
Veteran Interview, The Nation’s Health, April 2012
“You were strong enough to make it this far,” a Veteran wrote in one blog entry. “Don’t give up. Dig a little deeper and make that final push.”
Veteran Interview, The Nation’s Health, April 2012