The weeks news. I am taking some time away.

 

It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.

I am early this week, and will most likely be taking some time off from posting for a while, so I thought I would talk about something that has been near and dear to my heart since my return from the war back in 2005. Something that has hit home with me just this past Monday when I went to see my primary doctor at the VA for the first time. Something I have been living with these past 14 years and needs to be addressed.

We teach our young boys to “man up”, “boys don’t cry”, etc., etc. Then, when they are old enough, we send them off to fight our country’s battles, and wonder why they are committing suicide at the rate of 22 a day when they come home again.

Though I never served in a combat area, we were in the war zone, and when I was medically evacuated out on Christmas day in ’05, I saw a few things on the plane, and later at the hospital in Germany, that had a profound effect on me, and with which I have been dealing silently all these years. Monday, when my doctor asked specific questions, ones he is trained to ask, I completely broke down into a mass of sobbing tears. I now know that I have been suffering from PTSD, something I didn’t believe I had, since I had not seen combat. I thought that term was reserved for those poor souls.

Isn’t it time we stopped telling our young boys and men that they cannot have emotions?

We men have been holding emotions in all our lives, and now, veterans are having issues that they can’t control, leading 22 a day to end their lives because they think it’s unmanly to seek help. I find this unacceptable. I myself am now 58, and finally coming to grips with this.

I will be taking counseling, getting through these memories, and working to move beyond them, and I will be encouraging others to do the same.

As always, the lovely wife is beside me through this and is my rock.

Well, that’s all the news for now. Bye until later.