Double-Edged Sword

As you may know, I write an article every Monday for our local newspaper, the Mansfield News Journal, profiling our area military veterans. It is an honor and privilege to sit down with one of our veterans for a couple of hours each week and listen to their stories, which I in turn recount in print. It is an effort I thoroughly enjoy and, based on feedback via emails and text messages, readers enjoy also.

It is, however, a double-edged sword.

I've read volumes and volumes of history books, from America's Civil War on through present day Afghanistan and the War on Terror; watched hundreds of hours' worth of documentaries concerning this country's armed conflicts. Though I didn't serve in the military, something I've come to regret over the last two decades, I feel a very strong sense of pride for this nation's military and its veterans. Books and films cannot adequately describe the horrors of war, the death and destruction that comes with it...nor the psychological and emotional trauma inflicted upon those who have seen combat and survived.

On more than one occasion, while interviewing a patriot-hero, they've had to pause, collect themselves after emotions momentarily got the best of them. The act of telling their story dredges up bad memories, ones that some have taken decades to bury, reliving in the mind once again terrible, tragic events that have scarred them, wounded the psyche. Wounds that will never heal.

When they hurt, suffer the angst that sometimes comes with reliving combat, it has an effect on me:

Guilt.

In that moment, when chests get tight and voices choke, I feel responsible. Responsible for unearthing the terror of combat, for their reliving of the moment when a buddy or close friend died in battle or they themselves suffered grievous wounds.

It's my fault.

And sometimes, when I'm writing their stories in the solitude of my home, those moments come to me and I see again their eyes welling with tears, hear them apologizing to me for the emotions they feel; me, a civilian who never served a day in the armed forces.

And I weep for them.

God bless all our veterans, especially those who have seen combat and have borne witness to man's brutality to man, for without them we wouldn't be the United States of America.