Memorial Day is a somber day set aside to remember those who died in service of their country, but we cannot forget the veterans who live with the ghosts of past wars forever haunted by their experiences, the deaths they witnessed, and the many unanswerable questions that bounce around in their head decades later. Like the WWII Navy veteran blown from a ship with others that wound up clinging to a shallow water buoy watching the bodies of his fellow shipmates float by until he was pulled from it and taken to a survivor ship where the horror of seeing bodies stacked up like cord wood never left him along with the stench of death from that ship that stayed in his nose forty years after the war. We cannot forget the Marine that came home missing limbs from an IED explosion that took the lives of every member of his or her unit that finds it easier to live with the missing limbs than the unrelenting torment of the “why’s” associated with feelings of guilt for being the only one that survived the explosion. Wondering for decades after the war why God thought he was more worthy of saving than anyone else in his unit and is hurt or angry that he or she did not die with them because the pain in his or her head is far greater than having missing limbs or the phantom pain from
missing limbs. Let us not forget the veteran that would wake up in the middle of the night at home in a sweat holding a rifle searching for enemy combatants and thinking he or she is still in a jungle or desert fighting a war that has been over for decades or the sixty year old veteran that falls to the ground and covers his head when certain aircraft fly to low in fear of an enemy attack from above even though he has been back in the small town he grew up in an the war he was in has long been over. We cannot leave out those veterans who were trained to do a very specific job, like the sniper that wakes up at night years later because his own moral compass cannot get the targets out of his head that he was told to kill despite the fact that he had come to know them and fed them. Haunted by what he was ordered to do and the ghosts of the lives he took. A moral nexus that his mind could not rectify that kept him awake until he passed years after his time in the service.
As we bow our heads in remembrance of the fallen men and women of the armed forces this Memorial Day, let us not forget those tormented from within by the ghosts of wars past. A psychological war that rages on decades after the physical wounds of war heal. A war that only those nearest to these veterans may see a small sampling of if they are allowed to. A war that only blurs slightly as time passes. A war that never finally ends for these veterans until a flag is draped over their box.
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