Home from the War

Much effort is being made to give the veterans of military service in Iraq and Afghanistan a warmer welcome home than what the Vietnam Vets experienced. In many places the church is stepping up to its responsibility to provide care of the souls shattered by that service, and bodies too. PTSD, traumatic brain injury, uncontrollable rages, inability to re-adapt to civilian life, frustration with the VA, marriages which cannot take the stress -- all these now become components of pastoral care as well as medical care.

Still most of the attention is going to the men: men who no longer wear the pants in the family, men who are violent with their wives, men who turn to drink and drugs to self-medicate. Military women don't get so much ink. Army, Navy, Coasties, Airmen and Marines with time in Iraq are male and female now, with women carrying heavy weapons and operating heavy equipment and bringing home emotional loads just as heavy as those of their battle brothers. Journalist Kirsten Holmstedt has made it her mission to lift up the cause and the need of our sisters at arms, whom she follows during their service in theater in Band of Sisters and after their return stateside in The Girls Come Marching Home.

We who are civilians ministering to parishioners returned from deployment need to read these accounts in reverse order, taking up The Girls Come Marching Home first to get an idea of what is going on with those who sit in our pews or who may perhaps make it as far as our counseling spaces. We'll all be involved in this ministry in one way or another as we prepare for yet another surge of troops, yet another round of family separations. As the former mayor of New York said when he looked over the World Trade Center ruins, "this will be a burden that none of us can bear."