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15 November 2023

Can a Soldier Ever Go Home From War?

John Waters

Home: What does it mean? Homecoming football games, going home for the holidays?

For most of us, home is a refuge, a sanctuary, an escape from the world. Home is a fortress worth protecting from intruders and trespassers, an ideal dating at least to the Renaissance, if not even earlier.

More than a house, home is the place of our youth. The word conjures the memory of moments, hurts, friendships, struggles and triumphs. Home is a feeling, a time in our lives. We can move far away, start a new life, fill it with new places and new friends, with different struggles and accomplishments — but we can’t change the past or truly leave it behind. We never recover from childhood.

Some of us came of age during the era of the War on Terror, the post-9/11 generation, watching on television as planes crashed into skyscrapers and, later, as American rockets exploded like fireworks over a darkened city. Some of us wanted our share of that exceptional experience, perhaps without realizing then just how Hollywood and even history often idealize war.

War is real blood, real bones. Death and judgment are always around the corner. There’s no avoiding what war has to teach you. You confront what’s in front of you and make the best of the situation. You adapt continuously, over and over again, changing every day. Until one day — if you’re lucky — you go home to find that your life conventions are no longer the social conventions of the place you once called home. You begin to wonder: Does a soldier ever come home from war?

This is not an inconsequential question for the estimated 3.7 million veterans who served in combat or in support roles, many of them in repeated tours of duty, during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor is it so for their families or even for the nation at large, which is expected to spend $2.5 trillion or more on service-related health care over the next quarter-century.

For many of these veterans — like many of those from past wars — “coming home” is not an easy journey. A 2021 survey found that as many as three-quarters of the Afghanistan war’s more than 800,000 veterans felt angry, betrayed or humiliated by our withdrawal, and 76% of respondents said they felt “like a stranger in my own country” at times. Some 70% of the war’s veterans (and two-thirds of Americans at large) said they believed that veterans would “have a hard time processing the end of the war.”

This is not just a modern or a uniquely American phenomenon.

In Homer’s epic poem, it took 10 years for Odysseus to arrive home from the Trojan War. Ten years, and the death of every comrade and shipmate accompanying him on the arduous journey home to Ithaca. He reunites with his son, and together they deal with the suitors and traitors who stole from his household and harassed his wife, Penelope. But The Odyssey doesn’t end there: Odysseus persists in his warlike ways, until the goddess Athena stops the resulting slaughter.

In modern-day, Odysseus would have been diagnosed with shell shock, battle fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), adjustment disorder or any one of many abstract labels and diagnoses invented to describe warriors who can’t transition from war.

Once again, this is not simply an academic question or curiosity for today’s veterans, their families and communities. One Department of Veterans Affairs study concluded that 15.7% of those who deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq “screened positive for PTSD, compared to 10.9% of non-deployed Veterans.”

Adjustment disorder is of particular interest because of how this diagnosis “others” the person. Adjustment is what veterans must do because the world doesn’t adjust to them: Society is fixed, rigid and unforgiving. Either adjust, or you’ll find yourself alone and left behind.

But the poets see life differently. To many of them, the warring spirit dims but never dies.

Writing 150 years ago, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, locates Odysseus as an old man in his epic poem, Ulysses. An old man, “always roaming with a hungry heart” — a line, incidentally, adapted by Bruce Springsteen in his 1980 ballad, Hungry Heart.

Years after his return, Odysseus, now an old man, has not settled into the routine of life at home. He gives his crown and title to his son, Telemachus, and leaves his home and wife. Again, he turns to the sea, eyes tracking a ship leaving the harbor, and says: “that which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”

John Waters is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, a Marine Corps veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, and a former deputy assistant secretary of Homeland Security. He is the author of the newly published postwar novel, "River City One" (Simon & Schuster).

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