My Wounded Heart, My Catharsis- Part 1

What follows and what is to come is the most personal I have ever gotten in a public setting. My prayer is that this will help people. Help people understand what we go through. Help people who are going through it. Help people that love people going through it.

My pain is heavy. It pulls down on my soul like a stone in still waters. A song, a certain angle of a bend in the road, the snap of a flag in the wind, seeing a uniform and/or nothing can bring it on. I have cried in the shower, in the van, holding my children, walking down the street, in church and huddled in a ball on the couch in my office. I have snapped for very little reason. I have wished I was dead.

I feel like I need to hurt. Like if I no longer hurt, I will forget. It is not only for those fallen paratroopers that I cry. I cry for myself. I cry for my comrades that survived but still live with the war in their hearts and minds everyday.

Please forgive a veteran who needs to sit in the corner of a room so that no one can come up behind him. Please forgive a veteran who dodges trash in the road. Please forgive a veteran who stares at nothing. Please forgive a veteran who cries for his fallen brothers. Please forgive a veteran.

You may have seen the emails going around about a cold shower, a cold meal, a stone pillow, a hostile look, a long mission, a missed birth, a lukewarm homecoming. But it is so often true that it seers my heart to behold it and inflames my sense of right when beheld in the first person.

It has been said a million times. You cannot know what we go through unless you have been through it. Empathy does not require prior knowledge of the situation. That is all we want.

Empathy for what we have been through. Forgiveness for the horrors we carry with us.