Page 257 - Total War on PTSD

these feelings inside and withdraw into them unless distracted by work or some crisis or some event powerful enough to draw your mind away from simply feeling like you no longer belong, anywhere really.
In what follows, I will do my best to unpack this description, so as to make the experience and its unfolding as explicit as I can manage for the sake of Veterans and their support-networks.
A soldier becomes a Veteran the moment he or she sets foot off the battlefield and departs for the journey home. Though for many this journey is full of excitement and anticipation towards reuniting with family and friends, often these may be overshadowed with a sense of loneliness. This loneliness may engulf the Veteran almost instantaneously upon departure, or it may gradually settle in. Recall that loneliness invariably entails a cognitive discrepancy wherein one evaluates his or her existing social connections against the backdrop of prior or imagined social relations that are more favorably desired. Thus, to understand and appreciate the Veterans’ loneliness, it is crucial that one gain an understanding of the military culture and the kind of bond that soldiers have. Because from the initiation of this bond, it will frame any social experience thereafter.
Researchers, much to their surprise, have found that the loneliness experienced by active duty military personnel is different from that which is experienced by civilians. Specifically, they found that it does not seem to be influenced by familial bonds and socioeconomic backgrounds, as it typically does among civilians, but rather it reacts to fluctuations in social connection within the military unit (J. T. Cacioppo et al., 2016). What these researchers failed to realize, is that for those who served, the military unit is the “family.” It cannot be overstressed that the bond formed between combat soldiers runs deeper than blood and ultimately renders them “brothers-in-arms.” It is a kind of bond that can rarely, if ever, be emulated in any other context. The consolidation of this bond begins early on in the enlistee’s military experience.
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