Page 259 - Total War on PTSD

defining features of the Vet’s world. Nevertheless, this discursive practice also contributes to the Veteran’s isolation upon departure from that world. As former U.S Army Intelligence officer and Veteran of the Gulf War, Ray Starmann notes,
How do you talk to civilians about “fire for effect” or “grid 7310” or “shake and bake” or “frag orders” or “10 days and a wake up” or a thousand and one other terms that are mystifying to the real world? You can't. (Starmann, 2015).
Conversely, Benedict (2009) notes that the military language, almost as an undeclared purpose, strives “to maintain a secretive culture that shuts out civilians” (p. 8). And so it does.
Indeed, and unfortunately, all of the aforementioned factors that serve to bind soldiers to one another, also work to sever the repatriated Veteran from the civilian world, particularly from family and non-military friends. The all-encompassing Army life that soldiers grow so accustomed to is a paradoxical one. While deployed, one may become homesick, longing to reunite with the family left back at home; and yet, when back at home, one can often think and speak of nothing but the military. An important aspect of the soldier's isolation is, therefore, their severance from family life. American sociologist of the military and World War I Veteran, Willard Waller, notes that “Sometimes even the most sophisticated soldier is shocked when he suddenly recognizes the gulf that has arisen between himself and his loved ones” (Waller, 1944, p. 30). As one World War I soldier wrote in a letter to his young wife:
“All the time I was with you, I had the most curious feeling that I was waiting to go back to go "home" to Camp X. Now I realize why. I'm really home now, hard as it is to say this. But that's what happens, it seems, when you join the Army. You don't feel that you belong anywhere else you can't, when you're in a uniform. The Army seemed strange when I first got into it, but now everything else but the army seems strange." (p. 31)
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Being a warrior is an identity that one can hardly shake off (Hoge, 2010; R. T. Smith & True, 2014), and rarely wishes to do so (see footnote 1 below). However, it becomes