The troops are coming home.
I am having some interesting conversations these days as I explore the shift to being postwar with people in my world. (This is a reference to Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness: What it Means to be Black Now by Toure.) Through my talks,I am trying to get a sense of how the people in our nation feel about our current wars in Iraq and Afganistan. I am interested in the thoughts about their startings and apparent finishings, the causes of them, the challenge of deployments, the returns home, the consequences on multiple levels that we are/will be facing and the welfare of the troops who fought. The troops are my primary interest. I am concerned that we may not respond well to these soldiers and thus help them re-integrate into peacetime after horrors of war. Wars they fought for us.
As I begin to collect these conversations and reflect on them in this blog I am trying to make sense of what I am hearing. I am initially stunned to realize that a national conversation on this subject is not happening on any level. We are currntly winding down from two major wars and we're not talking about it. So when I have started many of these conversations, people seem intensely uncomfortable with the subject. So after asking a number of people now my questions, I have come to believe that I may be the first person to even raise the subject with them and they haven't had a change to talk about it. Therefore they are caught off guard, don't have much of an answer and seem unccomfortable maybe by that fact alone.
My questions generally take the form of:
"Well, the President has told us he is bringing the troops home by Christmas? What do youi think?"
"Do you have any family members, friends or neighbors serving in the wars?"
"Are you planning on helping the troops get reintegrated when they come back?"
"Would you like to help in some way?"
In one group and the first time I actually began asking, this one being at my church, there was a deafening silence and blank stares coming back instead of answers. Now I know these people well and they are to a person, some of the kindess, most loving, thoughtful people I know. Dead silence.
And when they began to talk, the answers were reflected ideas on many of the topics that have been debated and dogged us all since the first invasion occurred. There was disbelieve the war(s) were really ending, anger about the expense and cost of the wars to our country, concern about what we were leaving behind and fear that any help would be enough for the returning troops. But most of all, there was skepticism and distrust about it all. There was an almost palpable emotional distance from it all, even the last chapter of it.
And so as I think about how I can be most helpful to the returning troops I will soon see, I became even more concerned and worried about the help our nation needs. We have asked so many unanswered questions, felt so much betrayal and become so hopeless for any good outcome that our availability to help others may be limited. Alienation would be a word best used here. These soldiers will need, in many cases, specialized help to begin the recovery from the traumas of the wars. But so will our nation, I am afraid. And when will our leaders begin to talk to us about it?
Ask yourself these questions. And if you think of any more that need to be asked of you, send them on to me and I'll post them.
