Ex-Military - Please Help.

My mind has gone off on its own again. It tends to do this from time to time.

It moves around in eccentric circles leaving the body to do its own, military trained, habit of conforming to straight lines.

One or two people ask me why I still think about military life.

Because it is difficult to erase twenty-seven years. It’s not just the training but also the habits that are picked up during that time.

The traits that military people have are subtly different to those exhibited by civilians. Humour, for example, is different. Service, and ex-service, people tend to have a dark and grotesque humour that civilians do not understand.

Once, when at the scene of a crash site, where a transport aircraft had come down, we were in an extended line searching amongst short, but thick, growth for body parts that we should then put in large plastic bags issued to us for that purpose.

At some point someone called out, “I have four fingers—anyone got a thumb to make up a set?”

We laughed but when I recalled the incident to a civilian friend they recoiled in horror. They said it was disrespectful and morbid.

How else do you relieve the horror of being in that situation?

How do you overcome the revulsion that wells up in your throat when you hear a soft, wet ‘smack’ and the person next to you grabs their throat to try and stop the blood pouring out; to try and get some air into their lungs. The horror and panic in their eyes is not something you forget over a beer or two in the pub that night.

They were eighteen years old and destined to never become nineteen.

All over the World, in nearly every nation on Earth, there are discarded servicemen and women wandering the streets trying, often, to just survive.

They were good enough to put their lives on the line in defence of the civilian population but they are not good enough to warrant care now that they are ‘relieved of duty’.

We have heard all about this PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) but, to most people, it is just an abbreviation, a group of words that means very little.

Raped women and people who have been viciously mugged will understand but most do not.

When it comes to ex-military personnel we are talking about people who have risked their future in a bid to keep civilians safe.

Civilians have the right to express their views freely, the media has a right to denigrate whomsoever they wish, politicians have the right to practice whatever financial barbarity they choose because the military has put a ring of steel around them to permit that freedom.

PTSD is a reality. It is not something that is made up by doctors and psychiatrists to boost their funds.

Those of us who left the military over twenty years ago do not have PTSD because it was never recognised then. We were told to ‘brace up’, to ‘pull your socks up, lad!’ There were no remedial psychiatry sessions in those days.

Now we have service people on the streets. Homeless. Uncared for.

They cared enough for you. They cared enough to risk all for your safety.

What are you doing for them?