I just finished reading a marvelous book, “The Women,” by Kristen Hanna, who is a gifted writer with more than 22 novels.
“The Women” is about a nurse who volunteers to go to Vietnam, where she spent two tours. The shocking part is not the gory description of war injuries and the sacrifices that soldiers, nurses, doctors and everyone else face every single day. The shocking part is how the country welcomed or actually unwelcomed all those who returned from Vietnam after enduring a hell of an experience in a far country defending our own.
The war was not popular, but people could not differentiate between the political aspect of the war and the warriors who put their lives on the line. The hatred of the war was transformed into a disgust and animosity towards the returning soldiers.
Frances, the nurse in the novel, could not understand the hostility and the disgust that she was treated with upon returning from two tours of hell. Even her parents were not sympathetic. Her father would not even look at her face. Her social circle crumpled as no one wanted to associate with her or even be seen with her, as if she were a leper. The magical talent of Ms. Hanna’s story telling is how she weaved an uplifting story out of the gore, the hatred, the ugliness, and the continuous pain.
That book made me wonder: Why do we celebrate those who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the war, any war, but we don’t celebrate those who returned alive from those wars? Yes, they are still alive, but they have scarified a lot, nevertheless. War is hell and no one can appreciate the cruelty and the severity of a war without being there.
I have! I was on the front line in the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel. I was a civilian orthopedic surgeon stationed in Suez, where the front line of the war was. The gory and unimaginable images of the injured and maimed are still fresh in my mind after more than 40 years. So, even if you come out of a war alive, it is still hell on earth. You can’t go to a war and come out normal. You are never ever the same after being in a war.
Many of those veterans who came from the wars carry their visible and invisible scars, their anxieties, their fears and their nightmares with them for the rest of their lives. I understand that we have Veterans Day, but in my own observation there is a stark difference between celebrating Memorial Day and Veterans Day. It seems Veterans Day is a low-key formal function devoted to the older generation coming from WWI and WWII but not from recent wars such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
But Memorial Day is more poignant and reflective of the sacrifices that our heroes have made to protect our liberty and freedom. We still cannot brush off the sacrifices that those returning soldiers have made. Those sacrifices scar them for the rest of their lives and affect their ability to navigate ordinary life such as jobs, parenting and marital life. That is why mental illness, suicides and divorces are significantly high among those veterans after coming from the wars.
We need to develop deep appreciation for every one of the women and men who serve in the military. They are protecting all of us. And the least we can do is to acknowledge their sacrifices and help them with their mental anguish, life challenges whether social, professional or familial. This is the least we can do to honor their services and their sacrifices.
It is a shame that many of the homeless people we see in our big cities are veterans who struggled to have an ordinary life but ended up in total failure and a life on the curb being watched and despised by the same people they were defending in the first place. This should not happen at all. We cannot turn our back on those valiant souls who fought the devil to grant us the freedom by which we look down on those who protected us.
Acknowledging those veterans in a more obvious way will help them feel valued and honored by their country. I would suggest including in the Memorial Day celebration an item celebrating our heroes who returned after fighting those wars to protect us and keep us free. We need to show our appreciation and our gratitude to all of them. Our freedom is very precious, and we should thank and appreciate those who allowed us to enjoy this freedom for us, for our children and grandchildren.
This is the least we can do as a country saying thank you to its daughters and sons who went to war, fought, suffered, then came back. To each veteran of any war, we should say: “Thank you Ma’am and Sir for your sacrifice. We respect you and love you and we will do whatever it takes to pay you back for all what you have done to protect us”.
If we fail to do so, then we are not worthy of their sufferings or their sacrifices.
Nash Naam, an Effingham hand surgeon, is a native of Egypt and a naturalized U.S. citizen. He can be reached at nashnaam@gmail.com