I have a daughter who's one of the people in my life I really look up to. I also have three others I love very much and respect - but for different reasons.
The subject of this blog is a military veteran, the only one of my children who made it to the service. This week she went on a retreat for wounded veterans. It's a five day get-together in the Arizona mountains where the participants can share their stories and dig into the experiences they went through that are related in some way to their military service.
According to my daughter, women veterans are not treated as equal to male veterans. And part of this retreat is to have them do different exercises that allow them to examine aspects of themselves that they struggle to suppress because people don't view female veterans as on par with males. Even though they faced the same bullets and the same danger of death and disability, somehow they don't receive the same regard as the men.
Even though my daughter seems as normal as the next person, the military pays her 100% disability for the PTSD - along with other lesser injuries - she'll live with for the rest of her life. So generally, she keeps the vulnerable parts of who she is shut down - buried in her subconscious. She rarely volunteers that she helped fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the rockscape of Afghanistan's frontier with Pakistan. She doesn't engage in war stories - even with her dad.
But I'm happy she went on this retreat. Because she needs to know that those she served with also experience the same shadowy memories as she has since returning to us.
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