I’ve heard church leaders say things similar to this: “PTSD doesn’t exist. It isn’t any different than a normal citizen witnessing something tragic or going through a tragedy.” And “If you suffer from PTSD, you just need to get over it and believe the Bible.”
While not every church leader/goer is that extreme, I have heard things like this before and based on my own past beliefs, I know there is room for growth in this area.
I’m writing this as the wife of a combat veteran. I’ve learned so much through the course of our five years of marriage and recently realized the need to share some of this knowledge with the Christian community.
My husband, Todd, is a veteran of the Operation Iraqi Freedom War. He joined the Army reserves just a few months after he turned 18. During his first semester of college at Oklahoma City University, he was deployed to Iraq. Less than two years after his first 18-month deployment to Iraq, he volunteered for a second deployment to Kuwait. He and I live in Broken Arrow, Okla. with our sons, Cody and Shane, and are members of a great Bible teaching church.
This article intends to share with the Christian community some information that I believe has been missing from conversations to and about soldiers suffering from PTSD, with hope that my friends and family in Christ will gain understanding on how to approach soldiers who return from war. I’m not writing to condemn the church or those with misinformation, but rather to inform people who haven’t had any first-hand experience with a veteran.
When our U.S. soldiers arrive at their location half-way across the world to start their job, the attacks start. They don’t have a moment to get settled in. They are secluded from the support of their families. They are secluded from their churches. They have only their fellow soldiers as their family. These fellow soldiers are comprised of every type of belief: Wiccan, Catholic, Baptist, Atheist, Muslim, etc. And their deployment starts by having bombs (mortars) sent into their “home” and attacking their “family” everyday. The attacks don’t end there. They’ve just begun. When the soldiers start their job away from their temporary “home,” day after day they wait for the other versions of these cowardly attacks that they have been trained to defend. Attacks that could be a small child placed in their view with a hidden bomb, or a coward hiding out with a detonator and a roadside bomb. They are essentially paranoid, but not in a bad way – in the only way they can survive kind of way.
Then one day, they are driving down the road of Baghdad and it happens: a rocket is launched directly at their motorcade, followed by a stream of bullets. They are trying to defend their “family,” and then one of their fellow soldiers gets injured and some are killed. This is just the first wave of the attack. It lasts hours and hours…hour after hour of being stranded in a motorcade, trying to survive, waiting on the truck at the front that has been disabled by enemy fire on a narrow street in Bagdad to be moved…hours and hours of being sitting ducks. Todd has said this type of fire-fight physically feels like playing four football games back to back with no breaks. Emotionally, he can’t describe it.
Then they have to go “home” and debrief with their Atheist, Wiccan, and Roman Catholic support. Debriefing includes cleaning out the trucks so they can be used the next day. They have to clean the trucks because their fellow soldiers who were killed or wounded in battle left bodily remains – a graphic reminder of what they’ve just been though. They may or may not have some alone time to process what just happened, and finally fall asleep from exhaustion. They wake up the next day to go do their job again – their job where they expect to be attacked again, in one of the dozens of different ways that they could be attacked…
They go through some time of just having bombs sent into their home (
just) and then they go out to do their jobs again and they are attacked in another cowardly way. They are attacked by a roadside bomb and their truck is blown up. They are stuck in the middle of the desert, without wheels, with millions of dollars of equipment to protect, let alone their lives, and they are left to wait again…wait to be attacked, all the while, ears ringing, head pounding and praying.
This is just a very small example of a few of the catastrophies my husband experienced, but I know many of our soldiers go through situations like this and worse.
The third country nationals (foreign civilians contracted by the US) who Todd supervised gave him the title “Pastor.” He was in the Word as often as he could be. He drove his Wiccan partner crazy by listening to Christian music in their truck when he was driving. His journals are amazing to read. His heart was set fully on His King and he was an evangelist in those trials. He had nothing else to cling to but God and His Word, and he would say that the time in his life during these trials was a sweet time of growth and communion with the Lord.
As a soldier, he was excellent: the youngest in his unit to be promoted to Staff Sergeant and was accepted to West Point after his first deployment at the age of 21. He chose not to attend, instead opting for a second deployment.
I say that not to brag on my husband, but to tell you that even someone with a strong faith who is also a strong soldier can suffer from PTSD after experiencing such traumatic circumstances.
When he came home from his second deployment, it was as much a battle to re-adjust as it was to leave. His entire world had been vastly different for years. When he came home for good, he had suffered a traumatic brain injury from his truck being hit by a roadside bomb, he had degenerative disc disease in his back, and he suffered greatly from violent night terrors, flash backs, panic attacks and depression. He sought biblical counseling from his church in Choctaw, OK. He went to multiple pastors and asked for help. Sadly, they didn’t even give him time to share his story. Granted, with veterans, sometimes it takes a long time for them to open up. They simply gave him some scriptures, scriptures that he already knew, and told him to change his thinking. But his thinking had been trained into him for over five years, and living everyday knowing that people were trying to kill him, that he had to be prepared to kill people, and the reality of those things coming to life would require more than someone telling him: “change your thinking”. This left him with the only other resource he knew of, The VA hospital. Which had some great people willing to help, but it wasn't the family type of support he needed from his church.
Unfortunately, even though thinking can be changed, sleeping causes most of my husband’s problems. Sleeping is when nightmares happen, and the nightmares usually seem very real, which makes the rest of the night very difficult. Sleeping is very important for everyone, and especially in my husband’s case, because he developed a seizure disorder from the traumatic brain injury and without rest he is much more likely to have a seizure.
There are also flashbacks. I think most people don’t understand that flashbacks are uncontrollable. Flashbacks happen in the most random times. You see a pile of trash in your neighborhood and suddenly, without trying to think of it... you see a bomb and it literally sends you back to the streets of Iraq. These veterans do not want to dwell on the traumatic war experiences they endured. Most of them are strong and determined, but they come home to a completely different world, and in spite of having a completely unique and amazing experience, they still want to be normal. They want to be able to drive down the highway without being catapulted back into a life-or-death situation by seeing something as common as gas tanks on a semi truck. So, simply telling a veteran to change his thinking and memorize a few scriptures lacks the understanding and compassion that these vets need.
As a Christian, Todd memorizes scripture and uses it to battle these situations. Thankfully, he has been given much grace. His battles are not as bad as they were when he first came back. He relies on the Lord for his strength. He believes and trusts that those trials were used for his good and is thankful for those circumstances. But it’s a situation that we have been through for so long, and the ability to overcome PTSD and transition back into civilian life has not been an easy journey.
I believe it would be a great benefit to our veterans if the church could get a better understanding of what these men and women have gone through and how our distant, doubting, and minimizing attitude affects these servicemen. It is hurtful that so many of our brothers and sisters in Christ treat our soldiers as if they are being overly dramatic, or that they are no different than any other citizen experiencing trauma.
Maybe I’m passionate about this because I used to be one of these people! I didn’t get it. For years, I thought Todd was just being self-focused in his times of depression. I didn’t understand some of the things that he couldn’t control, like the nightmares and flashbacks. I had no frame of reference for what he and his fellow soldiers experienced, and unfortunately, I had been taught that PTSD was a made-up illness. The turning point for me was living life with Todd. The more I am with him, the more I see the strong faith of the man I referenced above. The more I see the desire to overcome these obstacles and the will to not become complacent. The more I hear from his experiences, the more I slowly begin to understand the circumstances that are so foreign to myself and to so many Americans. I love the Lord and desire to love His people, but it took me years to understand how unloving I was being to my own husband in this area.
Now that I have learned more, I don’t want fellow believers to do what I did and ignore or demean combat veterans’ experiences. They fought and bore hardships, thus allowing us to continue living a life of freedom and enjoying our religious liberties. They selflessly went to War only to come home and be told they are being too self-focused.
My initial thought in writing this was that the church is doing a
disservice to our servicemen, but I know it isn’t intentional. And it’s my desire that other soldiers who return from War with mental and physical battles will have a warmer welcome back into the body of Christ. Maybe if more people can get a small glimpse into my husband’s story it won’t take as long as it took me to acknowledge the battles of these men and women.
So, what is the solution? I’m not 100% sure. But, I know that love and understanding are at the heart of it. I know that Todd tells me that when I simply acknowledged the reality of combat and the uniqueness of what he had been through, he felt the support he needed at home. I know that the more I listen and the less I talk, the better our conversations get. I know that Christ provides perfect peace and James 1 tells us to ask for wisdom without doubting and He will give us that wisdom. I know that to love others as myself sometimes means holding my tongue and waiting to actually get to know the person before making judgments on their experiences. And I know that the only solution to any of these trials is not in the psychology of modern thinking, but it is in the Word of God. If anyone finds himself experiencing life with a veteran, I recommend they seek God’s wisdom for how to handle the situation. It’s so easy with half of our churches being opposed to psychology and the other half embracing it to discard PTSD or to treat it with techniques and tips that aren’t from the Bible. Balance is needed and I believe it can be found.
