Returning Home from War

Another situation that has expanded a lot since the War on Terror started is stress from deployed soldiers and spouses.

Or is it the same? Do we have more insight and information today than during earlier deployments thanks to Internet and high technology?

The fears and worries among families can create a major problem, or concerns. Some of these families feel like they have no control over their lives and doesn’t know what the future will look like. Just like the soldiers going out to war, they have to prepare themselves for what might happen by doing so, they prepares themselves and their closest family members for the unknown in life.
But returning home after a long deployment adds a large amount of stress on both the returning soldier and his family, a family who might not understand the emotions and fears that have pierced their soldier’s mind and heart.
And the soldier may not understand that his family’s life has continued while he has been gone, and is not frozen in time from the moment he departed.
He maybe doesn’t dare to speak about emotions to other soldiers about wanting to go home, that he misses his family. Afraid of being judged as weak, and on the other side, no one of the others wants to stay out in war anyway, either.

Many wives feel stressed out by staying home with their children alone, and the emails from their deployed husbands are many times short and shallow. Some soldiers don’t want to speak about what they see and do, for fear of worrying their wives. The protection can make many wives feel shut out. When a solider comes home, the mixture of nervousness and fear, excitement and dread, all are mixed with happiness and sorrow. The soldier feels that after a long time apart, the couple (family) will simply continue from were they left off several months or years earlier. But the spouse has her or his routines, and has been handling everything. In many cases both will have a hard time accepting the new realities, and perhaps relinquishing responsibilities they have grown used to.
The soldier returns home tired and possibly exhausted and burned out, and simply want to have some peace and quiet. The whole family, maybe even some relatives rushes to be with him and follows him everywhere, sometimes even when he goes to the bathroom. This particular soldier went up during the night when the family slept just to be by himself.

Soldier’s who perhaps have a wife who wants sympathy for being alone for such a long time starts telling him how miserable she has been. He views it as the one he most of all wanted to get home to blames him and gets defensive, angry and sad. Their emotions feed off of each other like gasoline on a fire.
He is tired, he has seen much, and every night away the thought of surviving another day to come home to her, adds to his internal stress.

When I worked in Sarajevo for a year and a half, and then returned to Sweden, it was difficult to come home! No one understood my pain and the sense of helplessness inside, so I stopped trying to tell people about my experiences. I became frustrated over how the media covered the rebuilding of a recently war-torn country.

And, people from my country had a different opinion about helping the “cave” people. Some would say, “Let them kill each other. Who cares? It was not “our” problem.”