Having faced bravely the trauma of combat, returning wartime veterans now face the challenge of not allowing those experiences to scar them permanently. How can the Church help meet their needs? What are their needs?

Of the 1.5 million U.S. service personnel serving on active duty, about 260,000 are deployed in political hotspots or war zones around the world at any given time. Many of these soldiers find it hard to adjust to life, work and relationships on the home front after the combat has stopped. Many feel they have lost their place in civilian life, where jobs no longer fit them, family relationships feel strained and conflicted, and they sense only their fellow soldiers really understand them.

SOLDIERS' NEEDS
Hanging up your uniform after war is not easy. How can you emotionally switch from being in combat, living with daily threats to your life and seeing the chaos and carnage of war to a peaceful civilian world with normal family life and regular work routines?

Some soldiers are like Staff Sergeant James in the Academy Award winning 2010 Picture of the Year, The Hurt Locker. Unable to make this adjustment to life back home, James volunteers to go back to war. A war-zone is a place where life makes sense to these soldiers, where they feel they fit in and can make a difference. They again experience the addictive, emotional rush of doing a dangerous and important job well, rather than being bored by civilian routines, with little sense of purpose or meaning. Once again they feel the camaraderie of a band of brothers and sisters that is found in combat, and not in civilian workplaces and in everyday communities.

However, most service personnel (close to 80%) return home from the war and within a year make a good readjustment back to their families and civilian life and work. Their biggest challenge is to find meaningful well-paying jobs to stabilize their lives economically in this recession. Unemployment is running 18% for returning war veterans. Without the stability of a good job, marriages become stressed and fall apart and many veterans turn to drugs or alcohol to blunt the pain of losing their place in the world of work. Failure to find good work has a cascading negative effect upon their lives.

This effect is more pronounced for the half-million troops who have been deployed to combat a second time (or more). For part-time warriors in the National Guard and Reserves who endure such repeated deployment cycles, they have a hard time finding good work. If they have a good job, advancing in the company becomes a problem, since they soon may be called away again for a year and become a liability to an employer.
For some veterans, returning home involves years of rehabilitation and therapy to recover from the wounds of war. As of early March 2010, according to Department of Defense accounting, 36,906 service personnel have been wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering terrible wounds to their bodies from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that destroy limbs and cause traumatic brain injury. Others bear the hidden mental health wounds of war, with a recent Rand Corporation study estimating 20% of all returning veterans (300,000) have difficulties with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or depression. That is a one in five ratio of returning veterans who are impacted by these hidden wounds of war. Only half of these have sought treatment.

Some returning veterans get in trouble with the law, with offenses ranging from robbery and theft in support of drug addictions to anger management problems leading to spouse abuse and violent behavior. In a Department of Justice study, roughly 10% of veterans have criminal records and 1% are presently incarcerated.

Spiritually, there is a real need for recovery and healing from war, especially for veterans who were exposed to serious combat action and saw horrific things. Some veterans did things in war of which they are not proud, and now need to seek God's grace and forgiveness and experience healing of the spirit to lay to rest memories too terrible to carry in everyday life.

Chris Hedges, in his book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, touches at the heart of another spiritual challenge war forces upon veterans.

I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush to battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent.

Hedges sees this as an idolatry that depletes the soldier's spirit, leaving him disillusioned in war's aftermath.

FAMILIES' NEEDS
Military families really need our help. They are whipsawed emotionally through a year-long deployment cycle, saying goodbye well (or not so well), and enduring long months of separation, loneliness and fear. Upon homecoming, they try to reconnect with the veteran and build a good life together.

Single parenting, with all that entails, is probably one of the biggest challenges military families face during a deployment. The spouse left behind is suddenly single, like someone who has experienced the death or divorce of a spouse. Trying to balance work with child care, managing the home-front on a limited budget shared with the deployed spouse, and feeling isolated from family or friends to help with respite care when they become overwhelmed - these are just a few of the challenges facing military spouses. The spouse left behind tries to be the cheerleader in the family to keep up the spirits of children, as well as those of the deployed spouse. This can be exhausting. Where does the spouse left behind go to replenish spirit and energy?

For some couples, their marriage becomes a casualty of war. In fact, 13,000 military marriages ended last year. There are no memorial walls to commemorate this kind of sacrifice for service. Contributing factors include being apart for long periods of time, poor communication skills, isolation from social networks, and financial issues.

CHURCH'S RESPONSE
How can a church minister to returning veterans and to the families of those deployed? In the book Beyond the Yellow Ribbon: Ministering to Returning Combat Veterans, I recount how our church ministered to my wife and three boys while I was deployed. They helped with home and auto repairs, provided my wife with respite care with a "mother's day out" program, giving her a chance for adult interaction (with childcare provided) for a morning once a month. The men of the church regularly took my boys to play soccer or to the beach with their kids, thus providing my boys opportunities to play with other kids and interact with male role models. Church members individually remembered my wife on holidays and her birthday, treated her and my boys with ice cream sundaes, took them on outings to encourage them and let them know they were not alone.

Rather than launch a new program to minister to veterans, most churches can simply refine existing congregational care systems to educate the congregation and lay care-givers to veterans' needs. The congregation can identify resources or existing programs (such as job support groups, grief support groups, etc.) that may fit the needs of veteran families. Then you are ready for those who may come in uniform (or recently from wearing a uniform) or those whom members meet in the community and invite to church programs. Once they come, you look for ways to connect with them, identify needs, and seek to meet those needs in the name of Christ.

Ask veterans in your church to help minister to this next greatest generation of veterans. You may be surprised what a WW II veteran of the Normandy invasion, a Korean War veteran who fought on Pork Chop Hill, or a Vietnam War veteran who fought in the Ia Drang Valley might have in common with Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans. In spite of their age differences, they have a mutual respect for each other and can quickly relate to each other because of their shared combat experience and challenges of coming home. Older vets in your church can offer a welcome home to younger vets in ways the latest veterans can understand and appreciate.

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE:
Read an extended interview with David A. Thompson > HERE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chaplain (CDR) David A. Thompson CHC, USNR (Ret.), is a graduate of Hillcrest Lutheran Academy and Lutheran Brethren Seminary. In addition to his Navy Chaplaincy, Pastor Thompson has served many years in the Free Methodist Church. Thompson wrote, with co-author Darlene Wetterstrom, Beyond the Yellow Ribbon: Ministering to Returning Combat Veterans (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009).

Order the book here > ffbooks.org