Society thinks you are broken when you don’t go to sleep or even to the mailbox without a weapon. Your fellow countryman is quick to label you a threat to the safety of the community by slapping a PTSD sticker on your psych eval, medicating you while stripping away your last shred of dignity. Those same people then turn right around and thank you for your fucking service. They throw change at homeless veterans and then thank you for your fucking service. Wives cheat on their husbands or surprisingly ask for divorces for “irreconcilable difference,” then put on their best “I love Veteran’s day parade” dress as they thank you for your fucking service.

I often find myself blaming my own countrymen for not knowing better, but then I forgive them. They don’t have the insight that comes from seeing what I’ve seen, even if that insight comes at the cost of living for nearly a decade in a constant state of extreme depression that you never tell anyone about.

I promised myself that I would finish school. So here I am at this University, taking my required classes, trying to build something for myself that I can live with. I’m on GI funding and being in school is my job. And yet, every day that I am in this little apartment, waiting for classes to start, waiting for life to start, the pull of Afghanistan gets stronger. The hardest thing is the struggle not to go back, not to run back to Afghanistan and the war. I loved Afghanistan. I love the people and the Pashtunwali, and the food, and the hardship, and living out of a bag for years at a time, and sleeping on the ground, and checking my shoes before putting them on, and I love the mountains and I loved the war. I loved it so much that I went back again, and again, and again after that. It cost me everything I ever cared about and I’d go back to Afghanistan again just to be there to have someone worth killing, someone worth saving, and to remember what it is like to feel alive again.

–Letter from a current student who is a veteran of the Afghanistan war