Journey Home

Victim…
Hostage…

There’s harm.
Suffering.
A lessening or deficit.
Grief, a grievance.
Duration and latency.
Maybe a victim outlook, or mentality, or habit.
It’s certain that I am scattered and out of regulation, a mess….

When some of us veterans go to the VA to get fixed
we find we are in a game we haven’t seen before,
we certainly don’t hold the deck.
We see empathy from some.
Overall we sense a protocol with illegible gates.
Diagnosis driven by categories of eligibility.
An intermediary has us sign a very spooky Power of Attorney.
We sense some sort of fraud,
that we won’t or don’t deserve the dinner being served in the other room…
The hasty offer of psychoactive meds.
An offer of financial compensation, which is such a strange thought—
do they want to buy our misery?
An interview by Comp and Pension social and medical people.
Some people do not like us.
Some are ominous.
At my second Comp and Pension interview a nearly ancient psychiatrist
warned me about the spiritual and moral trauma to combat veterans,
but especially to those in special operations teams.
He himself looked frightened.
I later discovered he was a good person, compassionate.

So, what about the thousands of brothers and sisters they interviewed and judged?
How do we hold our lives in this jumbled blast of energy?

Is there an opposite to victimhood?
Having agency, confidence…service to others…sentience….prayers of praise?
Can victimhood or stuck-hood become a fraud?
How do victims become not-victims, become un-scorched?

The quarry we pursue is cunning and powerful.
It is near
It is hunting us.

The smaller circle…..

A Dunbar Number (roughly 150 people)
suggests that we can have direct personal connections and accountability
with a fairly small number.
With larger numbers,
proxies, agents, and superiors enter the picture,
they bring classic principal-agent problems of truth telling,
self-dealing,
deception.
betrayal…
treachery

Some of us know we must be illegible.
The public just wants us re-entered, re-integrated.
The public does not want to know what we know.

Such as
if we did just defensive warfare
we’d have some honor,
wouldn’t be such pariahs,
but no,
we do expeditionary warfare.
What General Sherman did to the Georgia in the Civil War,
we do to little countries.
We ruin them.

So how do we forgive ourselves?

The angel of mercy
visits me
and is paying the ransom.

Mike Rivard
Minneapolis
November 25, 2019