If you're returning from war, the burden is on you to get back to normal. Sorry about that.

Let's assume you served your country in Iraq or Afganistan. You came back either okay or not. Maybe you suffered some wounds, maybe you didn't. Maybe you're missing a limb or two or your sight. Maybe you got hit in the head with a piece of flying metal and can't remember much of anything. So here you are, back from an experience that's all your own. Trying to take your place in that family and that community you left not that long ago. And ages ago.

You've been through so much that no one in your family or your community can ever understand, despite all their good intentions.

Sure, they welcome you back with balloons and maybe even a parade, but once the noise subsides, so does the interest in you. It all starts with everybody saying, "We honor you for your sacrifice," but as the days and weeks and years wear on, you're looked at as someone who needs to get a job, just like the rest of us. Welcome back to the real world, buddy.

But of course you're not like the "rest of us". Even if you lost no limbs, you may wake up to nightmares which no one else understands. Not even that perfect girl you were coming back home to. She doesn't know you anymore. She gets freaked when you wake up at night for no reason, maybe crying out. But she's never killed anyone. Or ever seen a dead person, except maybe her grandmother laid out in perfect reverence in the funeral home -- not rotting in the sun in a swamp. Not missing limbs and lying on the hot sand. She can't understand how you could have. And what if you're missing a damned foot? Or a whole lot more?

There's this barrier between you and your loved ones that will never be connected. They've lived their lives stateside, and you've lived yours "over there" -- and there's no way to make the two come together. But there it is, and it all depends on you. Since they will never understand what you've been through, it's up to you to figure out how to put that you that was at war behind you and become again the same old you everyone knew before and are hoping to see again.

They can't change themselves in a way that lets them understand you because they haven't had the traumatic experiences you've had; they have no way to re-adjust themselves. They're who they were before and remember you as who were then.

You're alone in realizing that you're not that person anymore. But, for their benefit -- and, in the end, your own -- you need to re-connect with that old you, the you before all that horrible stuff which you think changed you but maybe didn't: maybe you just accepted it at the time and now that you're back in another time, back home, you can let it go. It happened, for sure, but not to the you they all remember and that you can become again, with some time and effort and maybe counseling. Can you do it? Yes, you can. Go back and look at yourself in old photos in your school yearbook, smoke some dope if you need to, have a couple of beers, and re-connect with the you who hadn't killed anyone or seen anyone killed so violently. He's still there, waiting for you.

Every war is an exercise in ignorance. Your military leaders knew no more about where they were sending you than mine did when I went into Viet Nam. But that's all water under the bridge. We're left, you and me, with the knowledge that we've been through war, been tested, and survived. I had to piece it all back together when I came home from the Viet Nam war, knowing that I'd done my best, trying to forget the worst of what I'd seen (and done), trying hard to become a "normal" man again, to re-learn how to fit in and smile and love and all that stuff I'd put on hold for a year or more when I was serving my country.

It's us up you, like it was up to me, like it's always up to the soldiers who make it home again.
Know that you'll have to take upon yourself the awesome task of re-adjusting to a world that went on without you and that may have trouble welcoming you back. You've been to a place your friends and family have never been, and they don't understand. And it's not your job to make them live it all over again with you.

But look on the bright side: You're back home. You're done with that. Thank God! A bad dream. And now you're awake again.

Time to go back to being you again. Go for it!