Introduction to Coming Home: A Field Guide

It’s a romantic idea. It is. Defend your country. Through intense training, reshape your body as a machine. Study and master the skills of the combat arms. Carry your rifle to the worst hotspots all over the world, spreading freedom and protecting democratic values.

Or maybe you were someone who just came from a bad neighborhood and needed a way out.

Maybe you just needed a job or money for college.

Maybe you were just looking for discipline and adventure.

Whether you’re a dreamer or a pragmatist, we’ve all joined and served our time at war for different, personal reasons. At the end of the day, we did simply what was asked of us.

And so, here we are.

The difference between the combat experience and so many others experiences of the typical human condition is that the outcome of our war experiences isn’t a personal matter. It’s an indictment of the very values that we send our young men and women out to defend. The health of our veterans reflects the health of our nation. Each distressed veteran disrupts dozens of lives of their family and friends.

And if those lives were multiplied by the two million veterans who’ve already served in the Global War on Terror, if we didn’t take care of them, those numbers would literally break down the well-being of our country. Who would defend the states if we chose not to take care of our warriors? Who would rise up to defend to the constitution?

This is why I think taking care of veterans is one of the most important moral responsibilities that America should have. That care should come in three facets, I think: help from the government, help from the community and help from within (the last one being the most important, and complicated).

This field guide (which I will be posting over the next several weeks) is my attempt at giving clarity for our veterans and their families to meet the moral mandate of treating the wounded warrior’s soul.

In crafting this field guide, I intend to use a blend of academic and empiric sources to illuminate what I think are the many solutions to the challenges of helping our soldiers come home.

In the end though, we’ll all need each other’s help to make my field guide as comprehensive and complete as possible. Please participate. Please show our veterans that they are not alone.

Connect with Dario online:

Personal Website (Free Writing, Podcast, Dario in the Media, Biography, Books, Blogs)

20 Something Magazine (Editor-in-Chief, Creator)

JMWW Literary Journal (Senior Nonfiction Editor)

The Veterans Writing Project (Instructor, Nonfiction Editor)

LinkedIn (Professional Stuff)

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