Unseen Badges

                                    "Even in Laughter the heart may be sad." (Prov 14:13)

     I laugh a lot.  Most Soldiers I know laugh a lot.  Dave Roever, a motivational Christian speaker who was horribly wounded serving as a Navy Seal in Vietnam once said "I beat back depression one laugh at a time."  I spend a lot of my time laughing with Soldiers, drinking coffee, talking about extremely insignificant things often in inappropriate ways as they decelerate and defuse from unseen pressures that would crush softer souls yet they seem to bear up under the weight with the strange help of the many callouses Military life has earned them.  The harder the pressure the more necessary the laughter.  The times I sit and laugh about nothing unjudgementally, undemanding, tends invariably to somehow earn me the right to later sit on sacred ground with those same Soldiers and hear stories that wrench all laughter away from me.

      I have noticed a pattern among the warriors of our time.  Broken relationships laughed at hours before wept over in private conversation.  Nightmares that are held at bay only by the body refusing to go to sleep.  Barely contained to uncontrollable anger at the slightest provocation, usually dealing with mundane issues that were once easily overlooked.  Addictions from sleep aides, to smoking, to drinking, to a host of others drowning out reality at all cost.  Struggling with every bit of fight within them to avoid becoming zombies inside living but dead with each day being nothing but a gray haze of survival.  Young men and women on their third, fourth, even fifth deployments to the only life that still has any color in it left for them, and yet they serve with pride. 

     These scars they bear are unseen badges earned by sacrifice to a Country that loves them but is filled with people that don’t understand them.  How does one explain for instance that feeling alone while in a crowd is the saddest feeling that I wouldn’t trade for anything? I wouldn't lose its awkwardness because it was purchased by huddling together in instantly over crowded bunkers with other wide eyed ridiculously grinning Soldiers while being attacked at 2 in the morning.  And now that crowd of Soldiers with the same shared terror of mine are lost to the pages of yesterday’s war and I find myself lonely in crowds yet unwilling to have the unseen badge taken from me at any price. But how do you say that? 

     So we laugh...I found myself tonight at Camp Liberty at a sister Cigar Club to Camp Cropper’s as a host of Soldiers I had never met laughed at relationship pains and failed coping mechanisms, and shared badges that each of us could see plainly and felt a camaraderie from the shared knowledge that we were the only ones who could, and that was ok.