Sacrifice in Order to Listen

Travis Reed of The Work of the People (TWOTP) edited this video from a Zoom call we shared during the COVID pandemic.

A Community Without the Bonds

I was left without a community — without the bonds I was so familiar with. That's a transition a lot of veterans really struggle with: the initial discharge.

What the Military Gets Right

The church has something to learn from the military. The military does a great job — perhaps the best anywhere — of creating communities of meaning.

Now, since the Crusades, that meaning has been tied up in a willingness, even an eagerness, to do violence. That's a corruption. But it still does an excellent job of creating places where human beings feel connected.

Eighteen of Twenty

We want to be honest about our own traditions. We have to acknowledge that service members — the military — aren't some problem "over there." It's our problem. Suicide in the military isn't some external thing that needs a solution; it's our problem, because eighteen of those twenty suicides every day are by people who identify as Christian.

I think soldier suicide is a judgment on the church for failing to even see a problem with which it has been fully complicit.

Heroes or Monsters

The bond the military creates is something the church rarely achieves, and there's something good in that. But the corruption runs deeper than the lie that we have to do violence in order to belong. On the individual level, we aren't given the space to actually be — to feel fully human. We're either made into heroes or made into monsters. That's the corruption of a society unable to reconcile the alienation it created — maybe an outgrowth of the end of the draft, I don't know.

It's easy for soldiers to say, "Yes, I've done some bad things." We love talking about it. What we don't like talking about is civilians being culpable too — being part of the world in which soldiers feel unable to move beyond the corruption into redemption, because they aren't able to see how they are, and have always been, human. That's a hard pill for civilians to swallow: they may not have done anything themselves, but they're part of a system that has made soldiers and veterans feel like death is the only way out.

Paul's Letter to Veterans

Paul, in his letter to veterans — which is Philippians — says he desires to depart and be with Christ, that it's better to leave. I know vets personally who have said exactly that. Literally: dying would be better than putting up with this, than being accused of this — whether it's a custody battle or a career opportunity lost.

A Gap We Keep Fertilizing

Society has lost sight of what it means to be a service member, the value of service in our community. It's no secret that armed service — whether military or police — has been corrupted. My concern is that this gap we continue to fertilize is only going to get wider. I don't think we'll see a positive turn until we're able to actually see and embrace service members and veterans as fully human. And I think that requires civilians to do the difficult work of listening to soldiers and veterans say the things they have to say — including "society is unwelcoming to me."

The Self-Indicting Question

I have hope that it's happening, but I think the framing questions are slightly off — the difficult, self-indicting questions. I know I've had to ask myself: I don't know if I've killed anybody. I'm an artillery man. I don't know if I killed anybody. But I'm pretty damn sure I did.

A lot of soldiers and veterans know what it means to ask that question of themselves daily. Civilians have to come to terms with that same self-indictment on their side of the military-civilian divide. Largely, they haven't shown themselves able to ask those questions and risk — or even expose — that privilege, so we can have a better conversation.

Theologically and Socially Incestuous

We have to be willing to face one another and endure one another's pain. We talk a lot about dividing grief and multiplying joy, but there's some real difficult stuff that Christians largely don't want to deal with — stuff that veterans have no choice but to either bottle up or keep within our own circles. I think that's theologically and socially incestuous.

Opening up that space means being prepared for harsh words, harsh questioning, and self-indictment on the part of well-intentioned Christian civilians who need to learn how to listen. And it goes both ways — veterans have to be willing to share, and a lot of us aren't, because when we do, we get shut down.

It says something about us that the people who feel strongly enough about our ideals to fight and die for them, when they're done, don't want anything to do with everybody else. That says as much about us as it does about them.

The Sacrifice We Won't Make

I think doing the right thing requires sacrifice sometimes. Soldiers — by the violence we think, or they think, they have to do — set aside the sacrifices they're willing to make. I don't see that reflected in the church. We don't want to sacrifice anything.