Returning From War | Video

Retha Cloclasure | 10/3/2012

Returning home to a world that`s largely unchanged after serving overseas can be stressful for veterans and they don`t all deal with the transition in the same way. One retired veteran, Maj. (Ret) D.C. Faber with the Wyoming Army National Guard, is taking his own experience and is using it to help others.

Here he is, in his own words.

"I`m a veteran of Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008, and after I came home even as a 45-year-old male with a supportive wife and a great job in the fire department, and a son, I started having the same issues I`d read about my whole career. One of the issues coming home for a lot of vets is they notice really rapidly that their relationships are all changing. What I figured out was there`s a huge core assumption that they think we`re so focused on our past. What I can prove is people in trauma that just came out, like veterans, almost live exactly in the moment. They don`t care about tomorrow, they say that to their families.

They don`t worry about later. They`re just really stuck right now.

A lot of the soldiers that have been deployed hear my briefing and in one and a half hours with their families they go wow, that`s exactly my life, and once somebody understands them, they hear it, they reconnect with their families.

Society here back in America, everybody here is thinking about tomorrow, planning everything and worrying about later. We`re like well, that doesn`t make any sense to us, why do you worry about stupid things, we`re talking about right now. When you can reconnect people to their support networks, it just changes their life in minutes."

If any of this sounds familiar to you, you can hear Faber at Bismarck State College at 7:00 tonight in room 335 of the technology center.

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