After Military Service, the Grief No One Sees

I visited a guy from Dryhootch yesterday. His name is Levi, and he works at Dryhootch, a veterans’ organization headquartered in southeastern Wisconsin. The group runs several coffee houses catering to veterans in the Milwaukee area and in Madison, Wisconsin. They also operate a peer support network for veterans. Running that peer support program is Levi’s main responsibility—and it’s a huge one.

I offered to write an article about Dryhootch, but Levi convinced me to wait. He wants me to go through their peer support training before writing about Dryhootch’s mission. That makes sense. The truth is, I don’t yet know enough about what the organization does to write a competent essay. So, this piece isn’t about Dryhootch itself—it’s about a long and thought-provoking conversation I had with Levi in his office.

Levi plans to eventually massage our chaotic discussion into a coherent podcast. I wish him luck with that. We covered a wide range of topics that may or may not share a common theme. During our chat, we talked about the struggles veterans face when transitioning from military to civilian life. Levi remarked that there was a sense of loss for many veterans. He said:

“A vet grieves, and he grieves alone.”

That hit me hard. I had never really thought of leaving the service as being cause for intense grief, but now I see it that way. There truly is a loss involved when a person departs from the military. A veteran may grieve for many things—the loss of youth and innocence, the loss of health, the loss of good friends. Relationships built up over many years may be torn apart. Yes, I can see how a veteran may need to grieve, and in retrospect, I see that I spent years grieving without even realizing it.

In conjunction with our discussion of grief, Levi and I also talked about the idea of a “tribe.” What is a tribe? It’s hard to say. Indigenous peoples often live as tribes. Street gangs can be considered tribes. I had a good Jewish friend who often referred to his religious community as “the tribe.” The best source of information on the subject is a book by Sebastian Junger, appropriately titled Tribe. It’s a short book and a quick read, but Junger makes some excellent points.

From my reading of Junger’s book, a tribe is a group of people who totally depend on each other for survival. The tribe is more important than any individual. There are no loners in a tribe because they generally don’t live very long. A member of a tribe is responsible for the well-being of every other member. There is absolute trust between individuals in the community—there has to be. In addition, a tribe has rules and values that apply only to its members. These mores have no bearing on the lives of people outside the group. In fact, these customs are often unintelligible to outsiders. This particular way of life only makes sense to someone inside the magic circle.

The military qualifies as a tribe. That seems obvious to me. I never fought in a war, but if a soldier did—like my oldest son, Hans—then he was definitely part of a tribe. His life and the lives of his comrades depended on the success of that tribe. They had to have each other’s backs at all times. That sort of experience builds an unbreakable bond of trust. It’s something sacred.

I was an Army aviator during peacetime. My work was, by definition, dangerous, although not as hazardous as being in combat. Even for me, the experience was tribal. When flying, I depended on the competence of my copilot and crew chief—not to mention the mechanics who maintained the helicopter and the troops in the III/V platoon who fueled it. Likewise, any troops we transported in the helicopter put their lives in our hands. To perform a mission successfully and safely, we all had to rely on one another. We were a tribe.

So why does a veteran grieve? Because they’ve lost their tribe—and that means they’ve lost their community. For whatever reason, they’ve left the service and entered the civilian world, a world with alien values and customs. In the civilian world, there’s often little trust, and it’s rare that anyone truly has your back. How can that transition be anything but traumatic? Suddenly, a person is no longer part of a cohesive team. Instead, they’re in a cutthroat culture that worships individualism. A veteran may be glad to be rid of military madness, but they still have reason to feel a profound loss.

So why does a veteran grieve alone? Because there are so few of us. Who can we talk to about our loss? Who can we find who truly gets it? Often, there is no one. We wander alone in a strange world and shut down. That’s the tragedy of it all. The drugs, the violence, the suicide—all stem from that isolation. I’m convinced of it.

I’ll be talking to Levi more often. At some point, I’ll write about Dryhootch—but only when I understand it.

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Frank (Francis) Pauc is a graduate of West Point, Class of 1980. He completed the Military Intelligence Basic Course at Fort Huachuca and then went to Flight School at Fort Rucker. Frank was stationed with the 3rd Armor Division in West Germany at Fliegerhorst Airfield from December 1981 to January 1985. He flew Hueys and Black Hawks and was next assigned to the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, CA. He got the hell out of the Army in August 1986.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.