“Thank you for your service.”
I hear it often, more frequently around Nov. 11, Americans recognize veterans for their service. It is a kind gesture, succinct and I’ve never found a way to respond without feeling awkward. The interactions often leave me feeling more aware of the widening divide between civilians and those who have served. As a psychiatrist, I’m interested in helping to bridge that divide.
I have two experiences that may help; a long weekend this August and a deployment in 2017. Neither was traumatic, and one had nothing to do with the military. Both left me struggling to explain what they meant.
In August, my son and I backpacked to Meysan Lake in the Eastern Sierra. To call the trip perfect would be an exaggeration, but not by much. It hasn’t always been easy for me to connect with my son and his excitement inspired in me the most delightful mix of pride and joy. It rained. We’d both had better nights of sleep. The hike in was hard. And still, he begged to go again soon.. The trip felt like it had repaired and strengthened our bond. I texted photos to family and friends, hoping to share what felt like one of my proudest moments as a father.
But I couldn’t get that across. My wife came closest to understanding, though understandably, after being left home alone with our two girls, she had limited room to share my joy. My parents, siblings and friends were excited and “liked” the photos, but it was clear that I hadn’t conveyed, or they couldn’t grasp, how much the trip meant to me.
I had felt that gap once before. In 2017, I had just arrived at the hospital for a busy day of outpatient psychiatry when my boss knocked on my door. I was being tapped for a humanitarian mission to Puerto Rico aboard the USNS Comfort, part of the federal response to Hurricane Maria. He would cancel my clinic and redistribute my patients. I had two days to get our affairs in order with my incredible wife, who had a broken foot, and our (then) two children, ages three years and three months.
As hard as it was to leave my family, the deployment remains one of my proudest moments in uniform. I was part of a large mission, caring for people in desperate circumstances and I relished finding creative ways to provide the best psychiatric care I could under unusual conditions. I made close friendships with people I had just met and we used humor as our healthiest defense against the separation from home and the sometimes bizarre circumstances we shared. The deployment lasted only two months, yet I felt incredibly close to those colleagues and still relish bumping into them years later.
Coming home, I again struggled to convey what it had meant. My wife again came closest. I was deeply grateful for her sacrifice and tried to say so, and she was patient, noticing that I felt overwhelmed during our first dinner together. We found chances to talk about our two months apart (as many as the parents of a three-year-old and a six-month-old can find). Everyone else got brief, rushed conversations, shaped by what they had read or seen in the media.
When I talk with patients about traumatic memories, I start with an analogy of a filing cabinet. Every moment of our lives is flooded with sensory input. Our minds cut ordinary memories down to a simple phrase, snipping out most of the sensation and intensity, so the memory can be filed safely away, easy to find when needed and eventually easy to discard.
Some memories are different. If a coyote attacked me while I was writing this, my mind would hold on to far more of it, which is evolutionarily sensible: remembering the details might help me avoid the next coyote. But then the mind has a harder time deciding which details are safe to cut and the file keeps growing until it no longer fits in its folder, spilling into other drawers and popping out when we reach for unrelated memories.
The same thing can happen with positive, or more complicated, memories like my hiking trip and my deployment. Both experiences were packed with so much meaning that I couldn’t share them in a way that left me confident anyone understood what they meant.
What can we do about it? Simply recognizing the gap helps. If someone you love has come back from an experience that was overwhelmingly meaningful, good, bad, or most often both, a second question can keep the distance from growing. Instead of “How was it?” try “What was the part that mattered most to you?” And if you are the one returning, it may help to say plainly that it was bigger than words can express.
This Veterans Day, that might mean following the thank you with a question. Not “What was the worst of it?” but “What was the part you’re proudest of?” or “Who did you serve with?” Some veterans will decline and that is their right. Others may have been waiting a long time to be asked.
It was easier to talk with my colleagues from the Comfort, since we shared the experience, though I suspect I would not have done well discussing it only with them. Talking it through with my wife, hard as it was, helped me integrate the positive and the negative.
As for Meysan Lake, that file is still filling. The photo of my son fishing hangs framed where I can see it: one page standing in for the rest. It’s okay if not everyone reads the whole file. My son was there.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Navy, Department of War, nor the U.S. government.
David Nissan is an active-duty service member in the US Navy with 22 years of service, and 10 years of service as a psychiatrist. He has served overseas in Japan, and deployed in 2017 as a member of the USNS Comfort in support of humanitarian operations in Puerto Rico.
