After the Vietnam War, Russell lived in Everett Washington, having spent the end of his enlistment in Bremerton shipyard across the water from Seattle in Puget Sound. After attending college and settling in civilian life after six years Navy time, it became necessary to return home. Social stigma after Vietnam and finances left a choice of leaning on friends or a return to home to start over at the age of twenty-seven. The return to Nashville helped keep the thread of music and writing alive. Finding adapting to civilian life and work lonely and difficult, he began retreating mentally and emotionally into himself and began writing down thoughts, beginning with a letter to a friend left behind. Typical of letters not mailed and thoughts unsaid, these were collected over the years reflecting on deeper meaning of life experiences, viewpoints of the past, searching identity, and meaning of the present, as each page was recorded anticipation and remembrance, highs and lows of life. Collected by his wife, Suzanne, for family, sister, and Indian friend and mentor, in a volume for the holidays one year. This book is the narrative of those collected thoughts.

Chances are that if your loved one has seen war, he or she has Post-traumatic Stress Disorder at some level, and you who love your veteran will also be deeply and profoundly affected. Finally, the cries and needs of the loved ones have been addressed in this comprehensive, practical book, now newly updated in its 2nd Edition! Love Our Vets answers more than 60 heartfelt questions, providing down-to-earth wisdom and much-needed tips for taking care of yourself. Sharing as a counselor and from her personal experience of living with a 100% disabled veteran with PTSD, Welby O'Brien gives hope, encouragement, and practical help for families and loved ones who are caught in the wake of the trauma. This book addresses a broad spectrum of issues and concerns and offers realistic wisdom from a wide variety of individuals who share from real hearts and lives. Now newly revised and updated with additional material, the 2nd Edition of Love Our Vets continues to be enthusiastically welcomed by VA and other counselors. This is not just another book about PTSD; rather, it is a tremendous resource for families and loved ones who struggle heroically along with their vets to face the day-to-day challenges.

Vietnam and Beyond is a collection of wartime letters written home by Jim Markson from March 1967 to March 1968. Jim carried sadness and boxed-up memories from Vietnam. Perhaps, if it were not for the general divided and oppositional public opinion of the Vietnam War at that time, the soldiers returning home might have been able to open up and begin the healing process. Instead, those soldiers returning from Vietnam were afraid to tell their story. These fears bound each soldier to the other. We are very proud to embrace all veterans and include stories of veterans of all wars, including WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to show the similarities of war and the soldier from one generation to another.

For her two-plus decades as a hospice nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Deborah Grassman has often heard the comment, Isn t your work depressing? Like many others, she had begun her hospice career with that same prejudice. She feared death itself, and because of that fear, she was unaware that she could find peace, joy, and fulfillment in caring for people at the end of their lives. She had no special training in caring for veterans, and she had no reason to think that veterans needs were any different from nonveterans. With time and experience, however, she began to realize that these veterans had experiences and training that made them different from other hospice patients. Likewise she began to understand that she could learn lessons about peace from people who were trained for war; that warriors often have wisdom that, paradoxically, shows us how to live in peace with each other and within ourselves. In Peace at Last, Deborah Grassman takes the reader on a journey of understanding and growth. While caring for thousands of veterans in a hospice setting over a 25-year career in a VA hospital, she gathered the veterans stories of pain and redemption, personal awakening, and peace. Then she crafted these stories into an unforgettable book. Designed to help caregivers, family members, and veterans themselves understand the impact of war and military culture on lives and emotions, Peace at Last contains veterans stories, hospice experiences, and a series of appendices providing sample materials that can assist with healing.

In Reflections: Women and Their Lives, the women throughout the short stories are shown in and through personal and professional decision-makings. Descriptive details within each woman and each life provide a clear and full passage in and out of living steps. The stories recant a full-blown picture for each woman in lifes processes. Their involvement stages depict others in mentoring or in others posing persuasive action. The beauty and path to their entitlement are released vis--vis life-to-life scenes.

In this book, 50 experts study the lives of U.S. veterans at work, at home, and in American society as they navigate issues regarding health, gender, public service, substance abuse, and homelessness. The aftermath of modern war includes a population of veterans whose needs last for many decades—far longer than the war itself. This in-depth study looks at life after the military, considering the dual conundrum of a population benefiting from the perks of their duty, yet continuing to deal with trauma resulting from their service, and of former servicemen and servicewomen trying to fit into civilian life—in a system designed to keep them separate. Through two comprehensive volumes, essays shed light on more than 30 topics involving or affecting former servicemen and servicewomen, offering a blueprint for the formal study of U.S. veterans in the future. Contributions from dozens of experts in the field of military science cover such issues as unemployment, homelessness, disability, access to higher education, health, media portrayal, criminal justice, substance abuse, guns, suicide, and politics. Through information gleaned from surveys, interviews, participant observations, secondary analyses, and content analyses, the chapters reveal how veterans are able to successfully contribute to civilian life and show how the American workforce can benefit from their unique set of skills.

My name is not important at this time but I am the author of this series of vignettes about the thoughts of veterans who are patients in VA hospitals some are recovering from injuries incurred in current conflicts or wars of the past They lie in their beds with nothing to do, day in and day out, but think about yesterday and the things that happened. Happenings they want to forget and there are the things that they long to remember. The homes that they once had, their loved ones, the house across street that they once lived in, the block, the street and the little corner news stand and the people that you meet thats America. There are those who lived in the country and there are those city fellows, that is, the ones who claimed they knew everything but did nothing but talked about the dreams they had that were as tall as the skyscrapers that reached to the heavens, some seem to be a mile tall.