tattedup_ak

You stand there, deployment after deployment and fight on. You've lost relationships, spent years of your lives in extreme conditions, years apart from kids you'll never get back, and beaten your body in a way that even professional athletes don't understand.

Then you come home to a nation that doesn't understand.
They don't understand suffering.
They don't understand sacrifice.
... ... They don't understand that bad people exist.

They look at you like you're a machine like something is wrong with you.
You are the misguided one not them.

When you get out, you sit in the college classrooms with political science professors that discount your opinions on Iraq and Afghanistan because YOU WERE THERE and can't understand the macro issues they gathered from books, with your bias.

You watch TV shows where every vet has PTSD and the violent strain at that. Your Congress is debating your benefits, your retirement, and your pay, while they ask you to do more.

But the amazing thing about you is that you all know this. You know your country will never pay back what you've given up.

You know that the populace
at large will never truly understand or appreciate what you have done for them.

"Those who want to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, bear the fatigue of supporting it