Who Gets to Tell Veterans' Stories?

I started this magazine for a private reason. I'm not sure if I'll disclose it ever. Regardless, I've committed to writing stories of a population who made a decision that I never had to make. Yet one thing we have in common: we're trained for war.

Some went into the military already carrying their own histories of war. Broken families. A broken sense of self. Broken hearts. Then they were trained to fight wars that belonged to someone else.

I understand something about war, too. Not the battlefield. But I understand what it means to learn how to survive. I understand what it means to come from a broken family. I understand what it means to be misunderstood because your behavior is a reflection of trauma.

And then there are the veterans whose lives before service were nothing like mine. I'm intrigued by how service altered their lives in ways I couldn't imagine for myself. That's where the questions began. I questioned whether I even had the right to want to know their stories. To ask the questions that no civilian asks about their past. Their military history. I wanted to take in their experiences and publish them from their own mouths.

Some are eager to share their stories. Veterans can talk. At times, it's difficult to end the conversation. At times, empathy kicks in and I feel their experiences of trauma, loss of identity, loss of free will. I'm an empath. I carry what they share with me. I don't rebuke the painful truths they share or the tears they cry during our encounter. I feel it, and then I pour into them as I write their stories. It's my way to thank them for their sacrifices.

What does the veteran community think about me wanting to write their stories? I'm aware that some may view me as audacious. But that's the intellectual question underneath everything.

What happens when a writer enters a community that believes only members of that community have the right to tell its stories? What happens when a writer enters a community that is thankful that a civilian has the courage and heart to ask the questions no one else knew the depths of their lived experiences? What happens when a civilian enters a community and says 'I am here, and I am ready to tell your story?'

I'll tell you what happens: tension.

But my job isn't to resolve that tension, nor is it to wait for a consensus that will never come. My job is to stand directly in the middle of it. My job is to endure the fire from the gatekeepers, and write unapologetically for the ones who need their stories to be told.

I understand why they feel protective of their stories. I simply don't agree that protection gives them ownership over every story that can be told about them. Especially since they're not the ones sharing their stories with me.

I'm a writer. I have the right to choose who to interview. I have the right to decide whose stories get published. The length of their story depends on the time that passes in conversation. They literally write their own stories through talking to me.

I listen. I ask. I publish. That's my job. That's the work.

The veterans who sit with me, who share their traumas and their losses and their transformation with me, know this. They know I'm listening. They know I'm not judging. They know I'll tell their experiences the way they meant for them to be told.

But then some veterans and their supporters go to the current site and learn I'm a middle-aged Black woman who never served.

Then they learn I was married to a veteran...and the question becomes, "What's her story with him?"

My ex-husband had PTSD. He was also abusive to me and to my firstborn. His mother abused my son as well.

Those things existed at the same time. Those experiences shaped me. Those experiences shaped my two sons.

His PTSD may help explain some of what he experienced after service. It does not excuse what happened to us. I don't romanticize it, and I don't rewrite my children's childhood to make his story easier to tell.

Our marriage was survival of the fittest. I had two mild strokes. He had two mild strokes. We experienced many of the same traumas, but we experienced them differently. We responded to them differently. There were things happening inside our home that I didn't understand at the time, including the meaning and consequences of his diagnosis.

But there came a point when I understood something else: I had a child to protect...

I shot at my husband three times. The gun was empty. He had emptied the clip before I fired, and I didn't know it. I believed I had a loaded gun in my hand. I pulled the trigger three times.

No one was shot. But I beat him with his gun because I had reached a point where I believed he had brought me to the place of having to take his life.

I wasn't supposed to be in that position.

I wasn't supposed to have to make that choice.

But I was there.

And I made choices that I have to own.

That doesn't mean nothing happened.

I was hospitalized several times after having what was described as a nervous breakdown. I was eventually institutionalized after the shooting for attempted murder.

Those are facts about my life that I have carried for years.

I don't tell this story to make myself the victim. I don't tell it to make what I did or who I've become acceptable. And I don't tell it because the gun was empty, as if that somehow makes the decision to pull the trigger three times insignificant.

It doesn't. I was capable of causing serious harm. I also know what it means to be harmed. Both things are true.

I shut down their reign over my family's life. But I was too late. We were going through a divorce when he had his third stroke while driving. He crashed, broke his neck and was paralyzed from the neck down. He lived that way for three more years before he died.

His PTSD was real. So was the abuse. My son's experience was real. The damage is real. And so was my decision that it would end with me.

I'm not proud of that marriage. But I lived that life for almost 20 years! My children lived it.

I couldn't save him. I couldn't undo what happened to us. But I could protect my family. And I did the best that I could while up against an army. No one walked away unscathed. No one!

When everything was said and done, I took the policy money he left behind. I published my books. I built this publication. I invested what he left me into this work.

My marriage explains why veterans became personal to me. It doesn't explain why I started this magazine. And you still won't accept me. Or perhaps you will. Yet, when you question whether I belong at this table, understand something...

I am curious. I want to understand. I want to experience you from your lens. I want to share your military life: who you were before you enlisted, who you had to become while serving, and how your military experience carried over into your civilian life. Why?

I'm the dishonored woman who survived a veteran. That's me. That's who I am in this veteran space. And I love every bit of this journey to discover in you what I never experienced in being so close the veteran that took me as his wife.

I'm a mother who lived through the consequences of a veteran's trauma, while also confronting the abuse that happened inside our home. I know what it means to sit across from a veteran and hear something painful without immediately judging the person who is telling me.

I also know what it means to recognize that someone's pain does not give them permission to inflict pain on somebody else.

I couldn't save him. But I saved what I could. I saved myself and the son I had with my husband. Ultimately, the end resulted in a different kind of casualty.

His mother lost her son to his mortality. I lost mine to shattered identity, estrangement and the cycle of the very traumas we survived. All of us. This was a war where there were no victors. We all lost. There were no victors.

Now I sit across from other veterans and ask them questions I didn't know how to ask then. I listen. I let them tell me who they became through their military experiences. And I make sure their stories exists in this publication.

I claimed a seat at a table that wasn't offered to me. You didn't invite me. I sat down anyway. I asked the questions. I listened to the answers. I published what I heard.

And some shunned me for it. So, I'm getting up from your table, and I'm making my own.

I don't mind eating alone. If a veteran wants to stop by, we'll talk. If a supporter wants to sit down, there's a chair. If someone has a story they want remembered, I'll listen.

Maybe that's what this was always supposed to be. Not proving that I belong at your table. Building one of my own.

I'm a writer. I listen. I ask. I publish. That's my job. That's the work. That's the mission.

And I'm not asking for permission to carry it out to the end.