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Coming Home (Part 1)
57 Plays1 year ago
In this first half of a two-part episode, Ray chats with Todd Shelton and Jordan Hansen whose reflections on their military service shed light on the experience of coming home.
Host: Ray Haberski
Guests: Todd Shelton and Jordan Hansen
Audio Engineers: Jason M. Kelly and Kelly Kerr
- Vietnam Echoes | Coming Home. PBS, 2017. https://www.pbs.org/video/coming-home-fpwmje/.
- Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674979840
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Transcript
Intro to Podcast and Themes
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Justice and War in American History podcast. I'm Jason Kelly. And I'm Ray Habersky. War has long been an indelible part of America's story, shaping national identity, values and principles. The experience of war has transformed the lives of each generation. And because of this, it has historically elicited impassioned debates and conflicting perspectives.
War's Impact on American Identity
00:00:28
Speaker
This podcast aims to explore this history by bringing together a diverse range of voices, veterans, active service members, citizens and scholars. Through our conversations, we will consider the ways in which war has shaped and reshaped notions of justice. In the process, we will engage with broad themes such as duty, heroism, suffering, loyalty and patriotism.
Comparison of Historic Wars
00:00:50
Speaker
Our broad framework during this season is to compare and contrast the histories of the Spanish-American
00:00:56
Speaker
Philippine-American and Vietnam wars, wars that had a profound effect on the people of the United States. The National Endowment for the Humanities has generously provided funding for this project, making it possible to have conversations about the effects of war on American veterans, their families, and the generations who bear witness to conflict.
Focus on Soldiers' Return
00:01:16
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of Justice and War in American History. Today's episode is Coming Home.
00:01:23
Speaker
So many American movies have been made about soldiers who return home from war. And I think for many of us who have never served, never been in war, this is a topic that is charged, frankly. It has a lot of sentimental value sort of baked into it in popular culture, but is rarely sort of talked about in real terms.
00:01:46
Speaker
I mean, I think many of us know the movies that we might think about, including the movie Coming Home from the 1970s or Best Years of Our Lives in the 1940s. But I got a chance to sit down with some of the vets that we've been talking to in many of these podcasts to talk through what it was like to return home from any kind of service that they had done and why their experiences, each of them, were different from each other.
Veterans' Personal Experiences
00:02:10
Speaker
And what that sort of tells us about the expectations they had going into the service, into war, and how they had to translate that experience for the people back home once they were stateside more permanently. So it was a really interesting conversation. I think this is one of the most personal episodes that we have in the podcast, and I really enjoyed it.
00:02:33
Speaker
This episode is called Coming Home. Today we have four people who will be talking to. We have two people right now I want to introduce themselves. Jordan, why don't you start? Okay. My name is Jordan Hanson. I am currently a student at IUPUI studying to be a social studies history of sorts, maybe professor someday.
00:02:55
Speaker
and I served in the Army for five years as a 31 Bravo military police officer. I'm currently serving in the Indiana Air National Guard doing security forces, so similar role, just different title. I served overseas, was on a search and rescue team, recently was deployed to the Middle East, got some experience over there doing some police work and overall base security. Good. All right, Todd?
00:03:20
Speaker
Yeah. Hi, I'm Todd Shelton. Uh, currently I am a lecturer in the media arts and science program in the long named Luddy school of informatics. I'll just leave it at that. Right. Um, yeah, that just got renamed. Um, and then, you know, I spent three and a half years in the army as well. I started off as an IT person 25 Bravo, and then transitioned over to an 18 echo, which is a special forces communication. So.
00:03:45
Speaker
All right, so this episode is about coming home. So we're actually going to, instead of going back into your military past and your experiences overseas or basic training or anything like that, we'd like to talk about the memories that you have of the transition from whatever service you did to coming home sort of for good,
The Complexity of Returning Home
00:04:05
Speaker
right? Whatever transition into somewhat civilian life you had.
00:04:09
Speaker
This is a pretty important and common story that we focus on when we talk about war in America. So usually the pageantry of going into war is fairly simplistic. We focus on patriotism and things like that. Fighting of the war.
00:04:28
Speaker
We can talk about justification, the details of what it's like to be overseas, to be faced with the kind of crises that soldiers encounter. But coming home always seems to be very ambiguous, that it's a very personal story. There does not, at least to me and the stuff that I've read,
00:04:49
Speaker
It doesn't seem to be a simple common way for soldiers to transition out of being in some sort of real service to whatever comes next. So there are multiple ways to get into this. Some of the most famous movies about war try to tackle this issue.
00:05:10
Speaker
The Best Years of Our Lives maybe was perhaps one of the most famous, came out in 1946. It was based on a number of articles that were published in Life Magazine and Time Magazine. The movie at least focused on three soldiers, each one with very different experiences of coming home. One was a disabled vet, one was sort of upper middle class, he was an executive at a bank, and the other one was
00:05:37
Speaker
teetering on alcoholism and had lost his fiancée while he was away. I think often we see them, those sorts of characters as archetypes, but of course, even within the movie itself, you could see that there were lots of ambiguities within their own
Veterans' Emotional Challenges
00:05:55
Speaker
stories.
00:05:55
Speaker
So if you guys would be willing to share a bit more about what it was like to come home or what that meant to you when or even when you Realized that that transition was going to happen. I think we'd make for an interesting podcast So Jordan, I'm gonna ask you to go first if that's okay. Sure. Okay
00:06:14
Speaker
Uh, my experience has been a little different based on the fact that I am in the garden. So there's that kind of citizen soldier aspect where I'm continuing to serve. Um, the, I guess biggest experience for me in coming home was this most recent deployment. Um, and that transitioned back to my going from an active duty life to back to guard where I'm, you know, one week in a month or, uh, just kind of always ready to be called upon. Um, but it was very much.
00:06:45
Speaker
It was difficult in the fact that there is this patriotism that exists in our country, so I had a very great welcoming home. My entire family basically packed out the Indianapolis airport and welcomed me, and it was wonderful. It was amazing. But there's this feeling of
00:07:01
Speaker
of guilt because i have i don't feel like i've done enough or that i that i had done anything of substantial value um so that was a very difficult portion of me because i you know you see especially through the war in iraq afghanistan that there's these horrible things have happened and obviously there's
00:07:21
Speaker
Um, lots of people coming home, not fully themselves, disabled, you know, what have you. And you know, I was in the middle East, but I was watching the base. I was working out. I wasn't doing a whole lot. So there's this kind of lingering guilt that I didn't do enough.
00:07:37
Speaker
So that's kind of been my experience. I think as a general whole, the country has kind of rebounded from this, you know, when we talk about Vietnam and the chance of people to not have a good coming home, now we're on the opposite where everyone's thanked for their service and welcomed. And that does, if you haven't.
00:07:57
Speaker
if you haven't given a huge sacrifice, or at least what feels like a huge sacrifice, then you do kind of have
Military Experiences and Civilian Life
00:08:04
Speaker
that lingering guilt. And I know this of a lot of people, especially those that serve in the Guard, that we do have this time where we go, but we're still kind of expected to be that civilian also. So yeah, that's kind of been the biggest point of my experience. And it's something I still kind of battle with, because my stepdad was in the Army Guard for 22 years. He had multiple deployments. He got injured.
00:08:26
Speaker
And he lived this role very well of that citizen soldier and always wanted to give back. And so there's this part of me that feels like I need to be doing more, especially when you see the sacrifice of other people. I mean, it is interesting that one of the characteristics for you is this idea of guilt, which means that somebody somewhere has made you feel like you owe something.
00:08:49
Speaker
to something bigger. Maybe we can talk a bit more about that as we get into historical context for the idea of coming home. But I appreciate, you know, the sort of the personal reflection you have there. Ton, how about you?
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, so I would almost have to agree with Jordan here. I do feel that guilt, you know, so just going back through me coming home, I started off in the guard and then went active duty. And it was in Korea and then Germany for a hot second and came back to the States when training and stuff.
00:09:22
Speaker
ended up getting hurt and getting out and you know I didn't feel like I fulfilled everything that I wanted to you know in there even though I did a lot you know in that short amount of time it was like man you know
00:09:36
Speaker
I left something out there. And it was a hard decision for me to actually get out. And the surgeon was like, you know, hey, we got people coming home with no legs. Right. You know, if
Camaraderie and Civilian Adjustment
00:09:49
Speaker
we have to put, you know, one more surgery on, you're never going to be able to walk right again. You know, you need to think about that. You know, I was a little older. And I think when I got out, I was, I felt that guilt, you know, and you kind of live with that. And I thought about that for a little bit. And
00:10:06
Speaker
And I think it's because we looked at Vietnam a long time ago and how much stuff happened to all those soldiers that came back. And then I think that puts something on us. Like we saw how much they did and how much they went through, you know, and we felt like, man, I was nowhere even close to that. You know, and I still have a lot of, you know, my dad's friends, of course, you know, that still living with that stuff, you know, and the PTSD and, and all that kind of,
00:10:34
Speaker
You know hatred from Vietnam, you know, so I would have to agree with you
00:10:42
Speaker
And, you know, it was funny because people was like, you know, do you really have PTSD or do you really have that? And it was like, you know, some of that I can live with. I just felt guilty. And sometimes I just felt lost, like the brotherhood for me. You know, when you're surrounded by 16 or 20 guys, you know, all the time. All the time. And that's what you live with. And all of a sudden you come home,
00:11:07
Speaker
And what's really strange is even though I was only gone for total, even after basic and all of that, you know, for four years, all those people you knew before that, even, you know, and I was older when I went in, they just disappear and you come home and it's like, you don't have that best friend anymore. You know, you still talk to him, but it's not that connection you had before you left. And it's like, I'm starting over and I don't have that brotherhood.
00:11:34
Speaker
And I say brotherhood, but it could be females, it could be anybody, right? But that's what we called it. For me, coming out of my training and all of that, for that 18 Echo, that was a brotherhood to us. And to me, I struggled with that a little bit.
00:11:49
Speaker
It's definitely a transition and when you're serving in any capacity and you're going through and you look to your left and right, you generally believe that these people would die for you. When you're in the grocery store, when you're doing whatever, you look to the left and right, it's like people are, you don't want to make characteristic or characterizations, but generally selfish or whatever.
00:12:13
Speaker
I'm not expecting anybody to do what my brothers have done for me. So yeah, I get that.
Memorializing Military Experiences
00:12:21
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, part of what is interesting for me in this sort of series is I have never served. I've never thought about it. But I write a lot about the debate that the rest of America has about wars and how they
00:12:40
Speaker
view generally what soldiers do, what decisions that put soldiers in harm's way or put them in positions to kill and die for people that they do not know, the people in the grocery stores. When I teach courses about American history, one of the best ways to get students to start talking is to show them things from popular culture where people have tried to characterize whatever the experience of war is.
00:13:09
Speaker
Certainly one of the most evocative ways to get students talking is to think through the coming home experience because this is where both the soldiers have to make the transition back to something that is supposed to be familiar, but is now foreign. Right. I'm thinking of, you know, the scenes in Hurt Locker where the guys in the grocery store is like, what the, what am I doing here? You know, I'd rather be back trying to diffuse bombs and cars, you know, in Iraq for somebody in the theater watching it. Like, why?
00:13:38
Speaker
You know, it's, it's difficult to express the, the simplicity I think of combat or of, um, there's a lot of nuance to it, but the, uh, I explained this whenever I'm talking to somebody getting ready to go to basic training, like you will never have an easier time in your life. You're told what to wear, what time you're getting up, where you need
00:13:57
Speaker
to be, your foods, like everything is laid out completely for you. And it's similar when you're overseas, you know exactly what the mission is all the time. When you come home, what's your mission? And that's part of the issue that people have with coming home in general and transitioning back to that civilian life and people deal with the PTSD because they lose that mission component. Yeah.
00:14:22
Speaker
Yeah, so, you know, again, I mentioned I was a little older. So, I was in my 30s when I joined. So, I used to literally, you know, an older and more mature and going in through basic. I mean, I had the understanding of, you know what, I can only do so much. You know what I mean? So, I kind of had that where you had the 18 year olds just coming out, you know, and I worried about them. I honestly thought about them all the time.
00:14:43
Speaker
even if they weren't at war or whatever, just coming out. I was thinking, they're giving everything. Some of these have never experienced life. And all of a sudden, now they have housing for free. Now they can eat for free. Now they know where they're going home. You know what I mean? So it's like, how do they deal with that after four or five or six years or whatever they enlisted for, or they stay for retirement? Because even later, even if you get your housing income,
00:15:11
Speaker
you know, you're still getting that income for housing and all of a sudden you get out. You mean I have to pay $2,000 for a mortgage? Where does that go? You know, now you got to worry about your job, how much you're making. And that's a difficult transition for anybody. And just, that's just taking the war part out of it. And then when you add that on top of that,
00:15:29
Speaker
distress level to me, I think, would send anybody into a mental, you know, spiral. Yeah, spiral. I actually think this is a fascinating aspect of coming home that we don't talk about. Again, we sort of simplify the story, because we look back at moments that have some sort of collective memory in them.
00:15:53
Speaker
it's how vietnam vests were treated it's how world war two had you know vets had to create parades it was the celebration after the end of world war one it's very
Historical Narratives of Return
00:16:02
Speaker
ambiguous way that that soldiers were reintroduced to the communities after the spanish-american war some
00:16:10
Speaker
spent six months in Cuba and came back as absolute heroes. Others spent two or three years in the Philippines, you know, many coming back with terrible diseases. So I think this idea that that moment of transition
00:16:26
Speaker
in one sense, is something that, rightfully or wrongly, we actually remember in certain ways. It's much more complicated how Vietnam vets were treated when they got back. There's been a lot of good historical research about the myth of this or that.
00:16:45
Speaker
But much more serious is what both of you are talking about. It's the day after, it's the week after, it's the year after. What exactly have you been doing since you got back, since you came home? You know, since you spent whatever, it could be a year or two, three years, it doesn't matter, right? But if you're 18 years old, and for two years, everything's been provided for you, and you're back now as a civilian, or even in the guard, but you have to make it on your own. What does that look like?
00:17:13
Speaker
Well, and what you do with the feelings that you have about that, that's one thing.
Survivor's Guilt and Close Calls
00:17:19
Speaker
I have two direct examples that are almost the same, but two completely different paths. One friend won't say any names, but he came home on leave during a deployment in Afghanistan, and I believe it's Afghanistan, and when he was home, the convoy, the seat that he was supposed to be in,
00:17:39
Speaker
they got RPG'd and the guy that was in his seat covering his spot died and so he was only home on on leave and then had you know went back to his unit and and now he has that kind of feeling for the rest of his life like the person that was in that seat died and that was supposed to be Mia and
00:17:59
Speaker
And he struggles with that in a monumental way, lots of issues. But then there's another one that I've read a book that's actually called In My Seat that talks about one of the pilots on 9-11 who his flight assignment got changed that morning. He was supposed to be piloting one of the planes that went into the World Trade Center. And now he's reflected on that and kind of changed, I mean, that changed the trajectory of his life. It's these moments in coming home,
00:18:30
Speaker
wasn't actually anywhere but do you still have that moment of realization like I could have never come home and now I am and what do I do with that right I mean listen when you get deployed when you're sent overseas on behalf of the United States as a soldier right the
00:18:50
Speaker
there's a possibility that you're going to be placed in some sort of cross-airs or some sort of dangerous situation, unlike the other 99% of the population.
Draft vs Voluntary Service
00:19:01
Speaker
I mean, this is one of the things that does distinguish the generations that you guys are part of the service from a generation like the Vietnam generation, where guys were drafted into the service. They didn't volunteer.
00:19:14
Speaker
The idea of guilt may be different for some of them. Maybe it's luck, maybe it's fortune that they got out and didn't get hurt or killed or see one of their friends get killed. But for you guys, it is a different, it's a professional army, professional service. And that happened because of Vietnam in many ways, right? We didn't want to go back to that sort of manufactured moments of
00:19:43
Speaker
forcing civilians into the service and then having to have an obligation to do something about them when they got out. I mean, you guys signed up knowing that this was for perhaps for life. I wonder about that as well.
Service Mindset in Civilian Life
00:20:01
Speaker
When you come out of the service, you had volunteered to go into it. Do you ever leave it? I mean, you volunteered to do it to begin with. Does that feeling ever stop?
00:20:14
Speaker
Man, that's a hard, for me, I think it just depends on the person. I think in how much they want to forget about it, or what situation they were probably put in. For me, I really miss the brotherhood of it.
00:20:30
Speaker
for a lot of it you know you always see these ads on the you know on the tv where you know they're coming up out of the water yeah right right that's cool that stuff doesn't happen right i mean how many cq duties did i pull and it's just like what this was never in my contract you know and you know and you think and i don't want to forget i don't want to remember that you know those are but it's the brotherhood for me yeah where a lot of other people i got friends that just go i never want to think about that again i never want to you know that i just if i could get rid of that part of my life i would
00:20:59
Speaker
And, you know, I and again, Jordan, you probably had a different experience. But for me, I mean, I missed that part. Yeah, I wish I could go back to that. Yeah, there's aspects that I miss, but I'm, I'm a lot in that second camp where I'm, I've kind of been my perspective of the military of the United States system as a whole has kind of changed where I'm, you know, I think why a lot and
00:21:25
Speaker
I question the decisions that whoever is making makes on why we're sending people where we do.
Veteran Bonds and Civilian Understanding
00:21:33
Speaker
I mean, there is this assumption that civilians like me have, right? That once you've been in the service, you look at each other, those who have in a different way. Like you're part of a club in some ways the best possible way that we will never be part of, you know? And again, when I teach about World War II and I look at the best years for our lives, there are some scenes in that movie that I find very revealing, right? When the vets get together,
00:22:02
Speaker
in sort of pivotal scenes in the movie, they know which each other is thinking. Like they have an analysis of corrupt bureaucracies or what civilians don't understand or the idea of loyalty or all the price that so many of them had to pay and the guys who did not come back. There's that type of that sort of culture
00:22:26
Speaker
of brotherhood or of service or solidarity, I don't know if we can manufacture it almost any other way. I mean, now that you're in stateside and, you know, more or less, right, is there anything comparable to it outside of the military?
Changed Perspectives Post-Service
00:22:46
Speaker
I don't think so. I think that one of the things you just hit on, you know what the other person is thinking, and it reflects back to that brotherhood that you do have that, and you have people that disagree with each other on almost every level imaginable, any context you can think of, but they would still give the ultimate sacrifice for that person. And I don't think you can manufacture that.
00:23:16
Speaker
agreed 100% with what you were saying I think about how much my perspective has changed and like you said civilians that it's easy for them to make an assumption right or an opinion of something and say oh that's war is bad or you know until you go over there and see some of the stuff that the way that these other civilians are done in these other countries and how they're treated and and it's like
00:23:41
Speaker
You don't know. Like, you don't know how bad it really is. Or you don't know how this child, you know, it's easy for you to sit here and make an assumption of what's right and what's wrong. And you know, and I do agree with you. You answer, you ask yourself why.
00:24:00
Speaker
A lot. And then you hear a lot of this bickering the news, you know, and you're like, really, we're fighting over this. We're arguing over this when, you know, my buddy just got, you know, killed, you know, or, or whatever. And here I am a home, you know.
00:24:17
Speaker
I think about that often with the age of technology and information that we can see anything and everything, but you still don't have this, like there's still not the same on the ground grasp of what's going on in other people's lives. I think it's better now. It is, and there's different channels to where people can get more experience that maybe military gets, but not in the same way where, I mean,
00:24:43
Speaker
if you're on the ground giving clean water to somebody that's never had clean water, you know, stuff like that, that it's hard to replicate. I mean, actually, I want to ask one more question to the two of you. I'm curious about whether or not you developed a different kind of empathy after being in the service. So when you came back to wherever you came back to, did you see things differently, whatever it meant, whatever it's a danger mentor,
00:25:11
Speaker
or want or need or sort of the idea of helping people. Was there something that changed in how you looked at other people here in the United States after being away?
00:25:30
Speaker
That's difficult. That is a difficult question. I would say that, for me, I saw a lot more. I didn't worry about danger as much, because you feel like you should be safe here. So that part of me didn't worry about it. But it was just how ungrateful a lot of people were, just on a daily basis. And I'm just basing this on what I saw in other countries.
00:25:57
Speaker
You know, I mean, of course, Germany is still I mean, it's a great country, but even in just places in Korea, South Korea that I, you know, you just think about, man, there's just kids just that we would never treat like that, you know,
Importance of Connections After Service
00:26:10
Speaker
and over there. And then some of the other countries I went to, and you're like, wow, you know,
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, I have empathy more for that. Okay. For the children part of things. Because to me, I think an adult has a choice. You should have, you know, you can think better, you're more mature, and that kind of thing. But for me, it was the children. Yeah. Okay. I think for me, the connections is what I really changed my thinking of my connection with other people. Because
00:26:38
Speaker
where I was at was, it was a very large base, lots of moving pieces. It was easy to get lost in the base and in the functions. And my job, I did interact with other people, but often I was in supervisory roles where I was checking on multiple people or I was working by myself. So, I mean, there was times where I was in packed rooms and felt completely alone.
00:27:03
Speaker
And so the connection aspect really shifted for me to where I, when I came home, I was much more intentional about, you know, time with my daughter, time with my wife, time with my friends. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you both. It was really a great conversation. We will, of course, be talking to you again on a future episode. But thanks again. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.
Conclusion and Future Resources
00:27:28
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Justice and War in American History. Please stay tuned for our next episode, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or through any of your favorite podcast providers. Please be sure to rate the podcast and to be in touch with us if you have any questions or feedback. You can find more information about this podcast and the broader justice and war project at justiceandwarseminar.org.
00:27:52
Speaker
If you are a Veteran or concerned about a Veteran who is experiencing a mental health crisis, there is 24-hour support through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Dial 988- impress1 or text at 838-255. For more information on support from the VA, visit mentalhealth.va.gov. And, as always, special thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for making this project possible.