Eric Greitens Quotes

What happens for a lot of veterans when they come home, especially when they get back to their community is that they can go to a very tough and hard place and they start to wonder, 'What's next for me?' and they ask themselves, 'Why did this happen to me?'

Much as soldiers come back, they've been in combat or the edge of it and suddenly that adjustment back to civilian life is a real challenge.

The military is a discrete entity. Then they come back, and they're such a small percentage of the population, and they can't really - it's hard for them to talk to civilians.

I know from personal experience the issues veterans are facing, issues around PTSD, making sure our military officers and enlisted can transition to new careers.

These are things that we hear from military families everywhere we go. But it - on PTSD, the thing that I want to make sure people understand is that the vast majority of veterans and military families aren't dealing with any kind of mental health. But there are - these are what are called the invisible wounds of this war. And many times they don't present.

It's hard for people sometimes to relate to me. They weren't in the military, they weren't injured overseas in Iraq, they weren't burned, they didn't go through 33 surgeries, or two and a half years in the hospital.

I just felt from personal observation that there is nothing more dislocated or alienated than a lifelong military person trying to cope in civilian life. It's like two completely separate planets.

The thing is, a lot of our vets come home and they feel displaced, and they don't feel like their voice matters, so for me to be a spokesman and have that honor to educate America about who we are and what we are, it's like I'm doing my job.

I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.

Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

Please God, I'll never be in a war zone, but everything I sort of know about people who come back is that it's a hard transition to make. I mean, even if you've not been in a war, even if you've just been in the Forces, you come back and probably have more fights in civilian life.

It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.

After I was discharged from the military, it was difficult trying to become a civilian.

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

World War II affected the male population in a very detrimental way. They were happy to be home, happy to be alive, happy they won, but they could not express to anybody the horror they had been through.

I want people to take the initiative to find veterans that need help, veterans that are suffering and in need of assistance reintegrating from combat back into society, into normal family lives and jobs. We need to take a real 'boots on the ground' approach to helping veterans in need.

There was a huge, tremendous amount of disabled veterans and the Veteran's Administration just wasn't geared up for it. I know for a fact that it's getting better and better.

Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it.

I believe that the issue of mental health services for our troops deploying or returning from combat is one that demands the attention of this body, if only for a few minutes today.

I'd like people to listen to our soldiers. They were there. They heard the alarms go off. They tasted the substance in the air. They spit up blood. They had rashes on their bodies. They got sick.

Here in Israel, we want the boys back home, we demand it from our government, who often pay a steep price to get hostages back. But we need a happy ending. We don't want to deal with those days after release, their post-trauma or reintroduction to society. Yet coming home is only the start of their journey.

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

The University of Southern California has a wonderful social work department, and I was thrilled to find out that they have a whole veterans' initiative program there. They approached me, and I set up a scholarship that would go to a military-oriented person to learn techniques and skills to better help veterans.

I am also deeply concerned with the widespread, often undiagnosed, incidents of PTSD and the alarming suicide rates amongst our returning soldiers.

For many of the brave men and women who have fought on the front lines, returning home means trying to navigate a complicated and bureaucratic Veterans Administration benefits system.