[B]URLINGTON — A first-of-its-kind Veterans Town Hall in Burlington on Sunday drew a dozen speakers from the local veterans community and more than 50 audience members.
The event was billed as an opportunity for veterans to speak and members of the communities they served to listen. Organizers said attendees were not permitted to ask questions. Members of the press were asked to be unobtrusive and make information public only with the consent of the speaker, despite the event being held in Burlington City Hall.
The aim of these measures was to create a safe place for veterans to be heard by their broader communities.
Veterans town halls were envisaged by battlefield author Sebastian Junger as a way to “return the experience of war to our entire nation, rather than just leaving it to the people who fought.”
The first such gathering was held in 2015 in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Sunday’s was the first in Vermont.
The dozen stories shared by local veterans included:
Kyle Aines joined the military shortly after graduating from high school in 2002. He worked that summer as a stonemason, and though he liked the work he did not want to be broken by it as he saw the older men beside him were. “I just saw these older men — 40s, 50s — and they had all sorts of physical problems, just from lifting all this concrete, all these rocks and bricks all day, every day,” said Aines. “I was like, I don’t want to be broken by that age.”
Aines signed up with the Army the following year. He would have new experiences, meet new people, and it was honorable. “I thought, I can’t just go out with a rifle and start shooting people. I hadn’t even hunted at that point,” said Aines. He decided to become a medic.
He first gained experience in an Army emergency room in the United States before being deployed with a line unit fighting in Iraq. His work became more intimate there. “You know the people that you potentially work on. You’re their friend, confidante, brother, sister, and it’s very different to work and try to save that life of somebody that you know,” said Aines.
The unit formed a close bond, and Aines was hit hard when six soldiers in his unit were killed in an ambush in 2007. The unit had gone out on a rescue mission to recover the crew of a downed Apache helicopter, but Aines was left to watch the prisoners at base. “The truck that was hit was the only one that didn’t have a medic in it,” said Aines. He wondered whose life would have been saved if he had been there.
Eventually the trauma of the war zone made Aines doubt he would leave it alive. “I knew I was going to die there.” Aines said the certainty he would die helped calm him. “It kind of helped me throughout the rest of the deployment — to not be scared anymore,” said Aines, “but it didn’t help me when I came back.”
The struggle to reintegrate into society after returning from deployment was a theme among the speakers at Sunday’s gathering.
Aines had nightmares every night and difficulty expressing emotion once he returned to civilian life. “I would get drunk, and I would get drunk to feel something. Not to try to block something out, but to cry, to feel feelings again,” said Aines.
He was able to get needed help, and he attributes his healing to therapy, but particularly to the work he has done with other veterans. Despite difficulty, Aines said he values his experience and wouldn’t discourage anyone from joining the military. “All the vets I’ve ever talked to say the same thing. Wouldn’t change a thing,” said Aines.
He now works as the veterans and military resource adviser at the Community College of Vermont.
Jon Turner, who served four years with the Marine Corps in Haiti and Iraq, said contact with other veterans has helped him find a sense of place and purpose that eluded him for years after he returned from deployment.
Like Aines, Turner said that in Iraq he “had reached that point where the inevitable truth of death was far too close” and became emotionally withdrawn from a society he believed could not understand his experience. Turner said it was difficult to “come home to a culture, to a society, to a body of people who don’t truly understand what it means for young men and women to go off and fight in conflict at a very young age.”
“For the last 10 years I’ve been trying to feel something,” said Turner.
Turner said organizations that involve veterans in the community have been helpful for his and other veterans’ transition back to civilian life. “We’ve done some amazing work between Project Healing Waters and Vermont Adaptive and the Burlington Lakeside Clinic and the Farmer Veteran Coalition,” said Turner, listing some of the organizations.
He said the best way for civilians to help a veteran is “not to thank someone for their service” but to “listen to the things that they have to say and do what you can without judgment, without fear or worry, but with confidence and courage in your ability to love one another regardless of their experience or their belief.”
Turner is now the outings leader for Sierra Club Military Outdoors and founded the Vermont chapter of the Farmer Veteran Coalition.
Maureen Dwyer served as a nurse in Vietnam between 1967 and 1970. While pursuing a bachelor’s degree in nursing in the late 1960s, Dwyer decided to join the war effort as a nurse after seeing her friends and peers drafted. “Everyone I know is being drafted. Somebody has to take care of these wounded in the hospital — why not me?” said Dwyer, explaining the reasoning that led her to sign on.
“I elected to have the Army pay for my senior year of college, and then I owed two years of service,” she said.
Dwyer quickly made rank and was soon made the head nurse of the psychiatric unit at Fort Knox in Kentucky. She was 22. “I actually really loved doing that work,” said Dwyer, but still owing a year of service, orders came down that she was to go to Vietnam.
Dwyer was assigned to a hospital where doctors and nurses treated endless wounded for 12-hour shifts. “We had an operating room around the clock, and surgery going around the clock, and fresh trauma coming in every day and night,” said Dwyer.
They treated general infantry, American allies, Vietnamese civilians, North Vietnamese Army, Viet Cong and Koreans. “We took care of them all,” said Dwyer.
“You also loved your patients there because there was nobody else. Many of them, I would be the last one they would see,” said Dwyer.
“He was wide-eyed, he was frightened,” said Dwyer, recalling one patient whose memory has stayed with her. He was a young boy who had come in with frag wounds. Dwyer was his nurse, and when he unexpectedly went into cardiac arrest he called for her. “He was calling out my name, and he died in my arms,” said Dwyer.
Dwyer had little time to mourn individual patients. “There were always more patients to see, more burn wounds to change, and we never really had a chance to deal with our feelings. There was always another patient to go to,” said Dwyer.
“They were incredible heroes, and the Vietnamese patients were as well, in that they loved their children who were burned by napalm, who we took care of. They were parents. They were soldiers. And I look forward to the day when we have better ways of solving problems. Whoever the enemy and the victor are, it’s all humanity,” said Dwyer.