'A dog that's been beat too much': Try to feel what America's veterans have experienced

“I’ve never seen one history book that tells how anybody feels,” Bob Dylan said in 1963.

This Veterans Day, we are not involved in a major war for the first time in two decades. We should give thanks. But we also should take care to internalize what veterans who live and work among us have gone through and continue to go through.  

It’s unfortunate that we have not done what Iraq War veteran Phil Klay urged us to do seven years ago – to use our experiences of suffering to feel what service members have experienced.

All of us have suffered in our own lives. Our trauma may not be as deep or wide as those of veterans who have experienced the pain of soldiers and civilians harmed in war. But, as Klay emphasized, we can imagine and extrapolate from our own suffering to get a sense of what veterans endured.

If we take in what veterans are saying and how they say it, we can develop empathy through our common humanity. To deny that we can understand what they went through is to insulate ourselves from their suffering.  

Selfishness is one motive, even if subconscious, for our all-volunteer armed forces. Retired career U.S. Army officers Andrew Bacevich and Dennis Laich have argued separately that our all-volunteer military makes citizens less likely to oppose the kinds of long, unwinnable wars we keep fighting. Our loved ones are safe. We “have no skin in the game.”