I like the way you think.

RG:

Best of luck moving forward; heck, you cannot move back.

I hope you’re getting sufficient support from the VA. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder causes visible changes in the brain, you can see them in MRI scans.

So these feelings are not you: they’re caused by some neurology that’s gone awry. Neurology that is plastic to some degree, and can be corrected with the right therapeutic intervention. Often just time.. and that may be decades. Often just knowing someone gives a damn about you, someone who shows some understanding, can help you heal yourself. Medication to re-balance the neurotransmitters can also help, like a splint on a broken leg.

You hurt because you were in a position where people just like you were trying to kill you, and you had to kill them. And because people like me do our darnedest to make sure that it’s *not* a fair fight, that the guys and gals depending on us have the best systems we can think of, you massacred them. As we intended you should.

Please put the blame where it lies. And because we are not perfect, we are not godlike, sometimes the boys and girls who depend on us die horrible deaths. We know that, it’s a thought that’s with us decades later. So we try to do better the next time.

And if that doesn’t work… try something that I do. On a clear night, look up at the stars. Reflect that each of those tiny points of light is actually a vast ball of gas, more vast than you can imagine, burning matter into energy. And that they were there long before you or anyone you have ever heard of existed. That they will be there long after everything you know has turned to dust. Reflect on just how little even great tragedies matter in the grand scheme of things. How insignificant all our concerns are!

Now look again, and realise that every atom in your body has been created by mighty stars like those dying: it took one star dying to make the elements lower than iron, and then a Supernova, an exploding star, to twice-bake every atom of phosphorus, or calcium, or magnesium, or any of the dozens of other elements in your body. Not one, but two stars died to make you.

Then realise that each star you see generated photons, often many thousands of years ago, just so your eyeball could detect them on this one night. You are special, something rare and wonderful in the Universe.

It works for me.