Like a few million other living Americans, I fought a war.

I'm not mentally scarred or broken by what I experienced. I don't get scared by loud noises or freak out for no reason. I'm not disabled, or PTSD'd, or having difficulty reintegrating with society. I get along just fine. There just isn't any way around the fact that I'm different from anyone that hasn't fought a war.

The first time I came home, I thought I might be broken. I thought that maybe I was injured and I needed to get better. I thought this because that's what professional people told me to believe. I tried to talk with them, and they encouraged me to explain what I was thinking and feeling, but they couldn't seem to relate. They couldn't understand, and so their advice was all wrong. They always tried to get me to go back to what I used to be like, but it felt like trying to unlearn how to walk. I understand why so many of my Brothers and Sisters can't seem to reintegrate, the trust they place in "professionals" is the root cause.

The only people that ever understood were others like myself, those who had similar experiences. I recognized a deeper truth as I thought more about it: I wasn't broken, but I had changed. I had grown. I had firsthand knowledge that most people, even very professional people, simply did not have. I remembered something I had read once, some piece of scripture which mentioned "secret knowledge". Suddenly I knew that we had it, every one of us that had fought had some bit of that secret knowledge.

We're not broken, we're evolved. We're evolved, and that's scary to those who aren't.