Coming Home
I came back from Vietnam carrying something I hadn't left with: a profound gratitude for the country I'd been defending.
When I came home from Vietnam, I brought something back with me that I had not carried over: a profound appreciation for this country and for the freedoms we so often take for granted. The freedoms had not changed while I was gone. I had.
The ordinary things looked different after that. A quiet street. A flag on a porch. The simple, unremarkable fact of being able to disagree out loud and not be afraid. Things I had walked past my whole life suddenly looked like the answer to a question I had been asking on the other side of the world.
I channeled that gratitude into building a life. Into businesses, into family, into work, and eventually into songs and stories. I did not have the words for all of it right away. It takes a while to understand what you have lived through. Some of it I am still understanding, and writing is how I do it.
“The freedoms had not changed while I was gone. I had.”
Every veteran comes home changed. We do not all talk about it the same way, and a lot of us did not talk about it at all for a very long time. That silence is part of why I write now. If a song or a few honest sentences can help one person feel less alone with what they carried home, then it was worth writing.
You do not come home from a war the same man who left. You come home knowing exactly what the word home is worth, and spending the rest of your life trying to be worthy of it.
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