Soldier’s Heart Veteran Return Retreat

A young Marine sniper is asked by someone how old he is."How old am I?" he replies."I am 2 combat deployments, 47 dead friends, a handful of confirmed kills, one year of college and 24 years old. You'll have to add all of that stuff up"

Also remember that in any man’s dark hour, a pat on the back and an earnest handclasp may work a small miracle.

“… My wife and I would fight day in and day out & I would yell at my children or try to avoid them as much as I could. This went on for three years before I knew that I needed some serious help, or I was going to lose all that was important to me. The Lazarus project is the avenue that brought me back and saved my family. Without this program I would have suffered for years.”

"I wouldn't change ANYTHING at the Lazarus Project. Rev Jodi and Miss Susie helped us so much. I really appreciate everything that you've done for us."

"Jodi and Jerry are a Godsend. They have helped me expand my knowledge, deal with my issues and have done this in the most nonjudgmental way possible to make me feel at ease and comfortable to talk to about my concerns."

"The Lazarus Project has been very helpful and healing for my family. The staff and counselors were there for me when I was going through a rough time... The Lazarus Project helped not only me but others I know to get through deployments and to help communicate better with our husbands and children. Deployments are rough, and it's nice to have someone to lean on..."

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

What cannot be talked about cannot be put to rest. And if it is not, the wounds will fester from generation to generation.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

People tell me to forget the war, telling me it is over. Their advice is sound and well-intentioned but impossible to follow. Simply because my mind is not a faucet that I can turn on and off and at will. I am working on it.

The hero is the one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by. The saint is the man who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light.

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did.

The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation.

Must you carry the bloody horror of combat in your heart forever? 

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

Any soldier returning home must rediscover his humanity and establish a livable peace with the discovered, liberated, permanently dark places in his own heart -- the darkness that is always with us.

If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

When a culture simply shrugs about what happens to people in war, it breaks the fragile sequence, the bond between all people.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage; of the soul.

This country needs its professional warriors. It also needs people in other walks of life who know what the decision to go to war means.

What a cruel thing is war:  to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.

...For God and the soldier we adore, In time of danger, not before! The danger passed, and all things righted, God is forgotten and the soldier slighted.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have.

I know I have to deal with it (PTSD): Because I'm either going to destroy it... or it's going to destroy me.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, / My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est [Sweet and fitting it is] / Pro patria mori. [To die for one's country.]