How can we learn to listen again? Perhaps our veterans can help
Since the first two decades of the 21st century, while roughly 1% of Americans were serving in the military, the great majority of Americans served as citizens of the United States of Inattention.
In a time when innumerable lines of fracture run through the nation and meaningful conversation collapses at the fault lines, it is our conviction that finding a remedy for civilian inattention could benefit the nation in ways beyond estimation.
The malfunctioning of the tympanic membrane, more commonly known as the eardrum, offers itself as the touchstone for our shared conviction in the benefits to be delivered by a bridging of the mystifying military/ civilian divide.
Why have we focused attention on the tympanic membrane?
Ask veterans today about hearing loss, and they may respond with a jokingly exaggerated, “What?” For many uniformed personnel who served during the Global War on Terrorism, the highpitched ringing of tinnitus now holds new standing as the unofficial national anthem. With an incessant ringing in their acoustic world, they get daily practice in the essential cognitive exercise of separating signal from noise, distinguishing the messages that deserve attention from the barrage of clamor and tumult.
Meanwhile, the nation’s collective tympanic membrane is in very bad shape, failing to separate signal from noise. In every region and locale, clamor and tumult drown out messages that deserve attention and response.
Of course, plenty of civilians have acquired hearing deficiencies without military service. But explosions of Improvised Explosive Devices ( IEDS) do not shake civilians’ surroundings. Few civilians are deafened, day after day, by the racket of helicopters and heavy turbine engines. Spared from frequent exposure to disruptive vibrations of artillery and weapons ranges, civilians are far less susceptible to a takeover by tinnitus.
And yet, over the two decades of the Global War on Terrorism, civilians came down with a society- wide, voluntary version of hearing loss. Inattention prevented them from hearing the stories of the resilience, the tested strength of character, and the profound understanding of camaraderie that military service drilled into the center of veterans’ souls. Those lesson- bearing stories fell on deaf ears.
Instead, the airwaves, especially on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Veterans Day, are filled with these five
words: “Thank you for your service.”
Rarely indicating a willingness to hear the stories of the veterans so addressed, this ritualized salutation will need a major rehab if the military/ civilian divide is to close. Sometimes those five words are intentionally superficial, but sometimes they are an indication of goodhearted intentions, expressed without any idea of what to say next. The goodhearted need some help in cultivating that ancient skill called “listening.”
And yet experience as a veteran does not equal wisdom — until it is tempered by context. For many veterans without a moderating support system, post- military transition carries a deep loss of purpose, opening up their own susceptibility to believing propaganda as truth.
The testimony of veterans can also help civilians recover from their inattention to this nation’s heavily freighted history of violence; their spoken and written words can replace obliviousness with a forthright reckoning with our heritage.
It is equally important to reckon with the compounded struggles experienced by women in uniform. Their complicated memories illuminate society’s divisions, and they are far too often ignored in their efforts for justice and change.
When society manifests the qualities of an ideological minefield, who would know more about navigating safely in that terrain? Those who have been trained to accomplish missions, working in companies of people thrust together with opposing beliefs and clashing cultures, are distinctively prepared to lead this nation forward.
We have converged on this conviction from entirely different journeys through time. One co- author was born in
1951; the other, in 1989.
In 2013, one of us got involved with the Department of Defense’s Vietnam War Fiftieth Anniversary Commemoration; in that same year, the other one enlisted in the Army.
In the seven years preceding the global pandemic, one writer, with CU- Boulder as her home base, traveled across the nation giving speeches about Western American history, sometimes focusing on the violence in the region’s past and present. The other writer took lengthy excursions to military bases around the world, with rotations to Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and NATO- Allied countries preparing for future Russian invasion.
In 2021, the history professor met the aspiring teacher of history when he enrolled at the University of Colorado and took part in the Summer Bridge Program where new student- veterans receive a crash course in returning to the classroom. Since then, we have been beneficiaries of the leadership of Stewart Elliott, the retired Navy SEAL who has made the University of Colorado’s Veteran and Military Affairs office into an example for universities nationwide.
No generation is in control of the legacy it receives. But the structure of military values, tempered by the realities of warfare in this generation, has produced focused and driven individuals who are willing to speak the truth about their intense encounter with history.
To borrow the phrasing of radio operators stuck with old Army equipment, our national discussions are “coming in broken and unreadable.”
Among the women and men who have volunteered to serve our country and who have taken the oath “to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic,” we have the force needed to restore our hearing.