Working at the VA means that your heartstrings get tugged on a regular basis. Whether it is the sight of a veteran young enough to be your son or daughter, but scarred or missing a limb, or whether it is the sight of an older veteran who is no longer what he or she was, there are sights here that tug at my heartstrings. This midnight was another such night.
As I walked in on a cold, blustery rainy day of only 62 degrees, there was a veteran who wandered outside in just his pajamas. He promptly asked me if I had some spare change to go to the canteen. Now the canteen is closed at this time, and he certainly belonged inside before he got hypothermia. Just as I was about to say something, two of the VA federal police came rushing outside, a woman and a man, and began gently talking to him.
You need to know that our veterans are given as much freedom as possible inside the VA medical center. They are our honored patients, and we treat them like responsible adults (unless proven otherwise). So, he had managed to walk out of his unit and walk outside, where the security cameras (and me) immediately picked him up. He is an older veteran, and I am a grandfather so that puts him at around the Korean War, just possibly World War II, though I doubt that. I do not know his background, but I do know that in his twilight years his mental faculties are obviously not what they used to be.
That tugged at my heartstrings. But, what tugged at my heartstrings even more was the way in which our police were treating him. All our police here are veterans themselves, most of them have served in a theater of conflict. And so they treated him with the utmost respect. As I went in, I smiled at the way in which the woman officer was “mothering” him. It was very effective and he was responding. Now let me tell you that if necessary our police can respond with appropriate force. But that is not their first response. Their first response is what I saw, the gentle reaching out of one vet to another vet, of someone who has served in harm’s way to another who has likewise served in harm’s way.
But, it did bring tears to my eyes to see that tough woman vet, now a federal police officer, just gently joshing him and talking to him and, yes, to some extent “loving” him like a mother loves her children. And that is just what this old vet, whose mind was no longer quite as sharp, needed to hear. When I left he was already responding, already moving back to safety, already secure though he may not have realized it.
Our Lord does that for us many times, does he not?
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
When I first went to work for the VA, I met some of our oldest vets at our Nursing Home Care Unit who were Spanish American War vets–sadly they have gone as have the WWI vets and the WWII vets are going as well. I was always aware of how the vets cared for each other. I worked in Psychiatry for many years and saw many an older vet whose mind was perhaps not as sharp as it once had been being cared for by a younger vet–and this was despite any psychosis that might have been present in the younger vet.
I love my vets.
When I did my three tours of duty with the VA, I was coming from a non-veteran background; I had no relation to the military at all, actually–outside of my grandparents. But getting to go around a lot in the engineering department, it was always quietly amazing to me when I would witness just how cheery almost all of the vets were. The hospital atmosphere I would have imagined never really set in. Everything was very familial, just as you describe in your post with how the police confronted the man. It seems that the shared stories–the shared past–of most of the patients and employees led to remarkable understanding across generations and comradery. Come to think of it, humanity can only have an intimate affection for Christ because we realize that He lived a human life Himself, including everything that comes with it. The veterans care for each other in a similar fashion.