Michelle Obama Quotes

When people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over, and you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it.

The war does not end when you come home. It lives on in memories of your fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who gave their lives. It endures in the wound that is slow to heal, the disability that isn't going away, the dream that wakes you at night, or the stiffening in your spine when a car backfires down the street.

When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you're strong and you can handle it. But a lot of people can't handle it. And they see horror stories. They see events that you couldn't see in a movie, nobody would believe it.

Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.

And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.

And I think that it's - the military has actually made improvements, so people are considering post-traumatic stress disorder as, at the least, a possible psychological problem. You know, when I was in Vietnam, it was just considered malingering. And we're making progress.

I know what soldiers or their families go through.

My dad was in the Second World War with General Patton. He won medals for bravery, but he came home quite damaged, so he was a handful. He told us some terrible stories, and I guess you'd say he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

We do a very good job at fixing broken bodies but not such a great job at healing broken minds with our returning veterans.

As wounded men may limp through life, so our war minds may not regain the balance of their thoughts for decades.

It's quite a traumatic thing for a lot of our veterans that come back... You're in a war zone, you're dodging IED's and bullets one day and a couple days later you're back in society again with a bunch of people that have no idea of what you've been through.

Post-traumatic stress, that's why the soldiers need marijuana, is for their mental health. It makes them feel better so that they don't have the horrors of war in their mind all the time. And the government won't allow them to have it, because it's illegal - federally. It's absurd.

Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.

'Each One Lost' I wrote the day after I got home. My week in Afghanistan was a very short trip, but it was a powerful experience.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can.

If you are a real soldier, you never get over the war.

More soldiers died last year by their own hand than at the hands of the enemy…. More than 22 veterans commit suicide every day.

Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years.

I do not have to watch late-night television, watch a movie, to find out what combat is like.

As the wife of a retired Navy commander and the representative of the district covering Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, I see firsthand the permanent effects of war - both physical and psychological - on those who serve our country.

The military is a discrete entity. Then they come back, and they're such a small percentage of the population, and they can't really - it's hard for them to talk to civilians.

In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.

As we face an epidemic of veteran suicides, we must make sure that all of our returning servicemembers are honored and taken care of, no matter the wounds they bear.

Veterans want the choice to use age-old practices like yoga, meditation and acupuncture, but they should also benefit from scientific advances like detecting the biomarkers that will allow us to better treat the invisible wounds of war.