Finding Meaning in Veterans’ Stories

Anthropologist and Veteran Charles O. Warner III Is Sounding Reveille to Gather Veterans So They Can Connect, Heal, Educate, and Inspire

Stories surround us. From the bar at the local VFW to the backyard bar-b-que, we’ve all heard weird and witty stories of military service or warmly recalled tales of those no longer with us. Some of these stories we come to know by heart while others speak of new moments in the post-service lives of veterans.

Such stories make up a large part of what I do. While I am a veteran of the U.S. Air Force (Explosive Ordnance Disposal, 2000-2007), I am also a social anthropologist with the University of Leuven in Belgium. Since my active duty service, much of my research as an anthropologist has focused on the post-war lives and relationships of veterans living today in different parts of the world. In my search for veteran stories, I follow many different projects, newsletters, and magazines from around the globe that are focused on veterans. And it was during this search a few years ago that I encountered a certain documentary film that I would return to in unexpected ways.

Titled We Left as Brothers and produced by Evan Mulgrave, the film is a moving account of a trip organized by the Veterans Breakfast Club (VBC) that brought American veterans of the Vietnam War and VBC members to Vietnam in 2018. I watched as the camera followed with veterans and VBC members as they moved through the country and captured the reactions of American veterans as they encountered their Vietnamese counterparts.

Along the way, the film introduced me to the VBC, its director Todd DePastino, the VBC Magazine, and its rich collection of veteran contributors and stories. The film spoke of a commitment to veteran stories that not only tell of past wartime experiences, but also tell us about the power of veteran encounters in the world around us today. It is these stories that guide friends, family, and the random anthropologist to see veterans and learn what it means to be a “veteran.”

Such stories are entry points into veteran lives and allow researchers such as myself to explore when, why, or how veterans connect with one another after combat. Frequently in my work, I follow veteran relations that today connect former combatants who were on opposite sides of the same frontlines. These relations can be between Vietnamese and American veterans or between Croatian and Serbian veterans after the Yugoslav wars.

Naturally then, one of my first questions to veterans is what makes a person a veteran. At times I must also ask if the term “veteran” is preferred or why, in the case of former Yugoslavia for example, the word “veteran” (or veterani in Croatian) has been adopted after combat in a region long-known for its “partisans” or “people’s heroes.” Why the shift? What are former combatants seeking by adopting the term “veteran”? In following these post-war veteran relations, different kinds of experiences emerge to answer the question of what we mean when we say or self-identity with the word “veteran.”

Speaking of words, I ended up on Todd’s radar after contacting him about an article covering the 2018 trip to Vietnam that was published in The VBC Magazine. Reaching out to him, I asked why two men, both former combatants, were identified differently in a caption beneath photos that captured a very powerful moment between veterans.

The American, on the left, was referred to as a “veteran.” The Vietnamese, on the right, was called a “former soldier.” Not necessarily a big difference nor a problem. But I was curious. Why describe the two men differently? Fortunately Todd, a fellow academic, did not hesitate to take up what has now become a long-running conversation about veteran lives and the meaning of the word “veteran.” Little did he and I know that as we discussed his word choice, perhaps “chosen unconsciously,” we would be sowing the seeds of future collaboration.

To mark Veterans Day 2024, Todd invited me to speak about my research as well as my thoughts on what it means to be a veteran. Fortunately I can do both by sharing and speaking about veteran stories. And what eclectic stories they are!

My research takes me to meet veterans in Serbia or to commemorations for soldiers who defended Sarajevo. I join WWII commemorations in Belgium and visit VFWs in Utah or memorials in New Mexico. From sipping homemade rakija (a liquor that is distilled from a wide variety of fruit grown in Southeast Europe) alongside Albanian veterans in the mountains of Kosovo to riding across Croatia with veterans from the “Motorcycle Klub Veterans Croatia,” staying focused on their stories or on my note-taking can be an interesting challenge. Other times, I have been dubbed a “spy” and spend time trying to earn the trust of veterans understandably suspicious of foreigners. Each of these encounters adds a little more to my understanding of how veterans see themselves, how veterans relate to one another, and how veterans see the societies in which they live.

But my work is not just about recording stories as veteran contributions to a memorial archive or research library. Documenting veteran experiences is one thing. It is something altogether different to take up veteran stories as guides for understanding unique parts of our society and culture today. So while it is said that the “field work” I do alongside veterans is the art of collecting stories, anthropology is the art of thinking through these stories to create new stories: stories that can transform the lives of veterans today and tomorrow.

I spoke about this during a recent conference of various European militaries and representatives from the Croatian Ministry of Veterans Affairs, and argued that bringing veterans into anthropology is about bringing “the veteran” out of the history books and hospitals – it is about expanding how academics, politicians, and policy-makers see veterans in our societies. It is about awakening (reveille!) new perceptions of veterans and veteran relations.

In a sense, what I think we find with searching and listening to veteran stories is a distinctive reveille that forever announces across generations the possibilities and problems veterans carry after service. Just as it did when we were in the miliary, reveille made of our stories calls us together into veteran communities based on service and shared experience. At the same time, this veteran reveille “sounds off” to those around us that veterans are more than yesterday’s memories. For when listening to such stories, we hear the experiences that veterans carry after our service to a nation or to a cause – experiences that come from the past to shape our present. They are the stories that can, with their own intimate words, provide a starting point in a search for “the veteran.”

Some stories speak across generations to bring us back to the origins of different bands of brothers and sisters. As a veteran of the Croatian War of Independence (1991-1995) once told me: “Our volunteer forces had captured some mortars from the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) at the start of the war. And since I was a conscript in the JNA when I was younger, I took charge of the mortars to defend my town from JNA forces when Yugoslavia was falling apart. I got a few other volunteers together and designated our unit ‘Garfield,’ after the cat in the American comics we read. We even got a few Garfield patches to wear on our mismatched pieces of uniform.”

Other stories take us into the hopes and dreams veterans once held. “I thought I was fighting to protect a country and a legacy,” a Serbian veteran of the Yugoslav wars recalled in 2021 as we sat together in Belgrade. “And I thought the state would remember those who fought for it. Do you see how we veterans are forced to live?”

In recent years, many academics learning to listen and follow with veteran stories contribute to what is now being called “Veterans Studies.” It is an area of research in the social sciences that brings together academics working with veterans in a number of ways and who are, at times, veterans themselves.

As a relatively new field, Veterans Studies is increasing the visibility of veterans, with researchers coming together to create the U.S.-based Veterans Studies Association or academic publications such as the Journal of Veterans Studies, founded by Dr. Mariana Grohowski in 2015. (The Journal of Veterans Studies is free to access and read online.) While I focus on stories from veterans far from American shores, other academics look at gender or, as with Dr. Bryon L. Garner (U.S. Navy veteran), on how race and ethnicity shape veteran perspectives. For example, Garner speaks of Black veteran reflections on duty, patriotism, and life after service while demonstrating how Black veteran experiences in the U.S. are shaped by racial disparities.

All of this starts with veteran stories. Searching for these veteran stories reveals life in the here-and-now. Stories that reveal struggles against bureaucracy or struggles for recognition as well as sacrifice and survival. They are stories and struggles defined not only by combat, but born with peacetime service as well.

A reality faced today by the Belgian military’s bomb disposal technicians who continue to disarm and dispose of WWI/II-era munitions dug up across the Kingdom. They follow their orders and their years of training to safeguard Belgian soil and shores, coming away wounded or carrying with them memories of those lost in the line-of-duty. Yet many of these bomb disposal techs might never attain the status of veteran in the eyes of their military or state.

One reason for this is found in the extraordinarily narrow service conditions set by Royal Decree since WWII that declare who can be considered a veteran in Belgium. One of which stipulates that specific lengths of duty must have been completed in a select few military operations outside of Belgium. Belgian servicemembers must also submit an application to attain the “honorary title” of veteran. This despite the fact that Belgian forces have been active in the air above Afghanistan, confronted paramilitaries in the Yugoslav wars, or joined counter-insurgency operations in Mali.

For some veterans, the stories I focus on as a researcher are a bit odd. This is because I do not only focus on their active duty service or past experiences in combat. In a nutshell, I listen for stories that signal the thoughts and influences shaping veteran life in the years, if not decades, that come after combat and/or military service.

The stories I seek are of day-to-day lives after battle or after service far from battle. Which hopefully explains to the veterans I speak with why I try to keep conversations focused on what happened yesterday at the Veterans Affairs office rather than on what happened yester-years-ago in Mostar or Mosul. Yet sometimes my resistance is futile. “Why do you keep asking about the ministry’s legislation for veterans? You can’t be interested in that. I don’t need a ministry to tell me who is or who is not a veteran. Let me tell you when…”

At times, veterans need to share past experiences with other veterans. Storytelling can be an act of catharsis and an act of communion that speaks to how veterans support one another. These stories also contain our genesis, the moments when veterans are created and begin to see the world in a different light.

Here I am reminded of Faruk Šehić, a Bosnian veteran of the Yugoslav wars and today a noted author whose work offers insights to veteran perceptions of life during and after war. As he and I walked together in Sarajevo some years back, we discussed a kind of mantra he carries with him: no enemies, only survivors. Straightforward talk, strong in spirit, yet a view which some veterans will never accept.

Yet many veterans do seek out these opportunities to connect across the frontlines. So I wonder. What can come from veterans seeing themselves through the eyes of other veterans? What kind of support comes with mutual awareness between veteran communities? Can connections between diverse veteran communities act to address moral injury or substance abuse or the veteran suicide rates that continue to burn through our ranks?

In opening up these questions, I think we find new ways to speak about veteran issues and what some call the veteran identity. An identity shaped by veteran perceptions of one another. This means that the veteran identity can be claimed yet contested. Veterans are connected by what we carry – duty, combat, memories, stories, injuries – yet we realize that which connects does not always unite to speak for us. There will always be differences and distinctions between veterans. But in listening for these differences or acknowledging distinctions, can we see a strengthening of the ties-that-bind rather than a breaking of relations?

I mentioned earlier that Todd and I had no idea where our talks would lead us. So it was no small surprise for either of us when we – an American veteran and an American historian – ended up meeting for the first time in Croatia. Following in the footsteps of We Left as Brothers, a VBC delegation that included veterans from nearly all of the U.S. Armed Forces, a Gold Star wife, and spouses long-inducted into veteran life took up a journey to Croatia. The delegation came together after the VBC received an invitation from veterans of the Croatian War of Independence (a.k.a. the Homeland War) to visit Croatia and attend the annual veterans day ceremonies held in the small town of Karlovac.

Long story short, the VBC visit was initiated by Croatian veterans who had been, for several years by this point, politely listening to me ramble on about anthropology and veteran relations every time I returned to Karlovac from Belgium. (There’s a lesson here: be wary of inviting anthropologists into your home…we can be difficult to get rid of when there’s research to be done.) Eventually Slaven Vujnović, a veteran of the Homeland War, said, “OK Charlie, let’s see if there is anything to what you’re always talking about. Do you think we can get 20 or so American veterans interested in joining us for our local veterans day?”

In spectacular fashion, what emerged were the first meetings in Croatia to bring together multi-national veterans of Croatia, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Over the course of a week, the VBC delegation was hosted by Croatian veterans who shared local culture, dishes, and a range of beverages as we moved between casual BBQs and official dinners. Not to mention a private tasting session at the veteran owned-and-operated Magdić distillery known for its gin and rakija.

All the while, the Americans were guided by veteran stories and history of wartime Croatia. Though they had never met one another before nor shared a common language, exceptional moments were created that brought the VBC delegation together with Croatian veterans. As Sabina Protulipac, a veteran of the Homeland War, would later share with Todd and I,  “Although we are from different parts of the world and veterans of different wars, we immediately found a common language…we felt like a team, and until they left, like a family.”

Throughout the visit, Americans stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the ranks of Croatians placing candles or speaking solemn words born by veteran experiences. And we stood not just guests, but as fellow veterans acting as comrades-in-commemoration of the living and the fallen. These moments found their way into the personal stories that the Croatian and American veterans shared between themselves and took back to their homes.

For Todd, the trip to Croatia revealed new ways of thinking about veterans: “Our long conversations with Croatian veterans deepened my understanding of the community I serve and made me realize how much American veterans have in common with those who served in other times and places.”

In the after-action reports I sought from the veterans who met in Croatia (like I said, anthropologists can be tenacious) are accounts of veteran realities reaffirmed yet remixed; accounts that reconsidered what emerges when we encounter other veterans.

Andy Nigut, a Marine veteran WIA in Vietnam, shared that he “accepted the invitation because it is an honor and privilege to meet combat veterans from another country to share experiences, learn about culture, country and the people. First and foremost to pay respect, remember and honor those killed in combat, those wounded, disabled and their families and all the Croatian Citizens who endured war on their homeland for independence.”

While Chad Rittle, a Navy veteran, brought his past experiences into the frame. “I can remember that during my time in the Navy I was very cautious about wearing my uniform home during the mid-70’s. The social status of ‘veteran’ was not very acceptable at that time,” he recalls. “Now I wear signs of my service often. If you saw my Navy hat you will understand. I even added a pin of the Croatian flag since returning.”

This article began by remarking that stories surround us. They also connect veterans in unexpected, yet contested, ways. In the case of a special few Croatian and American veterans, the stories shared the considerations and communion between veterans of different nationalities, services, and languages.

So when speaking of “the veteran” for Veterans Day 2024, we reflect upon how our stories make us visible in the minds and memories of those around us. With a uniform came rank for all to see. A visible identity that guided our interactions. With life as a veteran comes a different identity. Not necessarily hidden, but an identity that we see and carry and speak of in different terms. However we identify ourselves – veteran, borci (fighter), citizen, mother, son – we are speaking of a process rather than an ending. A process of past memories and present moments that develop with veterans as we move through life.

In the end, if you ask me what is a veteran, I am probably going to tell you a story. A story of meeting a group of women veterans in Bosnia or a story about my EOD buddy Schultz losing his leg to an IED but still walking through life at an unerring pace. As I am the fourth generation of veterans in my family, with both my mother and father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather being veterans of the U.S. Army, I may speak of that legacy. I may regale you with stories of camaraderie between Croatian veterans or how a Serbian veteran of the “NATO aggression” against his country (a.k.a. Operation Allied Force) shared with me both his home and some unfiltered opinions about Americans. But veterans are more than our memories – we can be more than a memory. So I will also tell tales that challenge people to see veterans in the present and in the future. Perhaps a tale of hope for VBC’s next visit to Croatia or maybe even one day to meet veterans in Belgrade or Sarajevo. What is a veteran? Fall in with our reveille and listen up. Search for our stories. And in the process of searching and listening and searching again, you will find that each of us carries an answer that speaks today of the lives and legacies of veterans.

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Charles O. Warner III is a social anthropologist with the Research Foundation-Flanders and the University of Leuven in Belgium. Prior to his turn to anthropology, Charles served as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technician with the U.S. Air Force from 2000 to 2007. He supported counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, and force protection operations while stationed in the U.S., Germany, South Korea, and Iraq. In contributing to this article for the VBC, Charlie wishes to note his gratitude to veterans in the U.S., Belgium, and Southeast Europe who have supported his research.