Undeclared Wars

Recognizing the Medals No One Can See

As soldiers, we traded blood for silk and metal. Bright ribbons and shining stars marking our sacrifices, our battles, our pain. They pinned valor and horror to our chests in neat rows, each one earned in dirt and gun smoke and screams.

But under those decorations, beneath the crisp uniform, lay the real evidence.

Scars mapped across skin and soul, marking places and moments that no ribbon could ever capture. Every medal tells a story but they can't speak of nights when sand and panic fill our mouths.

When the thrum of the machinery of war makes our hearts stutter in remembered terror decades later.

These days, in this other life, these civilian wars, they don't give medals for surviving the night when your demons come screaming. No citations issued for fighting PTSD in darkness, when sweat-soaked sheets become battlefields and memories detonate like land mines beneath your skull.

No combat badge for battling the bottle and winning. For the way your hands tremble as you pour out handle after handle, watching liquid courage spiral away.

No recognition for the war of rebuilding a family from shattered pieces. For carrying the weight of brothers lost to their own private hells. No bronze star for holding your child while you crumble inside, forcing smiles while your mind howls in silence.

But here, in this other war?

Nothing marks the night you sat with steel against skin and chose to see another dawn, death whispering in your ear until morning light shattered the darkness. No medal for when you faced your reflection in streaming glass, barely knowing the hollow-eyed stranger drowning in the mirror.

No ribbon for the day you walked into therapy and finally let truth tear free, words catching like shrapnel in your throat. No bronze star for attempting to be a foundation and quake, for holding everything together when your world is shaking apart.

We pass each other in streets, in stores, carrying invisible war records carved into our souls.

That woman in line at the grocery store?

She's a veteran of cancer, her body a battlefield of scars and poison, each day fighting for territory against an enemy breeding in her own flesh.

That quiet man at the bank?

Survived his child's death, carries a photograph like a battle flag, has learned to breathe around a void that nothing will ever fill.

The teenager serving coffee?

Already a veteran of abuse and abandonment, wearing long sleeves in summer to hide pain's roadmap etched in skin, flinching at raised voices but standing ground, surviving, fighting.

Out here we don't wear our medals where you can see them. They're written in sleepless nights and silent screams, in the way we startle at shadows or break down in empty rooms.

Our battlefields are kitchen tables where bills pile up like body counts, each envelope a potential death notice.

They're hospital waiting rooms where hope bleeds out under fluorescent lights, each clock tick another round fired.

They're therapy offices where we fight to reclaim territory lost to trauma and terror, each session a mission into our darkest places.

They're grocery store parking lots where panic ambushes us turning ordinary moments into terror.

There's no parade for the mother who faced down addiction's demon army and won, who fought through withdrawal with iron will and shaking bones, who rebuilt herself from ruins.

No ceremony for the man who chose, every single day, to keep breathing despite darkness's undertow, who learned to walk with depression like a shadow-self, always haunting, always whispering, never quite conquering.

No flag raised half-mast for the victories and defeats that happen behind closed doors, in bathroom mirrors, in midnight prayers when God feels as distant as peace.

Sometimes I see them though. These fellow warriors.

I recognize the look in their eyes, that thousand-yard stare born from seeing too much, feeling too much, losing beyond measure.

I see how they carry themselves, shoulders bent under invisible rucksacks of grief and survival, spines straight with the pride of those who march on when nothing remains but will and spite.

We are, though, sometimes too blind to see their battle scars. How they haunt the edges of crowds, in how they map escape routes.

In the restless movement of fingers that once held weapons or pills or bottles or razors.

And I want to stop them, render a salute, speak words that echo with truth.

"I see your medals, brother.

I know what they cost you, sister.

I see the medals you earned in battles nobody witnessed,

the victories in wars nobody declared.

Been there.

Still here.

Still fighting.

Welcome home, warrior.

Welcome home."