While many have opted to lose weight or to quit smoking for their New Year’s resolutions, both of which are admirable, a few others have chosen to volunteer more of their time in 2012. A few more have even specified how they want to spend their volunteer time and have chosen to do so supporting military members and their families.

However, trying to find volunteer locations that support troops isn’t always easy. So if you have decided to support the troops more in the New Year, look to some of the following to find positive volunteering experiences:

Contact Your Local VFW
One of the best places to find the services and help needed by veterans and their families is by visiting the local VFW. Through VFWs you should be able to find out where the next care package day is being sponsored or which veterans throughout your area are in need. You can even just drop in to hang out with your local veterans, and challenge them to a board or card game or listen to their stories. All forms of support are appreciated, and nothing says thank you more than simply spending time with someone.

Visit Your Local VA Hospital
If you are lucky enough to have a VA medical facility located within your area, you can find a number of excellent volunteer options. Local Vas are a hotpot for organizations that support the troops and you can usually find listings posted all over community bulletin boards throughout these facilities. So whether you want to work with older vets, visit those who are far from family, or make quilts, cards, or gift baskets for our wounded warriors, the VA offers plenty of opportunities. All you have to do is show up and be on the lookout for other volunteers – or simply ask an attendant at the front desk.

Get Online
If you don’t have a VA facility located nearby, or simply can’t coordinate volunteer times, that doesn’t mean that you have to abandon you desire to support the troops. There are several ways that you can offer your services and support online.

Organizations like SoldiersAngels.org, Wounded Warrior Project, and Enhance Lives offer ways in which you can support serving and wounded soldiers as well as their families, whether it be through a monetary donation, sponsoring care packages to send overseas, or putting together cards and quilts for the wounded.

If none of these options seem to be working for you, you can always organize your own way to help the troops. Creating care package ship days or getting local classrooms to create Thank You cards are fun and easy ways to show your support for the troops, and generally your local post office will be willing to help you in your endeavor.

Our troops have fought hard to preserve our honor and freedom, and by offering your time to them, you are not only making their time of service a bit easier, but you are also showing your respect and gratitude in deepest form. So if you are looking for a great way to spend a few of your extra hours after work or on the weekend, don’t be afraid to look to some of your local volunteer opportunities to support the troops.

Maya Szydlowski is a community manager for Veterans United Home Loans, the nation’s top dedicated VA lender.

The Red Sox Foundation, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Home Base Program in partnership with The Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Project have published an invaluable resource to help military parents and health care providers protect the health of their children: A Toolkit for the Well Child Screening of Military Children.

It is divided into different sections for the primary care clinician, the parents, and the children. It gives the doctor screening tools and a overview of effects of a parent’s deployment. It provides parents with strategies for dealing with upcoming and current deployments, homecoming, and death. And the section addressed to children normalizes the range of possible emotions and responses to the parent’s absence.

My only criticism is that the toolkit does not address what can happen after the parent returns. The child’s mental health is just as at risk after the parent’s homecoming as during deployment. The veteran parent very well may experience PTSD that children easily absorb and perceive that they have somehow caused their parent’s anger and/or depression. It is urgent we consider the effect a veteran parent’s PTSD can have on their children.

Last week, I needed a good book to read- to relax in the evening. Rather than buying a new one or going to the library, I decided to look through the hundreds of books on my shelves. Many of them have been in my life for over thirty-five years. I keep them because as they enriched my life once, I knew they could do that again, that to revisit them would open up a different encounter, one that might reveal my own evolution as much as the book’s richness. I forgot that to reread a treasured book is to meet it anew, to see the place for the first time. As in T. S. Eliot’s well known poem, “Little Giddings:” “the end of all our exploring/ 
Will be to arrive where we started
/And know the place for the first time.”

I don’t know why my eyes fell upon Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. An English major in college, I wrote my senior thesis on Woolf’s works, focusing on her mystical philosophy. But as I reread Mrs. Dalloway, I discovered a theme I never came close to recognizing thirty-six years ago: the cost of war to a society.

Published in 1925, seven years after the end of World War I, on its surface Mrs. Dalloway, is about a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper class London woman who is giving a party that evening. Rather than depicting the external world of behavior and appearances, Woolf weaves characters’ thoughts and responses to external objects in an impressionistic portrait of how the human mind processes experience. Central to this particular book is how encounters with other people shape us, an aspect of it I did not remember as I picked it out of my collection.

“Brief, broken, often painful as their actual meetings had been what with his absences and interruptions the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery about it… in the most unlikely places it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look upon you, get the whole feel of it and understanding after years of lying lost.”

This particular passage expresses the musings of a former lover of Clarissa about their relationship, and while that relationship is important to her, it ends up not being the one at the heart of the book. The relationship that becomes definitive for her is with Septimus Smith whom she only meets at the end of the novel, their “meeting” occurring only through her hearing about his death, a suicide.

Septimus Smith is a veteran of “the War” and suffers from what we have called since the 1980′s PTSD. He lives in a constant state of terror, expecting “horror to surface and explode.” “He had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now.” His most acute symptom is an utter lack of ability to feel, to taste. He sees ghosts of the dead, especially a beloved commander, who was killed in front of Septimus. Yet the doctor, whom the book increasingly casts in a negative light as supercilious, arrogant, and destructive, says that nothing is wrong with the veteran and that he just needs to throw himself into an interest.

The gulf between his experience and his wife’s understanding of it becomes a chasm. “It was she who suffered,” she thinks, feeling completely helpless and alone. She fears he will try to kill himself. (The various characters think the words “fear no more,” the phrase like the chorus of a Greek tragedy.)

Septimus does kill himself, though without forethought or intention. As the hated doctor enters his home, Septimus is certain he is about to lose control of his life and flings himself out a window. It is when a group of politicians mentions his death that evening at Clarissa’s party that she “meets” him. The group includes the much reviled doctor who had treated Septimus, a man that neither Clarissa nor her husband ever liked. He is holding forth to Clarissa’s guests that “there must be a provision in the Bill” about shell shock. He tells the details of Septimus’s death.

“Oh, thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death.” As she moves out of a selfish, self-centered response, “her body went through it.” She experiences empathy and the other stages of grief. The shock, the questioning, understanding. “A thing there was that mattered. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was communication; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically evaded them. Closeness drew apart. One was alone. There was an embrace in death.” Somehow his death was “her disaster.” She did not pity him. She “felt glad he had done it; thrown it away…. He made her feel the beauty, feel the fun.”

What to make of Clarissa’s response? At first read, it seems extremely childish, narcissistic. His suicide made her more aware of the good things in her life? But if we consider that Septimus fell on a railing that impaled him, might Woolf be casting him as a Christ figure who sacrificed himself to redeem the world of its sin- the sin of the War that casts its shadow over the book from the very beginning? Five pages in we read “It is June. The War was over except for someone like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed… .”

After she thinks that Septimus’s death made her “feel the fun,” she next thinks she must go “assemble.” To assemble is to bring together. What Septimus wanted, what he could not stop thinking about in his last day was the utter importance of universal love. Such love is only possible when we connect, when we see what we cherish and long for are the same.
Woolf constructed Mrs. Dalloway so that the characters orbit one another, one passing another one by in the park, one having seen another in the doctor’s waiting room, each ignorant of the other’s struggles and relevance to their own life. Rather than meeting, they are separated by six degrees. Woolf tells us that our salvation lies in connection, in meeting. (And how amazing it is that Woolf captures the characteristics and essence of PTSD so well.)

What makes my re-encounter with Mrs. Dalloway significant for me is that in the last ten years I have learned that my father suffered PTSD from WWII and that his invisible wounds shaped our family history. Not only did I not see back in college Woolf’s subject of combat trauma (nor did any of the criticism I read at that time) but I had no idea that subject was relevant to my own life. Woolf is a greater teacher than I ever imagined her. (It is amazing how well Woolf understands and portrays combat trauma). She speaks what we have yet to learn: that our salvation lies in our connecting, in our finding our way to universal love.

The Huffington Post reported this evening that the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee is calling for an inspector general’s investigation into how long veterans are having to wait to get treatment for mental health disorders after they return from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Witnesses at hearings held by the committee have testified that veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder often have to wait longer than 14 days before getting an initial appointment, and that follow-up visits can take much longer.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has greatly increased the resources going into mental health care, but the large number of troops returning from the war continues to stress the system.

Today Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Richard Burr of North Carolina said congressional hearings have shown that even veterans who attempted suicide had appointments postponed.

These hearings, no doubt, are Congress’s response to the case Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United For Truth vs. Veterans Administration. A three judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled for the plaintiffs last May, holding that treatment delays for PTSD and other disorders are so ‘egregious’ they violate veterans’ rights. The panel said that veterans had waited ‘long enough’ for the VA to act, compelling the court to intervene. But last month the upon the vote of a majority of nonrecused active judges of the Ninth Circuit, the case will be reheard by the entire court.

Today’s developments indicate Congress has developed the will to take the necessary action to provide veterans with the mental health care that is their right.

When you have suffered a major setback, experienced betrayal or loss, what have you found brought you some relief? Did the ear of a friend help? Someone listening, not trying to solve your problem, but showing in their eyes that they care. They hear, and they care.

Telling our stories helps us to heal. It releases some of the energy the experience created and begins to externalize the experience. In telling it, in giving the story to another, it is not ours alone. Someone is sharing it with us. In enabling another to understand and have empathy, we move out of the sense of isolation the experience fostered into community, a requirement for healing.

In the last twenty years, medical practice has increasingly recognized the importance of what’s come to be called “narrative medicine” to the patient’s healing. Columbia University’s medical school has a Narrative Medicine program that “fortifies clinical practice with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness.”

Recognition of the value of story telling’s ability to heal is evident in the plethora of writing workshops for veterans that have sprung up across the country since troops began returning from deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Poet and author Maxine Hong Kingston began the first veterans writing project in 1993 in the Bay Area where she witnessed the healing power of writing about war experiences and sharing them in a group. Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace resulted from that project. Warrior Writers www.warriorwriters.org/home.html began in New York City in early 2007, providing writing and art workshops to veterans to create a culture that articulates veterans’ experiences. It now makes their workshops available around the country. Veterans Writing Projects offers workshops in Washington, D.C.; Reno, Nevada; Ogden, Utah; San Diego. Various Veterans Administration medical centers provide workshops as does the Veterans Education Project in Amherst, Massachusetts. The Writers Guild Foundation of Los Angeles offers the , and there is the Military Veterans Writing Workshop of the Veterans Writing Workshop at New York University.

For a few years the National Endowment for the Arts supported a writing project called Operation Homecoming in 2004 to help U.S. troops and their families write about their wartime experiences. This program brought distinguished writers to military installations to conduct writing workshops. A related call for writing submissions resulted in more than 1,200 submissions and 12,000 pages of writings. Almost a hundred of those were featured in the anthology Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families.

A unique program that enables veterans to both write their story and tell it is the Telling Project. It works with veterans in universities, communities and organizations to produce innovative performances. After interviews, trainings and rehearsals, veterans and their family members tell their stories on stage for their communities. The Telling Project has performed in Eugene and Portland, Ore., Seattle, Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Starkville, Miss., Baltimore and Iowa City, enabling veterans to speak their truths and their communities to listen.

Writing is an essential step in telling one’s story, because through writing, we create order out of chaotic events. In creating a narrative, we make clear the experience’s meaning– for ourselves and for others. Our truth might not only allow empathy but enlighten.

I once sat with a veteran of World War II, who like my father, had been among the liberators of the Nazi concentration camp the GIs referred to as Nordhausen. Like so many other WWII veterans, especially those who had been among the camp liberators, this gentleman had never spoken about his memories of the war. But as we sat there, me listening and showing familiarity with his subject and keen interest, he began to unwind his memory, a knotted spool of thread. When he came to a knot, I encouraged him to continue talking.
“You know,” he said at one point, “I’ve never been able to make sense of my memories. But now, with your help, I see how the pieces fit.” A few minutes later he turned to his wife of sixty-two years and said, “I have struggled to stay alive every day since.” Her face whitened in astonishment as she clasped his hands.

Trauma creates chaos of our senses and then shuts them down to protect the mind from becoming overwhelmed. And while this is life-saving in the short term, it is soul numbing in the long term. Finding a way to a narrative, to connecting the pieces, gives us a way to free ourselves from those sense memories that trauma encapsulated in our brains. And then to see someone listen to the story, to hold our hands in compassion and love- that opens the door to feeling safe. To coming home.

Let us celebrate and support the invaluable writing programs for veteran within our communities. And then let us listen to the stories our veterans speak. Last week, “60 Minutes” had a feature about Operation Project Exit that takes veterans suffering PTSD back to Iraq as a means of healing. As one young veteran said at the end of the show, “I always hear people complain about stuff, and it just makes me mad because a lotta people don’t understand. They don’t see the stuff that– they just go about their daily lives, while there’s still people dyin’ every day. For them. And it– it upsets me a lot.”

Let us listen and heed.

I came across this video of the work of artist Dario Robleto, who the Center for the Study of War Experience hosted at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Denver this past March. It features Mr. Robleto talking with veterans and their spouses about his “Defiant Gardens.” He created it 2009-2010 out of cut paper, paper he made from soldiers’ letters home and letters their wives and sweethearts wrote them, thread and fabric from soldiers’ uniforms from various wars, skeletons of carrier pigeons, WWII-era pigeon message capsules, dried flowers from various battlefields, hair flowers braided by war widows, mourning dress fabric, excavated shrapnel and bullet lead from various battlefields, seeds, seashells, cartes de visites, gold, and ribbon.
What struck me most were the words in the piece “Rise from Your Dream of Melancholy.”
Melancholy can be addictive. It can enchant us, like the siren that Odysseus encountered on his way back home. As the wife of a veteran says at the end, let us choose life.

A video of the artist’s private meeting with war veterans can be viewed below.

These numbers come from a report released by Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), a nonprofit that “raises the unique and powerful voices of veterans” to protect and enhance our military, veterans, freedom, and national security. In assembling this report, VCS uses reports from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DoD) that VCS obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Military Deployments to War Zone Since September 11, 2001
2,226,056 Total Service Members Deployed
941,743 Deployed Twice or More (42%)

Military Casualties in War Zone Since September 11, 2001
108,974 Total War Zone Casualties
6211 Deaths (6%), Includes 298 War Zone Suicides
45,889 Non-Fatal Wounded in Action (42%)
56,874 Non-Fatal Medical Evacuations Due to Injury or Disease (52%)

Veteran Post-Deployment Healthcare Use
1,442,987 Veterans Eligible for VA Healthcare
711,986 Veteran Patients Treated (49% of Veterans Eligible)
367,749 Veterans with Mental Health Condition (52% of Patients)
211,819 Veterans with Potential PTSD (30% of Patients)
9,700 Average New Veteran Patients Each Month

Veteran Post-Deployment Disability Claim Activity
1,442,987 Veterans Eligible for VA Disability Benefits
624,266 Veterans Filed Disability Claims (43% of Veterans Eligible)
133,595 Veterans Awaiting VA Decision (21% of Claims)
107,718 Veterans with Approved PTSD Claim (17% of Claims)
9,500 Average New Claims Filed by Veterans Each Month

Estimated Long-Term Impact on VA
1,032,000 Total New Veteran Patients, Dec. 31, 2013
938,000 Total New Veteran Claims, Dec. 31, 2013
Up to $900 Billion VA Healthcare and Benefit Spending Over 40 Years

Service Member and Veteran Suicide
462,854 Total Calls to VA’s Veterans Crisis Line
259,891 Calls from Veterans from Any Period of Service
195,933 Members Calls from Others / Family
6,030 Calls from Active Duty Service
16,855 “Rescues” of Suicidal Veterans and Service Members
2,293 Active Duty Suicides Since January 2001
298 Suicides While Deployed in War Zone
1,995 Other Suicides (Deployment Status Unknown)
Unknown Suicides Among Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans

Veterans’ Claims Pending at VA for All Periods of Service
1,097,489 Sep. 2011, Pending Veterans’ Claims and Appeals
568,711 Mar. 2003, Pending Veterans’ Claims and Appeals
528,778 Pending Claim Increase, Mar. 2003 to Sep. 2011

According to Paul Sullivan, “We are just at the front edge of this tsunami. Many more years lie ahead before we will see the peak of veterans seeking health care. Those still in the service are the most likely to need care.” That is because those still in have been deployed two or more times. Veterans with mental heath conditions will increase from 52% of VA patients to 60% or higher.

These numbers come from a report released by Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), a nonprofit that “raises the unique and powerful voices of veterans” to protect and enhance our military, veterans, freedom, and national security. In assembling this report, VCS uses reports from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DoD) that VCS obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Military Deployments to War Zone Since September 11, 2001
2,226,056 Total Service Members Deployed
941,743 Deployed Twice or More (42%)

Military Casualties in War Zone Since September 11, 2001
108,974 Total War Zone Casualties
6211 Deaths (6%), Includes 298 War Zone Suicides
45,889 Non-Fatal Wounded in Action (42%)
56,874 Non-Fatal Medical Evacuations Due to Injury or Disease (52%)

Veteran Post-Deployment Healthcare Use
1,442,987 Veterans Eligible for VA Healthcare
711,986 Veteran Patients Treated (49% of Veterans Eligible)
367,749 Veterans with Mental Health Condition (52% of Patients)
211,819 Veterans with Potential PTSD (30% of Patients)
9,700 Average New Veteran Patients Each Month

Veteran Post-Deployment Disability Claim Activity
1,442,987 Veterans Eligible for VA Disability Benefits
624,266 Veterans Filed Disability Claims (43% of Veterans Eligible)
133,595 Veterans Awaiting VA Decision (21% of Claims)
107,718 Veterans with Approved PTSD Claim (17% of Claims)
9,500 Average New Claims Filed by Veterans Each Month

Estimated Long-Term Impact on VA
1,032,000 Total New Veteran Patients, Dec. 31, 2013
938,000 Total New Veteran Claims, Dec. 31, 2013
Up to $900 Billion VA Healthcare and Benefit Spending Over 40 Years

Service Member and Veteran Suicide
462,854 Total Calls to VA’s Veterans Crisis Line
259,891 Calls from Veterans from Any Period of Service
195,933 Members Calls from Others / Family
6,030 Calls from Active Duty Service
16,855 “Rescues” of Suicidal Veterans and Service Members
2,293 Active Duty Suicides Since January 2001
298 Suicides While Deployed in War Zone
1,995 Other Suicides (Deployment Status Unknown)
Unknown Suicides Among Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans

Veterans’ Claims Pending at VA for All Periods of Service
1,097,489 Sep. 2011, Pending Veterans’ Claims and Appeals
568,711 Mar. 2003, Pending Veterans’ Claims and Appeals
528,778 Pending Claim Increase, Mar. 2003 to Sep. 2011

According to Paul Sullivan, “We are just at the front edge of this tsunami. Many more years lie ahead before we will see the peak of veterans seeking health care. Those still in the service are the most likely to need care.” That is because those still in have been deployed two or more times. Veterans with mental heath conditions will increase from 52% of VA patients to 60% or higher.

Based on the new PEW research survey estimating half of veterans suffering from PTSD symptoms, Sullivan anticipates the number of veterans with potential longterm PTSD during their lifetime will as high as be 1.1 million, or half of the 2.2 million deployed to war since 9/11. Currently, 211,819 Iraq and Afghanistan are already diagnosed and treated by VA for PTSD. Sullivan believes the number of veterans seeking healthcare and disability benefits from the VA has increased because of several reasons: the poor job market, VA outreach, multiple deployments increasing a service member’s need for care, and the decreased stigma of suffering from PTSD.

What we need to especially concern ourselves with is the amount of funding VA will receive. As David Wood’s most recent article, “As Veterans Fight For Needed Care, Long-Term Funding Remains A Question Mark, “ for his series Beyond the Battlefield lays out, the Veterans Administration is severely underfunded for the current number of veterans needing care. Where will the additional funding come from to take care of this oncoming flood of veterans?

I just read the comments left in response to Woods’s latest piece, and they do not encourage me that our country will find the collective will to take care of our veterans. The comments, for the most part, engage in finding blame for the situation rather than discussing possible solutions. And what Mr. Woods does not address in any detail is the consequence to all of us of our veterans not receiving care. Will we see a huge rate of suicide? Will mental illness become a contagion within families of veterans with PTSD? Because we know that when any member of a family suffers from trauma, the entire family absorbs and replicates the symptoms of the PTSD. Depression, substance abuse, rage follow. We are facing a vast segment of our population being impaired by the wounds these men and women are returning with. How do we begin to calculate those costs?

These are questions we must face now before we, as a country, have much more blood on our hands than we do already from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Think of what we could have done with the $900 billion dollars we will spend on veterans’ health care, not to mention the billions we have spent on weapons and the military. All in the name of taking out those weapons of mass destruction and defeating terrorism. We seem to have done a pretty good job of destroying and terrorizing ourselves.

What we need to especially concern ourselves with is the amount of funding VA will receive. As David Wood’s most recent article, “As Veterans Fight For Needed Care, Long-Term Funding Remains A Question Mark, “ for his series Beyond the Battlefield lays out, the Veterans Administration is severely underfunded for the current number of veterans needing care. Where will the additional funding come from to take care of this oncoming flood of veterans?

I just read the comments left in response to Woods’s latest piece, and they do not encourage me that our country will find the collective will to take care of our veterans. The comments, for the most part, engage in finding blame for the situation rather than discussing possible solutions. And what Mr. Woods does not address in any detail is the consequence to all of us of our veterans not receiving care. Will we see a huge rate of suicide? Will mental illness become a contagion within families of veterans with PTSD? Because we know that when any member of a family suffers from trauma, the entire family absorbs and replicates the symptoms of the PTSD. Depression, substance abuse, rage follow. We are facing a vast segment of our population being impaired by the wounds these men and women are returning with. How do we begin to calculate those costs?

These are questions we must face now before we, as a country, have much more blood on our hands than we do already from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Think of what we could have done with the $900 billion dollars we will spend on veterans’ health care, not to mention the billions we have spent on weapons and the military. All in the name of taking out those weapons of mass destruction and defeating terrorism. We seem to have done a pretty good job of destroying and terrorizing ourselves.