COMMENTARY: Loneliness harms veterans; listening can help

My grandfather, Albert Hlavaty, served in the U.S. Army infantry in World War II. As children, my cousins and I were enamored with his war memorabilia. We drank from his old canteen when we played war, but the items in his mind, the stories, remained locked. In my grandmother’s house, we did not speak about the war.

Not long before he died, my grandfather was ill and did little more than sit with his eyes closed. Oxygen mask in hand.

On the day he started talking, I was visiting my grandparents and found myself alone with my grandfather. A rare occasion. Unprompted, he started telling me about the war, sharing details of the European countryside, sleeping in farmhouses, playing cards with his buddies.

My grandmother, pleased to see us talking, entered the room, but when she heard him speak of the war, she grew angry and told me not to stoke bad memories.

Oddly, my grandfather told her to leave us alone. Something he had never done. She retreated, but from then on, I saw her peeking at us, clearly frightened for him.

Still, he kept talking, revealing two things he’d never told anyone. First, he described going through the pockets of a dead German soldier. I got the sense he’d done this a lot, but this particular time, he paused to look at the young man’s face, to really look, and he realized Germans were basically “just like you and me.”

He shook his head then, saying nothing more for a time.

When he spoke next, he talked about fear. He said that he grew used to the constant pop of rifle fire because foxholes offered protection. But the sound of mortar fire, the unpredictability of where the shell would land, forever terrified him.

By his telling, it became a fear he never escaped.

At the time of his telling, I was 25 and basically useless, hardly someone who could relate to his stories. For years, I wondered why he’d opened up to me. As far as I know, he’d never told anyone else.

But in 2017, I did a story on wounded veterans engaged in wilderness therapy. Though most had significant physical injuries ranging from TBI to extensive burns, they mostly spoke about social isolation when they returned from deployment. Nearly all of them described having no one who understood their experiences. I can’t describe the depth of their loneliness, but I could feel it, a palpable sense of existing with no hope of support or understanding.

We now know that loneliness is a killer. In 2023, the U.S. surgeon general positioned loneliness as an epidemic, and a significant amount of academic research now makes clear the dangers loneliness poses to veterans, including a 2022 article in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry that found older veterans who report feeling significant loneliness have a much higher likelihood of suicidal ideation.

These days, there is no excuse for letting veterans continue to suffer in isolation. Maybe you cannot relate, but simply listening without judgment can ease feelings of loneliness.

If my grandfather experienced such feelings, he kept them quiet. Mental health wasn’t even a concept in his time. While we often picture members of the Greatest Generation as stoic heroes, I remember him as a man completely alone. A man who functioned, who could fix anything, who worked in silence and never complained. But that’s just what we saw on the outside.

I suspect my grandmother sensed an inner world that frightened both of them. That day, as I was leaving, my grandmother escorted me to the door, scolding me again for dredging up war memories. I’d thought my grandfather was asleep in his chair, but he’d overheard our conversation. He said only that I needed to hear those stories.

But now I wonder if he just needed to tell them and to have someone listen. Finally.

Greg Hlavaty (ghlavaty@elon.edu) is an associate teaching professor of English at Elon University in Elon, North Carolina. His novel, “Hard Light,” is available on Amazon.