Liz Freitag

“There is one other wall, of course. One we never speak of. One we never see, One which separates memory from madness. In a place no one offers flowers. THE WALL WITHIN. We permit no visitors. Mine looks like any of a million nameless, brick walls— it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul; that part of me which reason avoids for fear of dirtying its clothes and from atop which my sorrow and my rage hurl bottles and invectives at the rolled-up windows of my passing youth. Do you know the wall I mean? —Steve Mason, U.S. Army captain (Vietnam), poet Excerpted from the poem “The Wall Within” by Steve Mason, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran considered the unofficial poet laureate of the Vietnam War. “The Wall Within” was read at the 1984 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and was entered in its entirety into the Congressional Record.”
― Kevin Sites, The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War – Award-Winning Military Memoir

“I want to be inside your darkest everything”
― Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

“As Tick writes in War and the Soul, “Our society must accept responsibility for its warmaking. To the returning veterans, our leaders and people must say, ‘you did this in our name and because you were subject to our orders, we lift the burden of your actions from you and take it onto our shoulders. We are responsible for you, for what you did and the consequences.”
― Kevin Sites, The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War – Award-Winning Military Memoir

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
― Frida Kahlo