I Typed Forms While Other Men Went to War. That Shame Shaped My Life

Photo courtesy of WikiCommons /> On the day I left the Army, a sergeant in dress uniform took my hand and held it while he spoke.

“On behalf of the president of the United States, the people of the United States, and myself, I want to thank you for your service to our country.”

He called me Mr. Thompson. Not “specialist.” Not any military rank. Mister. I was a civilian again, and he was acknowledging it with the formality the Army reserves for people no longer subject to its authority.

I walked out into the sunshine and sat down on my motorcycle. And that’s when something went wrong.

The author, who has ridden motorcycles since age 18, at a scenic overlook of the Columbia River during a motorcycle ride from Washington to Idaho in 2019. (Photo courtesy of G.A.Thompson) alt="" class="wp-image-44027" title="" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=1030%2C773&ssl=1 1030w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=400%2C300&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=1536%2C1152&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=2048%2C1536&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=800%2C600&ssl=1 800w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=600%2C450&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=200%2C150&ssl=1 200w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=2000%2C1500&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=780%2C585&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?resize=706%2C530&ssl=1 706w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28.jpeg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-28-1030x773.jpeg?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px" /> Not wrong like I imagine things go wrong in war. Wrong in the way things go wrong in a quiet parking lot when a man realizes he has just been thanked for something he believes he didn’t deserve.

I had been drafted and fully expected to die in Vietnam. Instead, I went to Fort Leonard Wood and typed forms. The war went on without me. Men I might have served beside went, and some didn’t come back.

My father was career Navy and we lived in military housing most of my life. I asked to go as a medic. I had no desire to carry a weapon, but saving lives seemed worth something.

Late in basic training, President Richard Nixon ended the deployment of draftees. The door closed. I finished basic training and stayed stateside.

I had wanted to make my father proud. I wasn’t sure I had.

I left with an honorable discharge and 30 days of freedom. I rode my motorcycle around the country, corner to corner, then returned to a good job I had left at Western Electric.

By any measure, things were fine. The parking lot feeling came with me anyway.

I had no words for what I was feeling, and I wouldn’t understand it for two decades.

Shame is the right word. Not guilt; guilt is about something you did. Shame is about who you are, or who you believe yourself to be. I could feel it at the mere mention of Vietnam, a flush of something I couldn’t escape. Even if I managed to sidestep a conversation, it followed me like a verdict. It didn’t always require a trigger. It just lived there, gnawing away at my self-esteem.

I wore it like a sodden greatcoat, a weight I couldn’t take off, that grew heavier every time Vietnam came up in conversation and I felt an expectation to say something. I didn’t want to participate. I wanted to retract into myself, find some safe place inside where no one could ask what I did “over there,” because typing forms in Missouri felt like an admission of something I couldn’t name.

I hadn’t been wounded. I hadn’t lost anyone. I hadn’t even been anywhere. It was a weight with no visible source.

I said yes when someone asked if I was a veteran, and before they could ask a follow-up, I was already talking about something else. I felt something close to guilt whenever I met a combat veteran, like he did the thing I was supposed to do and didn’t.

I avoided VA medical facilities whenever possible. The closest one was in downtown Denver, a long drive from where I lived high in the mountains, and I had Blue Cross, so I used that instead. I told myself it was practical. It wasn’t. I believed VA was for veterans who had really served—men and women who had been somewhere, done something, and come back carrying more than I had.

I worked alongside men who had been in combat in Vietnam and others, like me, who hadn’t. When someone mentioned an incident or memory from those years, the other men might lean in and ask questions. I stayed silent. I was the man who had gotten away with something, and getting away with something means you don’t get to claim the experience—a quiet undermining that doesn’t announce itself.

And when my drinking got bad enough, the shame shaped that too. Underneath every excuse was the sense that my problems weren’t serious enough to warrant attention. That VA especially wasn’t for someone like me. It took a second DUI, a lost job, and the people who loved me insisting before I finally walked through that door. Even then, it was reluctantly.

Twenty years after my military departure, I was sitting in a room at a VA campus in Vancouver, Washington, during a four-week inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. I was sober enough to listen and present enough to hear.

The VA facility in Vancouver, Washington, where the author attended a drug and rehabilitation program. (Photo courtesy of G.A. Thompson) alt="" class="wp-image-44028" title="" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=1030%2C803&ssl=1 1030w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=400%2C312&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=768%2C599&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=1536%2C1197&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=2048%2C1597&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=1200%2C936&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=1024%2C798&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=2000%2C1559&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=780%2C608&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?resize=706%2C550&ssl=1 706w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29.jpeg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-29-1030x803.jpeg?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px" /> There were eight of us that afternoon. We had all served during the Vietnam conflict. Some had been in combat. Myself and a few others had not. The counselor had left us alone for a while, and the conversation had drifted the way it does when veterans get comfortable with each other. Someone told a story about a patrol. Someone else told a story about coming home. Small stories, the kind that don’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t there.

Then a man named Jerry spoke up.

He’d been drafted, same as me, in the early 1970s, and assigned to an Army band in Germany. He played the trombone. He said it as if he was finally confessing something out loud, feeling for the edges of it as the words came.

He felt like shit about it. Like the luck of his assignment was something to be ashamed of rather than grateful for. Like the men who went to Vietnam had done the real thing, and he had played scales in Europe while they died.

I had never thought those words about myself. Not directly. There was just a feeling I had carried so long it had become a low, persistent unease. I just knew I used Blue Cross instead of VA and changed the subject when Vietnam came up.

Jerry put words to it. And something buried deep inside hit me so hard I had tears on my face before I knew they were coming.

Martinez, who served two tours and had shrapnel scars on his neck, leaned forward and told Jerry he was glad he hadn’t gone. Told him that good men died over there for no good reason and he was glad Jerry wasn’t one of them. Told him his service counted and he had nothing to feel guilty about.

G.A. Thompson at home with his dog, Brin, in 2022. (Photo courtesy of the author) alt="" class="wp-image-44029" title="" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=773%2C1030&ssl=1 773w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=300%2C400&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=1152%2C1536&ssl=1 1152w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=1536%2C2048&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=900%2C1200&ssl=1 900w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=600%2C800&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=450%2C600&ssl=1 450w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=150%2C200&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=1200%2C1600&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=780%2C1040&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=400%2C533&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?resize=706%2C941&ssl=1 706w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30.jpeg?w=1875&ssl=1 1875w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/null-30-773x1030.jpeg?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 773px) 100vw, 773px" />

Martinez looked over and saw the tears on my face. “You, too?” he asked.

I nodded. Clerk. Fort Leonard Wood. Typed forms. Never left Missouri.

He crossed the room and put his hand on my shoulder and said he wished every man he served with had gotten what I got: to come home in one piece. Then he pulled me to my feet and hugged me the way men hug when the thing between them is too large for words. He went to Jerry and did the same, and crossed the room to hug a third vet who hadn’t said a word, but his face showed everything. Eight random vets in that small room and three of us were crying because of our shame.

I hadn’t known I was wounded until that moment. I hadn’t known there was anything to heal.

What happened in that room was both simple and enormous—I faced it, addressed it, accepted it. Something unlocked.

The conversation among us got livelier after that, and I joined in. I was a veteran in a room full of veterans without apologizing for the kind I was. That was new.

I still don’t know if the alcohol and the shame were connected—I kept drinking after that afternoon in Vancouver, and that battle belongs to a different story entirely.

But the shame got lighter. Light enough, finally, to look at directly. Light enough to give a name to.

I call it noncombat service shame. It took time, but I was eventually able to see my service differently.

I had answered my nation’s call and put on the uniform. I went where the Army sent me and did what the Army told me to do. I hadn’t failed. I had simply served.

And that was allowed.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.