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Heritage
Foundation
Why
a Car Commercial Can Make You
Cry
By Amy Payne
February 21, 2013
Is
there a veteran of the U.S.
Armed Forces in your life? If so, tears likely came to your eyes when
you saw
Jeep’s Super Bowl commercial. Oprah Winfrey’s voice-over was a moving
tribute
to those who fight for us: “In your home, in our hearts—you’ve been
missed.
You’ve been needed. You’ve been cried for, prayed for.”
For
those of us who have had loved
ones in harm’s way in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other overseas bases in the
past
few years, the ad acknowledged that desire above all others: to bring
them home
safely.
“When
you’re home, we’re more than
a family. We are a nation that is whole again.”
Our
22 million veterans are indeed
part of the whole that is America. But after they’ve gone through hell
on the
battlefield, they come home—and then what? Home looks different from
the home
they left. After seeing what they’ve seen, feeling what they’ve
felt—they will
never be the same again.
At
Heritage’s Bloggers Briefing
this week, Colonel David W. Sutherland, U.S. Army (Ret.), talked about
that
difficult transition from fighting for his life in Iraq to driving
calmly down
a road in Texas.
>>>
Watch Col. Sutherland
describe the experience of saying things your family doesn’t understand
Col.
Sutherland, executive director
of the Dixon Center for Military and Veterans Community Services, was
introducing the audience to the driving force behind a new documentary
called
Veteran Nation that seeks to empower Americans to support service
members at
home. “There is an overarching desire by the American people to want to
help,”
he said. “They just don’t know how. And it’s this film, the
understanding of
how, that builds public awareness.”
If
you search for an organization
that helps veterans, you can find 400,000 websites. So where do you
start? Both
the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs have concluded that
linking
those who want to help with veterans and their families is the single
greatest
and most important challenge they face.
That’s
where Veteran Nation comes
in—to educate people on these efforts and prompt discussions of where
each of
us can fit in. Sutherland said these connections are important because
this
support and integration is an undertaking for communities, not the
government...
Read
the rest of the article and
see the videos at Heritage Foundation
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