During my own career as a Marine, I heard all kinds of war stories, and not just from my peers,

like the time an old Sergeant Major who'd fought on Iwo Jima during the Second World War,

told me how he still hadn't forgotten the stinging smell of gunpowder and death, or the gentleman who'd been

one of the first Marines to hit the beach on Pelelu in 1944. He told me he woke up one night

to find his foxhole buddy had been killed, a bayonet in the chest. He said he was never able

to understand how he had survived, sleeping only a foot away from him.

And then my own grandfather, he told me stories of his time in the Korean War, fighting in one

of the worst battles in military history, the chosen reservoir.

He said it was so cold that guys who'd lost limbs in battle survived because everything

just instantly froze and kept them from bleeding out.

There's a lot of stories like that, acts of valor, sacrifice, men who put themselves a great risk,

and of course there's the darker side of war, the horrible things men do to one another when

anything goes. But if you spend any time in the military or around military folks, you may have also heard

one or two stories that were much more difficult for people to open up about.

And I'm not just talking about traumatic experiences, I'm talking about the things that service

members encounter, things that keep members encounter.

Things that keep them awake at night.

Things they just cannot explain.

The kinds of stories that would get them red flagged by their command and placed on a drug test roster or sent for mental health counseling if they insisted on reporting it.

And if they have some kind of

security clearance, you're not going to risk losing that because you saw something. It's not

hard to see exactly why these stories remain untold. Who in their right mind would believe them?

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