✈️ The Moment I Sat Across From Carlos on That Rain-Slicked Bench in Oaxaca
I didn’t go to Mexico to heal. I went because my therapist suggested I stop rehearsing the war in silence—and start listening to others who’d lived it differently. On a drizzly Tuesday in late October, beneath the rusted awning of Mercado 20 de Noviembre, I sat across from Carlos—a former Mexican Army medic who’d served in Chiapas during the Zapatista conflict—and realized something vital: travel doesn’t erase war experiences, but meeting veterans across cultures can reframe them. Not through grand gestures or curated retreats, but through shared meals, unscripted pauses, and the quiet courage of showing up when you’re still raw. This is how I learned to meet veterans not as symbols, but as people—and how travel became part of my ongoing, non-linear process of making sense of what war leaves behind.
🌍 The Setup: Why I Chose This Path—Not Therapy Abroad, But Terrain Shift
It had been three years since my discharge from the U.S. Army Infantry. My deployment to eastern Afghanistan—2012–2013—had ended without physical injury, but not without residue: hypervigilance that flared in crowded airports, a reflexive scan of rooftops in downtown Portland, dreams where sound distorted into static before detonation. I tried talk therapy. I tried yoga. I even volunteered at a local VA clinic—helping organize supply drives—but kept feeling like an observer in my own recovery. My counselor gently pointed out I was avoiding proximity to other veterans. “You’re helping them,” she said, “but not connecting with them.”
Then I read a small, unremarkable article in The Lancet Psychiatry about cross-cultural peer engagement among military-affected communities—how shared narrative spaces outside clinical settings correlated with improved emotional regulation 1. Not cure. Not closure. But continuity—of voice, of witness, of ordinary life continuing alongside memory. That resonated more than any wellness retreat brochure.
I chose Mexico deliberately—not for its distance, but for its layered military history and strong tradition of community-based veteran support outside formal institutions. Unlike U.S. veterans’ organizations—which often center institutional affiliation—I’d read about colectivos in Oaxaca and Chiapas: informal networks of ex-soldiers, police, and civil defense volunteers who’d experienced armed conflict but now ran cooperatives, taught ceramics, repaired radios, or stewarded communal land. No uniforms. No hierarchy. Just people who’d carried weapons and now carried tomatoes to market.
🗺️ The Turning Point: When the Map Didn’t Match the Memory
I arrived in Oaxaca City in early October, booked a room near Santo Domingo, and spent Day One walking past colonial facades washed in ochre and burnt sienna, trying to match names from my research—Carlos, Elena, Mateo—to faces. I’d contacted two contacts via a bilingual NGO liaison (a retired teacher named Luz who’d coordinated similar exchanges for ten years). She’d given me phone numbers, meeting points, and one firm instruction: “Don’t say ‘thank you for your service.’ Say, ‘I’m learning how to hold space for what happened. Can I sit with you while you tell me about your garden?’”
Day Two, I met Elena—a former federal police officer who’d responded to the 2006 Oaxaca protests—at a tiny café called La Cumbre. We shared atole and pan dulce. She spoke softly about nights spent guarding government buildings, then paused, stirred her coffee, and said, “The hardest thing wasn’t the shouting. It was the silence afterward—when the crowd left, and I stood alone, holding a baton I didn’t know how to put down.” I nodded, but didn’t speak. My throat tightened. I’d expected war stories—explosions, patrols, loss. Not this: the weight of aftermath, held in stillness.
That evening, walking back, rain began falling—not heavy, but insistent. I ducked under the awning of the mercado, pulled out my notebook, and wrote: *They don’t narrate war as climax. They narrate it as interruption.* And that changed everything.
🤝 The Discovery: What Happens When You Stop Looking for Mirrors
Over the next twelve days, I met six people connected to armed conflict in Mexico:
- Carlos, 42, former Army medic—now runs a mobile clinic for farmworkers in the Mixteca region. He showed me his leather satchel, lined with repurposed IV bags turned into tool pouches. “The body remembers stitches,” he said, “but the hands remember how to mend.”
- Elena, 38, ex-police—co-founder of a textile co-op using traditional Zapotec patterns to fund trauma counseling for youth in marginalized neighborhoods.
- Mateo, 61, ex-paramilitary from Guerrero—now teaches woodworking to teens in Tlacolula. His workshop smelled of sawdust and linseed oil. He didn’t speak much about the 1990s, but showed me how he carved dove motifs into chair backs—“not peace,” he clarified, “just birds that choose where to land.”
- Luz (my liaison), 67—had lost two brothers in the 1970s guerrilla conflicts. She never served, but her home library held decades of oral histories recorded on cassette tapes, transcribed by hand.
What surprised me most wasn’t their openness—it was their boundaries. No one invited me into private grief. No one asked me to recount my own deployment. Instead, they modeled presence: sharing lunch without interrogation, correcting my Spanish gently (“No es ‘guerra,’ es ‘conflicto armado’—war is a word governments use. Conflict is what we lived”), inviting me to help harvest squash or sand a table leg. Sensory details anchored me: the chalky grit of dried corn masa under my nails, the sting of chile smoke in my eyes at Elena’s co-op kitchen, the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of Mateo’s mallet against walnut wood.
One afternoon, Carlos drove me to San Juan Guelavía, a village nestled in folded hills where his clinic rotated monthly. We walked past fields of agave, past women weaving under shade trees, past children chasing chickens. At the clinic—a converted schoolhouse—he treated a boy’s infected foot wound, then handed me sterile gauze and said, “Hold the light.” I did. My hands stopped shaking. Not because the memory vanished—but because my attention had a new, immediate task: steady light, clean pressure, quiet observation. That was the first time in years I’d felt useful without needing to explain why.
🚌 The Journey Continues: From Oaxaca to Unexpected Bridges
I returned to Portland in November—not “healed,” but recalibrated. I kept in touch with Luz via WhatsApp. In January, she sent photos of Elena’s co-op launching a new dye workshop using native plants. In March, Carlos messaged: “We opened a second mobile unit. The road to San Miguel is still rough—but passable.”
Then came the pivot: I started volunteering—not at the VA, but with Veterans for Peace’s international correspondence project, helping pair U.S. veterans with counterparts in Colombia, Nepal, and South Africa. Not for therapy. Not for testimony. For exchange: recipes, seed swaps, sketches of hometown bridges, recordings of local birdcalls. We used no formal curriculum. Just shared prompts: What does safety sound like where you live? What tool do you use most often—and what did it repair this week?
This wasn’t about comparison (“My war was harder”). It was about calibration—realizing how much of my internal landscape had been shaped by American militarized narratives: victory/defeat, hero/villain, before/after. Other veterans spoke in terms of seasons, soil health, generational memory, interrupted harvests. Their timelines weren’t linear—they were cyclical, fractal, rooted.
💡 Reflection: What Travel Taught Me About Holding Space—Not Fixing It
Travel didn’t “overcome” my war experiences. It displaced them—gave them different gravity, different scale. Standing in Carlos’s clinic, watching him wrap a child’s foot while humming a folk song, I understood: healing isn’t the absence of memory. It’s the presence of choice in how you carry it.
I’d assumed meeting veterans meant finding mirrors—people who reflected my pain back at me, confirming its validity. Instead, I found prisms: refracting my experience into unfamiliar wavelengths—humor, craft, patience, stubborn tenderness. The most profound moments weren’t confessions, but collaborations: kneading dough with Elena, sanding wood with Mateo, translating Luz’s handwritten notes from Spanish to English—not for publication, but so I could understand the weight of a single phrase: “no olvidamos, pero tampoco vivimos allí.” (“We don’t forget—but we don’t live there either.”)
And that’s the practical insight I wish I’d known before booking my flight: you don’t need a program, a visa waiver, or a sponsored trip to meet veterans meaningfully across borders. You need humility, preparation, and the willingness to show up as a learner—not a seeker of redemption.
📝 Practical Takeaways Woven Into the Journey
None of this happened through tourism infrastructure. There are no “veteran meet-up tours” in Oaxaca. What worked was slow, relationship-led groundwork:
- Start locally, not internationally: Before crossing borders, attend a Veterans for Peace chapter meeting or a StoryCorps veteran recording session in your city. Listen first. Observe how trust forms.
- Language isn’t just vocabulary—it’s protocol: In Mexico, asking “¿Cómo te fue en el servicio?” (How was your service?) risks reducing identity to duty. Better: “¿Qué te mantiene conectado con tu comunidad ahora?” (What keeps you connected to your community now?).
- Bring utility, not gifts: I brought extra medical tape and antiseptic wipes for Carlos’s clinic—not “donations,” but shared supplies. It signaled collaboration, not charity.
- Expect asymmetry—and honor it: Some veterans will share deeply. Others will offer only tea and silence. Both are valid. My role wasn’t to extract stories, but to hold space for whatever emerged—including nothing.
- Verify logistics with local eyes: I assumed transport between villages would be straightforward. It wasn’t. Buses ran twice daily—but only if enough passengers showed up. Carlos told me: “Always ask the driver at dawn. Schedules may vary by season and rainfall.” I confirmed each route with him the night before.
🌅 Conclusion: How This Trip Changed My Perspective
I used to think “overcoming war experiences” meant moving past them—like climbing a mountain and standing on the other side. Now I see it as learning to navigate terrain where the mountain is part of the map, not an obstacle to bypass. Meeting veterans across cultures didn’t give me answers. It gave me better questions: What does care look like when it’s not clinical? What counts as service when it’s unpaid, unrecorded, and rooted in place?
Travel didn’t fix me. It unsettled my assumptions—about trauma, about recovery, about what “veteran” means beyond a label. It reminded me that resilience isn’t stoicism. It’s showing up with flour-dusted hands, a repaired radio, a well-tended garden—and trusting that, sometimes, the most radical act is simply sitting on a rain-slicked bench, sharing silence with someone who also knows how heavy quiet can be.
