Suffering’s Brutal Truth: A Veteran’s Raw Lesson on Enduring Endless Pain

A decade ago, Jackson pulled me aside at the end of drill and asked me, “Hey, Sergeant… how do you do it… like, deal with all the pain?”

I didn’t know how to answer then, but I don’t think he would have liked my answer now.

I walked him down to the chaplain’s office, hoping they would provide something better.“

He asked me how a man lives with pain that does not conclude, and I, who had learned to command men but not to absolve them, had no answer worthy of his suffering. I sent him to a room of quiet words and gentle voices, as though silence itself could bandage a wound that breathes. A year later, he chose the needle – not as escape, but as verdict – and the world accepted it with the same indifference it offers all private catastrophes.

For years, I believed this meant I had failed him. Later, I understood something more terrible and more human: that no one can hand another the meaning of suffering without lying. The bottle promises forgetfulness; the needle promises mercy –but both are false sacraments. They offer an end where none exists.

Suffering does not ask to be solved. It asks to be endured. And in that endurance – humiliating, unglorious, daily – there appears a strange and scandalous beauty. Not because pain is good, but because consciousness remains. Because one still chooses to rise, to speak, to remember, to refuse oblivion. If life yielded its answers easily, it would be mere arithmetic, not faith.

Perhaps meaning is not found at the bottom of agony but forged in the decision to remain present within it. To suffer and yet not surrender one’s soul to nothingness –this is the quiet heroism no one applauds. And maybe that is enough. Not redemption. Not closure. Just the stubborn insistence on living without lies.

– Ryan Brazil