“I was very close to being one of those statistics. Multiple times. And that’s a disabling effect of war — you come home very different.”
~ Nick Paro ~
Nieta Greene, CEO of Disability Community for Democracy, Inc., invites Nick Paro onto her live stream — and what results is a 90-minute conversation about the bodies war breaks, the communities that don’t catch the people who come back, and what it costs to build something better. Nieta is a self-described sibling, niece, daughter, and granddaughter of veterans. Her grandfather served in Korea; her uncle was stationed there in the 80s; her brother did four years in the Marines, four more in the Army National Guard, and a tour in Iraq in the 2000s. Nick is an Army veteran who served 2013–2017, deployed to Afghanistan under Operation Enduring Freedom, and returned medboarded with a 90% VA disability rating and a self-described sense that he no longer recognized himself. Together, they hold the conversation that the military institution does not. Neither of them is here to perform gratitude. Both of them are here to name what happened.
Nick’s list of physical injuries is long and specific: degenerative plica disease in both knees, neuroforaminal stenosis in the spine, degenerative arthritis, radiculopathy through the entire left leg, fibromyalgia that has developed over the past few years, and a TBI he didn’t even think to report on his out-processing paperwork — the result of being inside a metal vehicle when an unannounced howitzer fired next to them. He blanked out. He still doesn’t know exactly how long. The migraines and neck tension and cognitive fog he lives with now trace back to that unreported incident, and the missed entry still bothers him. The physical damage is compounded by what he came back carrying mentally: night terrors severe enough that he would grab his wife in the middle of the night screaming “incoming,” hypervigilance that hasn’t fully switched off since, depression and anxiety that landed on top of the ADHD he’d always had. He doesn’t own handguns. He made that decision deliberately, knowing what could happen in a flashback. He has been in therapy, both individual and group, and found group therapy the more useful of the two — not because individual was bad, but because the core wound was isolation, and group therapy addressed it directly.
Nieta brings her brother’s story as a parallel track. She describes the night she came to surprise him with her key to his apartment and woke him up — and he almost shot her. He wasn’t angry at her because she’d done anything wrong. He was angry because he’d been managing a combat-pattern response for years and nearly failed to contain it, and that terrified him. He had been going to therapy in secret at the time because his police department in 2008–2009 would flag officers who sought mental health help and move to take their weapons — a policy that turned a basic health need into a career threat. Nieta didn’t understand why he kept telling her “don’t hype me up” until this conversation. Nick articulates it from the inside: when the fight-or-flight response has been reengineered to flight-suppressed-and-fight-only, emotional amplification from a loved one doesn’t feel like support — it feels like an accelerant. What they both needed was someone who would simply listen without escalating, who would say “I’m here” and hold steady rather than match the energy. Nick and his wife, also a veteran, have that language built between them. Nieta had to learn it the hard way, with her brother, over decades.
The conversation sharpens when Nieta turns it toward the Iran War. The current conflict is illegal, the troops are eating emergency rations, flu shots have been deprioritized, the DoD under Pete Hegseth gutted the resources service members need to file for conscientious objector status, trans service members have been expelled and their friends know it, and the National Security apparatus has been decimated by DOGE. Nieta is not a dove — she says it directly, more than once. She supports the military and backs law enforcement. What she cannot support is what is being done to service members right now, and what she is afraid of is a Vietnam-style reversion: a public so enraged at the war that its anger curls back onto the people fighting it, pushing veterans further toward the right-wing communities that will be ready to receive them. Nick frames the response clearly: the separation between caring for service members and opposing the institution that is currently destroying them is not a contradiction. It is the only coherent position. If the left does not build spaces now — before these people come back, before the other organizations get there first — those spaces will not exist when they are needed.
The episode closes on the disability community angle, which is Nieta’s core argument and the reason she made this conversation free to all subscribers: disabled veterans and non-veteran disabled people cannot afford to keep treating their struggles as separate. Every time veterans have come home in large numbers — Vietnam, the 40s — disability rights advanced. The 1973 Rehabilitation Act exists in part because Vietnam vets came back broken and demanded recognition. What Nieta is building at Disability Community for Democracy is a space that doesn’t ask whether you earned your disability in uniform or in a hospital. It asks: what do you need? Nick closes with the through-line: we have to build the spaces before they’re needed. A man who comes home from the Iran War into a vacuum — no community, no language for what he’s carrying, no one who will listen without escalating — will find the manosphere ready to receive him. The answer to that is not a lecture. It is a room he can walk into and feel like himself.
War doesn’t end at discharge. Nick’s most disabling injuries — TBI, fibromyalgia, neuroforaminal stenosis, night terrors, hypervigilance — emerged over years, not immediately. The VA disability system catches what you can name at the moment of out-processing. It doesn’t catch what you didn’t know to report, what your body manifested slowly, or what no one told you was claimable.
The fight-or-flight switch can break in one direction. Sustained combat training suppresses the flight response to make soldiers functional in danger. What doesn’t come with instructions is how to turn flight back on in civilian life. Nick’s most useful framing: when someone you love is escalating to support you, and your system is already flooded, their energy doesn’t feel like solidarity — it registers as threat. The ask isn’t for less love. It is for steadier presence.
Family members deploy and come back too — without benefits. Nieta’s brother almost shot her because his PTSD response had no off switch. That near-miss and the two days of silence that followed shaped how she now understands her own trauma as a family member of veterans. The VA does not cover family members. Nieta argues it should, and she’s right: the secondary traumatization of people who live with returning veterans is real, documented, and currently addressed by almost nothing.
The Iran War is already disabling people. The troops are demoralized, hungry, and stripped of the legal tools to object to an illegal order. The gutting of conscientious objector resources by the Hegseth DoD is not a bureaucratic detail — it is a deliberate removal of a legal right service members hold. People who want to refuse this war have fewer pathways to do so than during Vietnam.
Build the spaces before they’re needed. Nick’s clearest prescription: if the communities, the podcasts, the conversations about intelligent masculinity, and the disability solidarity networks don’t exist when veterans start coming back from Iran, the organizations that will fill the vacuum are ready and waiting — and their version of brotherhood does not include trans people, does not critique the system, and does not help anyone heal. The window is now.
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I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!.