By Rivka Solomon Gonzales-Aoki

(AP) – Ryan Sulzman walks alone through the woods behind his parents’ home in Binghamton, New York. It’s one of the few things that gives his troubled soul peace these days. “I like hearing the birds sing…and the crickets” he confides. “It takes my mind off the horrors I witnessed. These are…these are things I still find it hard to talk about.”

Like many young people who volunteered to join the nationwide Occupy movement, Ryan has been having a hard time being back in “the world.” “When we were ‘in country,’ we became used to a certain routine. The free meals served in the camp soup kitchen, the free wi-fi, the rhythmic sounds of the drum circles, and the crackheads who’d let you buy food with their EBT cards in exchange for cash for drugs. I’d give them, like, $10 and they’d let me buy $40 in food. It was a sweet deal.”

But it wasn’t long before Ryan, and so many young people of his generation who had volunteered to do their duty, saw the ugly side of human nature. “The day they cleared out our camp, this one cop…he…he yelled at me. ‘Move! Move! Move!’ He had a bullhorn…the sounds still haunt my nightmares. And then…” Ryan’s voice trails off, as tears well up in his eyes, “then he grabbed my Tumi duffle bag and literally, like, pushed it into my arms. I totally could have been knocked over it I wasn’t wearing my Urban Outfitters boots.”

Still, Ryan considers himself lucky. “I had a friend, Eddie…’Lucky Eddie’ the guys in the camp used to call him, because he’d always get lucky with the drunk girls who’d passed out. The day the camp was disbanded, he got…pushed by a cop. I saw him at the triage we set up in the Starbucks across the street. There was a vacancy in his eyes. ‘Lucky Eddie’ was gone – he was an empty shell of a man.”

Ryan, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and is currently receiving disability, says that all he wanted when he returned home were a few words of thanks from the people he left behind. “I didn’t ask for a parade; none of us did,” Ryan says, as he attempts to restrain the anger building inside him. “But when I came home, when I walked through the door, and there were my parents who hadn’t seen me for two months, and they gave each other a look, like, ‘oh crap, he’s back.’ They hadn’t even known if I’d been alive or dead the past two months…except, of course, for the text messages I’d send, and the Skype videos. Oh, and they both subscribe to my Youtube channel. And, of course, there were the money transfers I had them make so I could upgrade my iPhone. But other than that, I could have been dead for all they knew.”

Ryan isn’t alone in his restrained bitterness. Across the nation, returning OWS vets are finding readjustment difficult – owing in large part to what they see as an indifference on the part of their loved ones to their ordeal. One such disillusioned OWS vet, a 25-year-old who would only give his name as Nick when the we interviewed him in front of the Krazy Kures medicinal pot clinic in Culver City, related his difficult tale. “My mom erased every single program I had Tivo’d. EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM. Sure, I can catch up with “Dexter” on Video on Demand, but those episodes of “Conan” are GONE. I’ll NEVER be able to see them again.”

Snicker.

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