This weekend I spent some time with one the former Staff NCOs of my first unit, who I served with upon entering the Marine Corps Reserve in 2001. His wife, it turns out, is one of my peers in my creative writing program at Hopkins who I’ve become good friends with (she also used to be my neighbor in Baltimore when I was a one-year-old, coincidentally enough).
As veterans always do, we recounted for one another our individual combat tales (veterans always talk about these things when they get together because they have no one else to share these topics with): the crazy incidents where some lucky fool escaped death; the politics of the hierarchy of the military order; what it was like to not shower or eat well for days; the unlucky men who did not survive. We talked a lot about PTSD. My peer in the program is writing a story about a mortuary affairs Marine (someone we all knew) who came home in a bad way. Collecting bodies up and shipping them home never caused him any mental issues until, after a particularly deadly IED went off in Ramadi, he had to ride back to base in the rear of a Bradley Vehicle with the exploded remains of seven soldiers.
I have to admit that I felt very fortunate after hearing this tale. Several of my friends died in operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, but I never had to see their severely damaged bodies; instead, I had saluted their flag-draped coffins and headstones on U.S. soil, oblivious to their mutilated bodies (from snipers, IEDs or helicopter crashes).
For some, it’s not the graphic images of war that causes them combat stress or PTSD upon returning home. I don’t buy into the notion that the only people who have the right to complain about their experiences were ones who fought daily in, say, Fallujah or a really bad neighborhood in Baghdad (or any number of places that the media won’t cover because it’s too dangerous). That being said, I know warriors who have seen significant combat and killed other men, who have returned to the U.S. and become emotionally healthy, contributing members of society.
I don’t think there’s ever one specific trigger to the stress that happens to everyone who serves. In a combat zone, your adrenaline pumps fully for the entire time you are overseas, and that intense bodily reaction has to affect your body’s chemistry. At the same time, research has shown that PTSD is exacerbated for some because they can’t process their experiences. For instance, there was a significant up-tick in the numbers of WWII veterans who were seeking treatment for PTSD shortly after the movie “Saving Private Ryan” came out. Even fifty years after their wars, they had never sought to truly process their experiences, because that’s not what the military teaches you. The military doesn’t teach you action, they teach you reaction. You train over and over again until an unconditional response controls your motions when the bullets fly. A sound, a sight or smell – even fifty years later – can incite the memory of a traumatic time. This is why so much of the proper treatment of PTSD (like many other emotional conditions) involves talking about your experiences to effectively treat and process the symptoms that occur because of what you’ve experienced.
Sometimes, just getting the opportunity to relieve your experiences with someone who can really empathize and care – like the Gunny and I at a outdoor table of a cafe bar on the streets of affluent northwest D.C., far removed from the battle – can go a long way in helping the underlying stress and anxiety we all feel about our experiences. Don’t let those things build up as a tumor. You might think that you can control it, but sometimes you really can’t. To some degree it’s never really going to go away. You just need to process it; and the more times you actually talk about it, the easier it is to say.
Maybe you can share your story here. Be as anonymous as you like.
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