Hey, You!

(Just for a reference point for you older vets, no this blog is not about a track on Pink Floyd's epic 1970s concept album "The Wall.")

Hey, you! Be happy. That almost sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Of course if you could be happy you would be. Someone can't just order you into bliss and contentment. I'm embarrassed to admit this story because it makes me sound like a self-centered jerk, but this really did happen: 

Maybe about five months after I came home from my second tour, when I was at my most depressed, some old man stopped me in a parking lot as I walked to my car.

"Hey, you!"

"What do you want?" I replied, pausing my steps.

"You look like you're older than me. You should smile. Life can't possibly be that hard."

In my head I said, F*** you old man. What were you, a World War II veteran or something? I bet you never had to worry about going to war over and over and over again after you came back from your tour.

I just kept walking.

Years later I can appreciate the sentiment of the elderly man (and I can feel like a moron for trying to argue whose war was tougher. Yeah, I've seen Band of Brothers and read a few books. I'll give it to him).

But, in a way, the old man’s intent in stopping me really wasn’t that ridiculous. As been said a million times, coming home from war is a really difficult thing. There’s such a concentrated confluence of so many intense feelings: decompressing and digesting your combat experiences; trying to readapt to the much different civilian world; attempting to control your physical and mental reactions to all these changes. It’s tough. Point blank.

But, finding a little thing in your life that makes you feel just a bit better? (Alcohol doesn’t count.)

That’s really not that hard.

For me it’s the drums. When I get stressed or angry about things I can’t control, I just place my ass on a stool and beat my drums – literally just slap the crap out of them. Maybe that says something negative about me, but when I’m finished with one of these therapy jam sessions, I don’t want to fight anyone and become more docile. As a personal mental health bonus, I’ll have friends come over with their guitars and keyboards to play too, and that usually winds up in a cool, low key night with friends -- no craziness or self destruction.

Obviously, the path to getting well again is going to be a difficult road. But if you can find small things in your life to latch onto that make you feel better, why not start building your life around those things now?

What makes you feel better?

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The Third Phase

Think back to boot camp for a moment. Were you scared the first time that you met your instructors? Were you intimidated, being awakened by clanging trash can lids as cymbals and intense screaming? Were you worried to jump in the water with 50lbs of gear and a rifle? Did the gas chamber instill considerable fear in you?

Of course you were scared, but you kicked ass and made it through. You didn’t have a choice.

Now think forward a bit to the time you were at war: did the nightmare of falling mortars keep you awake at night, ready to snap alert at the sound of any blast? Did you watch roof tops and windows, waiting for the sniper bullet that might slice through your head? Did you fear the piles of trash and the bombs that hid beneath them? Did your training save you?

Maybe you experienced all those things. They’re common experiences of the contemporary wars. And unlike at basic training, the result of those very real situations damaged us -- some mentally, some physically, some with death. But we made it through. The skills we learned before the fighting allowed us to implement our training to be proficient in war.

Maybe you called in an air strike. Maybe you charged room to room. Maybe you consoled a dying man. Maybe you wore his blood.

But what about after the war?

There are thousands of circumstances we’ve been through, and unlimited reactions to these challenges.

There’s no predicting the permutations concerning our psychology and spirit that no one’s trained us for after the fighting.

You’ve learned the skills of combat. You’ve survived the war. You’d be mistaken to think that your education is over.

You’ve got to learn how to be a healthy person again. No one else can do that for you, but there are millions of us – fellow veterans, proud Americans, family members and friends --who want to help your achieve this personal growth. For that purpose, this is why this website exists. I don’t want this to become a cliché but it’s true. Here, you are not alone.

As always, please join the conversation. What have you learned after the war?

Next week I will be posting a practical field guide for coming home. I’m not a master of anything, but I’ve learned a lot in my life, especially after returning from Iraq. I would be honored if you would listen.

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Freedom Bird: A Scene from Coming Home

(Hello all, this is a scene from my memoir. For many, the challenges of returning begin at day one, moment one. What was your first day home from combat like? What was it like seeing your friend, lover or family member for that first time after them being away for so long?)

This plane ride, like any other, is cramped and slow. 20 hours leak by and the same group of music videos appears on projector screen. For the umpteenth time I hear the singer from 311 repeat, “When I am alone with you, it makes me feel like I am home again,” and I cannot help from dwelling on feelings for Lauren.

On the next song of the music video rotation, Allison Krauss sings, “There's a restless feeling knocking at my door today, there's a shadow hanging 'round my garden gate, I read between the lines of words you can't disguise, love has gone away and put these tears in my eyes,” and it is one of those moments where I feel life is providing a well-conceived soundtrack for me.

Everyone on this flight is tired. Tired to our marrow and fatigued in our minds. When the pilot announced five minutes ago that we would be landing in the U.S. soon, everyone cheered, but only because it felt appropriate. And even then our cheers were like golf claps.

The Navy Corpsman next to me – who I spoke to at beginning of the flight -- suddenly looks more vacant and lost than what his stories revealed to me. Seven months in the combat trauma center in Fallujah does that to a man; and returning home, for most of us, is an even scarier thing. I wonder how his wife will react to his lost stares. Will his child see him and cry? Will Lauren be able to see inside me? Will she understand what she sees? 

The plane descends in finality, and it is fitting that the first sound that greets my return to America is the “reverse thrust” of the large airplane. This is the second time I have came and gone, and now that I am back I have no clue what I am supposed to do. I wonder if this time my life will really change. Can I really step off this plane a new man? I will try.

Behind my desire for different things, I know, the war was bad when we stepped on this plane for home. Three years remain on my enlistment; it is very possible I will go back yet again and my life will be comatose because of this. Coming and going; fighting an eternal war; not knowing when it ends; never truly returning home. This is my life. How can I commit to anything when my life is defined by consistent, challenging changes?

Now that plane has landed and stopped, I step near the exit and the heat of Southern California feels the same as Al Qa’im. The San Bernardino Mountains prevent me from seeing too far eastward and I try to remember what home looks like. I wonder how Baltimore feels today.

I am shocked by the small turnout of well-wishers greeting our return. Not that I feel like we deserve a grand welcoming, but a year ago we came home off our planes like a Super Bowl winning team.

Iraq has changed.

I have changed.

Now that I am home, I am going to do things different. But, admittedly, I have no idea what that means. After all, I only learned a few weeks ago how fallible I really am and as the saying goes, “knowing is only half of the battle.”

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Six Years Ago, Today

This time of year is always a particularly introspective one for me. Both of my deployments started in February (2003 and 2004) and it was around this time in March or April several years ago that I experienced the majority of the combat I did. Usually those memories lie dormant in my brain like a volcano that seldom smolders.

Sometimes I have dreams of experiences so vivid I don’t know how they can’t possibly be true. They’re not bad dreams, luckily, just lucid echoes of fuzzy memories – the manifestation of combat stress in my subconscious. Confused, I’ll thumb through my journal (a distinctly Marine Corps lime green-colored journal) to uncover where I was, and what I was doing to see if these things actually did occur:

Fallujah, Iraq
Day 68
April 9, 2004

Slept in till 0800. Went into work and became very busy with random tasks. Off at usual time. Rested for night mission. Before crossing of wire, two separate mortar attacks came f***ing close. Posted as OP for our CA mission from last night that was canceled. Two minutes after we reentered the gate, witnessed a huge firefight across the wire. Seriously close s*** again. Thank God for his protection.

I dreamed that I was walking that night on a patrol (which was not the case), where something bad happened, but I couldn’t remember what. It’s just a flash of an image that I remember from that dream. I’m marching with my weapons and I’m feeling the foreboding of death…

My absolute last day in the Marines, I drove to the Henderson Hall post exchange (military department store) at the Headquarters of the Marine Corps in D.C. I knew I wouldn’t have access to these facilities as a civilian, so I wanted to purchase some parting gifts for myself: a brand new bumper sticker; extra ribbons and medals; a gray t-shirt that reads “USMC” in black letters. A captain was there. He felt familiar for some reason. I broke traditional protocol (a corporal wouldn’t usually approach a captain) and walked towards him.

“Good afternoon, Sir. I’m sorry to bother you, but do I know you?”

He stared back. “Yeah, maybe.”

We flipped through our collective consciousnesses. Were you in Iraq? Yes. In April 2004? Yeah, that’s right. Fallujah? Yes, that’s correct, who are you Corporal?

The captain, it turns out, had come with us on this civil affairs mission of ours that occurred on this day six years ago. We went to resupply a Jordanian hospital during the First Battle of Fallujah. I had been posted as an observation post slash machine gun position at the south side of the hospital. I watched the evening horizons all around me illuminate with dozens of flashes through my night vision goggles. Violent explosions thumped the ground. Apparently, according to the captain, an enemy element was observed at the north side of the hospital and he had called in artillery to eliminate them. “That night was the biggest fire mission I ever called,” the captain boasted.

I don’t think I ever knew that. But maybe I did. I’ve never killed anyone but I know, in part, that the captain only successfully accomplished his mission because I was watching his rear. Six years later, I still don’t know how I feel about what I learned. Maybe I couldn’t accept what happened then so I had hidden those realizations away.

It’s amazing what the brain can do automatically on its own accord. It’s hard to understand the past when trauma has beat up our minds. I’m writing this today for clarity. It’s part of my healing process.

Feel free to offer up whatever you have to say.

You are not alone.

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Who Among Us Is Well?

I wonder who among the thousands of men and women I’ve served with as brothers and sisters in combat is doing well today.

Did the PFC I served with in Kuwait, who used to have manic anxiety in our underground bunker during SCUD attacks, return home as a happy woman? Does she think about the time where we sang “Lean on Me” in our bunker after the surprise missile attack that started the war? Does she have kids and a job? Can her significant other understand why she sometimes can’t sleep (the missiles always came at night)?

Has my red-headed brother (I call him that because we looked so alike back then that this is how people referred to us, as “brothers”) had his hearing repaired from the explosion? Is there a ringing still that tortures him? I wonder if he can have his brain scraped of the images of the dead bodies he processed during his second tour as mortuary affairs.

I saw my senior drill instructor from boot camp on the Syrian border area of Iraq. He was in charge of a logistics convoy where two Marines had just died. Have you ever seen the broken face of the man who taught you how to be hard? Does this gunnery sergeant still wear that vacant look in dark rooms at the end of the day? Does he wear it over an open bottle in a bar?

I served with one of my best friends from youth in Iraq. I have a photo of the first time we encountered each other overseas: a polaroid of him chewing dip and half-smiling on a guard tower. That tower is destroyed now; three vehicle-borne suicide bombers made sure of that one year after our tour had ended. I have not seen my friend in over five years. When we saw each other then, all he saw was Iraq. I don’t like to think about him anymore. It’s easier for me to just think he’s gone.

Who among us is well?

How can we get back to the place before?

People tell me that they think I’m fine. But how can they really tell?

There are secret burdens that you will never see.

Who among us is well?

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Processing a Healthy Mind

(Warning: This blog deals with specifically described combat scenes)

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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A Scene from Last Friday at the Marine Corps Museum

Congratulations to newly-pinned USMC Lieutenant, John Nelson. That’s one of my best friends from college at Central Connecticut State University. We were co-Resident Assistants together. We shared responsibility for a particularly rowdy group of freshmen -- alcohol incidents, drug dealing, weapons charges and the like. I wrote him a recommendation for Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. The selection process was especially competitive for his group. I have no doubt that my glowing remarks went a long way in helping him earn his current position in life. I feel a combination of sickness and pride for what I helped do to bring him where he is now.

I went to see his graduation at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, VA last Friday. It was my first time being around a large group of currently active Marines since my final formation in June 2007. I think I had changed a lot: 15 extra pounds; a colorful tie and a cardigan; all black clothes instead of camouflage colors. I walked by the Medal of Honor Wall exhibit trying not to look at Corporal Dunham. He had died in Iraq, near the Syrian border, after jumping on a grenade to save his fellow Marines. He was reacting to an ambush that occurred to my Civil Affairs Team (they were wounded too; I was sent out that way as a combat replacement). My first day on the border, I attended his field memorial service. I swear to you it was a cloudy day, which of course, almost never happens in the desert. I didn’t want to look at his photo because I get emotionally overwhelmed when thinking about his sacrifice. I can’t stop crying when I envision the display of his boots, helmet and rifle; shiny dog-tags moving with the wind.

I arrived only just a few minutes before the ceremony, so I stopped checking out the displays and shoved my way into the main lobby. The Lieutenants began to file in; they wore their service alphas (the professional gabardine-green colored suit of the Marine Corps), smiles beamed from their faces.

From quite a distance away, I saw my very good friend, John. He couldn’t hold back his signature goofy-ass grin. He took his seat, returning his back to me. His jarhead haircut got lost in the neat arrangement of chairs and sitting men. 

When the band played the Marine Corps Hymn at the end of the ceremony, I had to turn off my mind completely to hold back a reservoir of tears. All the new Lieutenants dispersed themselves amongst the crowd and their families. I walked around for a long time trying to find him. I remembered when I graduated basic training at Marine Corps Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina. My mom hugged another boy that she swore was me.

I said hello to his family and friends briefly, and then left abruptly. “I have to leave or I’m going to cry,” I told them. They probably couldn’t have understood. Even John, probably didn’t get it. I’ve helped secure my friend's place in the business of killing and war. And I know that, while John is going to make an excellent leader of Marines, even an inexperienced insurgent marksman sometimes gets a lucky shot. It’s his decision, but I don’t know if I can deal with the potential consequences of the combat my friend will no doubt see after he finishes his training. Like I said, I’m filled with sickness and pride for my friend. Over the past two years I’ve been complacent, just like the rest of America that has been removed from the battle. I too don’t want to be connected to the war. I don’t want to experience a personal reaction to the inevitable outcome of sending men and machines into hostile lands – Death – anymore.

I’ll pray for John and the other troops, just like I’ve done for years – just like I’ve done since I faced my own mortality in the Spring of 2003.

There is nothing else I can do.

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