My normal disclaimer applies. This means if you are easily offended, don't appreciate the Semi-God like versatility of the word "fuck", can't stand the C-Bomb, or are offended by colorful uses of our language you probably need to stop now. If you feel you have a thick enough skin to survive my rants, please feel free to read on but don't say I didn't warn you.
Before going any further please read this article.
Court Blasts VA Mental Health Care System
All right people, stand by to receive a little bit of knowledge.
Throughout this I am going out on a limb and will convey a few my personal experiences for your understanding. PLEASE do not read too much into it, I'm fine. Most of you have a basic understanding of what PTSD is and some feel that many people shouldn't have it because they weren't exposed to as much. I used to feel the same way when I, for example, would see some Air Force kid who had only been exposed to a distant rocket blast in a clinic seeking help because he was having nightmares about it. I used to sit there and think to myself, "What a bitch, he hasn't seen shit..." etc, etc, etc. Then I had the distinct honor of speaking with my uncle who is a Vietnam vet. He basically told me to stop being such an asshole and keep in mind that what may not even remotely scare one person, could scare and traumatize someone else. I spent a lot of time thinking about that and have realized that he is absolutely right. So now that I have established the fact that different events instill trauma in different people let me give you a run down of how PTSD manifests itself in those who suffer from it.
There are three things that Doctor's generally look for in patients who may have PTSD. Re-experiencing, Avoidance, and Hyper-arousal. This is a simplification and a lot more goes into assessing each case but those are the three main categories that things fall into.
Re-experiencing is just that. What ever you may have experienced in combat plays over and over and over again in various way. Nightmares, flashbacks, reminders, etc. These times of re-experience can range from mildly annoying to out right shit your pants curl up in the fetal position and beg for mommy terrifying. Generally speaking they fucking SUCK more than a three dollar whore sucking a basketball through a straw. It's shitty and when it happens it is extremely difficult for a lot of people to get past the initial terror and calm back down. Imagine if every time you hear a loud crack around a construction site that your body goes into "fight or flight" mode. Then you have to try to calm yourself down and continue on with your normal day while people stare at you trying to figure out why your hands are shaking, you've started to sweat, your face is flushed, and your eyes won't stop darting around looking for the source of danger. A lot easier said then done.
To shed some light on my personal problems with this I mainly have nightmares. Some worse than others, all pretty much some twisted manifestation of shit that happened over there. The nightmares vary intensity and sometimes just wake me up and other times I wake up mid flight from my bed to the floor. I've woken up in a panic trying to find my rifle. My heart racing so fast I thought I was going to have a heart attack. With the smell of dead burnt rotten flesh in my nostrils. Even with the sensation of getting blown up again. In Afghanistan we lost PFC Matthew Bertolino. He was killed in an accident which seems incredibly unfair because that shit could have happened anywhere. At any rate, he suffered from massive head trauma and lost a lot of blood in the back of the Hummer that they put him in to keep him safe while they waited for the Medevac helicopter to arrive. Unfortunately, it was an Army "Combat Lifesaver" that attended to him and when they returned the vehicle to the Motor Pool at the FOB, he didn't feel the need to clean anything up. I was extremely pissed off about this and there was no way in hell any of my Marines were going to clean up the equipment that was used to try to try and save Bert's life. So I did it. It was pitch black, I was using a red lens flash light, and set about my business. Once I had everything cleaned up and everything put into a poncho I wrapped it up nap sack style and walked into the fully lit mechanics bay. This was when I found out that what I thought was water used to wash off the wounds was in fact blood, and I was fucking covered in it. It wasn't pretty, and I went on an ass chewing rampage of biblical proportions on the Army side of the camp, but that's irrelevant. For months I would wake up with what felt like wet hands and when I looked at them all I could see was the blood of a young man who never had a chance to live. I still have that nightmare but not as frequently. I still see blood on my hands but not as much. It still haunts me over 5 years later.
Avoidance is when people choose not be around or associate with anything that might remind them of their experiences. In the worst form people shut themselves out from life. They internalize everything. They become emotionally numb and no longer enjoy living. This my hoes and pimps, is by and far the worst thing someone can do if it goes too far. I think all of us avoid things to a certain extent. I no longer actively choose to be around fireworks. I've had people tell me to just get over it but that doesn't exactly work. In fact, it took every fiber of my soul not to dick punch the last person that told me that. I wanted to wring her fucking neck and turn her into a bloody pulp that I could wash down a storm drain so her pathetic existence would no longer offend the masses. But I digress.
To put a personal twist on this let me say that for the most part I had gotten sort of bad about this but was snapped out of it when my wife got sick. I more or less didn't have a choice because I had to care for my kids. I had gotten to the point where I avoided crowds whenever humanly possible. I didn't associate with very many people that hadn't experienced the same thing, and I had gotten emotionally numb to the point where I felt little or no love for anything or anyone in my life. I just didn't fucking give a rats ass. I shut people out. However, I still prodded on through life because I more or less had to earn a paycheck etc. I locked myself in a world that mainly consisted of work and school which required little emotional involvement. I didn't talk to people about shit because I felt that it was useless to do so. They wouldn't understand and frankly I didn't want anyone to know what I had seen or done, in many ways I still don't but I'm getting better at it. That's about as far as I'll go because frankly I'm not ready to divulge my demons to anyone yet cause I'm still trying to fuck those bastards up. This should at least give you an appreciation for what others may be going through.
Finally we come to Hyper Arousal. Not the good bonerific kind either. This is when the body has a physiological reaction. Heart racing, sweating, fight or flight, shaking, paranoia, etc. Sometimes it happens because of a reminder, sometimes it just happens. For no apparent reason you just go on super alert status like you were patrolling a bad area or were driving down a road that is normally laden with IEDs. It's rough cause sometimes you feel it coming and sometimes it's like "BAM I just got hit with a lemon wrapped gold fucking brick." To say the least it can be really disconcerting and normally leads to the reaction of "I need to get the fuck away from here NOW." It can also make it exceptionally difficult to relax or get to sleep or stay asleep or enjoy much of anything.
For me, it happens with reminders mostly I guess. Well that and my losing battle with the sleep monster. When I first got to the glorious area known as the Metro DC I had issues. Primarily because traffic sucks and people are inconsiderate littering fuckers. Now to explain this to you a little more let me tell you about training for recognizing IEDs in country. Basically they teach you to look for things like piles of rocks and trash. What they don't tell you is that in Afghanistan the National pass time is stacking fucking rocks and in Iraq they love to leave piles of trash FUCKING EVERYWHERE! So your first few months in either place your asshole puckers up every time you see a stack of rocks or a pile of trash. After a while you become kind of numb to it, until the day that something explodes and then shit gets real again. So back to what happened to me on occasion when I first got to the DMV (DC-Maryland-Virginia). I was driving down Interstate 66 which in essence is a 50 mile long parking lot, and I saw a pile of trash and boxes on the side of the road. No big deal right? WRONG. Somewhere in my brain housing group my mind instilled a fear and panic that it was going to explode and what made it worse was that I was in bumper to bumper not fucking moving traffic and had absofuckinglutely no where to go. I fucking panicked like a choir boy getting personal lessons from his priest. It was debilitating and I had no idea what to do. That in and of itself made matters worse. The thought that this shouldn't be happening here became my personal mantra and when I finally got passed the trash I managed to calm down a little bit but I was keyed up for the rest of the day and night. This doesn't happen to me that much anymore but every once and a while it will. I've learned to deal with it but it still sucks. Some guys never seem to get over it and it causes more and more re-experiencing issues which eventually leads to avoidance. It's a never ending cycle.
Eventually when things get bad enough you're by yourself and maybe, just maybe, the thought of ending it all doesn't seem like that bad of an idea. I mean you have guilt cause you made it. You have nightmares about those that didn't and the times where you got through by the skin of your ass. Your body is reacting in ways that send you over the edge and the only thing you can do is avoid it all but then it haunts you in your sleep. So what then? You try to get help from the VA and after weeks, maybe months, little help is received. You can't relate to anyone. No one truly understands how you feel. You don't have your friends around you who know what it's like to talk to. Alcohol and drugs numb it for a little while so you do that during your wait for help from the VA. Only to find out your claim is on hold or denied. Then what? What do you do? You're alone. Then one day...
People don't even know or understand what happened. You're parents stand over your coffin wondering what they could have done to help. No one understands. The pentagon refuses to add the statistics needed to wake up the politicians and the VA wants everyone to think they have it under control. It's fucking bullshit, it's wrong, it needs to be addressed. How many more have to take their own life before someone decides enough is enough. We hit what a thousand deaths in Iraq and people were freaking out and throwing a shit fit about getting the fuck out of there. Yet we have 1,000 suicide attempts every fucking month by those who are under VA care. What about the ones who haven't been able to get care yet?
This shit pisses me off and it should piss you off too. If it doesn't, do me a favor and suck start a shotgun because that's what you fucking deserve.
By the way, before I go I want to say this. This rant isn't about me. Please don't turn it into something about me. The purpose of me telling a little bit of my story is to help all of you understand what many vets go through. So with that, I say again, I'm fine.
Read, share, pass on.
Via con queso,
The Senator
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