Nate wrote:
How is it that a person can go to work and next thing you know it is time to go home but you don't know what you have gotten done that day because your brain disconnects from everything around you?
That happens to me a lot while I am driving especially out in the country where I feel the safest. It is as if I finally can let my guard down on the road and think but is it really a good thing when I do not remember stopping at any stop signs etc....? i am not sure. But when i am in a lot of traffic I am prone to much anxiety. It probably is a consequence of having to move through some real hostile areas by convoy more than a few times when I was deployed and also the fact that the last convoy I was ever in was the one with the IED. When I went to Boston last winter just a few months after I first got home, my cousin and his wife had me in a cab and we were going to see Oldd North Church. We got into a cab with a foreigner....I only say that because he had an obvious accent. Of course I admit my mind automatically thought he was middle eastern/Arab/Muslim because of his accent but how could I really be sure, right? that is my own prejudices baging around in my head. Anyway, we were in the cab and the traffic was terrible and this guy was driving like an absolute lunatic. My heart rate went up, i was sweating even though it was probably only about 15 degrees that day, and i started feeling dizzy and sick to my stomach. Right before we got to Old North, there was a stop light and I clearly remember seeing the sign that said "No right Turn on Red" and there was traffic coming from the other direction and this guy just floored the cab and made a squealing turn around the corner. just a few seconds later we pulled up to the Old North and luckily I was sitting next to the door (I do not think it made matters any better that the guy locked us in to the cab after we got in and I could not unlock the lock on my own....they were power locks and he had to unlock them himself) because I immediately opened the door once I saw the lock come up and threw up right outside the cab. Guy is lucky I did not throw up in his cab. Part of me wonders if maybe he did not act the way he did in person because I was wearing a leather jacket my platoon had sent to me when I was in the hospital that had a patch from the 82nd on it and also a big Dept. of The Army patch and an OIF/OEF patch with all my dates of deployment they had had specially made and sewn onto it for me. So the guy knew I had been in Iraq when he saw me with that on. Or maybe I just wanted to be angry about it because I was angry and I figure I could use that as an excuse to be angry....you know the whole "he knows I was in the war and he is messing with me" excuse that makes it okay for me to have gotten sick/gotten angry/wanted to cuss my cousin out for having us even take a cab/ and alllllllllll the other emotions I had that day.
track108 wrote:
IT is crap the way they treat you when you admit you are not perfect and have a problem with ptsd, my friend said he had ptsd and they sent him to the doc and they said he was malingering, but he really had it then our gunny pulls him in front of formation one day and tells him "you are a disease in my platoon" and spits in his face and told him to stay away from the platoon and the company cause he doesnt want him srpeading the disease like cancer and they discharged him for malingering
that is awful track but unfortunately that is not the first story i have heard like that. heck even General Gearoge Patton when he came upon a soldier in a field hospital in WW2 who did not have any obvious wounds and he asked the doctor what was wrong with the man and the doctor told him he was suffering from "battle fatigue' (or the doc said "shell shock"...different versions of the story have different terminology when talking about it)....general Patton apparrently became so enraged by that and he thought the guy was such a coward he took of one of his gloves and slapped the soldier across the face over it. I have heard that in later years Patton was forced to apologize to this guy but I do not know if that is officially true or not. Point is that I remember being told that story in basic training and AIT and Jump School by all different NCOs and other leaders and it was never told as something shameful in the way Patton acted with that soldier. It was always told as a sort of "bravado/macho" type of story like it was supposed to inspire us young soldiers to never get battle fatigue or shell shock.
I remember iwhen I first got to the 82nd ABN and when I was in 82nd replacement detachment the commanding general at the time General Mike Steele came in to address us as new additions to the 82nd ABN. the first words out of his mouth were "I do not know what you have heard about the military today and all these so-called peace-keeping missions and peace-keeping forces, but that is NOT what we do HERE. You are now in the 82nd Airborne Division and our only mission is to make WAR!!! We do not make Peace ....We make WAR!!!!".
the sulture that we grow up with in the military is that we have one mission as a soldier...one primary mission and that is that every soldier regarless of their MOS is at heart an infantryman/woman. I know the Marines have the same idea with the idea that every marine is first and foremost and rifleman, right? Thing is that when we get home from deployment or get out of the miltary for good, we have to transition back to being in a world where we do not have to pull guard duty, where we do not have to be suspisious of every pile of trash or pile of leaves or misplaced pile of sand or misplaced manhole cover on the highway....we have to learn what it feels like to not carry a weapon anymore. My ex-thought it was nuts when i first got home and I immediately got my conceal/carry weapon permit so I could carry my handgun in public without getting in any trouble. I thought it was the perfectly natural thing to do and I found out what I needed to get the permit and I had it 13 days after getting home. I had never needed to carry a gun before but for some reason I feel like I should now.
There are some things in all of us that have to be re-wired I guess but like another person on here messaged to me recently, "it will take some time, but we will get there.". I fwoke up feeling anxious and angry this morning and I have no idea why other than the fact that I have only slept about 6 hours in the last three days and nights. But honestly there is no reason for me to be angry...I just know that I have that feeling inside like if one tiny little thing goes wrong today then I know I will go off on someone. Part of it could be because I know I have to drive 88 miles to go to the PTSD group I go to. Part of it could be as I said due to lack of rest and my headaches a little bit. part of it could be just that I am having some other more panful emotion I guess and it is easier to be angry than it is to be whatever else I might be feeling. I know that is what our group facilitator a tthe VA is always saying is that we are not usually really angry...that anger is used to mask some other painful emotion like sadness, fear etc. because as soldiers, sailor, airmen, marines, etc....we are not supposed to feel things like sadness and/or fear. So we get angry because maybe it is a more honorable way to feel or a more acceptable way to feel or maybe it is in some ways an easier emotion to feel. Some people would say this might be more true for men than for women but I do not think so. I know I would much rather be angry most of the time than to feel that gut wrenching sadness or the pain of loss or greif or lonliness or that fear when you feel the ground buckle underneathe you right before the concussion of an explosion goes off and it feels like all the air gets sucked right out of the whole world. that fear that makes your belly turn quite literally inside out. would I rather be angry than to feel all that...HECK YEAH.
Anyway, I am sorry you are having problems with the whole driving thing....I have that alot and it keeps me off the road quite a bit mostly because my reflezes are so weird and I do not know how I am going to react when i see something along the side of the road that does not look like it should be there. I have swerved into oncoming traffic before when something out of the ordinary has caught my eye and it is one of the main reasons why my ex stopped letting me drive whenever he went anywhere with me. So I know how you feel with that one track.
I am also sorry you are not getting the help you need from the VA. I am 100% service connected disabled and medically retired so I have no choice but to go to the VA. Sometime I think I should get a civvie counselor even if it is at my own expense because then at least i could talk to someone on a regular basis. But then I might stop getting any help at all from the VA at least that is what I am afraid of when I hear they will not help you because you go to a civilian doc. I think it is their duty to have to help me even if I choose to supplement my care with a civilian counselor but they have weird rules some of these people about that stuff so I do not know if I am going to do that or not.
Anyway I guess it is one more thing to get angry about. One thing I was reading earlier in this thread that Anthony wrote is about how ultimately we did know that we could go to a combat zone and our lives could be ended prematurely due to it when we volunteered and I do agree with that. I never had a problem with the fact that I had togo to a combat zone at all. However I do feel the government has an obligation to take care of me after i have stepped up and volunteered to prematurely give my life for my country (or for a BS reason like fake WMDS and stupid arsed ideologies/rhetoric/political greed/etc....) I mean I would think it is the least that they can do know what I mean. I played their reindeer games and it is only right that they should have to pay for the sprained brain I got while playing for their team.
