This is not an objective article. It is too rooted in my past.
In August of 1984, I had one infant four months dead, her twin fresh home from intensive care on a heart and lung monitor, and a young wife falling apart at her emotional seams. I was working shifts at a convenience store, and when I wasn”t bouncing from shift to shift, I was grocery shopping, driving the kid to doctors” appointments, or bounding up from bed every few minutes to the screeching of her heart monitor.
On Aug. 19, I was driving back from work to our studio beach shack. I stopped at a four way stop. The car to my left popped out from its stop sign, claimed its left-of-way, and cut me off. The passenger flipped me off.
An arctic surge of adrenaline surged through my veins. An exact procedure blazed through my mind. I would accelerate next to the car that cut me off and crowd it into the drainage ditch. My pickup truck would hold the driver”s door shut while I raced around the vehicles and bludgeoned the passenger with the tire iron from under my seat. Once I killed him, the driver was dead meat. A mercilessly logical sequence, and it seemed so righteous.
Miraculously, a shred of control surfaced. This isn”t right, I told myself. I pulled to the road side and sat quaking. I sat, forehead slumped onto steering wheel, shirt sticking with icy sweat, and admitted to myself that I might have left my war behind precisely thirteen years before, but it hadn”t left me.
That admission was the start of a search for help that took me through five therapists in three years before I found the right man. With his help, I discovered I had had the most human of reactions. I had suffered shocks too great for my system to handle, and I had found ways to deal with them that preserved me.
I call it combat fatigue. It has also been called soldier”s heart, shell shock, battle happiness, Post Vietnam Syndrome. The modern name for it, embodied in the mental health field”s professional book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, commonly abbreviated as PTSD.
It is still a socially unacceptable disease, like leprosy or AIDS. Military veterans are often still uneasy with mentioning it, or admitting they may be sufferers. PTSD has the stigmata of unmanliness, cowardice, weakness, just as other mental disorders do.
And, just as with other mental problems, ongoing research is discovering physical connections linked with the mental condition. There are anomalies in brain scans of veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The wiring of our brains has been altered by our stress.
Tremendous strides have been made in treatment since that scary August day I almost murdered strangers for their rudeness. However, to be treated, I had to admit I had a problem. Looking back, I can see I must have been blatantly displaying visible classic symptoms of PTSD.
I was intensely aware of my surroundings, and aggressively reactive to any unusual occurrences. I was irritable all the time, and easily angered. I self-medicated myself with marijuana instead of alcohol or other hard drugs. If I had back all the pot I smoked in those years, I could bale it like hay. I slept belatedly, poorly, or not at all. I was?and am?obsessively aware of my experiences.
With all that, I didn”t realize I had a major debility until that August day.
I”m sure that those who loved me, and whom I tried to love, knew I was in trouble; I can”t blame them for not knowing what to do. No one had any idea what was wrong.
That lack of knowledge no longer exists. It is past time to realize that not all wounds are visible, that their scars can be left on our minds, and it is yet another price veterans pay for their service.
George J. Dorner is a veteran retired on disability because of PTSD. This column appears in honor of Veterans Day, which was celebrated on Saturday, Nov. 11.
