(After Corps School, on my way to Charleston Naval Hospital)
Blogging friend Should Fish More (Mike Mullins) wrote of an
episode of PTSD-spawned flashback to his service in Vietnam.
As Mike says in a reply to a comment, everyone’s jungle is out there. Maybe my first trip wire was the hospital
ward at Ft. Polk, Louisiana in 1968, where we went to see my brother,
recovering from wounds he received in Vietnam.
Or when I was stationed at Great Lakes, for corps school, and got my
first exposure of the unending stream of walking (wheeling, hobbling, et cetera) wounded. Then there was Charleston Naval Hospital, my
last duty station. None of what I saw
was like being in a kill zone after a firefight, or working in a field hospital tent, but it was more than I
had ever seen in real life before, and was more than I could process. So it lay repressed, in deep cover, for 45
years, waiting for the right moment to ambush.
Sometimes I feel ashamed of myself for having these episodes
when I didn’t see combat or serve close to the front, where the boys I did see
had been patched together enough to send home to stateside hospitals. I can’t imagine what I’d be like if I had
been, and that’s scary to contemplate, considering.
I'm learning about triggers and desensitizing and coping
mechanisms and how the 45-year-old memories that seem to explode from nowhere,
that destroy my serenity, are also door-opening keys to the memories from childhood
forward that I took with me into the Navy.
The memories I can’t look at directly, but only through the lens of my
time in service.
I don’t fully understand the mechanics of PTSD; may never
know. But I’m working on it, getting
better a little bit at a time, one episode at a time. My heart breaks for those whose condition is
far worse than mine, who can’t function in “the world”, who are still lost in
their own jungles (or deserts, or mountains - wherever there was mind-altering trauma). I hope they find the
help they need and deserve…and have earned.
(Thanks, Mike.)
