PTSD has many insidious symptoms. One of them is coping with the horror of other peoples' fates and how it makes you feel. Another is admitting that you might have thought...."Today it was them. Therefore it was not me." The worst one is when you realize...."I didn't die. It's not for me to feel bad."
How do you cope?
Earlier this week, in another diary, I brought up a nightmare that keeps coming back to me. It's a workplace shooting and I'm helpless, fleeing in a warehouse warren of cubicles, hearing the shots but not knowing where the exit or the shooter is, till finally, I have to lie down in a pool of someone else's blood and pretend to be dead. That's usually when I wake up. It's too horrible to hear other peoples' screams and realize that I want to save myself first instead of them. Waking up, that dream leaves me sick, shaken, and another emotion I can't even identify. I feel like the worst person in the world, the biggest, most worthless coward, and it takes days to shake it. Often, if the dream goes away for a while, it still takes days or weeks to shake off that dreadful feeling.
This week, a memory sprang out of nowhere: an atrocity that my company stumbled over and had to deal with. It was not to us, though, that fell the duty of burying the dead or notifying the survivors, so in real terms, at least for me, it shouldn't matter.
Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army cornered this woman on a Najaf street, shot her three times in the face, and then turned to her four-year-old son, who they had forced to watch. They cut his throat. It was close to the anniversary of that event, and it's not so much that I had forgotten it, it's that my brain had buried it.
I didn't die. She did. Her face---the entrance wounds were fairly small and out of decency, the people who timidly came out of their houses later, they covered her face----was in fairly good shape. I'm not a good soldier, I guess: her face comes back to me and I can't make it or her go away. And yet it's her tragedy, not mine. It feels selfish even to reference her. I don't know her name, where she's buried. That's the paradox of war, I guess. It's other peoples' tragedies, and if you're lucky, you never know your own body count, or if you have one. Boasting about 'confirmed kills' makes it seem like a video game, especially when some segments of the forces are calling the Iraqis 'hajjis'.
But things hit you in war. They strike you really hard, leave you reeling, and then you try and speak past the lump in your throat to people who frankly don't give a shit. There's nothing like the feeling of betrayal that comes when you realize....Jesus, is that me? Did I just do that? Say that? What is wrong with me? when you first start to realize that you have to be crazy---and people just back away from you, or call you horrible things, or worse yet, laugh and jeer.
Sometimes it feels worse because no one knows, superstitions you invent to convince yourself you'll live. I know we drove past one bombed-out convoy and I thought, "Today it was them. That means it won't be me. If I live till sunset..." And then you don't admit you thought that, to yourself, but it's like you're bargaining with someone else's life. What if there is a God, and he's everything those hateful, TV preachers talk about?
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 91, George Bush told the Iraqis that this was their opportunity to get rid of him. The Iraqis thought he would back them up, but he didn't. Saddam went on a rampage of revenge, and our unkept promise, implied morally even if not explicitly spelled out--cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives. When, twelve years later, we invaded again and found the gardens of bones that had sprouted all over Iraq, we congratulated ourselves on having deposed such a savage. But he had our help.
Those mass graves are still being found to this day. On at least one occasion, the body count was inflated because, one has to assume, based on anti-Muslim hatred here in the US, Americans don't find them Ayrabs as compelling as Americans and it takes more dead bodies to make a true tragedy.
Towelheads. Camel jockeys. Donald Rumsfeld sent 150,000 to Iraq because that's what it would take to win a war. There's a difference between winning a war and winning a peace. We lost the latter because Rumsfeld wanted to look macho, but it was and is the Iraqis who suffered the most.
It's taken me nearly five years to be able to articulate some of this.
I've had battle buddies try and poke my memory. "Hey, remember that time?! That was wild!" OR vice versa: "Hey, dude, do you remember that time that we-----" "No. Haven't a clue."
The problem is, of course, that we were out on the street every day, bargaining with the kids to send them to the kebab place, showing pictures of families and friends, chatting about the weather and pets and, oh, yeah, the assassination attempt that nearly killed one guy's boss. When he drove away after a nice long chat, I got a good look at his windshield. There was a huge star on the driver side, where an insurgent's bullet had missed. The guy caught me staring, waved excitedly, and then tooted the horn as a final coda before cheerfully driving off.
So, who treats their PTSD? What is it like when you have no escape? What would it be like if you woke up tomorrow to the sound of gunfire and mortars, and heard pebbles ratting against the walls of your house as shrapnel and bits of debris got thrown hundreds of feet by explosions? Here's a tip, by the way, Hollywood: you cannot outrun an explosion. The force expands at about six thousand feet per second so you don't even have time to blink. Luckily, this is a good barometer for whether or not I can watch certain movies: Black Hawk Down had me frozen in shock to my seat, while Transformers had me going, "Aw, that's so cute!"
You feel guilty when this stuff affects you, when the model is that you're supposed to be the strong, silent type. Yet it's remembering the good things that have brought me back from the brink, and that, too, feels selfish because it wasn't my country, it never will be, and it seems unfair to be able to walk away with visions of Babylon at sunset in my head.
I remember the cranes' nests along the road to Kut, the sight of rusted-out hulks of Soviet-made tanks still pointing south, the gladiator-like whirling blades mounted on the Iraqi trucks' hubcaps, the way some lines of traffic would be obscured by waving hands and smiling faces, or the time that the donkey drover was so startled to be waved at by a woman soldier that he stopped in traffic, stunned, till the donkey ran away without him and everyone collapsed in laughter, jamming traffic. Towel heads? Hajjis?
When we were pinned down in combat, unable to get to the vehicle radio, the chow hall at the base went silent, as the Pakistani cafe workers shut off the bright Bollywood pop because they and everyone else coudln't stand it. We were trapped across the river with 30-some Ukrainians, one woman (me), a Polish diplomat, a British asshole who was more concerned with his legacy than our lives, maybe two dozen scared KBR employees, and an opposing force of anywhere from five to eight hundred insurgents surrounding us. Another force of Ukrainians had gotten cut off and, knowing that some British expats were trapped and surrounded by insurgents close by, refused to retreat until ordered to do so by their country's president. There were Australians in that chow hall, Pakistanis---including one round-faced gentleman who constantly shook his ladle at me sternly and made me take more food, Ukrainians, Americans from all over the country, and Poles. I'll never listen to another Polish joke again. YOu see, the Poles idolized us, volunteered for the assignment, and they had the worst body armor and vehicle armor that you could imagine. I talked to them, using my rusty Russian, and they politely let it go---imagine, talking Russian to a Pole!---and talked about how they wanted to be in NATO or 'nata' as they pronounced us. Even taking into account the esprit de corps amongst soldiers, their affinity for Americans was matched only by the Estonians, who did bomb disposal and seemed to be so cheerful all the time that they were in danger of simply bouncing with excitement.
I heard about this later, about how the chow hall was silent, as if soldiers feared for another soldier and the country didn't matter. I remember getting back to base 22 hours later, my ammo almost gone (some of the Ukes were totally dry by then) and finding it startling that my legs wouldn't stop shaking in the heat, nor would my body stop shivering uncontrollably. Even using the latrines seemed like an unimaginable luxury. My body had simply shut down all unnecessary functions during the battle.
Heading back to the hooch, I noticed the figure of the PX girl, Becky, heading toward one of the makeshift barracks. "Hey, BECKY!" I yelled, not expecting what happened.
She froze. Then she whirled around, her shower basket flying out of her hand and chunking into the pebbled ground, her face white even in the moonlight, her mouth hanging open. The next second, she was crushing my lungs, and that was when I found out about the silent chow hall and the soldiers of so many nations, staring down into their food.
The irony is that nobody on base knew it was us, except for a select few, so the next time we went to the chow hall it was rather anti-climactic, except for the sight of a mild-mannered, white-haired Alabama soldier, stopping by our table and haltingly trying to find words to let us know how glad he was we lived. It just seemed that then, in a war zone, there's more to live for than there feels like there is some days here.
People want to believe they're good and fair and honest, and that they wouldn't knowingly do something wrong. I've tried to talk to my doctor, in these past few days, about how the depression is choking me more and more, and I feel like if they could just fix me, I could go back and make it right, maybe find some kind of absolution. I can't convince myself that anything we did ultimately was worth the war.
I told the VA that what they should do is design a therapy program of working at homeless shelters, food shelves, Muslim-American centers, soup kitchens, and other places like that, but....I feel like my service needs to correct in some way some of the wrongs I participated in.
I'm not writing this for pity or sympathy or whatever else. Save the hugs for somebody whose hands are clean. I was not as strong as I could have been and am still am not now. This was not my tragedy to take to heart. I need to put it aside and make it right for the people who didn't do any of this.
I don't know what else to say.