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Two months ago, an Army friend called to check on me. Vets recently have been doing “buddy checks,” often organized as a Facebook event. The events coincide with the 22nd day of the month, as a way of raising awareness that an estimated 22 veterans commit suicide every day. The idea is that you reach out to see how a friend is doing. You offer your support, should they need it, and catch up on experiences within the civilian industrial complex.
It had been a long time since I last spoke with my friend, beyond quips on Facebook. I was surprised to get called. I immediately thought, “why are you calling me?” Everything in my life was going pretty well. I got engaged over the summer, had a steady job, and had completed my first GI Bill funded quest for self-improvement.
The reality was, even at that moment when I said I was doing fine, I really wasn’t. Work had been very stressful and I was experiencing a ridiculous level of insomnia. While I was glad to have finished my degree, its completion left me with too much time to ponder what should come next. In the military, there is a tremendous drive to make every day a success. To repeat and develop iterations of your daily life to an exacting and ever intensifying standard. When that is removed, either at the termination of one’s enlistment or on leave, some of us become train wrecks. I had lost one of my outlets for subduing that need to stay busy, and I was struggling.
I thought I would be fine because I was in therapy, and had been for over a year. Normally, I was the one who was checking up on others. To me, with everything I had going for me, it seemed ridiculous that I was a tense ball of insomnia and loathing for weeks on end. After that call, I ended up in worse shape. Jittery, deeply stressed, feeling half-crazy and uncertain if I could act normal for long enough periods of time to go unnoticed. The trend was developing long before that call though. I also thought that I would be OK because I had dealt with rough weeks that started like this in the past. Certain times of the year cause me to be uneasy. When I am groggy, or preoccupied, I have a detachment that people notice. I can be a basket case behind the wheel of a vehicle. Stress and caffeine act like tent-poles supporting this half-awake person struggling to stay upright through life.
I’m not sure what set me off this time. Sometimes, it is pretty obvious as was the case during the bombing of the Boston Marathon. Over this past summer, I knew I was getting frantic, so I was trying to find outlets. The project management courses I was taking were too tedious even for a distraction addict like myself. I was having no success in replacing the steady diet of lengthy papers from my degree program. It also didn’t help that I had writer’s block and the miserable blog posts I was churning out were getting about one hundred views.
As an intelligence soldier in a kinetic part of Afghanistan, I did a lot of my “warfighting” (if you will forgive the term) with Microsoft Office. There are strange new variants of combat veterans around today, and I am one of them. I never killed anyone directly and I never directly witnessed anything too disturbing. I know people who have dealt with much worse. The war for me meant relaying information via radio, sometimes typed quickly into an online chat , which then lead to fire missions or directed aircraft. There were occasional hikes to OPs and convoy escort trips to various villages along the Kunar river. But, most of the time, it was my job to know what the INTs were saying.
Right before this latest period of angst, Kunduz fell and I think that was a factor. I recall talking to people a few years ago, dismissing the chance of success for our efforts in large swaths of the country, but saying that perhaps the North would be able to develop into something like Kurdistan. When I read about the attack on Kunduz, it brought back memories of what fighting had been like in Kunar. But, equally important is the fact that a number of veterans, myself included, are wrestling with a sense of diminished purpose and biochemistry that is still wired like it was a few years ago.
A good start is to call someone you haven’t spoken to in a while and admit that things aren’t always going as great as they seem.
Chris Zeitz is a former member of the U.S. Army who served in military intelligence. He deployed to Kunar during the surge in Afghanistan. While in the Army, he also attended the Defense Language School in Monterey and studied Arabic. He has a Master’s degree in Diplomacy from Norwich University and is a member of the Military Writers Guild. The opinions expressed are his alone, and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
