Veteran
Residue
TW: combat, violence, PTSD
In the mid 1980s, I served in the US Army in a high-performance, rapid deployment unit.
The mission of the unit was to conduct combat operations during peacetime, among other things. My experience of those three years was a blur, as if I sprinted through them with no time to catch a breath. It wasn’t until I was out of the Army, and at relative rest, that I was visited by nighttime experiences that left me questioning my sanity.
The nightmares were related to the death of my platoon leader on the border of Nicaragua and Honduras in 1984 and to searching for the body of a soldier who had fallen 9000 feet to his death in the woods of Fort Lewis, Washington, the result of a parachute failure.
The experiences I have while I’m unconscious each night feel alive, more real than reality. I wake into my body, aware of the space I am in yet frozen, paralyzed. Often the residue of the nightmares feels like gravity pulling me to the ground, as if into a grave. Not having the ability to move feels like death.
This is the soldier’s worst fear. To freeze is to die, to flee is to lose.
Recently at a meeting, a man seated behind me got up and opened a folding knife to puncture a foil topped can of hot chocolate mix. The sound and movement of his body in the periphery of my awareness triggered a shock of adrenalin; I was instantly overwhelmed with heat under my skin.
This state of arousal is something I am familiar with, where my body reacts to cues that are sometimes beyond my conscious awareness. The man did it again, several minutes later, flicked open the knife with urgency. I filled with violence and rapid-fire impulses.
The images flashed through me quickly: stand up, kick the back of his knee, pull back on both shoulders to the floor, lunge my knee on his throat, break the knife from his grip, pound that knife blade into his chest.
Without any thought, I sprang up from my seat and stood behind him, my words on his neck, telling him to put the knife away. I was escalating, something in me was begging to explode.
I write this now, almost a week later, and still there is something activated in me, charged up. My sleep has been fitful and unsettled, and my gut is raw and unsatisfied. Like a switch turned on, my physicality is wound up like a compressed spring, tensed and twisted through my core, waiting. Ready.
With that switch turned on, around the same time, I woke up screaming, on my feet, and rushing toward a silhouette at the threshold of my bedroom door. The sound of my voice echoed against the walls of the room as I came to consciousness, mid-rush, arms up, a quickening fear coursing through my body.
I woke up to the silhouette of my son, now 18 years old, and larger than me, hands up in surrender, wide eyed, imploring, “It’s OK, dad, it’s me.”
How to express the feeling of shame that lingers still, shame about my powerlessness over the processes of my body, its storage and expression of fear and violence.
During a visit to Nicaragua, a few years after the Army, I was walking in the dark with a group of North Americans. We were in a small mountain town, building a school for the Sandinista’s, a result of my idea of social activism at the time.
That night, some attackers with AK-47’s fired on us as we headed up the road from the school toward the town. When the firing started, my body reacted to the gunfire by turning toward it and barreling down the slope off the road toward the attackers. As my legs and arms wheeled me forward, inside me was a rage-filled conviction to find them and kill them. What was missing was my weapon, team mates, grenades.
Despite what I lacked, the drive to kill overpowered any sense of self preservation. Much like the arousal at the meeting described earlier, charging down the slope felt like freedom.
The firing stopped and I came back to myself at the urging of the others at the road. That moment was pivotal for me. Even though my head told me I was crazy, I knew in my heart that I needed to reconcile something. I needed help.
How to integrate my desire to be a peaceful civilian, one who would help build a school in the mountains of Nicaragua, with the fierce and violent impulses that live just under the surface of my skin? What felt shameful was being seen by the others who, up to that point, perhaps had no clue about the animal that lived inside me.
I felt exposed and, frankly, done with living.
We retreated to the safety of the town and the streetlight at the main intersection of two muddy roads. I returned to the house where I was staying, where the family provided an AK-47 to keep by my bedside. Sleep felt dangerous, and as I lay my head down, I collapsed into the nightmare, into that frozen space, and I gave up everything. My willingness to live was muted, and I surrendered to the dream space fully knowing I was going to die.
When I came to the next day, I felt fundamentally altered, my sense of self retreated into a small space. I experienced a numbness far beyond anything I’d felt before. This is the point in my life after the military that I sought help.
As I continue with Buddhist practice, I learn how deep not only my service has impacted me, but how the foundation of my identity, growing up as I did in this culture, contains self-destructive elements. Disarming myself is not just about putting down my weapon or sitting on my hands, it includes looking at all the ways I harm myself.
While I may not be suicidal in the dramatic sense of the word, what I come up against today is how I limit myself and how I take out on the world my feelings of failure and smallness.
Courage has become something different for me over time. It’s my effort to go against the inertia of the easy way and act into something new and unfamiliar. To stay connected with others and step over the gravity of isolation, to call someone, to get honest with myself and speak of my guts with others, to act in ways that are productive, all of these are exercises that require a strength that does not rest.
