Bear with me, or just skip this, it doesn't matter. This may just be little more than a rant, a lingering, a spillage of broken thoughts into words in order for me to sort them out. Hell, I might not even hit the Submit button when I'm done.
It's a little after 5am here, and around 4am I got a call from an old friend. I'm going to call him Bret to skip having to say "my brotherly friend" every little whip stitch.
Bret enlisted in the military 15 years ago. He was young, married with a small child, and needed solid employment. That, coupled with a love for extreme sports, made the military seem like the perfect job. He's leaving the military soon now, becoming a civilian again.
So, Bret called. I was scared due to the hour that he called. Four in the morning is the time of day that you get calls telling you somebody has been in a wreck, had a heart attack, or died. The call came in 'unknown' so I had no clue who was calling, and when he told me who it was, my first reaction was to ask what was wrong, is everybody ok.
Once we established that nobody had died, was near death, or physically injured, he began to speak. Bret was in the habit of calling when things went sideways on him. Luckily, unlike pre-Iraq Bret who was always stoic and reserved, post-Iraq Bret is very talkative.
Bret was feeling 'out of place'. "People, either I can't stand them, or they don't like me. That leaves me with nobody."
I won't even begin to try to relay the entire conversation, it flowed and shifted like the sands in a river. I flowed along with it, whisking my oar when needed.
Bret had spent 15 months in Iraq, he said that he had been in trucks that were hit with IEDs 7 times, he had even been in one where an MPG flew in through the front window, breezed past the back of his head, and blew a hole "the size of a beach ball" out the back window. Most of these events he took in stride, while in Iraq, because over there these things were 'normal'. Even if they made it difficult to sleep at night.
He clearly, in hindsight, had suffered multiple untreated concussions because of all of this. He would "soldier on" (I know why the phrase is that now) because he was still capable of being mobile. He said he "got screwed out of a purple heart because I didn't see the medic about it". Yeah, I don't think that's fair either, but it just seems like a splinter in the board that he he was back-handed with. He suffers spells of extreme headaches (in the back of the head, where his hair is now discolored due to the MPG) that get so extreme they make him vomit.
Eb and flow. "I have emotions now, and I don't know what to do with them. I hate civilians, they don't do anything right. There's no honor there."
He told me how he resents, to the point of wanting to lash out, when people come up to him and thank him for what he's done. He says none of it was good, none of it was something they would thank him for if they knew. He followed orders. Even when he disagreed, he followed orders.
Just as med students play catch with a cadaver's heart to keep their spirits up at 2am as they carry on into their 36th hour of work, soldiers, as a coping mechanism, would find things humorous that 'civilians' would find sick and appalling. Looking back in awe himself at what they had done and finding humor in, he now feels like everybody is staring at him. Everybody is wondering what is wrong with him. Back to the feeling of not fitting in.
The saying that goes, "There are no atheists in foxholes" is wrong. According to Bret, all you have are atheists in foxholes, because they know that no god worth worshiping would permit war. No god would want his children to even begin to view the things they saw in Iraq as normal.
He was on a cell phone, out in the middle of nowhere at his uncle's, so his signal dropped a few times. Each time, I gripped the phone willing him to call back, because I knew he wasn't done. Better to call me back and talk some more than to let his emotions carry him off.
Bret is not suicidal. Like myself, he is not wired that way. Our anger phrases include 'grudge', 'revenge', and 'retaliation'. For me, it usually ends up in a scathing editorial showing up in the paper I wrote for. It's a quality my editor enjoyed and reaped the rewards for. We both use the phrase, "I don't get suicidal, I get homicidal." I'm a writer, he's a soldier. So it's best you keep talking to me, Bret, kill them verbally through words to me.
No, on a day-to-day basis, he would not randomly hurt or kill anybody. He is a reasonable man. But in the wee hours of the night, when he's taken 2 Ambien and 2 klonopin to try to get to sleep and it still evades him.... who knows. But he reached for the phone. And after every other number didn't get him help, he dialed mine.
His words race around in my head.
"These are the guidelines about double-tapping..."
"....and whenever the locals heard we had lost somebody, they buckled down because they knew..."
"One guy told me that I'll never be a civilian again, I'll just live among them...."
"....marking our shells (this is doodling on them, they did it out of boredom) was against the Geneva Convention, but chopping off guys' heads isn't?"
".... then we found this big, bad jihadist hiding under a bed..."
I realize that my friend, my brother, is hurting. And I don't know what to do for him but listen. With all of the wonders of modern medicine, they don't know enough about the brain to understand what the scarring and injuries they see on a CT scan really mean in regards to what has been damaged. They can tell a wounded soldier that they may have headaches, hearing problems, dizziness, but unlike a severed limb they don't know what to reconnect to fix it.
The human brain is too complex for us to figure it out, hell, it's too complex for us to even use all of it. So they try this med, and they try that med, then they settle for this grouping of meds. And the inner workings of the mind are even more baffling. They can't explain, let alone fix, the changes in a person.
Old Bret was confident, New Bret feels lost in his own home. Old Bret was popular, the center of attention. New Bret feels alienated from everybody around him. Old Bret was reserved with showing his emotions, and now New Bret has emotions he can't understand that weigh him down daily.
I'm very close friends with Bret's wife, Terry, as well. "What has Terry told you about me?"
She's confused about how to deal with the changes in him. The changes aren't all bad; he's more open, affectionate, and talkative. But they are all new. It's like living with a different man. I told him she had told me about him reaching for his rifle in his sleep, and about him saying, in his sleep, that he wanted to go home. When she asked him where home was, he said Iraq. Not that he longs for the nightmare that was day-to-day life there, but because that had become his new definition of 'normal'.
After he had ridden the current of emotions for a full hour, he sounded more at ease. When I told him to call me back anytime he needed to talk, I'm always here, he said he would. He even said he thought he might be able to go to sleep now. I hope he can, and I hope it's dreamless. For his sake.
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