Road Tripping

So this is my first blog post... ever. And it's late, so I'm sorry.

It's a lot harder than I thought it would be to write a blog about trauma or PTSD. To be honest, when I was a kid I used to think of PTSD as a joke made at the expense of people incapable of dealing with manly things like war. Vietnam veterans on tv and in movies were portrayed as paranoid weirdos with drug problems. I don't really remember hearing about PTSD from the Second World War except in the movie "Patton" - when General Patton, portrayed by a convincing George C. Scott, slaps a shell shocked soldier and calls him a coward. I watched the first Gulf War on tv when I was seven - and the subsequent parade for the troops in New York. I figured PTSD was something for the weak minded, weak hearted, or just weak.

A few years later I fought my own war.

Five years after I left the military, I found myself driving out to Palm Springs with my girlfriend to see her grandmother. We smoke harsh cigarettes and talk about guilty food pleasures. Mine is milk chocolate. Somewhere on the road, through the heat distortion on the horizon, she spots it.

"Oh poor thing, did you see that dead dog?" She says with a compassionate look on her face.

"No, was there dog out there?"

I saw the dog. And I saw the hundreds of other dead animals I had seen on the roads in Iraq - the ones insurgents would hide bombs in the guts of as my platoon rode by. In nanoseconds, I'm seeing the never ending stretch of desert from central Iraq to Kuwait. I'm seeing the bombs that went off next to my humvee, the smoke, the body parts - everything. I feel the sweat underneath my armor, the M-16 selector switch under my thumb, my ears ring a little from the sound of guns.

"Baby, are you ok?" She asks me. I suppose my face had gone from milk chocolate to the barbecue smell of corpses.

"Yeah. Just a little tired."

But I'm not tired. I'm never really tired driving. On the road - during the war - you were always scanning. You always looked for anything that might signal an improvised explosive device setup in the road, an ambush - a trap. If you fell asleep, you could miss it. You could get yourself and your whole platoon killed. The signs could be anything. Dead animals, a sudden drop off in locals wandering about, misplaced bricks in the curbs, trash along the sides, mutilated guard rails, people wearing to many clothes  - anywhere you could think of to hide a bomb sets of a little tremor in me. Sometimes if the bombs were big enough, they would be in cars and cars were everywhere.

Do I have PTSD? Maybe. Maybe everybody who has ever gone through a traumatic event has it. Maybe some choose to deal with it and some don't. A med student once told me that enough shock waves from enough bombs might alter your brain pattern and give you PTSD - but I'm not sure it works that way. I do know that there are good ways to deal with it , and there are bad ways to deal with it. You can drink yourself stupid and play with guns - or you can exercise and learn to make waffles - it's harder than you think.

Meanwhile, when I get on the road, when I'm in a crowded place, when I'm in a room with just one exit - I am still scanning. I will always be scanning.