Fight or Flight

Right now, my stress level is rather high.
Whether I am doing good or bad, either way pretty much every hormone in my body is at highly elevated levels, every day. It’s a fact of life while deployed.
There is a whole school of research that says this is one of the primary causes of PTSD: the body spending months and years detoxing from the constant intensity of being over here.
Even when you are tired and bored, and doing nothing, you are still wound up far tighter than you ever are elsewhere.

Colors are more intense. Smells are sharper. Mood swings more radically.

Coming off of that is hard.

The mind fixates on simple things, and obsesses over them. I had a guy last deployment, he wanted to buy fuzzy purple handcuffs for his wife. He had this image in his head, of her wearing the handcuffs, wearing a short skirt, leaving partway over a table. When we were coming home, I bought a Russian infantrymans dress uniform. I know soldiers who obsess over cars, or motorcycles, or who plan a cruise. Your mind grabs something small, and meaningless, and invests it with all your hopes and thoughts and focus. Does it mean anything? No. Quite frankly, it is just how the mind adapts. Obsession allows the mind to still have the feeling of hoping and planning and thinking, even when you are in a position where nothing you hope or plan or think matters. We are deployed. When we come home, we will find our children distant, our money gone, our girlfriends left, our wives cheated, our family pull away. We will find ourselves returning to empty houses and debt, and alienation.

So we obsess. It keeps us busy, keeps our mind focused. A good wife, like mine, just puts up with it. I want to buy a Russian Army Uniform? Cool. I want to listen to stupid music? No big deal. I need to sleep on the floor? Ok, we move the pillows to the floor. I need a tournequit hung up in the kitchen and a VS-17 Panel (It’s a 2’x2’ fluorescent orange flag used for signaling helicopters and suck) in the trunk of the car? Ok, no problem. A good wife knows that when you come home there will probably be a lot of crazy, for a while. My friend A. with the handcuffs thing, his wife didn’t realize it was a harmless coping technique. He’d keep thinking about how cute she’d look, she’d get mad, he’d ask for a picture from her in this particular pose, she’d put him off. Basically he was just asking her to reinforce the knowledge he already had that she loved him by going out of her way to do something for him, she didn’t, he got steadily more frustrated and angry.
You know when your kid wants to be tucked in at night, and he wants this toy, and a glass of water, and a hug, and a song, and a story, and the other toy? That’s us. We want to be reassured. We want to be told that we are still loved, still able to be loved, still deserving to be loved. We want to know that we haven’t been forgotten, that someone, somewhere remembers us, and thinks of us.

When I came home, I had two people who I liked a lot who stopped speaking to me after I talked about the war. People don’t want the truth. People don’t want to hear that you piss yourself, they don’t want to hear that you put bodies in a bag and then go eat spaghetti, they don’t want to hear how funny it is that the coolest scar I ever saw on a guy is on a black guy and now everyone who sees it doesn’t think “war hero” they think “thug”. On me, it would look like a war scar. On pretty much any vet it would look completely badass. It’s a giant slice down the side of his throat, like would be caused by a knife. Everyone just figures he’s in a punk gang. Too funny. They don’t want to hear about how B. remembers that E. didn’t scream hardly at all after the IED, when his foot was blown off. I remember. I remember he screamed like a wounded animal. He screamed and screamed and screamed. B. Remembers him not screaming, telling jokes and shit. It’s not what I remember. I remember him screaming, and throwing the parts of his foot in the river so the dogs wouldn’t eat it. You tell people that back home, people stop talking to you. Have you seen Restrepo? There is a scene in there where they get hit by an IED. There is dirt all over the windshield; people are yelling the vehicle is at a 45 degree angle. That scene, I laugh every time I see it. Every time. Why shouldn’t I laugh? It happened to us too, and I’m still alive. We laugh when we go on a scary rollercoaster and don’t die. I laugh when the IED strike doesn’t kill me. Actually, I also laugh when I am scared, which is actually a pretty handy trait, btw. But if I laugh at that part of the movie, people are going to get upset at me.

When I was 18, I almost lost my virginity, but I laughed during the end of “Silence of the Lambs” and that was the end of that. Some things are socially appropriate, some are not. When you are here, and when you come home, what you consider appropriate, it’s different from what other people consider appropriate. So it’s easiest to not talk to people.

Here are a couple of situations: you come around a corner the same time as someone coming around in the opposite direction. Both of you step aside, say excuse me, and move along. When I come around a corner, when I walk down the street, when I stand in line, my shoulders are square, I don’t move aside, and I project what the Army refers to as a “dominant body posture”. Civilians call it “being an asshole”. Usually they call it that after they get out of the fucking way, and when they are far away. In the Army, it’s a good thing, its self confidence and an aura that demands respect. Amongst civilians, it is called being a dick. Another example: I met a new coworker today. She’s Southern. I pretty much hate southern girls. When I was young, I was poor. So poor that southern girls were pretty fucking uppity. So, when I said “I don’t think we’ve been introduced” and she said her name, normal people would have said their name, like “I’m Sergeant Geerts, I’m the CJOC SGT, if you need this or that I’ll be glad to help you out blah blah blah”. What I did was just continue the conversation after she had given her name, not giving my name in return. What do I care? My name and rank are on my chest, she’s a southern belle, and I’m here all year, she’ll probably figure out what my job is sooner or later, and if she doesn’t then she’s and idiot and it would be better if she didn’t interact with me. These are not the social skills that win friends and influence people. I wish to make this perfectly clear: I know how to massage egos, make people feel important and good about themselves, how to make people like me. I choose not to. Fuck that, too much work.

I reiterate: these are not the social skills that win friends and influence people.

This all being the case, I have less tolerance as well. So maybe someone makes a borderline joke, or an offhand comment, and instead of not noticing, or letting it go, I am more likely to read the worst into it. It's a fact of life that must be weighed into every situation, every interaction. It is not wise to make big decisions while deployed.