Broken by This War

[babylonsister]

http://www.progressive.org/mag_bannerman0307

Broken by This War
By Stacy Bannerman

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His e-mails were sometimes delayed, or returned to him as undeliverable, with portions blacked out by military censors. The ones that got through asked for more homemade treats, baby wipes, batteries, movies, and magazines. One missive informed me about rockets landing next to the trailer where he slept . . . while he was in bed. Another ended abruptly because he was under attack.
Lorin spent hours loading coffins onto cargo jets; I spent days on red alert.

Finally, the phone rang with the news that my husband was coming home, after nearly a year in Iraq. They didn’t tell me he’d bring the war with him.

He’d been back for almost two months, but he was still checking to see where his weapon was every time he got in a vehicle. He drove aggressively, talked aggressively, and sometimes I could swear that he was breathing aggressively. This was not the man I married, this hard-eyed, hyper-vigilant stranger who spent his nights watching the dozens of DVDs that he got from soldiers he served with in Iraq. He couldn’t sleep, and missed the adrenaline surge of constant, imminent danger. The amateur videos of combat eased the ache of withdrawal from war, but did nothing to heal my soldier’s heart.

At a conference on post-deployment care and services for soldiers and their families, a Marine Corps chaplain asked, “How do you know if you’re an SOB? Your wife will tell you!”

Har-de-har-har-har. The remark got the predictable round of applause from the capacity crowd, which, with one exception, wasn’t living with anyone who had recently returned from Iraq. I was that exception, and it infuriated me that this was a joke. The Pentagon’s solution for the constant stress endured by those of us who felt bewildered and betrayed was: “Learn how to laugh.” With help from the Pentagon’s chief laughter instructor, families of National Guard members were learning to walk like a penguin, laugh like a lion, and blurt “ha, ha, hee, hee, and ho, ho.”

Emotional isolation is one of the hallmarks of post-combat mental health problems. The National Guard didn’t conduct follow-up mental health screening or evaluations of the men in my husband’s company until they had been home for almost eight months. Nearly a year later, in August of 2006, my husband was informed of his results: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It was obvious that he was suffering, but when I brought it up, he parroted what the military told him: “Give it time.”

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