"Don't be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends."
~~Richard Bach
A private battle made public
Veteran hopes account of war, PTSD struggle helps other troops
By Sean D. Naylor - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Jun 25, 2008 12:18:11 EDT(excerpt)
After surviving one of the most vicious firefights in the war in Afghanistan, Capt. Nate Self knew he had to write about it.
Self led a Ranger platoon in a daylong battle on Takur Ghar mountain that claimed the lives of seven U.S. servicemen on March 4, 2002. [Read more →]
I received an email that had me reminiscing about how I had prepared for Mike’s deployment and Bryan’s time in Tradoc last year. I am still having a hard time adjusting to the fact that we are on the other side of all of the time away and time in Iraq. When I think back to that time I often feel an increase in the speed of my heart rate and I can feel a small amount of the time warp I lived in for that year — and in particular that six months with both guys gone at the same time. [Read more →]
When the time came for redeployment I went through a huge array of feelings and emotions that I really was not ready for. I had envisioned over the past 15 months that when the end of my son’s deployment came up that I would feel joy, elation, relief, and happiness. Don’t get me wrong. I have certainly felt all of those feelings, more so than anything else. It’s just that they were accompanied by other feelings that took me quite by surprise, to be honest. [Read more →]
“We are more than a color;
we are the embodiment of ovarian peace
and fallopian justice!” –Code Pink Motto
For months now the anti-war group known as “Code Pink” has been hard at work trying to force a Marines recruiting station in downtown Berkeley, CA, to move out of the area. “Actually we would like it if all of the military offices would shut their doors.” said Zeta Mandarin, a leader in the local group of Code Pink volunteers.
“We are more than volunteers” said Mandarin “We are she-warriors of peace and light, and we plan on shutting the military down by holding events like ‘Breastfeeding instead of bombing’ where we nurse our babies in front of the station.” Who would have thought that breasts could have such an impact on the world? The goddess is afoot, I tell you!”
While Mandarin and the other Code Pink “she-warriors” continue to picket, sing and nurse their babies, we searched the parameter of the scene outside the station to get local reactions on the events that has brought Berkeley to national attention and has even come to the point of threatening its federal funding. [Read more →]
(h/t Michelle Malkin)
Today’s award is being given to you,
“Mr. Anti-war-beat-up-young-ladies-in-wheelchairs-man.”
Where did you learn those mad, bad, big and macho fighting skills anyway? Was it dragging old ladies through the Walmart parking lot when they cut you off for the good space? Perhaps you push toddlers down when they smile at you? You aren’t just an average, run of the mill man. No, you are a handicapped-woman assaulting kinda man. Hold your head up high, and proud. [Read more →]
I have recently started taking a class called “Body Sculpting” at the YMCA. It is an intense one-hour long class that targets specific muscle groups and works them to the point of fatigue. I never knew how painful exercising could be until I started this class, and I honestly mean that. Several years ago I took Yoga for a period of time. I loved it. It was a lot of work and it would leave my muscles a sore, but nothing like what I am experiencing in this new class. The odd thing about the pain is … I like it.
I like to feel the pain after the workout because I know that I am building muscle. I like the pain because it is the type of pain where you know you are not injured, and you know that you have done something good and beneficial. This pain will make me stronger, and there will come a point where these types of workouts will get easier and I will have to add more weight on my small barbell and use bigger hand weights. Weight lifting, running, Yoga, and other repetitious types of exercise gets easier with time. It’s not just because you are building muscle either.
Muscle memory is a large reason why an exercise gets easier with time. Just like memorizing lines for a play — the more you say them, read them, and see them the better you remember the lines — your neuromuscular system remembers the movement of an exercise. The memory makes the muscles more efficient in their movement and more accurate in their target. The body no longer needs to build muscle in order to do the repetitions, and it no longer exerts the same amount of energy. This is why we have to step up our work outs all the time in order to stay healthy. It’s important to keep up the exercise or you will eventually lose some of that muscle memory, but the old saying “just like riding a bike” is also true. Once you learn a skill and learn it well, even if you quit for a long period of time, you will gain the skill back quicker than when you learned it the first time. When you hop back on that bike after giving up the pedals for 10-years you may be wobbly, but it doesn’t take long to remember how to balance.
So, what does all of this talk about muscle memory have to do with coping and deployment? It serves as a very good parallel that is helping me understand the journey I have been on for the past ten months. Not only have I been building muscle and cardiovascular capacity over the past year, but I have also been building coping skills and abilities. It’s something that I set out to intentionally tackle, and now that I am 10-months out I can see that my “coping muscles” are getting stronger and have more definition to them. That does not mean that the difficulties of deployment have gotten easier — it means that I am coping with them more efficiently and more accurately now that I have some “behavioral-emotional memory” to draw from. [Read more →]
So many military parents that I have talked with about deployment stress, either online or in person, say the same thing “It feels like a part of me went over with him…” I have heard military spouses speak similar sentiments as well, but I am better equipped to talk about this from a parent’s perspective. I know that feeling. It really does feel like a huge part of you leaves for a while. You become disconnected from the world around you for a period of time. You want nothing more than to talk about it, but you don’t want to talk about it. You want to cry about it, and you usually do not have a choice in the matter. The suppressed tears demand a trail from your eye, down your cheek and into the pool you have created. The grief strikes us. The fears strike us, and the more I think of all of this I begin to realize that we truly do live parallel to our soldiers when they are deployed.
I am not talking about some weird parallel universe with different realities, or a Twilight Zone episode. This is a matter of parallel emotions and experiences. Both sides feel the emotions and experiences on a continuum. The soldier’s experiences are, undoubtedly, removed from what we know. We can imagine them, read about them, hear about them and empathize with our soldiers about them, but we can never fully experience them unless we tread that sand ourselves. This is the chasm that separates the two universes that are perpetually parallel.
Parents are the first encounter we have with empathy. They have walked the path we are currently walking, to one degree or the other. It is much easier to take civilian experiences and translate them into metaphors or other linguistic helpers that illuminate a message and allow for it to be easily discovered and accessed by those needing our empathy and understanding. When it comes to our soldiers, though, we come up feeling inadequate to address the need for the highest level of empathy that we could possibly give. We feel this inadequacy because our experiences in life provide us with the necessary information in order to solicit an empathetic response. We must understand both the content and the affect of what someone else is saying in order to demonstrate that beautiful tool of mercy. Should we feel inadequate? Maybe we should, but I think that we have more experience to draw from than we realize.
When I talk with my son, read his writing or hear his stories, I feel a deep sense of connection. I would argue that a lot of that is a parental bond, but some of it comes from the fact that I do have situations that are a dim mirror to his, but that are just bright enough for me to draw from nonetheless. I am saying that we have tools that make us better listeners, but I do not commiserate with my son because I have never fully felt the difficulties he has had to live through at various times during his deployment.
Here are some of the tools I have to draw from when I am thinking of him and wanting to understand where he is coming from in a clearer light:
Fatigue is a biggie. There have been days and nights through this deployment when I have been unable to sleep. My fatigue will never reach the same level his is on any objective scale, but it most certainly has given me a very tangible reminder of how hard and painful it is to function at my best while I am extremely wore out. I also remember how vivid and scary dreams can be. Sleep perchance to sleep without dreams is more my motto these days.
I can also draw from my own longing for “home” to understand his feelings of missing us here at home. I am not home sick in the physical sense. I am surrounded by things that richly impregnated with sights, sounds and smells from times past. They are slowly awakened by these objects and then fondly replayed in my mind’s camera lens. I am more “home sick” for my family to be together again. My family is what makes my home to begin with, and when one of them is deployed then our “home” is uprooted with him to a degree — to a lesser degree that he is uprooted, but in a similar feeling of upheaval and longing.
I am paranoid and hyper-vigilant at times. There are times when I cringe if I hear the phone ring — especially when it is a late night call. It’s unexpected. It’s intrusive, and it’s loud to me at that time of night. I startle. I am sure there are sounds that my soldier hears that elicit the same feelings, but to a hugely magnified degree He struggles with the reality of living in an area where people are actively trying to kill him. Every unexpected noise that is intrusive and loud reminds him of why he is paranoid and hyper-vigilant, just as it does me. Every suspicious looking vehicle using my driveway as a turn around point, causes me to break out into a sweat until I know the threat of bad news has passed for the moment. Every strange person who walks toward my son is approached with trepidation until he knows that the threat of a suicide vest has been forgone. There is no doubt that our universes intersect at the most dangerous and vulnerable of locations these days.
The fear, angst, paranoia, anger, sadness, joy and celebrations of victories are all intertwined in what we experience while they are gone. While they are in the sandbox we too are feeling some heat. While they are fighting the war over there we are fighting our own small wars here on the home front.
We all wait here for them, and when they come home then we will begin the journey toward re-entry and re-unification. We will also hold the experiences for that phase because we will have been forced to face the world again while the war is waged and our soldiers are in the thick of it. We will have had to have already reconnected to some degree, move forward and deal with the stress that war has had on us. It will not be sufficient enough to full understand our soldiers and what they have been through, but it is necessary to experience it if you want to relate to it on a deeper level.
I borrowed the Disney movie “Pollyanna” from our Church’s library. As a young girl it was my favorite movie. I just loved the precocious and whimsical nature of the main character, as well as her infectiously cheerful disposition. I wanted Emma to see it, and at first she was not too interested… there are no princesses, no animation and no slap stick comedy. After the second time of putting it on the movie caught her eye, and now she seems to love it too.
The term “Pollyanna” has become the label of choice for a person who is a “do-gooder” or for one who tends to see the world through rose colored glasses. I have been accused, a time or two, of being a “Pollyanna” about things. I certainly have my cynical side and I am much more a stoic than the character ever was, but I do like to pick out the strengths in a situation or pick out what I can be grateful for.
If you have never seen the movie or read the book, Pollyanna teaches some pretty miserable people how to look at things through a different lens. One game she uses, and it is a game she learned from her father before he died, is a game called the “glad game.” When playing the glad game you have to look at something that makes you sad and then find one good thing about it that makes you glad. She shares a story about how badly she wanted a doll and her father (they were missionaries) had put in a request that the next missionary donation basket would have a small doll for his daughter. There was a mix up and Pollyanna did not get her doll, but for whatever reason there were crutches inside the shipment instead. When Pollyanna was asked “So, what’s there to be glad about? That’s terrible!” She cheerfully replied, “I am glad that I don’t have to use the crutches!”
There are always things in our path that are hard to navigate. Deployment, sickness, disease, strife, contention, and stresses are certainly some of the things that we have all faced — some of us have faced all of them, and some of us just one or two. Ultimately we are all on this path together. When I worked with “severely emotionally disturbed” kids I would do a strengths based assessment on the child and the support system around him or her. It was amazing to me what resources I could find if I could stop and focus on what was working well. It’s not a negation of the hard or difficult things, but rather it is like taking an inventory of what is working and how to use it to find your way through the calamity.
I used the movie Apollo 13 to illustrate this point when I would teach other social workers how to do a good strengths based assessment. I would forward to the part where the ship begins to have its serious troubles. Do you remember the movie? When the Astronauts radio down to Houston the guys on the ground begin to scramble for ways to fix the ship enough to bring it back home. At first they start talking about how to fix what was broken, but the main leader on the ground essentially tells them to stop thinking and dwelling on the dead parts of the ship. He then tells them to take an inventory of what is working and what we can use from it. Beautiful! You can’t build a working ship from the parts that are useless and not working — you build it from what you have that is useful and working. There are many days that I forget the very advice I used to teach to so many other social workers. Another childhood character comes to mind here. Remember who said “I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.”
So, if you want to play the glad game with me, please feel free. I for one am going to try and play it more often. So, I will list the sad thing, and then I will list what I am glad about:
Sad: My father is in the hospital with pneumonia.
Glad: I am glad that he is getting to rest and is being cared for.
Sad: I won’t hear from Mike again for a while.
Glad: I know that I can pray for his safety and his care.
Sad: Bryan’s leg still has a long way to go.
Glad: He is home and his Spirit is still strong.
Sad: I have a headache.
Glad: I am alive and well enough to feel it and to do something about it (grabbing the Advil as I type).
See, it’s not hard at all. What are sad about today? Is there anything in the sad thing to feel glad or grateful about?