The following excerpt from an article titled why soldiers miss war explains PTSD well in my opinion. Hope it helps my fellow combat vets and maybe everyone else will get a little better understanding of our thoughts... It’s the inability of normal life to ever match the amplitude of living that you achieved in war. It’s the letdown of survival, and the worry that normal life is just a countdown to a gentle fadeout. Ask most combat veterans to name the worst experience of their lives, and they’ll probably tell you it was war. But here’s the confusing part. When you ask them to choose the best experience of their life, they’ll usually say it was war too. This is nearly impossible for someone who has not been in war to understand. But the lesson to be gleaned from this confusing truth is essential to understanding the experiences of the 0.75 percent of the U.S. population in the military and the seven percent who are veterans. Contrary to the steady stream of Wounded Warrior Foundation commercials on TV, combat veterans are not broken, and they are not victims. They should not be pitied or looked at with a sad shaking of the head or some reflexive, “Geez, what a shame.” Pitying them belittles their experiences and misrepresents the challenges they face after military life. Combat veterans have experienced a spectrum of emotions whose breadth supersedes by a number you cannot imagine the emotional fluctuations of civilian life. That’s why it’s hard to give a damn about normal things when you come back. Ask a combat veteran about this, it’s a common feeling. “The first time Chris came home, he was really disgusted with everything,” Taya Kyle wrote about her husband, Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, in American Sniper. “With America, especially. In the car on the way back to our house, we listened to the radio. People weren’t talking about the war; life went on as if nothing was happening in Iraq. ‘People are talking about bullshit,’ he said. ‘We’re fighting for the country, and no one gives a shit.’” Normal life, whatever that is, seems silly and pointless. It’s a grey rerun that leaves you hollow. You feel like you are living on a razor’s edge, only skipping across the surface of life, never returning to the heights or the depths of war. But PTSD isn’t nostalgia. Nostalgia is really just forgetting the shitty parts of a memory, and you never forget the bad parts of war. The pain of losing a friend or the images of the dead reflect in everything you see and echo in everything you hear. Yet, even in times of comfort, you find yourself missing the hardships of deployments. The tough times at least made you feel something. And that’s what you miss the most—feeling truly alive. You say things like, “I was happier living in a plywood hooch in Afghanistan with my worldly possessions reduced to whatever fit into a backpack than I am now, living in this apartment, where everything I could ever want is within my grasp.” That quote is from a veteran who now works on Wall Street. How does that make sense? Why do the fantasies that sustained us through the toughest times of our lives seem like such a disappointment when we come home to live them? Maybe, for those who have been to war, the metric by which you measure pleasure and pain is permanently reset. You’re not sad. You’re just flat. You start to lust for the feelings to which you didn’t realize you were addicted, but required the worst experience of your life to achieve. You grow resentful of those who go about their lives indifferent to your experiences and the sacrifices of the brothers and sisters with whom you’ve served. The little pleasures and achievements that drive most people’s lives and the challenges they claim to have overcome all seem inconsequential. You see reflections of your wartime experience in every part of life, and you wonder, knowing what you know now, how those around you can live the way they do. That is PTSD. Combat veterans aren’t damaged. They are enlightened, profound souls forced to live life by a set of rules and expectations that make pursuing true happiness feel like chasing the moon. And for those who ultimately descend into a darkness from which they cannot save themselves, it was not war that broke them—it was the peace to which they returned, but never found.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 15:07:10 +0000
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