"The Making and Un-making of a Marine"

Memorial Day 2008

        I was awake early the morning of Memorial Day. I lay thinking about why I wanted to get up while my wife slept restfully. Seeing her repose made me wonder what it's like to truly be at rest. I can't remember the last time I actually felt a state of complete relaxation. Of course I sleep, some. I even attain different levels of calm but real peace, a feeling of safety or surrender in my core of my being, I lost in the Vietnam War.

        It being Memorial Day and all the talk about war veterans coming home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I remembered something I'd read years ago. I thought it might apply to PTSD.  The author said when we are hurt physically or emotionally, the traumatization causes our muscles to tighten up in protection. The example was given of when you stick an amoeba with a pin, its cell wall tenses; but, after a few minutes it will relax to normal. If you keep sticking the amoeba, it will take longer and longer for the cell wall to relax.  Eventually the cell wall will go into stasis never recovering its relaxed state. The author went on to say that humans that are emotionally, physically hurt or frightened repeatedly developed a stasis that he called "body armor". Body armor lets no emotion out or in. It occurs to me that this is what it's like to have PTSD.

        When a soldier is on the battlefield, pin pricks come in every size and shape. To make my point more current the battlefields of today's Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the entire country  -- there is no such place as behind the lines. There is nowhere for a soldier to rest safely, not even the green zone. To overuse my analogy of the amoeba, today's soldiers have no place to hide from the pins and no time to recover once they've been stuck. The pin pricks in these wars come from daily exposure to direct explosions which have become the lethal background music of Iraq. The ever present drone of war's machinery in soldier's ears carries the menace of death, either their own or someone else's. The pervasive awareness of road side bombs makes all movements life threatening. The suicide bomber has made a potential death threat of all unidentified human beings.

        If you are wondering what PTSD looks like, here is what's on my personal list. I don't sleep. I sit with my back to the wall of every restaurant. Loud sounds cause my jaws to tighten. The list of war dead on PBS sends my night time into fields of dread. No one should ever wake me, when I do fall asleep. When I smell road kill, a blank stare come into my eyes. I can ball my fist so tight my blood stops flowing into it when someone makes a dumb comment about soldiers or veterans. I need to stand guard, while my beloved wife enjoys the deep peaceful sleep she deserves.

        There are fifty million cells in a soldier's body; all of them have been pricked.

Larry Winters USMC, Vietnam 1969-1970

Author of The Making and Unmaking of a Marine, subtitled One Man's Struggle for Forgiveness.