Page 30 - Total War on PTSD

exposure to danger death and unspeakable horror that Joe told me in between drinks painted an invisible picture of what I now know to have been severe untreated PTSD. The gunfire. The screams. The growing sense of personal isolation that came home with him from Vietnam were all haunting Joe. I felt powerless to help. I was ignorant and back then there was little in print that could have guided me to help Joe.
I thanked him the night before I moved out of his spare bedroom and into my new apartment on Capitol Hill only four blocks from the U.S. Senate. After that, Joe never returned my calls. I figured he was deployed or otherwise engaged and maybe he’d had enough of me whining about my marriage. Gradually, I stopped calling him and leaving messages.
Less than three months after I said goodbye to Joe, I received a phone call from a mutual friend. “Sorry, Jeff. I gotta tell you our pal ate his gun last night. The poor maid found him this morning when she came to do her monthly clean. I showed up to get him a little while after she did because he didn’t show up for work and wasn’t answering his phone. Cops were already there when I arrived. Place was trashed. Lots of empties and cigarette butts. Joe left a note. All it said was, “Fuck it.’”
I now know that what it should have read was, “Score another one for untreated PTSD.”
If this book had been in my hands back then with all of its tools and resources, I would have had a chance to help Joe save his own life. Now the book is here. It’s going to help so many people do just that. Military and civilians. I am so proud of this book’s author, Courtenay Nold, a former U.S. Naval officer whose experiences in Afghanistan left her in
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