Page 27 - Total War on PTSD

stories of severed limbs and enough of the kids who he commanded being killed in extremely ugly ways and Joe became cold and hard.
“Back then,” he told me, “Business was killing. And business was good.”
When my first marriage finally fell apart after eighteen years, I took refuge in the spare bedroom of Joe’s condo in northern Virginia near the Pentagon where he was the number two boss of a high-profile unit.
At one point, Joe began drinking heavily when he came home from work. When I called it to his attention, he became uncharacteristically angry toward me. Next morning, I found a note taped to the bathroom mirror. “Sorry, Jeff. See you tonight.”
But the drinking just got worse. I wanted to be of help but I’m a nondrinker and at the time I wasn’t smart enough to suggest we both attend a nearby meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. The stories of his repeated 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
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