Page 841 - Total War on PTSD

It's kind of funny...but it's not...I got a Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) from someone, somewhere...when I was on leave. I did not know that you could go to any base and 'get taken care of'. So, I waited till I got back to Germany until I saw the doctor. Oh, my lord was I in pain by then. It was funny though...it was funny. You know...because everyone was laughing...they knew I could have gotten it treated anywhere but I didn't know that...I wasn't thinking. Most of my military experience, I was a drinker, so it was all about drinking. And the Gulf War made it even worse. Coming home, the way I dealt with it was I got drunk. I had friends who were over there with me who weren't that way. They'd drink like I did but when we got home, they all had sufficient reasons and they stopped drinking. One's a cop down in Kansas, another's with the cable company...been there since 1990. I couldn't maintain jobs like that. I am on disability now. I am 100% with the VA for PTSD and Bi-Polar. Some people can deal with things and some can't. I couldn't do it. The things we saw over there...the things we had to do...I couldn't do it. We were up in Kuwait for about five weeks. I slept on a bomb because it was stuck in the corner of a building. It went in one wall and partially out the other so it was caddy-corner. And there were rats running across the floor so I slept on top of the bomb. It was a 500-pounder stuck in the side of the building. It was better than sleeping with the rats. We went in there right after they pushed them out of there. So there actually was live ammunition everywhere.
The helicopters were cool...I liked those. I got to ride in them a couple times...it was a highlight to get to do that. I rode shotgun in an Apache...that was pretty neat. I remember that we had soda pop, we had it on pallets...and the roaming people, there were a lot around, they'd steal pop in the middle of the night. And then they'd sell it back to us during the day. They also had trailers out there where we could get cigarettes every so often. In Germany the Meals Ready to
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