Page 842 - Total War on PTSD
P. 842

 Eat (MREs) came with cigarettes. The funny thing is that, because of there being coalition forces, often time people would end up trading MREs because they would like other countries MREs better than their own. We learned to drive 40-passenger buses...and turned them into prison buses. We ripped all the seats out, put chain-link fence up, put a guy with a rifle at the end, chain locks on the back doors, and then just loaded them up with prisoners. I only spent time in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia...and Germany. We went 40 miles outside of Bagdad. Our main prison camp was in Saudi Arabia.
I had to supervise guys going out there and burning the feces and they had to stir it too...yeah that is horrible. Over there a high-class outhouse was one that actually had a toilet seat. We created showers with submersion heaters on top of them. We made shower towers with 500- gallon water tanks on top and then put the submersion heater in it to heat it up. The only way to light those was to climb on top and light the dripping gas. We did requisition a Water Buffalo...one of those things for drinking water. We ended up turning it into a swimming pool. We had a blast in that thing. I think it held around 1,000 gallons. We requisitioned a lot of stuff...but so did a lot of other people. I attend group therapy through the VA on a weekly basis. It helps me to understand my reactions to life and to come up with better solutions.
It triggered my PTSD when the twin towers were hit on 9/11. That's when I became unemployable. I went immediately into flashbacks of the desert and my experiences. My whole way of thinking changed and I haven't been the same since. My job called me and I was like, "No, I ain't going." At the time I was employed as a Fireman/EMT at an aircraft company. I called the suicide hotline and I went to see a psychologist and she, within five minutes of talking
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