Page 877 - Total War on PTSD

would find places to park that would allow me to catch some shut eye while I tried to figure things out.
I was connected with a Veteran Nonprofit group that put me up in a hotel for two days. After the second day, I reached out to the Masonic Lodge in Indiana that I was a member of and asked for assistance in making the trek to my brother’s home in Atlanta, Georgia.
Over the next year the nightmares and anxiety were overwhelming. I hardly slept. And, when I did, it was not much. My PTSD and my experiences with people in general kept me from being social and from trusting anyone. I got drunk every night. Anger and alcohol got me in trouble more than once. In August of 2009, I moved back to my home state of Indiana.
The military trained me to be a machine, to act and react with a set of muscle memories driven into me through non-stop training. I learned to suppress my emotions and move with a sense of purpose that entrenches the mission comes first. It was drilled into me to move with calculated movements that drive the mission. In my almost 18 years in the Army, I excelled at leading men under my command and taking direction from higher ups. I relied on someone else to give me the direction that I would go. I was trained to Lead, survive in a Combat Zone, suppress emotions and Kill, as well as be proficient in a multitude of skills and assets. The Army taught us to be prepared for the unthinkable and how to act and react to every situation they could.
They trained us to be tools of war. When it was time for them to move on from us as individuals, they did not retrain us to be active civilians among non-combatants. So, when I came home, I still have the hyper-alert tendencies I had while “over there”.
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