Page 247 - Total War on PTSD

******************************************************** Healing Stories from Veterans With PTSD Middle East Veteran
A Veteran came seeking help for trauma he had incurred during a military assignment in the Middle East. He had gone shopping off base and had to dress in civilian
clothing. While shopping in a store he heard terrified people screaming and saw a man, apparently scrambling under his partially opened coat to detonate bombs strapped on his body. People in the store realized that he was a suicide bomber whose “bomb belt” had malfunctioned. Our Veteran jumped on that man and tried to immobilize him on the ground. As he was trying to restrain the man’s hands without much success, the suicide bomber continued struggling to touch together the wires that would have detonated the bombs. This Veteran realized that the suicide bomber would either successfully connect the wires, or that the struggle itself would cause the wires to touch. He stated, “I had no choice... I did not even have a knife... I had to kill him with my bare hands. I am a man who never killed even an animal.”
My client’s trauma consisted of memories of the convulsions, twitching and fluttering of the bomber’s eyelids as he strangled him to death. My client explained that he could not sleep for years, because when he would begin to fall asleep he would see the suicide bombers eyelids fluttering and feel his convulsions and twitching. Such a memory would take a very long time to heal by means of traditional counseling, because it is not a matter of having a logical realization that there could have been no other choice, or that the bomber would have died in the explosion anyway. There were
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