Page 28 - Total War on PTSD

friends in the U.S. military whose first name is Joseph, my buddy was called G.I. Joe. Of course, that suggests a kind of average guy who steps up when everything goes wrong. This G.I. Joe was anything but ordinary. He graduated a famous college with a degree in science and a second lieutenant’s bar on his shoulders. By 1984, this G.I. Joe was a Colonel. He’d earned rapid promotions the old-fashioned way—in combat. He saw a lot of it in Southeast Asia and enough of it was absolutely so horrific that it began to hollow him out, to grind down his most human of instincts—empathy.
By the time you get to be a 1st Lieutenant in the infantry, you’ve already begun being management—making decisions sending other men into combat knowing that some of them won’t come back in one piece and some of them will go home only in body bags.
When he got to Vietnam, intelligence said the enemy had been cutting off the arms of some villagers to terrify others into silence and non-cooperation with the Americans. My pal Joe like the rest of our troops had been told they were coming to save ‘Nam from communism and to give the local people a chance to enjoy freedom and peace. Enough 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.”
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