Page 890 - Total War on PTSD

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 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.
890 of 1085