Page 17 - Total War on PTSD

important paperwork when the obnoxiously loud siren on the pole just outside our building roars to life issuing a warning that forces us to do what has become almost automatic. We then hear the booming, pre-recorded, suspiciously calm and somewhat irritating (given the number of times I heard it during my deployment) female British voice saying declaring “Rocket Attack” three times over. After dropping to the floor for the requisite five minutes...give or take...we quickly secure our computers and exit the small office building, heading out to the bunkers that dot the sprawling airbase. We pack into the bunkers much like sardines, something that has made me claustrophobic to this very day, waiting until the all-clear announcement came from the same British lady and we were allowed to exit the bunker and return to work. Then it was business as usual...as if nothing happened...more nonsense...at least to me. We didn’t get killed or wounded this time but our nervous systems were assaulted by fear doing subtle damage to physical and emotional systems that are routinely ignored by military physicians as a matter of policy. It was kind of like chipping away at mortar between bricks in a wall, just a little at a time, not expecting anything to happen...and then being surprised when a brick falls out. Eventually the wall is going to fall apart. Such is PTSD.
Early in the deployment I felt comfortable in my job, my position, as a leader of my small ‘department’ and the job itself, working in a war zone. It gave me more purpose than anything I’d ever done. Actually, if I was able, I would go back and do it again in a heartbeat. But after many life-or-death trips from the office to the bunkers with enemy rockets closing in, that comfort started peeling away like the skin of an onion, leaving me with the raw interior that is my PTSD. Sometimes I’ve felt like I’ve become the onion.
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