IN THE COLD PRE-DAWN I can hear generators running and vehicles moving on the other side of the base. But it is quiet inside my tent. None of the other soldiers I share the tent with is even snoring. I’ve been awake for a few hours, but stay in my sleeping bag, fighting the nearly overwhelming urge to run away. The Taliban have launched a couple of rockets toward the base during the week, so we are all a little on edge, but that isn’t what’s keeping me up. I am bundled into my sleeping bag, trying to control my racing heart, and trembling because the dead have come to talk with me.
They’ve been coming every night for a couple of weeks. The dead from Kosovo or Rwanda beckoning to me, pulling me from a warm, comforting sleep into a series of wretched, tormenting, wide-awake dreams. Tonight it’s the dead from a farm near the town of Podujevo. Burned Bible-black, twisted into hideous, contorted shapes, they lie in a cold rain that falls through the burned-away roofs and pools on the dirty floor. “Do you remember us?” they ask. Most assuredly.
The night before, it was the dead from the village of Racak. Forty-five of them, shot in the back of the head and left to die in that rocky ditch on a frozen January morning in 1999. They’ve dropped by for a chat. “Why didn’t you do more to save us?” they ask. Why, indeed. Night after night they appear on the big screen of my mind in oversaturated Technicolor, writhing and imploring.
Night after night, the murdered and mutilated come back. Each time, I am scared and ashamed. I know they aren’t real. I know that they are only images in my head. But I fear them no less for knowing this. They terrify me for what they remind me of: the fighting I didn’t stop; the lives I didn’t save. They terrify me for what they represent: I can no longer stop them from taking control of my mind. I lie on my bed, trembling, eyes wide open, but still seeing the dead in front of me.
The trouble begins slowly, developing over time, and by the time I am fully aware of it, I am having graphic, violent dreams nightly. I wake from these dreams in a panic: shaking, heart racing, crying sometimes, always afraid to go back to sleep. I am losing control of my brain, of my mind. In time, I even start seeing these images when I’m awake. During the day I’m unable to concentrate. I sit at my desk or go to planning meetings for operations, shaking until I have to leave the tent to go outside and get control of myself.
I fear I’ve lost my mind. But, I am afraid to ask for help. I fear I will be ridiculed, considered weak and cowardly. In Army culture, especially in this elite unit filled with rangers and paratroopers, asking for help is a sign of weakness. My two Bronze Star Medals, my tours in Airborne and Special Operations units, none of these will matter. To ask for help will be seen as breaking.
But when I can no longer control the images in my head, when in the middle of the day I am forced to hide, shaking and crying in a concrete bunker, railing against the noise and the images, when I realize that to continue to deny this would endanger soldiers I was sent to Afghanistan to lead, I finally do ask for help.
I stop my friend Ed, a doctor, on his way into the Circus Tent. I tell him I’m not sleeping, having trouble concentrating, that I am trembling noticeably. On more than one occasion, I’ve lost track of what day it was. I try to be coherent and explain what’s wrong with me in simple terms without being overly emotional, but just talking to someone I think might be sympathetic brings all my anxieties and shame to the surface.
I ramble on about the dreams and the images that are stuck in my head from Kosovo and Congo and Rwanda. I attempt to explain why I’m not able to sleep and why my hands shake, and admit that it’s because I’m afraid I’m not getting my job done that I have come forward to ask for advice. I look at the ground and mumble something about thinking I’m pretty sure I ought to talk to someone, although, of course, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time, and how I’m pretty sure I am probably all right, but since this is maybe starting to affect my work, I figure it’s a good idea to at least bring it up, but I really don’t want to bother anyone, and so forth, on and on. Ed listens carefully and says he could get someone to talk to me. He adds that these days, of course, the leadership is much more understanding about mental health issues but, oh by the way, he asks, what level security clearance do I have? Because going to the psychiatrist might be grounds for the security guys to pull my clearance.
Shit. The idea of losing my clearance hadn’t occurred to me. I hold a Top Secret clearance with access to Special Compartmented Information. If I don’t have this clearance, I can’t do the work. Being unemployed because I’m a nutcase had never crossed my mind. All of a sudden, I face an enormous dilemma: ask for help, or keep my job.
Images of my wife looking sadly at me through the reinforced glass of Sheppard-Pratt’s non-violent-but-loony wing flash in my head. I imagine friends gathered at a bar, lamenting how close I was to retirement—“if he had only been able to hold out a little longer…”—as they shake their heads in unison and order another round.
I look at Ed. He offers to make me an appointment with the psychiatrist and asks what day is good for me. I think about that day’s schedule and say, “Well, Mondays are bad because we have so many meetings,” trying to downplay how screwed up I feel. “Ok, I think he should be able to see you this afternoon,” he says. “I’ll email you with the time.” From my stunned expression, I must look to him like he said, “Gort, Klaatu Borada Nikto,” because he lightly takes my elbow and asks if that was all, and then asks me if I feel I am a danger to myself or anyone else. There are lots of weapons around and I have a 9mm pistol and about twenty rounds on my hip, but I hate carrying the damned thing so much it never crossed my mind that I might use it. “No,” I say, “I’m not dangerous.”
I go inside the tent and walk past the senior leaders towards the back where I work. I look at the briefing schedule and have the sudden epiphany that it is Sunday, not Monday. My stomach rolls. I realize I am completely screwed. I walk to my desk and shudder at the idea, once seemingly impossible, but now somehow horrifyingly real, that I might not be able to work. I need a security clearance to do my job, and who would trust me with a clearance in this condition? I wonder what kind of job I could qualify for: lawn guy, hell no, they work way too hard; ticket clerk at a porno theater, that’s rich; maybe distributing those flyers about discount Chinese food to peoples’ mailboxes in dodgy neighborhoods, I wonder what that pays?
I suppose I’ve always been a little out of step with the rest of the parade. I’ve never been talented enough to get away with any real eccentricities. I never truly had the self-confidence to be a real individual. I’m not intellectually deep enough to be avant-garde. I’ve always just been a little out of step with the other dancers, like a punk rocker trying to two-step. But it scares me to think that I might be crazy, that I might be forced out of service and become unemployed.
I’ll probably be forced to wear some jumper with a big “L” for “Loony” on the chest or to bear a stain, visible to the whole world. People in the neighborhood will get some sort of notification from the police that I have moved in. Or not, since I certainly won’t be able to keep the new house. How will I make those payments if I am unemployed?
I go see the doctor that afternoon. Apparently, the word of my appointment has preceded me. His young receptionist, a specialist, warily eyes me—the nut-bag officer—as I walk in, and bids me to sit. His nurse, a full colonel in the Army Nurse Corps, quietly says I should wait to speak to the doctor because only he can write prescriptions for medication. Oh great, I think to myself, I’m so screwed up they can already tell I need to be medicated. I sit in a chair and look at the television.
Larry King is allowing some faded ingénue to use his show as a vehicle for her attempted comeback, and he’s explaining to his devoted viewers how important she is, and that she’s a major star, whatever her name is. As I survey the room, I’m surprised to see several straitjackets, just sitting there in the open, folded neatly at the bottom of a bookcase next to the TV. Suddenly, my hands start shaking, and I feel like I’ve been hollowed out by some alien life form. “Oh shit,” I say out loud, and wrap my arms across my chest to stop them from shaking. So, when the doctor comes out to get me, I’m sitting in a chair trembling and rocking slowly forward and back, staring at those straitjackets while Larry King takes a caller from Long Island.
In the back of the tent, behind some “walls” made out of blankets clothes-pinned to 550 cord strung from stanchions, I sit on a folding chair while he perches on a cot a couple feet away. I start rambling, explaining why I need to talk and repeating much of what I had told Ed earlier. The doctor watches me and listens earnestly as I describe the picture shows and the shaking, the wrenched guts and the fear. I talk for about ten minutes, I guess, explaining what I had seen and been a part of in Kosovo and Congo, and about how I have been unable to get past the images flashing in my mind and keeping me awake at night. As I talk, my fear and self-loathing spills out, and I start to cry.
He listens and asks a few questions. Then he says, “The first thing I want you to know is that I can help you.” He seems earnest. I’ve been warned that he isn’t very “Army.” I suppose that in the end neither am I. He tells me I am suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Depression. Each is a part of the other, and they feed off each other. He tells me I need medication.
We discuss options: medication, therapy, privacy, security clearances. He says he will ask his bosses what the system would have to say about someone with my level security clearance being crazy—ok, those are my words not his. He explains the different types of medications he could offer me, their benefits and their side effects. He talks about Prozac, “it’s been around for twenty years;” Paxil, “can’t miss a day or quit cold turkey;” Zoloft, “side effect: soft stools; but cheap for the Veterans Administration;” Selexa, “two forms: one active, one inactive;” Lexapro, “low sexual side effects; stops night sweats;” Xanax, “rapid acting sedative: like two shots of tequila in a pill—very addictive;” Propanidol, “a beta-blocker” Xeprexa, “makes you hungry and fat;” and Syraquil, “major tranquilizer and antipsychotic.”
I’m to come back in a week and he’ll know what my options are; then we can start taking meds. In the meantime, he tells me to talk to myself, but not in public and not out loud. “Tell yourself you’re OK and that you’re doing the best you can. Stop beating yourself up,” he says. Then he asks if I see myself as a danger to myself or to anyone else. Even though it’s the second time that day I’ve been asked that question, I feel my gut wrench, and I cross my arms in front of me and rock until the shaking stops. Right then, I know intellectually what I’ve known emotionally for days: I am fucked up.
While this seems a positive first step—and the fact that he didn’t want to put me immediately in a straitjacket was a slight comfort—I am also a little put out because now that I know I’m nuts, now that it’s official, I want him to make me better immediately. Although I figure I’m not so bad and can make it another week, I still want a safety net. I want to know that the pictures will go away and the shaking will stop and the fear will subside. I leave the office scared and a little unsatisfied.
I return to the Circus Tent and compose a message to my wife. I say I’ve been to see the shrink and I tell her what he told me. I add that we’re waiting to see if I will be able to keep my job before we decide on a course of action. I tell her he wants me to take medication and go to therapy—Happy School I call it. Then I go for a run and feel a little better.
A few days later I’m sitting at breakfast, not having a particularly good day. My hands are shaking and I’ve been awake most of the night. I probably look like hell, because when I glance up from my cereal at one point, I notice the good doctor sitting a few tables away trying not to stare at me. I slink out of the room and out into the sunlight. Following his instructions, I have begun documenting and cataloguing my days and nights according to how I feel. I design a simple scale: All Right; Vaguely Not All Right; Seriously Not All Right. This particular day I am Vaguely Not All Right.
At some point that week, I ask our security officer questions about how mental health treatment might affect one’s clearance, not mentioning any names of course, and hoping that she isn’t particularly intuitive. She says that certain medications are acceptable, and certain medications aren’t—those being principally the anti-psychotics—but that it is critical that the patient immediately inform the service commander and the security officer that he or she is under treatment.
The decision I’m facing seems pretty stark: take the meds, go to treatment and risk my job, or skip it and risk my guys’ lives. It sucks, but it is what it is. There aren’t any other options. No deus ex machina will descend from the rafters and solve this because this is not a Greek tragedy. It is my own puny, personal catastrophe, and no god will come down to explain to me why things are just so magnificently screwed up inside my head, or why I am forced to sit fecklessly by as these horrible, repulsive pictures fester in my mind and shackle my thoughts and dreams—while all the while the world goes rolling merrily by, and everyone is just so chirpy and buoyant.
Man, I am up to here with chirpy. Don’t these people know about the ones who were murdered? What about the ones who were burned, raped, humiliated, tortured? No, I guess they don’t remember, the Chirpy Bastards. Is it just me who feels this way? Maybe the Chirpy Bastards do know about the killings and burnings and rapes and everyone else in the whole world can just process this stuff better than I can.
And now I have the wonderful option of taking medication that can make me feel better so I can do my job, but—and this is the Catch-22 of this generation’s war—if I take the medication I can lose my security clearance and I’ll lose my job and my house. Nice goddamn choice: crazy or homeless. I decide to take the medication, but keep it secret for a while.
The week passes with no major episodes. On Sunday morning I wake feeling Vaguely Not All Right. I make it through the shower and shaving part with no major disasters. I go to breakfast, sit alone, and read an article in The New Yorker with my cereal and peaches. I have two glasses of orange juice in an attempt to beat the cold I’ve been fighting for a few days. I make it to work and sit behind my computer to read email. It’s pretty quiet in the office. Maybe most of the people have gone to get something to eat. Then things start going wrong.