SYMPTOMS

You’ve been back from Baghdad a year or so now, you got the job you wanted, and are settling back into “normal” life but, in stalled highway traffic, you roar onto the right shoulder and whiz past other cars because you have to get “outta there.” It’s a body thing that comes over you. Traffic stalls were death in Iraq.

When pedestrians swarm around your car in midtown traffic, you become slightly crazed and break into sweat. You no longer go downtown.

People standing on over-passes prickle the back of your neck, making your hair stand on end.

It’s the war and you know it. You tell yourself to give it time, that it’ll pass. It is supposed to, or so they say.

But green tree lines still cause apprehension these many decades after being in Viet Nam. The smell of newly cut grass still carries a ripple of fear. Someone, squatting on the ground, picking weeds, still makes you grip that long-gone machine gun ever tighter. Oil slicks cause flashbacks. You never go into a place you haven’t been before without sizing up any obstacles and all possible exits. You have come to believe this is just “how I am.”

Several broken relationships and marriages later, you still don’t know if you can ever really feel again, let alone love.

It’s after combat, after war, after homecoming, after settling back in that signs of post war distress, otherwise known as symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, become noticed. All the finer emotions and sensations of  “the war” are coming back around to be dealt with. You were so busy surviving to give them their due back then.

THE CLASSIC SYMPTOMS OF PTSD

• Survivor guilt
• Rage, chronic irritation, great impatience
• Depression, low self worth, an empty feeling, chronic blahs
• Hopelessness, catastrophic thinking
• Feelings of helplessness to get what you want
• Flashbacks and intrusive thoughts in the day
• Nightmares, trouble sleeping, sleepwalking
• Intense fear of loss
• Inner tensions with other men, hostility
• High anxiety, tension, and conflict
• Isolation, few, if any, real friends
• Negative feelings toward women and children
• Avoidance behaviors, aversion to feeling emotions
• Hyper alertness, vigilance, and worry
• Substance abuses, especially alcohol
• Suicidal thoughts
• Homicidal ideas

And the most curious part? Hardly anyone will notice any of this–what is going on inside you.

Unless you are in one of the several stages of PTSD that you simply can’t ignore or hold down any longer, and these inner states finally show up in the way you act, react, talk, and even think, then you know that, despite all you’ve done to readjust to living the way you wanted, the war still lives in you.

You don’t do or feel those official PTSD things, not much anyway. You’ve been in control. You are not one of those who let the war get to them. You didn’t do the big blowout, the things that call attention to you. It’s just a mood, it’ll pass. 

BUT…

• Do you give blood too frequently?
• Exercise your body day after day until, for example, your feet bleed or your muscles spasm?
• Take too much aspirin each morning?
• Eat too much at one time or not at all?
• Drive around aimlessly?
• Hit or kick things in a fury?
• Always look for acceptance?
• Avoid cocktail parties, airports or crowds?
• Do others consider you a workaholic?
• Have trouble keeping a job?
• Do you turn down invitations to join other guys in games, at bars, in outings?
• Go out of your way to prevent being noticed? 
• Never have sex anymore or, on the other side, act like a sex addict?
• Are you overly strict with the kids?  Or distant and hands off with them?
• Do images of your war flit through your mind at least fifty times a day?
• Or do events in the day remind you of what happened back then?
• Are you chronically critical of others, even jokingly?
• Have you married more than once?
• Are you able to maintain intimate relationships?
• Do you chronically feel older than you are?
• Maybe you cannot remember what you were like before the war?  
• Do you joke about catastrophic events happing suddenly?
• Do you have to appear “cool” all the time?
• Does the wind go out of your sails after you plan happy things?
• Are you driven to seek thrills, highs, and danger?
• Do you think of yourself as a loner, despite the fact people like you?
• Do you do things to hurt yourself, like taking daring chances, driving fast?
• Do you feel empty, hollow, despite successes?
• Does hearing about and watching media scenes of new wars agitate you?
• Despite the years after war, do you wonder why you exist?

And this—

• Have you been able to feel human again?

There are many ways for the larger symptoms of war’s distress to be expressed in daily life. Not all symptoms are so ominous sounding and extreme as those formally listed. You don’t have to be strafing down people from a college tower or running your jeep through a VA’s large plate glass doors to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD. In fact, most men and women have distress symptoms that are lower-keyed and don’t catch attention until they begin adding up.

It’s said that five or more symptoms clustered together indicate PTSD. But who doesn’t do those things some of the time, right? Only those who have warred know.