PTSD

You know what that is. It's a word bandied about. That's about all it is: bandied about. But if you think of your own, non-military/non-police/non-emergency responder life you still think about "what happened" to you.

You got in a fight in the schoolyard when you were 13. No big deal, right? Wrong. I still remember being forced -- forced -- to box in what was the equivalent of whatever school people go to when they're 11. As a boy of 11, I was forced -- made against my will -- to "box" with some other boy from my school whom I didn't even know. In front of all the teachers and the rest of the 84-boy school.

I did NOT want to box. I was afraid, afraid for myself and afraid for the other kid. It was quite obvious he didn't want to box either. we had no real "training," just a pair of boxing gloves. I must have weighed all of 65 pounds, if that. Him too. Next thing I knew, we were boxing. Yelling from the sidelines, and one thing I knew, I didn't want to hit him in the face. Anywhere but the face. But somehow, something went wrong and he must have moved wrong, because next thing I knew, his nose was bleeding. I was horrified. I stopped and dropped my hands to my sides and looked around, bewildered. Wasn't someone going to stop it? The boy looked as if he were about to cry. I was about to cry.

They didn't stop it. "Come on, Robinson, don't stop because of a little bloody nose," admonished one of the masters. Oh yeah, they were called masters. This was, after all, British boarding school.

I don't remember what happened after that. maybe I put it out of my mind, I have no idea. But I remember people coming up tome afterwards and saying things like "You really bashed him up good, didn't ya!" and feeling fakely proud of myself.

But I don't feel proud now.

And that was over 40 years ago. I'm still on a guilt trip about a boxing match that happened when I was an 11-year-old boy, where there was a little blood on some other boy's face.

Imagine being an 18 year old boy, just seven years older than I was then, shooting a man in the face with an M-16. Or seeing someone you were talking to moments before with half his head blown away.

Or being in an unpressurised tin can hurtling along at 250 miles an hour at 30,000 feet with massive explosions going off all around you, for ten minutes at a time, at watching a plane nearby explode and go into a death plunge with people you were having breakfast with that very morning.

Well, those sorts of things tend not to happen to people who read blogs like this but they do happen. They have happened. To lots and lots and lots and lots of people.

Do you think those people are normal now? Do you think these are people you can hold a normal conversation with at the grocery store? Can you imagine going to bed tonight not with the memory of seeing blood on a boy's face when you were 11 years old, but the image of a child with both its legs blown off, still alive?

I don't think you would EVER be able to rejoin this world, not in any sense of the word. You would forever be a prisoner in your mind, a mind full of images and memories that could and can never be taken away from it.

If my dad had PTSD, he sure as fuck hid it well. 25 missions at 45,000 feet bombing Germany MUST have done something to his mind, but we never cottoned on to it.

I would be very afraid to meet a veteran from Iraq or Afghanistan. I would be very, very afraid. Not because he or she seemed so normal, but because of the knowledge of what was probably going on inside their brains.

PTSD is simply the carrying of an unpleasant knowledge or memory around with you 24/7, for the rest of your life. It can happen to someone who is watching a loved one die of some horrific illness. Once the person is dead, does the memory of it magically go away, do you just rejoin the world as if nothing bad ever happened?

PTSD is beyond real; it's a plague. Things that happened to me during my childhood, while not anything anyone normal would call unduly traumatic, nonetheless changed my brain. I very much still think of that boy, 40-odd years later. I think of him all the time. And I wonder if that's why I get irritable a lot about small things these days.

Who the fuck knows?