Veterans Day: part two

(This is part two of a series. The first part is here.)

On Memorial Day, 2002, I was finally able to symbolically march in a parade I had missed 28 years ago. I quietly followed the Memorial Day parade in Lodi, Ohio. My two sons walked with me. I shared with them my feelings about honoring our country, not because our country always does the right things in the world, but because the American people always want and work to do those right things. They want to protect freedom and dignity here and throughout the world.

And veterans are American citizens who go that extra step. They commit their bodies and souls to protect and to defend us all. They don’t just defending the people and the laws that they like. That would be easy. They don’t protect only their parents, their children, their cousins. They protect the people they don’t know. They even protected the people they don’t like. They even protect the people who hurt them, or cheat them out of money, or otherwise treat them unfairly. That's the commitment a soldier makes: to defend everything, and to protect everyone.

Then they come home. Being part of a military organization isn't an easy job. In some ways it's like being a parent. You're never really off duty, never get enough sleep, nerves fray, your mistakes can cost someone their life, and once you've made the commitment, you stay and do the best that you can. And there are some wonderful moments of camaraderie.

And there the similarity ends. Because unlike parenthood, your comrades are all adults, all under stress, and react in their own ways to that stress. And the purpose is different. The military exists to cause destruction and death, not nurturing and growth. The potential for ugliness in any military organization is quite high. Violence is expected. It’s a big part of the job.

The military is a machine programmed for violent intervention. Sometimes it sits and waits, and no orders come to engage in violence. The machine does not wait well. It wants action.

The machine operators—-the people in charge—-have the responsibility of keeping that machine ready, without letting it hurt itself. Sometimes they fail, and violence between soldiers occurs. People make mistakes, and that machine is hard to monitor. But when one American soldier hurts another American soldier, the damage can be incredibly painful.

I am a soldier who has felt that violence. The sense of betrayal and unreality was overwhelming. And I was hurt in a physically painful and deeply personal way. I was hurt as a soldier, as a woman, as a person. A fellow soldier overpowered me (made easier by my trust of his uniform), and raped me orally, vaginally, and anally.

The shock, the pain, the violence of that attack changed me forever. And I didn't even know I had changed because I hurt so badly in my whole being. I dissociated during the rape, which feels like parts of your brain don't communicate with other parts of your brain. If you think of the brain as a series of networked computers, mine became a roomful of stand-alone computers, unable to speak to each other.

To this day, I have to jump from one system to another to do different things. Life is inefficient and tiring. I can't recall events in a clear linear way. My whole system of memory has changed. For quite a long time, I didn't know it had changed, and when I did come to know it, I didn’t understand why it had happened. I was way too disconnected to figure it out on my own.

I have many problems that I don't understand and can't name.

What I have, I finally found, is something called PTSD: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is a chronic systemic disease, and can be terminal if undiagnosed and untreated. It’s systemic because it affects every part of a person's life: body, emotions, intellect, and soul. It's difficult to diagnose because it affects a person's cognitive functioning and their memory. PTSD is difficult to treat because no one fully understands it, and it is so very pervasive in, and damaging to, a person's life.

Symptoms of PTSD include:

1. Memory problems. Fragmented memories, often available as separate sensory memories. I may remember an event in a non-verbal sensory way, in terms of color, flashes of light, smoke, smells, shades of light and dark, tactile sensations, temperature, breeze. Any of these sensations can take me back to my trauma, leading to

2. Flashbacks. This is where I partially re-experience the event in my mind. I don't think I'm physically there, but my mind is. In my case if someone breathes on the side of my neck my mind takes me back to the scene of my rape, and I am mentally back on that floor. Flashbacks are painful and frightening, emotionally terrifying events. After a flashback, I am prone to

3. Dissociation. This is when I'm not sure where I am. I seem distant and confused. If I talk with you I will not remember our conversation later.

4. Nightmares. Sometimes of the trauma. These often involve sensory fragments incorporated into a new strange dream. Many times dreams are not remembered. I just wake up very alert and scared.

5. Interrupted sleep. Difficulty falling asleep. Difficulty staying asleep. Extreme startle reaction while sleeping in response to any noise or touch. This results in chronic sleep deprivation: no more than three to five hours of sleep each night, for the rest of the person's life.

6. Difficulty traveling. I get lost easily due to memory problems, dissociation, and flashbacks.

7. Difficulty forming close personal relationships, both due to trust and to the difficulty other people have with being friends with, or living with, someone with PTSD symptoms.

8. Difficulty holding a job. Due to symptoms, chronic fatigue from lack of sleep, anxiety, and memory problems.

9. Anxiety and panic attacks.

10. Depression. This is a result of trying to live with PTSD symptoms, difficulty in relationships (which we all crave), employment issues, and unresolved conflicts over the trauma (primarily the belief that there was some reason we were traumatized—like we weren't good enough).

11. Substance abuse. To relieve the depression and to dampen down the symptoms.

Mostly people with PTSD look fairly normal, but our lives are different. We are lonely, isolated, and confused. Life for us is very different from the way it was before the trauma or precipitating event, and very different than the way it would be if we didn't have this disease. Which is hard for us to imagine.

And many people look at us and blame us for being different, for having this disease, for not being pretty or handsome or normal anymore. But we didn't cause our disease. We live with it. It's chronic. Some of us are more damaged than others. Some of us take better care of ourselves than others. And the world hurts some of us repeatedly more than others.

One of the ways that we are hurt is by interacting with the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is staffed by a wide range of people. Some caring. Some indifferent. Some destructive.

Those of us veterans who remember the nation's promise to us seek help, not just for our medical problems, which are easy to see, but also for our emotional and spiritual problems. We were promised this help. We were promised this help whether we came home and you liked us, or didn't like us. We were promised this help because we promised to protect all of you whether we liked you or not. And we honored our promise to defend you. We understood that we were offering our whole beings, including our lives, to that cause.

We came home. We have problems. We ask for help. And the system is failing us. The American people need to know that the system is failing the veterans. You need to know so that you can decide whether you want to try to fix the system, so that it operates more fairly and honors its promises, or whether you want to just leave it the way it is.

Maybe you want to try to fix things. Maybe you don’t. But if you don’t, please don't lie to us. Be honest. If you don’t want to try to fix the system, have the decency to tell us that your intentions have changed, and you cannot or will not honor the promises that were made. Because as bleak as that would be, it’s still better than being lied to all the time.

Coming up next: part three.