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The Daily Signal
Why Soldiers
Miss War
Nolan Peterson
January 06, 2016
Army Sgt. 1st Class Jeffrey Martin parked the truck outside the
concrete slabs arranged in a defensive perimeter around the tactical
operations center at Forward Operating Base Shank, Afghanistan.
A layer of fine brown dust hung in the air. Out in the distance, high,
snow-capped mountains ringed the combined U.S.-Afghan base. C-130
transport planes and Apache helicopter gunships roared overhead at
regular intervals.
“You wanna see where the rocket landed?” he asked me.
“Yeah, of course,” I replied.
“How you doing?” he asked, knowing what was in store for me later.
“I’m fine,” I replied automatically, not knowing if it was a lie. “I’m
sure it’ll sink in later.”
He said nothing.
It was December 2013, and I was embedded with the U.S. Army in
Afghanistan as a foreign correspondent for United Press International.
Due to the frequency of Taliban attacks, at the time FOB Shank was
jokingly called “rocket city” by the U.S. soldiers stationed there.
Hills and urban areas dotted the enormous bowl valley within which the
base sat in Logar Province, offering plenty of places for Taliban
militants to hide and lob one-off rocket and mortar shots.
Consequently, the place was constructed like a medieval castle.
Reinforced concrete and rebar bunkers lined with sandbags and stocked
with first aid kits were never more than sprinting distance away.
Two Choices
When the air raid alarm went off, as it did several times a day, you
had two choices.
If you weren’t near a bunker, you just dropped to the ground, covered
your head with your arms and prayed silently that the incoming round
didn’t hit anywhere near you.
You kept your eyes down and stared at a seam on the plywood floor of
the room you were in, or at a pebble or blade of grass in the field
into which you dove.
You focused on the sound of the alarm and waited for evidence of the
exploding Taliban weapon, hoping that it was a distant thud and not a
flash of red and white and heat and then darkness. Survival is reduced
to a few seconds of waiting and pure luck.
If you happened to be near a bunker, then you went for it. You stopped
whatever it was you were doing and got your butt under cover.
The entrances to the bunkers were open to the outside, with another
vertical concrete slab a few yards away, ostensibly to block horizontal
shrapnel.
You usually could see blue sky out the entrance, though, which always
made me wonder what would happen if a well-placed mortar found its way
into the little space between the open entrance and the protective
shield a few feet away. Such a scenario would turn the bunker into a
death trap.
But the odds of that happening were low.
Martin and I left the truck and walked over to a 3-foot-wide crater in
a gravel clearing about 20 yards beyond the walls of the Army compound.
It was mid-afternoon, and we had just eaten lunch. A standard meal from
the DFAC (a military acronym for chow hall) of some indescribable meat
and soggy vegetables, topped off with a few Rip-Its for an afternoon
caffeine kick.
“Jesus,” Martin said as we looked at the charred crater where the
destroyed Taliban rocket had hit the earth. “We’re so [expletive] lucky
to be alive.”
‘He’s Long Gone’
As if on cue, we both looked up and in the direction of the rocket’s
flight path. Along that line of sight there was a tall radio antenna
inside the Army compound, about 100 yards from the crater.
A few hours prior, Martin and I had been standing underneath the
towering steel structure, chatting while we sipped on Blue Monster
energy drinks. When the attack came, we survived by diving into a
concrete bunker that, as luck would have it, was only a few feet away.
Farther out in the distance behind the antenna, slightly obscured in
the valley’s eternal brown haze and well beyond the base perimeter, was
a low bluff covered in typically drab Afghan buildings. Apache gunships
still patrolled the skies above this area.
“That must be where they [expletive] shot from,” Martin said. “Although
they always put the rockets on timers and run away before they shoot.
Don’t know why they’re still looking for him. He’s long gone.”
Martin estimated that the Taliban militant had aimed the rocket at the
radio antenna, since it was an easily identifiable landmark at that
distance. It was a good shot, he said.
The rocket might have hit the tower had it not been shot out of the sky
by the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System that guarded FOB Shank from
indirect enemy fire.
“We killed off most of the experienced Taliban fighters long ago,”
Martin said. “That one obviously had pretty good aim, so he’s probably
been around a while. It also means he knows how to disappear, because
we’re very good at killing whoever shoots at us.”
‘That Was Close’
That was how Martin convinced me that I probably wasn’t going to die in
a rocket or mortar attack when I first arrived at FOB Shank. The
Taliban didn’t live long enough to get very good at aiming its rockets
or mortars, he assured me.
The Taliban refilled its ranks quickly, he said, but lacked experience.
I felt so relieved.
After the attack, we inspected the exterior of the bunker within which
we had sought shelter and found it pockmarked by nickel- and dime-sized
shrapnel holes. Any one of those supersonic, molten metal bits would
have been lethal.
It was a miracle that Martin and I were alive, and the gravity of our
near-death experience was beginning to weigh on me. My head was
spinning as if I were drunk; time and emotions operated at some other
speed than normal as I dealt with the what-ifs and the nauseating
reality of how close I had come to dying.
“That sound,” Martin continued, referring to the laser Doppler sound
that bullets or shrapnel make when passing overhead, similar to quickly
running your fingernail down tightly stretched nylon. “I know that
sound. That was close—too close.”
It’s a distinctive sound that, once you’ve heard it in the context of
combat, will trigger the primal part of your brain that guides
reflexive life-and-death responses.
Surviving on Autopilot
That’s probably why Martin beat me inside the bunker that morning by
several seconds. As a veteran of two wars and eight combat deployments,
he had been under fire a lot more than I had.
They say that when you’re faced with a life-or-death situation, your
training kicks in, and you don’t think about what you’re doing anymore.
It’s all muscle memory. You operate on autopilot.
That’s true, to a degree. Training, after all, is just a safely
repeatable replacement for near-death experiences.
In his book, “Outliers,” journalist Malcolm Gladwell makes the case
that becoming an expert at a skill requires 10,000 hours of practice.
Perhaps that’s true. But one near-death experience has a similar effect
to those 10,000 hours, ingraining in your memory every action, no
matter how minute, that kept you alive.
And when any portion of that near-death experience is recreated—the
sound of an air raid alert, a car backfiring, the Doppler sound of
passing shrapnel, the pop of miniature sonic booms as bullets pass
overhead—the unthinking responses that saved your life are triggered
automatically as if they had been forged by 10,000 hours of practice.
As a former military pilot, I’m aware of this phenomenon.
In pilot training the instructors would put students in simulators and
subject us to unsurvivable situations again and again. We would emerge
from the simulator dripping in sweat and with our hearts beating out of
our chests.
Even though we were just sitting in the simulator working the controls
and flipping switches, our bodies responded to the effort as though we
were doing back-to-back Ironman triathlons.
Why Time Appears to Slow
But that’s the point. The hormones released by high-stress situations
instruct the brain to imprint memories more deeply.
Evolution taught us that trick: The caveman who could best remember how
he escaped a saber-toothed tiger attack had a statistically better shot
at surviving the next one.
That’s why time appears to slow down in a car crash or while you’re
getting mugged. The adrenaline coursing through your veins triggers
your brain into hyperactive memory storage. Your mind and senses go
into overdrive, absorbing every sensory detail with superhuman lucidity
and completeness.
Because of this, an event that might only last a split second occupies
as much mental storage space as a week or a month. Years later you can
recall details, feelings, colors, smells, and sounds more vividly than
you can remember this morning’s breakfast.
Two years later, I can remember with perfect detail Martin’s facial
expressions when the rocket exploded overhead. I specifically recall a
spot of whiskers on his face that he had missed shaving that morning.
In Ukraine last September, I had a Kalashnikov pointed at me at a
separatist checkpoint. Today I can recall the vein pattern on the hand
of the soldier.
This hyper-alertness often extends beyond the actual experience that
sparked it. For hours, maybe even days after you evade death, life just
seems, well, better.
You laugh easier. Things smell better. You notice little details in
places and things you have seen countless times before. You want to
talk about what happened, you want to tell friends and family that you
love them. You live harder and truer than you ever have before. And it
feels good.
‘I Feel So Alive’
The evening I returned to Florida after my time in Afghanistan as an
embedded journalist, I drove across the Everglades at sunset.
I pulled the car over on the side of the road, stretched out my arms
and felt the sun’s warmth on my skin. I closed my eyes and could see
the glowing red of the fading day’s light through my eyelids.
“I feel so alive,” I remember thinking. “I wish I could live my whole
life like this.”
That is PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder.
It’s the inability of normal life to ever match the amplitude of living
that you achieved in war. It’s the letdown of survival, and the worry
that normal life is just a countdown to a gentle fade-out.
Ask most combat veterans to name the worst experiences of their lives,
and they’ll probably tell you it was war.
But here’s the confusing part. When you ask them to choose the best
experiences of their lives, they’ll usually say it was war, too.
This is nearly impossible for someone who has not been in war to
understand. But the lesson to be gleaned from this confusing truth is
essential to understanding the experiences of the 0.75 percent of the
U.S. population who are in the military and the 7 percent who are
veterans.
No Pity Required
Contrary to the steady stream of Wounded Warrior Foundation commercials
on TV, combat veterans are not broken, and they are not victims.
They should not be pitied or looked at with a sad shaking of the head
or some reflexive “Geez, what a shame.” Pitying them belittles their
experiences and misrepresents the challenges they face after military
life.
Combat veterans have experienced a spectrum of emotions whose breadth
supersedes by a number you cannot imagine the emotional fluctuations of
civilian life. That’s why it’s hard to care about normal things when
you come back. Ask a combat veteran about this; it’s a common feeling.
Normal life, whatever that is, seems silly and pointless. It’s a gray
rerun that leaves you feeling hollow. You live on a razor’s edge, only
skipping across the surface of life, never returning to the heights or
the depths of what you felt in war.
But PTSD isn’t nostalgia. Nostalgia is really just forgetting the bad
parts of a memory. You never forget the bad parts of war. The pain of
losing a friend or the images of the dead reflect in everything you see
and echo in everything you hear in peace.
Yet, even in times of comfort, you find yourself missing the hardships
of deployments. The tough times at least made you feel something. And
that’s what you miss the most—feeling truly alive.
You say things like: “I was happier living in a plywood hooch in
Afghanistan with my worldly possessions reduced to whatever fit into a
backpack than I am now, living in this apartment, where everything I
could ever want is within my grasp.” That’s from a veteran who now
works on Wall Street.
Reflections of War
How does that make sense? Why do the fantasies that sustained us
through the toughest times of our lives seem like such a disappointment
when we come home to live them?
Maybe, for those who have been to war, the metric by which you measure
pleasure and pain is permanently reset.
You’re not sad. You’re just flat. You start to lust for the feelings to
which you didn’t realize you were addicted, but required the worst
experience of your life to achieve.
You grow resentful of those who go about their lives indifferent to
your experiences and the sacrifices of the brothers and sisters with
whom you’ve served. The little pleasures and achievements that drive
most people’s lives and the challenges they claim to have overcome all
seem inconsequential.
You see reflections of your wartime experience in every part of life,
and you wonder, knowing what you know now, how those around you can
live the way they do.
That is PTSD.
Combat veterans aren’t damaged. They are enlightened, complicated souls
forced to live life by a set of rules and expectations that can make
pursuing true happiness feel like chasing the moon.
And for those who ultimately descend into a darkness from which they
cannot save themselves, it was not war that broke them.
It was the peace to which they returned, but never found.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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