Harvesting History

: US Army

For myself and my Vietnam brothers and sisters, we came home to a country that blamed us for all that went wrong. I quickly learned to put my war in the closet and get on with life.  But one learns that the life you left behind is forever different and it’s not just the passage of time. Your attitude, your value system has been completely turned upside down. Little noises in the night find you getting up and walking around the house checking the windows and door locks. You may feel naked, as you no longer sleep with your weapon. Smells or sounds trigger responses in you so fast, even you are shocked. Those around you wonder what’s wrong, why are you different. And how in the hell do you explain to them what you don’t even understand yourself. Wander down this path awhile and you will never see the end coming.            

For PTSD is like a leech, it sucks such a little peace out of your life each day you never notice it until suddenly its dark. You’ll slowly withdraw from those close around you, get angry for people stressing at things that don’t really matter; not in your world of life and death, sanity and insanity. Perhaps medication will help, a drink, a pill today, a little more tomorrow, until there is never enough to kill your pain.

9/11 and the Wars of Terrorisms raised those ghosts in me, and like many veterans, I turned to alcohol to cope, to make it through another day. My life literally crashed in 2002 and it was a band of Vietnam & Gulf War brothers who stood with me, got me the treatment that I needed, and saved my life.

Now we face more wars, and our troops are sent back again and again and again. And soon they will realize the war they thought they left behind, in fact came home with them. Dryhootch.org is a veteran’s nonprofit offering a veterans peer to peer counseling center centered on the social space of a coffee house. VA mental health professionals have embraced this model as a way to reach out, to connect with our new generation of warriors before they follow our path to addiction, divorce, jail, or suicide.

It is before the leech burrows in, that treatment will do the most good.  This is when one needs to find the camaraderie of those who were baptized by fire to once again sit with you. Those who were with you in the darkest of times, who feel your pain, your fears, your heartaches. You don’t have to finish a sentence if you can’t find the words, or you can’t put your heart back in your chest. They can finish it for you, because they’ve been there. And there will be those who came before you, who have walked your path and found a way out. And you will listen to him or her, for “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he (she) to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.” They, like you have been shot between the eyes. Only they can see that wound, that invisible scar of this shit storm no one else can see, and only they can show you the path back.

This post was submitted by Bob Curry.