I've been reading Tyler Boudreau's "Packing Inferno: the Unmaking of a Marine." Probably a wise choice, in light of the news recently about combat stress and how servicemembers do and don't tolerate it. I was drawn to reading Boudreau's book because I'd read several of his essays recently, and pretty much felt like they didn't go far enough -- and I was trying to understand the backstory. His backstory, that is. And how better to do that, than to actually read his book. Boudreau comes across well, as he earnestly attempts to untangle the ordeal of his experience, both serving and (more to our point), coming home. Within the first ten pages of the book, he's already described his PTSD, and it's a nice, succinct, almost poetic expression, which will help others who don't quite understand it yet. Here it is, in Boudreau's own words:
"I’m hemmed into the
night. My brain has come to prefer the
darkness. I can’t say with any certainty
if this is a product of never sleeping – that is, if it’s just a bad habit I’ve
got to break – or if there’s something else going on, like the systematic
avoidance of those bloody dreams. I told
the doc I wasn’t sleeping when I got home, and he glanced (up) casually from
his desk and said, “That’s normal. It’ll
pass.”
Normal, he said. When
I told him I was just about jumping out of my skin every time I heard a loud
noise, he said that was normal, too.
Normal, as in commonplace, as opposed to, say, pathological, like it
would have been abnormal not to jump out of my skin. It’s what they expected from me. They figured I was in good working order, I
guess.
Then they blew off my rage
with the same line. “Everybody’s got that,” they said. I wonder if they’d call me normal now, with
all that I’ve got to say. Three years
later, my heart was still pounding, I was still raging, and I still wasn’t
sleeping. I was up, thinking about the
war. I finally told myself it’s like a
bad back or a trick knee; you just learn to live with it and you walk. on. So as I’m walking on, night after night when
the darkness has fallen, and the rest of the world is silent, I go looking for
my narrative."
(The narrative is something we've talked about earlier, here, and in Boudreau's case, we'll also talk about again -- but later, in another post.) Suffice it to say, he finishes the foregoing description with a very potent, and poignant, explanation of who he is right now:
"The Marine Corps made a
schizophrenic out of me, figuratively speaking.
I used to have only one voice, one point of view. All right, so I’ve got a new perspective now.
It happens. But it’s not like I changed
my mind. My mind changed. It split, two, three, and four ways
over. Now there are voices coming at me
from all sides. There’s no coherence to
them, and no clear distinction either.
There’s the angry voice, and there’s the broken-hearted one. There is the tender me and the savage. And of course, there is the Marine. There will always be the Marine, standing
tall inside me, speaking smartly about values and patriotism. There there’s all the rest of me, the part of
me that was left over when I left the Corps.
He has no name, no identity, or credentials, or skills. He has no title or rank. He has no cause. He is just me in the wake of battle."
With these words, both simple and profound, Boudreau expresses many, many combat veterans' experiences, that they will often spend decades trying to come to terms with, often failing, sometimes succeeding, and sometimes also killing themselves, in a forlorn attempt to, ultimately, attempt to bring resolution to that exact conflict. Not the external one, in which they were involved as a warrior; but the internal one, with the battle that continues to rage, that they often feel they cannot escape. Good for Boudreau for putting words to his experience, so that others -- veterans and the public at large -- can relate.
Editor's note: Boudreau's book, "Packing Inferno: the Unmaking of a Marine," is linked here.
